A vivid, immersive journey through the rhythms of the bustling Lusaka city, seen from the sensory overload at Soweto Market. Through sharp observations, the narrator captures the resilience, contradictions, and humanity of urban life where hustlers and market vendors share the same streets, and every corner tells a story.
I’ll be in town tomorrow.
I'll leave at half seven in the morning and head downtown in a cramped minibus, no taxi, no ride, no car. I'll be hoping for the big Rosa bus, but I know I'll only catch the minibuses, which look like they just came from being placed together at a junkyard, barely hanging on. Its door handle will be a wire, there will be a chair that the conductor crammed inside to squeeze in an extra passenger, tightening the already packed vehicle, the interior body will have been removed, exposing the car's naked inner workings. The headliner lights won't be working, and the music will be loud.
The bus will be loaded with a maid heading off to work at a middle-income home with her obvious wig and make-up, a handbag on her side with a chitenge inside of it for when she'll be working. There will also be a young man with a laptop in his bag heading off to work with Arabs or Asians because he knows the future is digital. Three or four primary school kids will be speaking learned and practised English with tiredness on their faces from the early morning transit. There will be a woman with a baby, either going to a hospital or visiting a relative in another province. Hence, she had to leave early to catch the eight-thirty bus at Intercity Bus Terminal. The conductor wearing flip flops to his black hoodie, and ripped jeans, the reek of his unwashed armpits will sting my nostrils even if I'm sitting in the back. The driver will be cool, silent and calm as he looks ahead on the road as if looking into his future. There will be time enough for me to admire my neighbourhood and environment as the mini-bus stops to load more passengers.
As we crawl towards Kafue roundabout where our bus will join the hive, with an orchestra of hooters trying to make their way through the circle. The heavy traffic will attract officers, their pockets hungry for lunch money. Their eyes will be hunting for vehicles that will be turning in the wrong lanes, lanes which won't be visible as they have long faded from view, officers halting vehicles going through a red light which sometimes works, to halting vehicles that give a wrong signal from their used cars, to those having an expired license. It's inevitable, the officers will eat today.
Beyond the roundabout as we head to town centre, there will be a boy stalking a woman who has her handbag behind her, there will be young men making their rounds around the slow-moving cars carrying rectangular Styrofoam probably taken from empty TV boxes, the Styrofoam will have sunglasses for sale injected in them. Other young men will be selling water heating buckets of different colours, while others will have newspapers, caps of different sizes, and others will be selling wristwatches and belts. I'll exit the bus and roam town centre. Women line the streets with salaula and fruits that will be spattered with water. There will be SIM card booths and other vendors selling cheap electronics in what used to be parking spaces.
Coming from a mall, there will be a smell of Hungry Lion that won't seduce my craving until the afternoon. I'll make my way to a street where there will be an iron fence covered in blankets for sale. There will be a young girl or boy who will be resting on blankets neatly folded in plastic bags on the floor as their mother eyes for customers. There won't be a space in sight until I make my way through a mall, and the polished caramel and amber tiles will reflect light coming from the fluorescent tubes. My discomfort eases, and my grip on my phone relaxes as I scour the clothing line stores, pharmacies, fast food joints and Home Essentials stores. The mall will give me a sense of order in the minimalism of it all compared to the outside. There will be employees in matching branded clothing handing out flyers to uninterested individuals, and a young boy with an unfilled charity form asking for donations even though he has no pen. The mall will have a reappearing and disappearing smell of drainage water, but I won't know where it will be coming from. The problem won't be fixed for some time.
Outside, wheelbarrows rattle past with unique goods being delivered. "Psst" They'll warn others with urgency, as they will ignore the fact that they almost hit me. They won't try to make a scene and will carry on wheeling off.
I'll pass by buildings clothed in worn-down advertisements of big company brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and a local beverage company. There will be vendors with recorded audio of a man shouting out the dropped price of Android chargers, screen protectors and earphones. There will be women walking about with woven baskets on top of their heads, loaded with sweets, biscuits, fruits of all sorts, and water in small transparent plastic packages for sale. I'll make my way through a bus rank where conductors call out their destination names. I'll spot a man pouring water from a bottle to cleanse his feet and hands, and wonder how he washes his body. There will be young men helping Arabs unload cargo into their shops, there will be cheap items I'll adore and items I'll remember buying when I was in school. There will be garbage trucks with unhurried garbage men and women busting about it. There will be a man covered in polish all over his body and will probably polish a car even though the driver doesn't want to, and will pay the polish man a five-kwacha nonetheless.
I'll be careful making my way through a main street that connects two main roads.
Crossing a vendor-free stretch of road knowing they'll be hit and the driver won't care, I'll head into the bustling Soweto market where vendors sell organic foods. I will walk through every corner of the market, but there will be no end to it. Vendors swat flies from fish with bucket lids. There will be buckets of water that need to be replaced because everything edible has been washed in them. If the water is replaced, that is, the tap is somewhere deep in the markets, and the women don't want to leave their stands because the tap is too far. There will be Kapenta, chisense, cabbage, chibwabwa, spice, soda, watermelons, bananas, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and dry fish; vendors will be plenty and endless. I know when I ask for groundnuts, they'll tell me it's out of season. I won't bother with mangoes, they are always coming next week. There'll be young men with plastic bags going around selling them for a kwacha to those who stop by street vendors.
I'll spot fruits I've never tasted before and fruits my mother told me about, but I forgot their names. I won't dare ask what the names of the fruits are, for I will invite an excited vendor thinking I'm buying by the way she'll ready her plastic to pack the fruits. Tomorrow, I’ll return. The city is living concrete. I'll discover new scents and see new faces. My people will be there, waiting. I will be among them, a small part of their lives.
