Proud moment abroad

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Friday, February 18, 2022*

A frisson of excitement is rare during a disquieting semester. But I had one on Monday. The experience was as cool as the first day of autumn. It made me think of Zambia in very soft and tender ways.

It’s not what you think. I wasn’t conscripted into the US army, neither did President Joe Biden invite me for dinner at The White House. That’s what you’d probably bargain for because some people are wont to make a name that way, like John Banda, who was born in the slums of Kalingalinga, but is now a lieutenant in the US army. You know I’m joking, right?

What I speak of took the form of a simple, special moment, triggered by an ordinary person in an ordinary setting. And what do they say about ordinary things? Well, they’re the secret to finding joy in life.

The bus ride

It happened on my way to school. I take the bus and the ride lasts for at least 30 minutes. Sometimes I’m alone, sometimes I’m with friends, who are mostly Africans caught, to borrow Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” in search of the Golden Fleece.

It’s the usual bus ride, except that it’s not bumpy and it’s in America, so you often get to see some ostentatious display of wealth on the roads in the form of a convoy of Jeeps.

The ride is also a picturesque introduction to the architecture of American houses, set as if to form a phalanx on the roadsides, in bright white wooden frames that have withstood the recurrent menace of winter storms and the faint rays of American summer sunlight. It’s beautiful.

And since I stay near a farming area characterized oddly by gentrification and its own share of industrialization, you can spot a deer or two on your lucky day.

The lawns as you head to my university campus are green and extensive, as if they never grow dry or long. Sometimes.

The big surprise

It was no different on Monday. I was on the bus with my roommate, an engineering student called Sadiq, and my classmate, Mary, both from Nigerian.

We sat in different rows of the bus, with Sadiq behind me and Mary, separated by the aisle, opposite me.

It was the lady sitting at the back of the bus that broke the ice and eventually set the proud moment in motion. `

She had been tapping Sadiq on the shoulder while I minded my own business. She was an elderly black American woman, who I might speculate is in her early seventies, if they type of gait in her feet was anything to go by.

When Sadiq looked over his shoulder to speak with the woman, she asked him a question that sent my head turning, not in agitation, but in pride and wonder.

Pointing her finger in the direction of Mary, she said, “Is she from Zambia, too?”

“No,” Sadiq said, “She is from Nigeria, like me.”

It was at this point that I took the liberty to introduce myself as being the only Zambia among the three students.

What took me aback about this encounter was the woman’s clear assumption that the young female African student was a Zambian, a nationality which seems to constitute a negligible minority in this part of the United States called Collinsville, Illinois.

It was like a stray bullet had just hit me in a crowd the moment she asked, “Is she from Zambia?”

As you might have noticed, the odds that someone will ask you if you’re from Zambia are very slim. But the same cannot be said about Nigeria, for example, because our friends occur in relatively greater numbers in many parts of the USA.

Besides, it was this same week that I got more insight into this disparity. As I was completing some payroll forms, the lady attending to me (clearly a black American too) wanted to know where I come from.

"Zambia," I said. “Do you know where it is?”

Her response didn’t shock me. “Near Nigeria?”

Of course, I had to educate her, except that she could only relate after I mentioned the Victoria Falls and she looked it up on Google!

So it’s because of experiences like these that the woman on the bus struck me as exceptional. I wanted to know not only how she came to know about Zambia, but also what she thought about the country and its people.

Unfortunately, bus etiquette would not allow me to do so. I nursed my curiosity until she dropped off.

Moreover, it was Mary my colleague whom she thought was from Zambia. She actually thought that the Nigerian lady was very pretty, and she confessed this to her.

Well, all I can say is that I was the only real Zambian on that bus, and I’ve lived to tell the story. It was a proud Zambian moment abroad and I can imagine that the American woman has probably met many wonderful Zambians in her world that she wants to associate the country with as many black people as she meets in America. Even on a bus.

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