When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger." Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war. With the same fiercely beautiful prose that won her acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her friendship with K.
K is, seemingly, a man of contradictions: tattooed, battle scarred, and weathered by farm work, he is a lion of a man, feral and bulletproof. Yet he is also a born-again Christian, given to weeping when he recollects his failed romantic life, and more than anything else welling up inside with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, unimaginable tortures, and the murdering of innocent civilians—and K, like all the veterans of the war, has blood on his hands.

Driven by K's memories, Fuller and K decide to enter the heart of darkness in the most literal way—by traveling from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Mozambique to visit the scenes of the war and to meet other veterans. It is a strange journey into the past, one marked at once by somber reflections and odd humor and featuring characters such as Mapenga, a fellow veteran who lives with his pet lion on a little island in the middle of a lake and is known to cope with his personal demons by refusing to speak for days on end. What results from Fuller's journey is a remarkably unbiased and unsentimental glimpse of men who have killed, mutilated, tortured, and scrambled to survive during wartime and who now must attempt to live with their past and live past their sins. In these men, too, we get a glimpse of life in Africa, a land that besets its creatures with pests, plagues, and natural disasters, making the people there at once more hardened and more vulnerable than elsewhere.

Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier

After being expelled from Botswana for writing their controversial bestseller Cry of the Kalahari, Mark and Delia Owens set off on a journey across Africa, searching for a new Eden. They found it in Zambia, but elephant poachers soon had them fighting for their lives when they tried to stop the slaughter. 16 pages of photos, half in color.

The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness

In A Cowrie of Hope Binwell Sinyangwe captures the rhythms of a people whose poverty has not diminished their dignity, where hope can only be accompanied by small acts of courage, and where friendship has not lost its value.

A Cowrie of Hope

In the 1970s Shiva Naipaul travelled to Africa, visiting Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia for several months. Through his experiences, the places he visited and his various encounters, he aimed to discover what 'liberation', 'revolution' and 'socialism' meant to the ordinary people. His journey of discovery is brilliantly documented in this intimate, comic and controversial portrayal of a continent on the brink of change.

North of South: An African Journey

On 24 October 1964, the Republic of Zambia was formed, replacing the territory which had formerly been known as Northern Rhodesia. Fifty years on, Andrew Sardanis provides a sympathetic but critical insider's account of Zambia, from independence to the present. He paints a stark picture of Northern Rhodesia at decolonisation and the problems of the incoming government, presented with an immense uphill task of rebuilding the infrastructure of government and administration – civil service, law, local government and economic development. 

Sardanis was a minister at the heart of the government and later a highly successful entrepreneur. As a friend and colleague of many of the most prominent names in post-independence Zambia – from the presidencies of founding leader Kenneth Kaunda to the incumbent Michael Sata – he uses his unique eyewitness experience to provide an inside view of a country in transition. He looks at the highs and lows of Zambia's political development: a purposeful beginning followed by many blunders; confusion, at times bordering on chaos, interspersed with flashes of sensible action and good work. 

This book provides a detailed examination of the major events in Zambia's history since independence and their effect on the country's development and progress, based on Sardanis's in-depth knowledge of Zambia and its people and the inner workings of its government.


Zambia: The First 50 Years

In "Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight", Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller’s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

In the declining years of the British Empire, in Northern Rhodesia, Stewart Gore-Browne was a proper English gentleman who built himself a sprawling country estate, complete with liveried servants, rose gardens, and lavish dinners finished off with vintage port in the library. All that was missing was a woman to share it with. He adored the beautiful aviatrix Ethel Locke King, but she was almost twenty years his senior, married, and his aunt. Lorna, the only other woman Gore-Brown cared for, was married as well, but years later her orphaned daughter would become Gore-Browne's wife. The story of a colonialist who beat his servants yet supported Rhodesian independence and who was given a chief's burial by the local elders when he died, "The Africa House" rescues "from oblivion the life story of an astonishing man, an astonishing marriage, and an astonishing house" ("The Spectator").

The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream

One hot, dry summer in Zambia, the rain stops falling. Soon, the animals are very hungry and thirsty. How can they recover? They have heard of a wonderful tree that can produce fruit, but it will only do so if it is asked by name and no one can remember what it is called! The animals agree to send a messenger to the wise mountain to find out the name of the tree and bring it back. One by one, the animals set out, but remembering the name is not as easy as they had imagined . . .

The Tortoise's Gift: A Story from Zambia

Just off the Great North Road

Zambia is one of the best destinations in Africa for walking and river safaris, yet it is little explored by travellers. This fourth edition covers the prime attractions, including all national parks, from the lower Zambezi and Kafue to the famous Luangwa Park, host to several unique species and the top place for leopard-spotting. Advice for the independent traveler includes how to choose first-class bushcamps, lodges and/or hotels to organise memorable safaris.



Zambia, 4th

In "Always Another Country", Sisonke Msimang writes about her exile childhood in Zambia, Kenya and Canada, her college years in the USA, and returning to South Africa in the 1990s. She reflects candidly on present-day South Africa, but this is a book about family, romance and motherhood; of childhood jealousies and adult passions, and what it means to be born into a life scored by history. Her memoir is a chronicle of a coming of age, for both a woman and a young democracy.

Zambia

Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier

Alexandra Fuller

The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness

Delia Owens

A Cowrie of Hope

Binwell Sinyangwe

North of South: An African Journey

Shiva Naipaul

Zambia: The First 50 Years

Andrew Sardanis

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Alexandra Fuller

The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream

Christina Lamb

The Tortoise's Gift: A Story from Zambia

Lari Don

Just off the Great North Road

Hugh Chare

Zambia, 4th

Chris McIntyre

Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home

Sisonke Msimang

Travel Light, Move Fast

Alexandra Fuller

Tales of Zambia

Dick Hobson

The Elites Of Barotseland, 1878 1969; A Political History Of Zambia's Western Province

Gerald L. Caplan

The Lusaka Years: The ANC in exile in Zambia, 1963 to 1994

Hugh Macmillan

Culture and Customs of Zambia (Culture & Customs of Africa) (Culture and Customs of Africa)

Scott D. Taylor