Where's Lusaka?

Lusaka

The city to the right, from the railway line

I Didn't know much about Lusaka and Zambia before I first went there early in 2013 and now I feel i know even less. I had to get the atlas out from behind the chair to have a look and could only find books to read by authors with very English sounding names and published by departments for "African Affairs".

If you consider that Africa is cut in two by the equator, then Zambia is in the middle of the bottom bit. It's about 6000 miles away from the UK or something like that and consists of two big bulges of land, east and west with a narrower strip joining them and 13 million people living there. Lusaka lies toward the south of this central strip about 100 miles north of the old capital, Livingstone, the location of the Kariba Lake and notorious dam. The Victoria falls might ring a bell and is found at the border with Zimbabwe. That's the place that tourists head for, if venturing to the country, aside from visits to the game reserves of the nearby Kafue National Park and Luangwa Valley in the north eastern bulge of Zambia, where they shoot the wildlife with cameras or guns. Other nieghbouring countries, clockwise from Zimbabwe, are Botswana, a interesting thin strip of Namibia, Angola, The Congo or whatever it's called now, Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique. The nearest thing Zambians get to the sea is Lake Tanganyika in the extreme north west of the country and this may explain the fact that I have never met a Zambia who can swim or could ever see the point in learning. Much of the country, outside the cities, is grassland and "bush", often consisting of medium sized trees. That's where the elephants and all their mates live. There is a high and urban and traditional rural population and strong tribal and family links between the two. Apart from Lusaka, the other major urban concentration is in the north of the central bit of the country, an industrial area rich in mineral resources, belonging to other countries, and known as the Copperbelt. A lot of people live and work up there. There are 76 different first languages in Zambia and an similar number of Bantu tribes. These come together in the cities where new languages and cultures evolve. The main tribal languages in Lusaka province and Chainda are Nyanja and Bember but both in an increasingly diluted form. More on that later.

Lusaka is a sprawling city with a population of around 3 million. It actually lies on a vast northern plateau at the same altitude as Snowdon in Wales. I use this to account for game being slightly off the pace when playing football with the 17 year old's. If you were to stroll around the centre for a day you would notice several things. There are two main parallel city centre streets, Cairo Road and Freedom Way. The former, named by some colonial bloke who dreamt of a road to Egypt, was where the colonial whites bought colonial white things from colonial white shops and the latter, where the blacks went shopping. Aside from the distinct absence of white people, they maintain there differences, both in appearance, background noise and the goods they deal in to this day. The banks, money lenders and children begging are on Cairo road and the builders merchants and cheap clothes shops on the other. Starting at the southern end of these roads and spanning the parallel railway tracks, after the single train a day has departed for Livingstone, lies Kampala Market where you can pick up anything from Kapenta (little salted fish in small, medium and large sizes), bones and potions used in traditional healing, the most delicious Nshima porridge with Lusaka beans at a little cafe shack, as well as the obligatory rubbish global AA batteries that you can squeeze together between two fingers, and all that crap. Backpacking tourists may show their faces here on the way to the nearby bus station. Most white Zambians will shop at the slightly out of town shopping arcades, more of which later, and pretty much the same as out of town shopping centres all the world over. The two main ones in Lusaka are found along the route of the other great landmark i'll mention here, the Great East Road, a behemothic dual-carriageway of a road that runs at right angles from the north of the city centre streets for miles towards the airport. I found it to be a gigantic blessing in disguise. If wandering aimlessly and eventually lost, you sigh in relief when you come across it and, if you can't find it from where you are lost, the first person you ask will invariably know where it is.

Freedom Way

Great East Road

I hope this serves as an introduction to the city of Lusaka and the country it sits in, but like I said, it feels that I know less now than when I started. Wandering around the city, I came across far more questions than answers. I'll try to remember to include some of what I came across another day. It is a vast, smelly, exciting and noisy city with a multitude of people in green Zambian football shirts with time on their hands, little blue buses and lives.