‘I’m looking for my father’

Official column logo

THE PILGRIM, Friday, December 31, 2021*

I do not understand why some people were puzzled by an SOS from a South African girl who asked social media users to help her trace her father.

Apparently in her twenties, the young lady has the scantiest information on her father, not even a photograph of him—but nonetheless surprising because she has never seen the man before.

His name also does not appear to be a very helpful lead because it suggests that the man, if not South African, hailed from a different country.

The said girl was born after her mother, who is still alive, had an affair with a security officer.

The mother also has no clue as to the whereabouts of her erstwhile lover, since it appears they lost contact with each other shortly after their dalliance.

For what it may be worth, tragic instances like this one are infamous in the checkered world of love, but they also sound to be too sad or too good to be true, as if they were culled straight from a movie script.

But the situation at hand is a real-life story that happened in South Africa in just about the manner I have tried to describe it from the facts I gathered.

Some people felt that it was not wise for the young lady to send out such a plea after so many years, whereas others could not just wrap their heads around it.

I am interested in the following question about the credibility of the story: what is the likelihood of it happening?

As a former security officer, once based in Ndola, I want to give my two cents on this issue and hope to lend my weight to the story.

I was a boy of 19-years-old when I was forced to take up this job just to offset my own sense of despondency after I left secondary school and found a desperate lack of jobs in the ghost town that is Ndola.

As early as 2015, I had realized that if you had no qualification in careers like nursing or teaching to be able to land a civil servant job, you would soon be resigned to your fate as an unskilled labourer in the shop industry or as a maid or garden boy.

So the security officer position I found was a typical underpaid job, with erratic wages outrageously out of sync with the labour laws of the day.

But I reluctantly took it up and daily went about to ply my trade from my assigned beat, which was a sprawling business complex in town.

I was joined by two of my colleagues, including employees of several other security companies, who manned locations near mine.

So we would together walk down the famous and beautiful tree-lined Broadway Road on our way to work, and it was during these fleeting moments of fellowship that I was introduced to and joked about the awry side of the security officer’s job.

I discovered that my friends who had been in this job for a longer time were often excited not about the challenges of their occupation at night, but rather about the opportunities for sensual pleasure offered by nearby sex workers.

While they went to bed with their clients at a fee, the sex workers slept with security officers not for money but in exchange for permission to freely roam around their premises in search of prospective customers as the night dragged on into the following day.

It was a repetitive cycle and some of these men, who were my seniors, spoke of their own favourites from the women they went out with.

As a new kid on the block, these women openly solicited for sexual relations from me to secure my favours with them.

But I acted sanctimonious and naïve, and they visibly took offence to my apparent lack of experience in this area.

We even joked, once at our company offices, that some of our colleagues were moving corpses because they had pursued some of these sexual relations with such reckless abandon that sometimes they did not wear condoms.

Before I could give in to a similar lifestyle, I resigned from the job after I obtained admission as a media student at the University of Zambia.

So when I heard about the South African experience—I am not insinuating that the woman involved was a prostitute—I imagined that it is during such instances in the risky lives of security officers that children can be conceived.

And because these jobs are often changed like clothes, there is no knowing where one would have left a pregnancy in the offing during their course of duty.

 By the way, it is often the fate of many unskilled labourers or low-paid employees to find sex, whether casual or not, as their form of recreation besides alcohol.

If you have stayed or attended school in the barracks like me, for example, you will remember how unsuspecting girls, including promiscuous women, bore the brunt of pent-up lust from new army recruits after their pass out.

Of course, they cannot afford a holiday in Dubai, so they celebrate life with beer and women and sometimes end up spreading unplanned pregnancies.

For the same reason of little income, most families in mining towns like Mufulira had at least 15 children.

Having interviewed mineworker children myself, I have found out that there is no other way to explain such virility apart from the fact that after spending many days of backbreaking toil in the mine, men plodded back home to get as much sexual entertainment as they could get from the women they loved. The result? More pregnancies!

So it is what it is. A security officer, like the mineworker or excited army recruit, could possibly end up with a child somewhere, who eventually struggles for his or her father’s identity.

*This column is published every Friday in Zambia's best-selling newspaper, the Zambia Daily Mail.