Topping Up

Residents of the Zambian Copperbelt town Luanshya have experienced great hardship since the widespread implementation of structural adjustment policies in the mid-1990s, which saw the privatisation of the state mining conglomerate the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) that was the mainstay of the region's economy. Life, as portrayed in contemporary Zambian popular music, has become a precarious and continuous practice of trying to live and make a living. The past is a nostalgic experience that underlies the present and the future is too frightening to contemplate. Implicated in the uncertainty of the future, that is, the possibility of living a long and full life is the body. The body is perceived through the sensorial aspects of living within a difficult environment as letting one down and at the same time offering an inalienable corporeal tool through which one can continue the activity of living. Some make it, others do not, what is valorised is the ability to pick up and go on trying.