Zambia
In my previous blog, I mentioned that Namibians never seemed to be in a hurry, and I never even saw a Namibian run. Well, that was true for 99.9% of the time. But as we neared the Namibia-Zambia border, everything changed. Men with wads or cashed chased down our taxi, as I looked to my right out the driver’s side window, I felt a tug on my left shoulder. We were completely surrounded by these men and one had even reached into the car and grabbed me. Bewildered and a bit startled, I was trying to frantically figure out what was going on. It turned out to be a completely harmless situation, as these men were moneychangers wanting us to convert our Namibian dollars to Zambian kwacha. Once the car stopped and we got our bearings we smoothly made the conversion with one of the overly friendly moneychangers, happy to get our business. But this was far from an isolated incident. Zambia was a whole new vibe. The slow pace of Namibia was contrasted with the relentless hustle of Zambian entrepreneurs who clawed their way for each kwacha. It made for an entertaining experience, but also was a wake-up call to the extreme poverty faced by millions around the world. The intensity of those we met was not motivated by a desire to get rich, but rather to not starve. How do you find work in a nation that has almost no opportunity? Well, in Zambia, people get creative. 90% of civilians work in the informal sector. These are some of their stories.
When the supply of work is so large, prices must drop and each individual must find creative ways to gain a competitive advantage over others providing the same service. If we wanted a product, we didn’t have to ask around. It would be provided immediately and as efficiently as possible. If we didn’t want a product, it could get quite annoying because we would be relentlessly pestered by someone trying to convince us that we did. Let’s take a taxi ride for example.
If you want a taxi in a Zambian city, you don’t even need to find a taxi driver. There are people associated with specific taxi drivers who scour the area looking for potential customers to direct to the driver, poised and ready to go anywhere in the city for a price slightly higher than the informal market price. Of course, with knowledge of the actual prices, a little confidence, and a lot of patience, you can always get the price at or below what you should be paying…there is too much of a supply of taxis to turn away a paying customer.
However, if you don’t want a taxi, expect to be harassed at every turn by people trying to get you to take one. Once you agree to take one, the drivers and taxi salesmen are incredibly friendly and accommodating, but prior to that they can be quite aggressive. The same goes for any product — taxis, clothing, and avocados alike.
There were very few beggars, as everyone tried to find some sort of productive niche, even if it was asking for a few kwacha for pointing you in the right direction. The sheer supply of labor and social interaction needed to function on a Zambian street made travel inexpensive but emotionally taxing. It’s hard to say no that many times to people who clearly need the money more than you and are trying to be helpful.
At any location our bus or minibus would stop, even for a second, it would be swarmed by sellers of all sorts of products. Imagine any entire Walmart supermarket coming to your bus window. At the wave of a hand, you can purchase nearly anything under the sun while still sitting down. That’s service!
Even the smallest of profit margins present an opportunity for a Zambian entrepreneurial venture. In Livingstone (near the Zimbabwe border), cyclists trekked on the shoulder of the highway in blistering heat with heavy packs on their backs. They were bringing goods like Coca-Cola, that are cheaper in Zambia, across the border to sell for a small profit in Zimbabwe. Then they would purchase cheap Zimbabwean products, such as sugar, oranges, juice, and cooking oil, and pack up their bikes to cycle back to Zambia and sell these products there.
In Lusaka I bought oranges from a woman who said she bought them in bulk at the wholesale market for a price of 180 kwacha for 95 oranges (1.89 kwacha per orange). She then sorts them and sells the small ones for 2.5 kwacha and big ones for 3 kwacha. That means for every small one she sells, she makes a profit of less than the equivalent of 5 US cents. Each large one she makes just over 8 US cents. Yet still, she carried her bowl of oranges on her head through the streets of Lusaka with a friendly smile and a relentless spirit.
For any touristy experience, there is a cheaper informal market of people providing the same service. At Victoria Falls, you can use a booking company to hire a local guide to take you to the top of the falls to a place called Angel’s Pool, which provides one of the most spectacular views of this natural wonder. But the high fees the booking companies siphon off the top led local Zambian guides to provide the same, yet cheaper and informal service, to more adventurous and thrifty travelers like Hugh and I. We found a few of these “illegal guides” and bartered the price down to $15 per person. At 15% of the actual price we had the exact same experience with 100% of our money going directly to our guide that made the experience special for us. Tapping into this informal economy allows travelers to experience Zambia on an extreme budget, yet the Zambian government misses out on tax revenue and the entrepreneurial potential of their citizens due to the lack of formal business opportunity, largely because of mismanagement and corruption at the top.
When there are no set prices, payment is no longer confined to money. When I was in Zambia two years ago, I bought a necklace from a man who called himself “Ice Cream” for a half-eaten bag of corn flakes and a mostly used can of bug spray. Upon returning to the US, I lost the necklace and seized the opportunity to buy a replica on this same trip. I didn’t find Ice Cream, but I found a man selling the exact same necklace. This time, I didn’t have any bug spray or corn flakes on me, but I offered him 30 kwacha. When that wasn’t enough for him, I threw in a roll of toilet paper I had in my backpack, and we called it a deal. This time I’ll be more careful not to lose the necklace. I can’t keep trading away perfectly good rolls of toilet paper.
This system can be fun, but it also can seem frustrating and annoying. As an outsider with limited knowledge of the system, you can feel like you are being taken advantage of and everyone is trying to eek that last kwacha out of your wallet. But in reality, I truly have no reason to be annoyed. The pestering of people on the street is not coming from a place of animosity, but of desperation. The system many Zambians have been born into, with an economy wrecked by British colonization, government corruption, and the poverty trap of being landlocked with bad neighbors, has left most people with no other choice than to hustle for a living. There is no way they can get out of their situation than to hustle. And hustle they do…pounding on my bus window, yelling at me from across the street, and biking across borders to make a few cents on each product they sell. I, as someone whose first job was literally working at a country club on a golf course, truly have no excuse to be annoyed by this behavior. This is exactly what I would be doing if I was born in Zambia. At least I hope so. If I wasn’t working that hard to make a buck, it would mean I had given up. The inconvenience I face as a traveler is ridiculously minor to the gritty realities of the day-to-day lives of the vast majority of Zambians. Traveling to this region and supporting local industry and small businesses may be the best way I can positively contribute to this immense inequality I was born on the privileged side of. Hopefully one day I can use this privilege to do far more.
I can’t tell you how much I respect the hustle in Zambia. I walk through the streets of Lusaka and see limitless potential in so many of the people who make that bustling city what it is. Without any government protection, people are making lives for themselves by creatively finding their niche in this complex informal market. But recently, it’s getting harder and harder for local Zambians in the informal sector to make ends meet. Increased competition from Chinese immigrants who have cheaper products and better technology are undercutting the already low prices that Zambian sellers provide. Chinese immigrants recently introduced GMOs to the food market and now sell more attractive foods at the same or lower prices. Chinese genetically modified chickens have put local Zambians out of business. Chinese restaurants are popping up completely staffed by Chinese immigrants, each with only one Zambian employed for translation purposes.
But Chinese influence in Zambia doesn’t stop there. Actually, it started over 50 years ago, with the train I am currently riding on as I write this. Zipping through the beautiful hilly countryside on the Tanzania-Zambia Railway (TAZARA) the history of this train, and its modern day implications, are on my mind.
Shortly after the former British colony of Northern Rhodesia attained independence in 1964 and become Zambia, it ran into a major problem. The landlocked country faced higher shipping prices due to sanctions imposed on Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) by the UN. With its main route to the coast no longer economically feasible, and its only other options war-torn Mozambique and politically unstable Angola, the newly independent Zambians turned to Western nations to ask for assistance on a massive railway project. However, it found no country sympathetic enough to fund their risky proposed project.
With no other options, they looked to the East and found salvation in a poor and battered China ruled by the authoritarian Mao Zedong. Desperate to expand China’s global influence, the spread of communism amidst Cold War tensions, and get re-admitted back into the UN, Chairman Mao stopped all railway projects in China and shipped his top engineers off to Zambia to begin work on one of the most ambitious engineering feats of its time, a 2,200 kilometer railway connecting central Zambia to the vital port city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. At the time, TAZARA was the single largest foreign finance project in the world. This risky geopolitical move worked for the Chinese in the long run politically but not economically. At the UN General Assembly in 1971, China was readmitted to the United Nations behind the votes of over 30 African countries. It was implied by TAZARA that a serious relationship between China lending to Africa was beginning, and enthusiastic African leaders were ready to embrace their new ally. The votes from African nations which restored China into the UN proved critical for increasing China’s international legitimacy amidst turbulent ideological times. The railway was not as lucrative as expected for China, but in the following decade the market shifted towards a global economy supported by primary manufacturing conglomerates in Southeast Asia and China’s rise to prominence as a global superpower began. In retrospect, it seems political gains from the TAZARA project have more than accounted for any economic losses.
But just as important, the TAZARA railway established the groundwork for amiable relations between China and Africa going forward. The Chinese influence in Africa is a topic that deeply interests me and one that I will certainly touch on in future blogs, so I will briefly touch on it from a Zambia specific perspective here.
Zambian soil, particularly in the north, is rich with natural resources, the most prominent being copper. Owning better technology for extracting and processing, private Chinese copper firms became the main Zambian industry around 10–15 years ago. The eager Zambian government readily agreed, hoping to line their pockets with this lucrative industry. The introduction of China has led to much needed development in Zambia. However, the economy is now incredibly dependent on copper prices and Chinese influence. The profits enrich those at the top but rarely trickle down to the working class. A Couchsurfing host we stayed with for two nights, Ivor, shared his experience working through the hazardous working conditions and long hours of these mines. His entire family was involved in the industry and his dream growing up was to keep working for the mine until he could get a higher paid and safer management position. He worked 12 hour days 6 days a week underground as upper management demanded “more production” endlessly. Every day after work the miners would have to drink a fermented beverage to clear their lungs from the toxins they breathed in. They were expected to do nothing besides sleep and work, and the desperate need for a paycheck led to no one complaining about these conditions. This is daily life for a good amount of Zambians who are lucky enough to get a job in one of these mines.
Ivor escaped this life by risking his job to attend a workshop in Nairobi that connected him with a man who runs a foreign volunteering program at an orphanage. His inspiring ambition ultimately led him to starting his own informal school for kids who can’t afford government school fees. He runs it out of his house and his wife is the only teacher for the 45 kids that attend. He funds it by welcoming hundreds of Couchsurfers like us from all over the world each year and asking for a donation of $8 per night for his school. Ivor is truly an exceptional human being who built a unique life of service to others despite extreme adversity. Most people are not like Ivor. They slave away in these dangerous mines their entire lives.
Chinese influence does not stop at mining and infrastructure projects. They are setting up language and cultural schools for Zambians and providing thousands of scholarships each year for bright Zambians to study in China. Learning Chinese is becoming one of the most lucrative skills a Zambian can have. Ivor plans to start learning Chinese this month in hopes to increase revenues for his school through part time translation gigs. Chinese immigrants are not only employed in high level mining management but also in every sector of the economy. Little cultural mixing occurs between these two groups and incidents of racial clashes are not uncommon. Still, most Zambians understand that the Chinese influence is inseparable from the Zambian economy. The overwhelming sentiment we got from Zambians was that they wished the government would do more to regulate Chinese intervention, but they think Zambia is better with China than without.
We even hung out with a fellow Couchsurfer from China who works at a bank in Lusaka. He admitted China can sometime seem as though they want to take over, but these transactions are simply business. Unlike Western nations that add political contingencies to loans and aid projects, the Chinese hand the money over, no strings attached. If an African country is cautious enough to turn them away, there is a healthy supply of alternatives the Chinese can choose to do business with. Most often, the African countries come to them. They continue to extend their global empire as they mutually contribute to the development of the African continent. Time will tell if the West lets this expansion of power continue.
China is changing the face of Zambia every day. With time, as these cultures further interact and blend, what it means to be Zambian may change. Something tells me that one thing that will persist against the test of time is the Zambian hustle.
