My Dearest Zambians wherever you are,
I am a former English teacher who taught at Kabulonga Boys secondary school. I am indoors as I write this letter recovering from a hip joint fracture suffered when I fell from the stairs. I write as the rain taps softly on the windows here in Luton.
England has a way of being quiet, even when there are many people around. The buses pass, the lights shine, the shops open and close, yet sometimes the silence enters the heart. It is in such moments that Zambia returns to me more strongly than ever.
I left home during the days of President Kenneth Kaunda, when we were still young and believed life would wait for us. I remember Lusaka dust rising behind minibuses, the smell of charcoal fires in the evening, women calling across the yards, and the sound of radios playing rumba from open windows.
I remember speaking Cinyanja freely, laughing without translating myself, belonging without effort.
Here in Britain, many years have passed like pages turning in a book. I married, raised children, paid mortgages, worked hard, queued politely, learnt to speak in a softer voice, learnt to apologise even when nothing was wrong.
My children are mixed race, beautiful souls with my eyes and their father’s complexion. They know they are Zambian through me, but only in pieces.
They know nsima, they know I say “iwe” when I am annoyed, they know I sing old songs while cooking. But they do not know the warmth of a compound neighbour who enters without knocking. They do not know the smell of first rain on dry earth.
Sometimes I speak Cinyanja to myself in the kitchen, just to hear it alive. “Muli bwanji?” I ask no one. “Ndili bwino,” I answer myself. Then I laugh, but it is a lonely laugh.
People ask if I will ever return home for good. The truth is difficult. My body misses Zambia, but my life has become British.
I now feel cold when the weather reaches what once felt normal. I like punctual buses, quiet streets, and tea at odd hours. I stand in queues without complaint.
I have grown used to privacy, to appointments, to this ordered life. If I returned now, I fear I would be a stranger in the place that made me.
And Zambia too has moved on without me. New roads, new slang, new politics, new generations who never knew the Kaunda years except through stories.
Those who knew me are older now, some buried, some scattered abroad like seeds in foreign soil. I sometimes think I belong nowhere completely: too Zambian for England, too English now for Zambia.
Still, in dreams I walk barefoot in the yard of our childhood home. I hear mother calling. I hear laughter from the tap where women gather with buckets. I smell kapenta frying. In dreams, no time has passed.
Tell the young ones there that leaving a country is not the same as forgetting it. Home can live inside a person even after decades away. But it changes shape. It becomes memory more than geography.
If I do not come back, know it is not because I stopped loving Zambia. It is because life planted me elsewhere, and roots, once grown deep, do not move easily.
Ndakusowa kwambiri, my fellow Zambians.
With love always,
Your sister,
Miriam
Luton
UK