Zambia Dispatch

First-time visitor. Long-time yearner.

Everything is so colourful. So much so that at 11 pm, in jetlagged protest, I find myself deep-diving Google to figure out when and why all our buildings and design back home turned white and grey.
Modernism. Minimalism. Function over feeling. Surprise! It’s Capitalism.

Yeah yeah yeah.

I could text my brother, he is the architect of the family, but that would open up more architecture talk than I can stomach.

Someone asks what I think so far.

“Life. Energy.”

Every corner. Every street. Life, movement, community, colour.

I’m here with Santilla Chingaipe on a mini recce trip for her debut narrative feature, Umuzimu — a story that challenges us to give form to the intangible and invites us to rethink how we connect with what we can’t always explain. (Poetry).

A film that reaches across continents and, by extension, me. Context is crucial in the field. A producer without it is like a fly breakdancing on the windowsill after slamming into the glass fifty times while the door beside it sits wide open.

On our last day, we get to stand ten metres from two adult rhinos in the national park. Two rangers, who take shifts protecting them from poachers, lead us to see them.
The rhinos have just mated and are too tired to be dangerous. (Amen).

All I can think about is that scene in Jurassic Park with the Triceratops, when Dr. Grant says:

“She was my favourite when I was a kid. Now I see she’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”

What a privilege.

T.