ZAMBIA LETTERS, 22

11/07/2025

Hanna and I dropped Irpa off at her school. Returned to LuCAC. Trained Snake, Hip attacks. Circle walk.

Took a Yango to East Park Mall to get a SIM card for my Nokia. Hanna will probably use it next week, as I must take her smartphone. It will be difficult for me to travel alone in the Copperbelt without the possibility of ordering Yango´s or arranging other errands.

On the way back, the taxi played Christian Rap.

”You cant run when judgement day is coming. You can’t hide when judgement day is coming. You’ve made your choice, I have made mine. Payment time is judgement day.” 

Irpa told me that they pray three times a day. I have told her that she does not have to, but that she should be respectful. It is enough for her to tell her teacher she is not a Christian. She did that and was respected for it.

But of course she keeps on asking why everything is so different. A recurring question is the issue of school uniforms. All girls must wear skirts and all boys have to wear trousers. Her teachers dress like women did in Europe in the 1940s. What happens to those who wear a veil, Irpa asked yesterday, are they not allowed to wear it when they are at school?

This led to a longer conversation on religions. We talked about the conflicts between the secular idea of ​​personal freedom and the religious idea of ​​everyones right to express their own religion. We also talked about the position of women throughout history and how the idea of ​​gender roles is reproduced through forms and institutions. Why don't we have school uniforms in Scandinavia and why have they chosen to have it in England? How do Zambian school uniforms relate to the British colonial system and to missionary work? What ideas about the individual subject lie at the core of our decision not to have school uniforms, in Norway? How did men and women dress in Europe a hundred years ago and what is different today? Who wears the veil? Is it only Muslims? Do all Muslims wear it? Is the veil a voluntary choice or is it being forced upon women?

——

Yesterday was Naokos last day in Zambia. She was very happy that Samba Yonga agreed to come to LuCAC for an informal talk and she kindly invited me and Hanna to join them.

Mrs Yonga is a former journalist and the co founder of The Women’s history museum of Zambia. Their work became viral when BBC made a documentary about their perspectives on the hegemony of western knowledge. Among other things, the museum is an online resource outlining women’s experiences. It reactivates intangible knowledge, often contained within artifacts or objects. 

Mrs Yonga explains that ”The Women’s history museum was a way to ask why, to gather women’s perspectives. Women are at the center of indigenous knowledge. Christianity labelled it as evil and derogatory and this has caused it to be suppressed, together with our indigenous identity.”

”It is so entrenched in us that when you are a christian you are a good person…”

NAOKO

-”They have monopoly on being good…”

”Yes. And so my own parents even, I had to tell them that it is ok to appreciate your own knowledge. Colonialism has taught us everything in our own culture is evil, so we have been shamed. Here in Lusaka, most people don’t speak their own languages properly. You will not find many people here who can speak Bemba or Tonga, not fluently. More and more families are talking English at home. Why? Their languages are forbidden in school, children are punished if they use them. And I bet the people enforcing this has forgotten why, they don’t even know why they are doing it anymore.”

She elaborates on this. The western way of producing, transmitting and activating knowledge, through books, is seen to be the right way to transmit knowledge at the expense of the intangible knowledge of the body. Zambians believe that they have to dress like westerners, talk like westerns, learn like westerners and believe like westerners. Privileges are connected with that, so people are afraid of not living up to these standards. Any expression of admiration for the traditional culture is associated with being evil and the fear of being branded thus is very strong. These mechanisms lies at the heart of the Zambian school system. It enforces self loathing and a suspicious attitude towards traditional Zambian culture. 

Mrs Yonga has personal experiences of this from within her own family. She comes from an educated background and her father was a diplomat so she grew up in Europe. This has given her perspectives. Even so, she had to convince her own parents that it is ok for them to appreciate their own, traditional, knowledge. Her grandfather was a herbalist. When she tells people this, their usual reaction is: ”oh, so he was a witchdoctor?” Her mother learned a lot from her father and she also applied some of those skills on her own children when they were younger, but she did so out of memory, nothing was ever written down. 

”I compare the European perception of how knowledge is produced, transmitted and applied with how it is understood here, as something going through our bodies and happening through physical transformations.”

Her work with the museum is an interrogation of museums as institutions. She understands museums as relics of colonization. When we visited Livingstone we were able to see an exhibition by her. It was the ”Mines and minds” exhibition, commissioned by KoBold metals. The company is owned by Bezos and Gates and it uses AI to mine and prospect and to geo map before it drills. It usually turns to preexisting mines where it searches for undiscovered sills. Her exhibition celebrates the future of mining and exemplifies the many positive changes happening now within the industry. It discusses mining as an important source for positive change, both in relationship to environmental concerns and also in relation to the position of women within society. I remember I was a bit reserved towards the exhibition when I visited it. 

Mrs Yonga explains: 

”There are four forms of mining: flat mining, deep mining and mining in open pits. In all mining there is the issue of disposing the toxic waste. Very often the waste is left at the mining site. There are many abandoned mining sites in Zambia where you can see pools pf chemicals bubbling. These are treated as no go zones by the population. Traditionally people were displaced when a mine was opened. Today a mining operation is negotiated with the government but displacement still happens. Owners are tricked into fake positions at the companies and then pushed away from their lands.”

”The mining workforce was created through taxation. The colonial government started taxing people for living in their homes, which forced them to go and work in the mines.”

”At the end of colonization the mines became a cradle for resistance. The freedom movement was born in the mines. Miners could see the injustices as black miners were forced to do the more dangerous and uncomfortable work, while white miners were given higher salaries and better housing. Today we see more and more women in the industry. KoBold is run by a woman.”

In her work with the Women’s history museum of Zambia she has been facing the question of how to relate to archives. Archives can be objects, displayed at museums, as well as documents and other items. In a general sense, what are they? After an archive has been taken from a context and exhibited, should it then be destroyed, returned back to its origin or what? Very often, archives were never meant to be saved. Archives and memories are temporary, they are changes and impulses, even if they have material capacities. 

Naoko shares Mrs Yonga´s interest in this. The two curators soon find themselves engaged in a discussion on the nature of objects and artifacts: 

”What is this permanence we so often speak of? This object we are showing?” 

”What can we reactivate, different positions of being, taking objects back to communities and see how they can be used…. Knowledge production outside of eurocentrism… how do we unpetrify knowledge… test the theory that we can activate knowledge and reintroduce it to people?”

”People like you and Victor, who make change happen here in Zambia, for future generations, you all have experience of living abroad. I am Japanese. How can I transcend it in relationship to what happens in Zambia, in the Arts? Can you transcend eurocentrism?”

”When we came back from Europe we participated in rituals of initiation and it helped us, it allowed us to think through our experience of educational systems in many ways. But it is not peculiar to only those who have been living abroad.”

PAUSE

”But I consider myself as someone born and living here, I did my University here. The process of awakening happens at different stages in peoples lives…. One should not have to be obscured in order for the other to exist. Christianity has completely taken over, through the idea that someone has total truth and goodness.”

”The Christian concept of sharing is greed. Ok, so you have this mineral. Let’s share. That is how it’s applied.”

”Hoarding contaminates. We understood this in our culture, the ancestors never hoarded. At one point consume, hoard and control was introduced. Christianity was the tool for control. We see deforestation and pollution as a result of hoarding. If you consider the wealth this country produces and the level of living people have, then you see the inequality. The big issue is control and wealth is in the hands of a few. The problem is not to stop people from cutting down trees, as some organizations make it out to be. Things cannot be solved through the distribution of stoves. The furniture industry uses huge amounts of old Yewtrees. Miombo trees, Mukamba trees…”

In the Women’s history museum of Zambia a series of works labelled ”Frame” are being presented. They are digital reframing of objects or artifacts. 

”You see the object but not the intangible culture. The knowledge. We try to reactivate that. We bring objects back to their source of origin and rediscover them together with the people living there.”