Mukandi Siame

She fought for independence, then spent decades supporting the freedom fighters history nearly forgot. Meet Betty Chilunga, the woman still asking Zambia to remember.

The road to Ng’ombe Ilede runs 150 kilometres from Lusaka and several centuries backward in time. What waits at the end of it is not a ruin; it is a reframing.

In Zambia, identity is both personal and geographic, traced through systems like the NRC that quietly map origin and belonging. Beneath this lies a deeper history of movement: migration, kinship, and exchange that predates colonial borders.

Long before collars and seams, clothing was a response to land, climate and belonging. In Zambia, textiles were never separate from life; they carried ancestry, marked status and transformed the body into something social, spiritual and enduring.

Tusona, the ideographic drawings of the Chokwe, embody Africa’s overlooked intellectual heritage. Once dismissed as decorative, these intricate line designs reveal advanced mathematical concepts such as symmetry, recursion, and algorithms.

What is Lusaka, anyway? The answer is found in the dust, the nostalgia, the colonial bones, and the resilient spirit of its people who have made a borrowed city irrevocably their own.

I cowered and wondered if this was part of the ritual, a mystical performance where he would recite my name, place of birth, and what I had eaten for breakfast. Would he divine that I never have breakfast?

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

A poignant tribute to Martin Abasi Phiri (1957-1997), the late Zambian artist, lecturer co-founder of the Visual Arts Council of Zambia, and activist.

Culture is a fishbowl; anyone can look through it, but only those inside can truly understand it. A Zambian funeral is a perfect example. Nobody explains the need for the tent – typically army green – or why the furniture is carried from the living room to the outside, where the men will sit and raise a wood fire.

Style is a love language. We all learn fashion and style from somewhere and in the Kaumba family, the patriarch, Charles Kaumba perpetuated a unique style that a young Diana soaked up and long after his passing.

People who live in beautiful places become beautiful themselves. This thought often runs through my mind when I encounter beautiful spaces and the people who occupy them and it first occurred to me on the banks of the Kafue River.

If you venture 20 minutes outside Lusaka, you will discover The Brewery at Ciêla. Established in 2021, The Brewery is exactly what it says it is, and its honesty is the first form of refreshment you will experience.

There is something to be said about names. Zambia is named after the Mighty Zambezi river, Nzambi Enzi, that flows for 3,540 kilometres through the butterfly-shaped nation.

This is just the beginning!” Sana Ginwalla says these words each time she starts something: projects, partnerships, collaborations, workshops, pieces of art and writing. Sana is always up to something and her ‘things’ don’t have an end.

Returning these objects cannot fully rectify colonialism's impacts, but it would allow for new ownership, storytelling, and an opportunity for African nations to reclaim their identity narratives.