This guest post is by my friend Steven Brownstone who recently moved from Zambia after living here for two years.
Editor’s note: I hope to bring different viewpoints about Zambia to this blog over the coming months. The views expressed in the following piece are the views of the author, and not necessarily mine.
I expected many things from moving to Zambia: road trips, power outages, afrobeat, but I never expected to be confronted with a segregated society. I got off the plane, found an apartment and car and suddenly realized I was in Africa, but my close friends were all white.
This is a common experience. We white expats play soccer with their Zambian colleagues or gossip with them about politics, but on a Friday night, they will look around at a sea of white faces. Maybe there are one or two Zambians, but one is dating the Swedish girl and the other is every expatriate’s one Zambian friend who is far more at home drinking G&Ts in Brixton than Mosis in North Mead.
In Zambia, race is the elephant in the room nearly everyone is too afraid to confront. The moment Lusaka’s invisible social walls snap into focus was a rude awakening for me most other expats. A few truly oblivious, or South African, expats may take segregation as the norm. Some expats react with alarm, immediately trying to invite every Zambian they even tangentially know to all their white social events only to get endless polite declines. Some expats use sex to break down the social walls. While far from the rule, all too often these relationships become far more about wealth, lust, and exoticism rather than meaningful cross-cultural connection.
A few brave expats completely abandon the comforts of familiar faces and cultures to latch onto the first Zambian social group that breaks open a small gap in the wall.
Many expats casually flaunt each Zambian connection like a millionaire flaunts a trophy wife, each “authentic” connection a sign of clear social superiority. However, even these of expats clinging to non-white authenticity often end up back in the familiar comforts of their white expat brethren.
I struggled to explain Lusaka’s social walls and so does the rest of the city. Zambian bankers casually wonder over brunch “what do all the white people do,” while new expats scheme over various plans to integrate their social life. They are a myriad of explanations for the cities segregation. Some say it’s all class. They note few Zambians can afford the expatriate lifestyle, forgetting the group of Zambian twenty somethings popping bottles at Skybar every Friday. Others say it’s simply inertia, no one really wants to be the one black person at a white party or the one white person at a black party. Other blame expats’ short stays, why invest in getting to know someone who will leave in a few months. Family commitments also sometimes keep Zambians away from events they actually want to attend. However, there is a more pernicious explanation for social segregation few acknowledge, the white expatriate community has slowly adopted a discourse that subtly creates a hostile space for Zambians. This discourse is not limited to the social scene; it also extends to professional discourse, hindering the economic decolonization Zambia still craves.
As a person with all the privileges, I used to think of hostile space as simply a buzzword uttered on liberal college campuses. In Zambia I came to realize the word aptly describes an environment that makes a group uncomfortable not through overt racism, but rather through a discourse whose subtext makes people feel unwelcome. In Zambia, when you are a white man who speaks Chinese, the overt racism behind the subtext rears its ugly head. Other privileged people forget to hold their tongues. This is especially true of Zambia’s original expatriates, the white and Indian business people that still run Zambia’s economy. The colonial economic order was whites followed by Asians (historically Indians) followed by the local black population. Many value chains still follow this pattern with white-owned seed companies selling seed through Indian distributors to black farmers. Chinese business people are exerting new influence, but there attitudes to the local population are often even more racist than the Indian and white business people they are displacing. The Indian, Chinese, and white business people all complain about lazy workers, government harassment, constant theft, and incompetent Zambian staff who could never possibly take their jobs. From welders, to accountants, to farm managers, foreign workers have streamed into Zambia since colonial days. Bribes make sure Zambia’s pesky laws around local hiring can never staunch the flow.
The sorry state of Zambia’s education system does make some of the need for at least some foreign labor unsurprising. Zambia’s best public university, UNZA- formerly one of the best universities in Southern Africa, closes due to faculty strikes for months at a time. At UNZA, instruction on statistical analysis is limited to professors writing lines of code on a chalkboard. The private universities that have come up to fill the gap offer degrees that are often not much more valuable than the paper they are printed on. Most Zambians that can afford it go abroad to Namibia, South Africa, or further afield for their education and many don’t come back. In general, the issue in Zambia seems to be chronic underfunding of public higher education and an immature private education market with a lack of high quality market leaders. However, there are plenty of professors at UNZA who strive to offer a world-class education despite the limited resources, and private universities are working every day to improve their quality. Graduates from these institutions have gone on to important positions across Southern Africa, however, for far too many graduates their schools have failed them. This weak educational system hinders Zambia’s growth, but still doesn’t excuse Zambians’ continued limited representation in leadership roles across the business and NGO world.
While development organizations at least make a show of local hiring, development workers manage to make up the bulk of the visa ques (except when the Chinese construction workers go for home leave). In general, the development community is theoretical aware of painful colonial economic legacies, and on paper organizations are committed to empowering local people to solve their own problems. Development organizations are increasingly trying to avoid a neocolonial system where decisions on Zambian’s development are made in Washington DC and Geneva rather than Lusaka. While a full discussion on their success and failures requires another blog post, and has inspired many anthropology papers, it’s clear in Zambia that most organizations have failed to hire Zambians into powerful posts. Planes full of young idealistic westerners trained extensively to reference jargon like capacity building, and empowerment arrive in Zambia daily. Most are unaware that because of their numbers, even if development decisions are made in Lusaka, Zambians are making few themselves.
Despite coming to Lusaka armed with the best buzzwords and eager to dismantle the old economic order where almost all Zambians lived in poverty, many young white idealistic expats, including myself, end up mingling with the non-black business people who represent the continuation of the colonial economic order. Lusaka’s economic ruling class and the employees they bring tend to stay in the country longer, and they tend to be richer. Young white development workers are easily drawn to their large houses and stories about Zambia in the old days. Some may notice a disparaging remark here or there about the sorry state of Zambia, but usually the businessmen, yes they are mostly men, are on their best behavior, at least at first.
A key turning point in these relationships is when the development workers are faced with their first big project. Maybe it’s running a survey, building a school, or getting the government to sign-off on a health communications campaign. The young development workers attack the project with zeal, full of youthful energy and optimism. Quickly, they find the issues their older development colleagues and business friends have been complaining about become all too real. Data collectors disappear without notice or fake survey data. Contractors produce shoddy work weeks late; Ministry officials seem to care more about handouts for districts that voted for the ruling party than HIV awareness.
When these young professionals’ meaningful interactions with Zambians are only through work due to racial social walls maintained by the economic elite since colonial days, it is easy to take these failures as evidence of a wider problem with Zambian people. After all, didn’t your white Zambian friend who grew up in Africa say Zambian workers were like this? His family managed to build up a massive farm despite how hard everything is here, he must know something, right? Even expats, especially expats of color, who avoid the white business community, can still conflate their issues working in Zambia with issues with Zambians.
This line of toxic thinking is dangerous because making things happen in Zambia really is difficult. Parts of government are corrupt; theft is an issue; and some workers really are unreliable. Even basic services such as power, water, and internet can’t be trusted making everyone less productive.
In the heat of stressful projects, it is easy for an expatriate to forget the counterexamples that prove their project’s troubles do not extend to all Zambians. It’s hard to remember the janitor that bikes an hour across the city every day to show up to work when their data collectors are two hours late to training. It’s easy to forget the driver who ran to defend you from a mentally ill villager with a knife when your driver manages to go the wrong way miring the field team in mud miles from other cars and other villages. When junior Zambian colleagues are struggling with some seemingly basic analysis you need for a report due tomorrow, it’s easy to forget other Zambians are coding their own apps and that your colleagues just started coding of any sort a few months ago.
Soon the business people’s complaints colored by generations of inherited racism begin to merge with the development workers discourse. Expatriate parties sometimes descend into macabre competitions where people share their worst experiences working in Zambia. Naturally, people take great pride succeeding despite the difficult setting, and the more difficult the setting seems the bigger the sense of accomplishment they can achieve. I will be the first to admit I am more than guilty of participating in these conversations. Who does not want to boast about facing down a corrupt police officer; it is far more exciting than talking about a police officer you had a friendly chat with and who gave some helpful directions.
This discourse has an implicit and toxic message: Zambia fails because of failing Zambians. This sub-text is hard for expats to notice, but it quickly turns off many Zambians from the expat fold and maintenance the city’s walls of social segregation.
When expats expound on their challenges, most are completely un-aware slight changes in phrasing can turn a simple complaint into an indictment of the Zambian people. For example, “it’s impossible to train anyone in Zambia how to administer this assessment” implies all Zambians are untrainable, while “this assessment is complex, you need a PhD in gender studies to answer these questions,” acknowledges the assessment’s lack of fit to the enumeration team and the respondents without making assumptions about the entire population. Obviously, Zambians complain about Zambia as well, but by acknowledging their friends and countrymen’s accomplishments they make clear the issue lies in institutions rather than individuals or all black Zambians.
Situations like these also highlight that a Zambian well versed in the local situation may be more helpful than someone with a PhD in gender studies when faced with the “technical challenge” of designing a gender questionnaire. Both business people and development workers like to call certain tasks “technical” and then use that label alone to justify bringing in foreign “technical experts”
This pernicious discourse can also affect the work of development and help perpetuate the flow of expatriates. Ideas such as all Zambians are lazy easily translate into an idea that an NGO really needs to bring in an expatriate to handle an exploding workload. The idea that Zambians cannot be trusted creates a need for expatriate “expert M&E officers” so a foreign face can verify the closest thing development has to a bottom line, impact. Sometimes projects really do need people with advanced analytical skills or who are willing to work 80-hour weeks without complaint, but all too often development workers talk as if there is no possibility a Zambian could be found to take these roles. All too often, “technical” is simply a synonym for foreign staff. Sometimes “technical” tasks like developing a gender questionnaire are accomplished far more successfully by an “un-technical” with a deep understanding of village life than a foreigner with a Ph.D. in gender studies.
New generations of foreign development workers coming to Zambia should watch their discourse carefully as the colonial narratives still driving much of the African economy can all too easily slip into the most well-intentioned development workers mouths. If development workers can learn to push for inclusive language, white spaces can slowly become more welcoming, and over-time the discourse will become naturally inclusive as expatriates make friends who show them daily the drive and tenacity of the Zambian people.
Peace Corps volunteers will not let you forget their endless bike-rides from their remote villages to the main road, each new volunteer seems to live a little further into the bush, but few mention the Zambian farmers who make these same journeys weighed down with bags of cement or seed. The same volunteers will always let you know there was no running water, although I am still baffled why that stops them from showering in Lusaka. However, they fail to mention the community health workers and traditional birth attendants[1] who with little pay, training, or running water manage to deliver important medical services to communities even more remote than where volunteers are stationed.
Change cannot start from a diversity training where development workers are again reminded of racial power structures with a vague prod to be aware of their biases. Instead, development organizations and workers must put in a concerted effort to enforce inclusive discourse within and eventually outside the office. The process of building this inclusive discourse will eventually force people to think more inclusive thoughts or find different colleagues and friends. Many Zambians seem to excuse the casual racism of the economic elite as a necessary evil for investment. To avoid socially awkward situations, most Zambians avoid hostile spaces completely or just ignore subtle comments like, “My project is delayed, typical Zambia.” While direct confrontation can be challenging, especially in the workplace, subtly pointing out a counter-example like how fast the government moved to implement a cash transfer project can be a nudge in the right direction. Generally, the Zambian elite could do a better job highlighting the hustle and drive of their fellow Zambians, rather than constantly complaining their country to London and New York. Does anyone really benefit from giving Americans, including myself, another opportunity to complain about inferior Mexican food? Let’s celebrate the aunties stirring massive pots of nshima to feed Zambia some of the world’s hardiest lunches and stop worrying where we can get authentic margaritas.
The implicit assumption that what is foreign, Mexican food, is good and what is local, nshima, is bad is inherently colonial. When this inherent bias is extended to people it can do real harm. The problem is that as long as the legacy of colonialism is allowed to flourish in expatriate and elite discourse Zambians themselves will struggle to overcome the colonial power structures and thrive.
Personally, I never really did much to change the structure of Lusaka’s social life or discourse. In my own social life, I floated between the worlds of Zambians, whites, and expatriate people of color. While I regret doing little to correct my own speech or those of my peers, I hope writing this will force my friends still in Lusaka to think more critically about the racialized spaces they inhabit and build.
For those still in Lusaka, I offer two pieces of advice. First, for every frustration remember the systemic roots of dysfunction and the Zambians who are fighting every day to overcome them. Second, don’t judge people based on their friendships, Lusaka is not middle-school. People should be aware of the spaces they are participating in, but it isn’t wrong to seek out friends of your own culture. Not everyone can be social chameleons. Expats need to remember, that Zambians have their own friends, family, and cultural norms to balance. Just as expats need to adjust to Zambia, Zambians need to adjust to expats. It’s important to give people, time space, and the benefit of the doubt. Judge people for their own speech and actions not whomever they choose to befriend or which braais they attend. Everyone will have to work together to break down the colonial walls still defining Lusaka’s social life.
[1] See Gill et al. 2011 paper, “Effect of training traditional birth attendants on neonatal mortality (Lufwanyama Neonatal Survival Project): randomised controlled study,” for a discussion of how providing limited training to TBAs in the Zambian context can dramatically reduce neonatal mortality.