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At Home in the World in Postcolonial Lusaka

In literary and cultural terms, Lusaka in the late 1960s and early 1970s must have been one of the most vibrant and interesting cities in Southern Africa – not always easy to see from today’s perspective. Chikwakwa, the radical people’s theatre created in 1970 by idealistic University of Zambia staff and students, now languishes unused, although the building still stands and remains structurally sound. The pioneering literary cooperative New Writers Group – founded, legend has it, in 1963 during a lunchtime meeting by a small band of intellectuals eager to kick-start a new kind of literature for the newly decolonised nation – is rarely publicly remembered. The edgy, volatile, politically charged atmosphere of urban meeting-places captured by Nadine Gordimer’s 1970 novel A Guest of Honour has given way to new social trends and energies. Fortuitously, however, that early, insufficiently documented period, before Kenneth Kaunda declared Zambia a one-party state and the drop in copper prices ended all kinds of collective aspiration, has now been remembered and reimagined in three noteworthy recent publications. Present at that 1963 literary meeting alongside educationalists and cultural workers Elias Chipimo, Chiman Vyas, Sundie Kazunga and V.V. Desai were journalists William Saidi and Kelvin Mlenga. Nearly half a century later, in an iconoclastic and irreverent memoir that documents a ‘sort of life’ in regional journalism, Bill Saidi remembers being a founder member of the New Writers Group and recalls a lifetime of literary achievement inspired in part by his admiration for South Africa’s Drum magazine. Saidi contributed a string of short stories to the New Writers Group journal, New Writing from Zambia. In the coming decades, he authored half a dozen fictional volumes (published in Zambia and his native Zimbabwe, where he returned in 1980 after 17 years in Zambia), including the novels The Hanging (1979) and Day of the Baboons (1988). But the real focus of A Sort of Life is Saidi’s illustrious journalistic career, which took him from promising beginnings at the colonial-era African Daily News, via the Central African Mail and The Times in independent Zambia, to what he calls the pinnacle of his time in journalism – four years at Zimbabwe’s legendary independent Daily News, from its inception in 1999 to its government-enforced closure in 2003.