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Stories clarify what happened and draw pictures for others.

How we got to know each other

Zambia and me – we have known each other for about 10 years now. Early in 2004 I travelled to this beautiful and demanding country for the first time because of close personal contacts, and in October I went straight back there. Shortly after the upcoming turn of the year I was given the chance to learn more about the country and its people and work together with business people and local government representatives in a two-months-project with “gtz”. I lived in a small town in the countryside and realized more about ordinary people’s life than I would have been able to in the capital Lusaka.

And finally I came to Zambia again for a private visit early in 2006 which also included a flying visit to Zimbabwe. With my then companion and me however starting to go different ways, the chapter Zambia came to an end – except from very occasional e-mail-contacts. To be a supportive force in my family became the focus of my interest in the following years.

Almost eight years later the idea grew in me to reveal my “Zambia” to my older nephew, a social work student, the “Zambia” where I had made profound experiences some years ago and compared to Germany had come to know quite different ways of life. Luckily some of the old contacts could be revived quite easily and our travel plans soon started to take shape.

Already in preliminary stages two of my contacts pointed out that I would be surprised to see how much Zambia had changed, especially concerning the traffic in the capital. At that point I found it hard not to assume exuberant exaggerations.

Yet as early as on the day of our arrival I noticed at the airport that well-known and new things were rather close together, such as the familiar old-fashioned toilets on one side of the arrivals hall and on the other side the scanners in the passport checkpoints, which had been introduced to create a digital register of all fingerprints for every newly arrived person.

In the course of the following two weeks I repeatedly learnt that Zambia still is Zambia and that certain rituals and traditions still have the same meaning. Yet, I also witnessed the practical consequences of the 10 years of continuing growth, which secured Zambia some distance to the poorest of the poor countries and at the same time access to the countries with middle income – albeit in the lower range.

Construction boom, tremendous traffic problems in the capital, rapid spread of shopping malls, WhatsApp buzz and so on do shape the new Zambia. Due to my last visit in December 2014 I became even more aware of the growth-driven aspects of Zambia, because this time I hardly got to the touristy or rural areas with their traditional ways of living.

With this present story collection I’d like to build a bridge between the old and the new Zambia, describing people, their rituals and different areas of life. As opposed to the short collection of writings which I composed in 2005, one doesn’t exclusively find stories in this new collection which talk about practices and habits hardly known to us Europeans living in a highly technical and hardly religious society.

In the descriptions one can actually find a great deal of what we often would like to leave behind, when we leave Europe and embark on a journey to sub-Saharan Africa.

The collection hence feeds from older writings, provided that they are still relevant, and from stories, which were conceived early in 2015. Apart from my experience during the last two journeys and the conversations which I have conducted there, considerable research on the internet also had its influence on the writing of the stories. Above all, my personal experience of the presidential election campaign at the end of 2014, which had been fought in more than just a heated fashion in my opinion, has challenged me to source information in order to perceive certain events in their context and be able to understand them in the best possible way.

Frankfurt am Main, january 2015