Unequal Scenes

Chudleigh and Ngombe sit barely two kilometers apart in Lusaka. Walls, razor wire, and a tree-lined quiet on one side; an unplanned warren of roughly 100,000 people on the other.

Zambia is a country that is "balancing" — balancing the legacy of the Copperbelt with ambitions to become a hub for the minerals of the green transition, balancing Chinese investment against Western courtship, balancing a fragile hydropower grid against an unforgiving climate, balancing the comfortable mythology of a "peaceful democracy" against widening cracks underneath.

But it's also a place where the cost of that balancing act is paid almost entirely by people and ecosystems with no seat at the table, and nowhere is the resulting tension between aspiration and reality more visible than in Lusaka. Southern Africa is one of the most unequal regions in the world, and Lusaka wears that inequality on the surface: a city whose population has grown almost tenfold in five decades and where roughly 70% of residents now live in unplanned settlements, the "compounds" of Kanyama, Chibolya, Misisi, Ngombe, stitched together from cinder block, corrugated iron, and improvisation.

Drive east toward Ibex Hill or Kabulonga and the city changes character entirely: high walls topped with razor wire and electric fence, gatehouses, manicured lawns, and the garden-city blueprint bequeathed by the British that still dictates who gets space and who gets density. In the cold-dry months, woodsmoke from the compounds mixes with diesel haze from generators in the wealthy suburbs and settles over the whole city at dusk, an acrid reminder that less than half the country has access to electricity even in a good year.

Two men adjust their net in a lake in the compound of Msisi, Lusaka, founded in the 1960s on land squatted from a colonial-era farm (the name is simply the Nyanja rendering of "Mrs.", after the original white landowner, a Mrs. Edwards). This lake is euphemistically called "Blue Waters" — an old quarry in the middle of Misisi that doubles as the compound's landfill, swimming hole, fishing pond, and, for some, drinking water.

The fringes of Soweto Market, Zambia's largest, where the formal grid of the CBD dissolves into a labyrinth of stalls, tarps, and handcarts. Roughly 80% of Lusaka's population sources its food through the informal sector, and almost all of it passes through here.

In markets like these in central Lusaka, thousands of traders pay a daily council levy plus a patchwork of unofficial fees collected by party cadres for the use of toilets, walkways, and the privilege of staying put.

A smallholder's maize field in Mkushi. This is the kind of plot that, collectively, produces more than 90% of Zambia's staple crop, with no irrigation, no grid power, and almost no margin for a year when the rains don't come.

A busy crossroads in rural Zambia.

Shucking corn and tossing it into a pile on a smallholding in Mkushi, Zambia.

Small fields of maize, soybeans, and tomatoes around a single home — a working polyculture, the opposite of the monoculture maize and synthetic fertilizer Zambian policy has pushed for two decades. The alternative is being built by groups like the Young Emerging Farmers Initiative, which has regenerated some 10,000 hectares of degraded land through agroecology and indigenous seed.

Roma and Chipata compound sit in the same northeastern slice of Lusaka — walled lots, lawns, pools, and gated complexes on one side; an informal settlement defined in the academic literature by its erratic water supply on the other.

The City Market and bus stop in central Lusaka.

Downtown Lusaka as seen from above Msisi, the giant compound in the city's south.

Two men adjust their fishing net next to a huge floating garbage patch, in Blue Water, Msisi.

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