This is Zambia, The Real Africa

It wasn’t long ago, but entirely too late, that I realized that being here in Zambia I feel as though I’m in the Real Africa.

Visiting a friend the other week, I was taking a hot bath (one of the many luxuries afforded by the village life) and worrying about the 30 mile bike ride I’d have to make to get home. I was looking over the grass wall of the bathing shelter and Pride Rock was jutting out in the distance, I thought “Hakuna Matata”. With a smile, my worries dissipated and the only things missing were the signing elephants, the dancing antelope, Simba and his entourage of Timon and the Fat Warthog friend.

Zambia is located on the Northern border of what’s considered Southern Africa and, at least where I am located, is Lion King to a ‘T’. Not to say that Lion King is the real Africa, but with the Savannah, forest enclaves, occasional trees and winding rivers, it is exactly what most people picture when they think of this vast continent.

To me, it is less the jutting rocks, the expectations of seeing large animals and the fears of deadly snakes that make it feel like the Real Africa, but rather the strange encounters and confusing cultural misunderstandings that make it so. It’s the little boy that went running, screaming with tears running down his face when he saw the white man riding a bike, and the sweet old man giving me the most contented and equally baffled look as he bathed in the river and I rode by. It’s the little girl chasing me down and telling me to walk my bike as I pass the Chief’s Palace and the people that introduce themselves as ‘Piston’, ‘Nervous’, ‘Candymore’ and ‘Wireless’ that make this the Real Africa.

I thought for sure, I’d arrive elsewhere, the jungles of the DRC, the pyramids of Egypt, or the dunes of the Sahara and feel that those places were just as much the Real Africa until, on my way home my suspicions were confirmed. Bumping over the dirt road past the corn fields and through the small mud hut villages I passed a group of school-aged boys, all wearing the same shirt at different stages of tattered-ness. It was a green, short-sleeve shirt with words arcing over the Zambian flag. It read, in big black letters with a fine white stitching at the edges “Zambia The Real Africa”. It was then that I figured it out after all, this is The Real Africa.