Walking the Bowl—A True Story of Murder and Survival among the Street Children of Lusaka

Authors: Chris Lockhart and Daniel Mulilo Chama
Publisher: Hannover Square Press 2022

I was initially apprehensive about this book thinking this is another hypocritical attempt by NGOs to belittle a third world country.  However, that apprehension got somewhat diluted while reading this book.  I still have a small but nagging feeling about it primarily because of my experience with reading enough spurious stories written by avaricious collaborators of the NGOs about Sri Lanka.

I read a positive story about Zambia in Caitlin O’Connell’s book Wild Rituals. 

Today many of the traditional elephant migration routes in Zambezi are blocked.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, this region was carved out from the Southern border of Zambia and the northern border of Botswana above the Okavango Delta by the German colonialists to gain access to the Zambezi river.  There are efforts to reconnect a safe passage between the southwest region of Zambia and the southeast region of Angola to the north and the Okavango Delta to the south through the Zambezi, which at one time was, and occasionally still is, an open migratory path for elephants.

This is not a positive story.  This is a heart-wrenching story of the street children of Lusaka.  The story is written like a novel  through the eyes of the street children.  It took a team of eight individuals over five years to gather data to write this book.  The team consisted of five former street children, a journalism student from University of Zambia, an outreach worker who was once a street child himself, and an anthropologist.  Most of the events described in this book occurred in 2016.  The team recorded hundreds of hours of interviews, group discussions, impromptu conversations, personal observations and interactions.

The body of a ten-year-old was discovered by Timo under a garbage heap.  Timo is the leader of a group of children living by excavating the garbage of Lusaka’s largest landfill.  Normally, such a finding goes unnoticed by the authorities, but the victim’s mother was politically well connected.  Soon police arrested Timo and the corrupt police-chief threatened him with murder charges unless Timo can find the murderer within two weeks.

The street boys belong to gangs with their own territories. Homeless girls do not end in streets, but they end in brothels.  Kapula, a pretty sixteen year old girl who has to sleep with men all day is worrying about her missing brother.

Moonga, a new member of the Beggar Boys gang, learned that beggar boys keep plastic bottles filled with stuff under their noses to constantly inhale the fumes.  

“It is something we do everyday, every minute—breakfast, lunch and dinner,”  

Glue sniffing is the rule.  

“When I sniff glue, I forget about all the bad people we have to deal with here”.  

“Do you mean the policemen and the security guards?”  

“Yes them”.

Timo’s, Kapula’s, and Moonga’s lives become more closely intertwined as each child engages in a desperate bid for survival while the murder “investigation” continues.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted.  However, if you can summon up enough courage to read it, then you will be reading an extremely well written book; one of the best of its kind.