The lions den, p.1
The Lions' Den, page 1
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2024 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Iris Mwanza, 2024
The right of Iris Mwanza to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 992 3
eISBN 978 1 83885 993 0
For David
The king declared to Daniel, ‘O Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you serve continually, been able to deliver you from the lions?’ Then Daniel said to the king, ‘O king, live forever! My God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths, and they have not harmed me, because I was found blameless before him; and also before you, O king, I have done no harm.’
Daniel 6: 20–22
Contents
Lusaka October 1990
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Nyamphande Village 1985
Chapter Five
Lusaka November 1990
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Leopard Hill Cemetery October 1992
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Lusaka
October 1990
Chapter One
Grace paused outside the maw of the Central Police Station. She’d passed this station five days a week going to and from work, but had never been inside. From the bus, Grace had admired its colonial architecture: the arched entrance, the imposing columns and the white, sweeping stairway that gleamed in the early morning sun. Now, surveying the building from up close, she could see that this once-grand building had gone to seed. Termites had cracked the facade and left dirty brown trails across the walls, weeds poked out of cracks and crevices in the stairs and a determined ivy had crept halfway up one of the columns.
The decrepit building did nothing to dampen Grace’s excitement. She had spent four years studying law, and the last five months at the firm of DB & Associates proofing legal documents. Now, finally, she had been given a case. It was a pro-bono criminal case that no one else wanted but still … Grace suppressed a smile and stepped from the sunlight into the building’s gloomy entrance.
A policeman sat in the foyer behind a mukwa wood desk, almost hidden behind manila folders in messy piles.
‘I’m here to see my client, Willbess Mulenga,’ Grace said to the officer. He lifted up his head, took off his glasses, and pointed his lenses at Grace as if she were a bug to be magnified. Knowing that her habit of looking people in the eye was considered bad manners, she looked down into her bag and pretended to dig for something, careful not to squash her banana. When she looked up again, the policeman was still staring at her. His glasses were perched back on his broad nose and his magnified eyes gave him a comical look, but his lips were thin and unsmiling. He pulled out a manila folder from one of the piles and opened it over the newspaper on his desk, covering the full-page colour pictorial of President Kaunda in his Chairman Mao suit waving a white handkerchief to crowds. It looked like yesterday’s paper, but the newspapers were always full of fetching pictures of the President so Grace couldn’t be sure. She cleared her throat a few times, but the policeman continued to ignore her.
‘I’m a lawyer from DB & Associates,’ she said, surprised at how tinny her voice sounded. The policeman stretched and yawned, exposing the dark patches under his arms, before extracting a form from his desk drawer and handing it to Grace. The form had been photocopied to the faintness of a spider web, and it took Grace several minutes to figure out the questions and fill it in. She gave it back to the policeman, who reviewed her answers, his lips moving as he read.
‘Grace Zulu,’ the officer whispered, reading her name off the bottom of the form. ‘Zulu,’ he repeated loudly. ‘My sister, you’re from Eastern Province?’ He was suddenly all smiles. ‘Which village?’
How did he know that I’m from the village? Grace wondered in dismay. Maybe it was her second-hand skirt suit. Or maybe it was the cicatrices on her cheeks. Grace ran her fingers over the ndembo left by the nganga’s razor-blade and the black potion he had rubbed into the fresh cuts – protection from evil spirits, her father had told her.
‘Chief Nyamphande’s village.’
The man switched from English to Nsenga. ‘I’m Officer Lungu from Chief Mumbi’s village, less than forty kilometres from Nyamphande. You must know it.’
‘Ndithu,’ she nodded. Clans from the two villages had intermarried for generations. She had even been there with her father, but it was so long ago she couldn’t remember why. She recalled walking through fields of maize, millet and sorghum, across a stick bridge over the Nyakawise river, up and along a series of waterfalls in the Chibulubulu hills, and then finally down a winding dirt path, only to arrive at a village that looked exactly like Nyamphande – mud huts with neatly thatched roofs, surrounded by fields of maize, millet and sorghum.
Grace switched back to English. She was here for work, not fraternising. ‘Officer, I’m in a hurry to see my client.’
‘Iyai. You must wait for approval.’
‘Approval? I have a legal right to see my client.’
‘Ndithu, but there are still procedures to follow.’
Grace thought about her boss, Avaristo. She couldn’t go back to the office without getting this interview done. Avaristo always expressed his opinions at high volume. She imagined his reaction if she offered Officer Lungu as an excuse. What moron can’t execute a basic client interview? Get out and don’t come back until you’ve done your job!
‘I need to see my client today,’ Grace insisted.
The policeman shook his head and said, ‘As you can see, there are many in line before you,’ pointing to the piles on his desk. ‘But since you are in a big hurry, sisi, pay the expediting fee and I’ll see what I can do.’
All Grace had in her bag was ten kwacha – her bus fare for the rest of the week – and a banana. Even if she did have the money, she wasn’t about to pay a bribe. ‘I’ve never heard of any such fee.’
Officer Lungu shrugged. ‘DB & Associates has lots of money, sisi, tell your bosses not to be so stingy.’
Grace wished he would stop calling her his sister. She opened her mouth, but then shut it again before saying a word. She knew reason wouldn’t work on a corrupt cop; she would wait for his shift to end and start again with the next policeman. She would file a complaint against Officer Lungu – one rotten egg made the whole police force look bad. As she turned to walk away, Officer Lungu stood up and called her back: ‘Sisi! Bwela, bwela, bwela!’ Standing, Officer Lungu was surprisingly short, his uniform ill-fitting and a size too small, but he wasn’t as corpulent as his big head had suggested. ‘I’ll help you today, but next time you must bring me a token of appreciation. You understand?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Follow me.’
Grace hesitated; she didn’t want to owe Officer Lungu anything, but then thought about Avaristo and raced after him, her kitten heels clicking against the concrete floor. She followed him down a long corridor to the left, past several women sitting on a bench who looked up hopefully, but the policeman ignored them. Grace felt guilty walking in Officer Lungu’s wake past these dejected-looking women in their bright blouses and chitenge, the colourful cloths tied at the waist and covering them down to their ankles. She didn’t need to be told that they were waiting to see their husbands and sons, and wondered if the police required ‘appreciation’ from them before letting them in.
Around the next corner, Officer Lungu paused and held up his fist for her to stop, peered up a narrow stairway, then skipped across it. ‘Hurry now,’ he whispered, moving even faster around yet another corner and into an unlit corridor. A fluorescent light above them suddenly buzzed on and startled Grace, but Officer Lungu didn’t seem to notice. ‘You’re tall like a giraffe, and just as beautiful,’ he said to Grace over his shoulder. She ignored him. She knew she was too tall, too dark and too thin to be beautiful. At over six feet, she particularly hated being compared to a giraffe.
‘Are you married?’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘In marriage or in me?’ Officer Lungu stopped at a door at the end of this last long corridor.
‘Neither.’
He laughed. ‘Ah, but you girls of nowadays, mukonda kumeka.’
How dare he think I’m playing hard to get! Grace thought, but said nothing, fearing that any word she uttered would reveal how much she already despised this little, toad-like policeman. Officer Lungu opened the door and said, ‘Wait in here.’
Chapter Two
To Grace’s relief, it was an interview room with no prison cells in sight. She had h eard that the cells were so overcrowded that prisoners had to arrange themselves head to toe, like sardines, to sleep. This room was small with high ceilings and three tiny windows at the top of one wall shafting light into the gloom. In the middle of the room were two wooden chairs on either side of a narrow metal table, with a drawer hanging out like a dog’s tongue. Grace pushed in the drawer, but it rolled out again. After a few shoves, she gave up and sat down. She pulled out the case sheet, a legal pad and two pens, and arranged and rearranged the items on the desk while she waited for her client.
Although she knew it by heart, she reviewed the case sheet now tucked inside her legal pad:
Name: Willbess Mulenga of Plot 847/11/9, Kalikiliki Township
Charges: Contravening Section 155 of the Penal Code
Age: Unknown
Details: After an incident reported on the night of September 15, 1990, at the MacGyver Bar, one Willbess Mulenga, a male dressed as a female, was reported to have been seen in flagrante delicto with an unknown male patron.
Willbess Mulenga was arrested the morning of September 16, 1990, at his parents’ home in Kalikiliki.
Grace had loved criminal law in school, puzzling over labyrinthine codes, Latin phrases and shifting burdens of proof. She had even interviewed with the Public Defender’s Office, but withdrew when they told her they required a year as an unpaid intern, which she couldn’t afford. She didn’t earn very much as a first-year at DB & Associates, but it was enough, exactly enough to pay her room and board, transport costs, and to send 100 kwacha back to her mother in the village every month. Although the firm was corporate, it did have a small portfolio of pro-bono criminal cases. Grace had found a copy of the green-velour-covered Penal Code in the firm’s library and had flipped through it until she found Section 155: ‘Any person who has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature; or permits a male person to have carnal knowledge … against the order of nature; is guilty of a felony and is liable to imprisonment for fourteen years.’
As Grace waited for her client, she pondered the meaning of ‘the order of nature’. Homosexuality was part of nature, of that she was sure. She had seen it in both the animal and human worlds, and so read Section 155 as an effort to rewrite the laws of nature. Grace thought about Mr Patel. He had been her father’s oldest and dearest friend. No one told her that Mr Patel was different, it was just something she came to understand as she got older, but, unlike most of the village, it didn’t change how much she loved him. She didn’t understand why anyone cared about his private life, but they did. He was rejected by his family, and, with the exception of her father, demonised and mistreated by the villagers. And now an even worse fate awaited her client, imprisoned and in remand since mid-September. More than four weeks already!
Grace made a note in the margin: ‘Research constitutional challenges to Penal Code, Sec. 155 – rights to privacy/protections from discrimination.’ She slid her finger a few inches down the page. She circled Willbess’s age, noted as ‘Unknown’. Were these consenting adults? The age of consent was sixteen. And what about the other facts? Not much on record except a male dressed as a female caught in flagrante delicto with another male in a bar. ‘In flagrante delicto, a blazing offence,’ she whispered. Who were the witnesses to this blazing offence? Why was Willbess wearing a dress? The burden of proof was on the prosecution but she still needed the facts. She thought about her old professor Dzekedzeke’s favourite legal aphorism, ‘If you have the law, hammer the law. If you have the facts, hammer the facts. And if you have neither the law nor the facts, hammer the table.’ Grace pretended to hammer the metal table.
The squares of light streaming into the room through the small box-windows crept across the floor. What was taking so long? Grace was hungry and started to think about the fruit in her bag. Her growling stomach was audible but she couldn’t risk her client walking in as she stuffed a banana into her mouth. The room was tinged red by the setting sun and she was about to give up and leave when Officer Lungu burst in with what appeared to be a boy, and gave him a quick shove into the empty seat.
‘Your client,’ Officer Lungu said, looking as pleased as if he had performed a magic trick. Grace stared at Willbess Mulenga in shock. He was even shorter than Officer Lungu, with a twig-like neck, and the thinnest arms and ankles sticking out of a stained red t-shirt and oversized prison-issue black pants. His light skin was bruised on the right side of his face, his right eye swollen shut, and one of the two front teeth that seemed too big for his mouth was badly chipped. The smell of piss and shit was so strong that Grace gagged. Her manners forgotten, she yanked her handkerchief from her bag to cover her nose.
‘Hands where I can see them,’ Officer Lungu growled. Willbess placed both small hands on the table. He had black rings from handcuffs around his delicate wrists and his hands were trembling.
‘What happened to him?’ Grace shouted at Officer Lungu through her handkerchief.
‘He resisted arrest. Looks worse than it is. Tell the nice lady that you’re fine.’
The boy kept his head down and said nothing.
‘He was arrested almost five weeks ago. These injuries are fresh.’
‘So you’re a doctor now?’ The officer placed his boot against the wall and pulled his truncheon from its loop in his belt, spun it and then returned it. Willbess flinched.
Grace tried to control her rising anger. ‘My name is Grace Zulu,’ she said to Willbess. ‘I’m your lawyer, and I’m here to help you.’ She turned to Officer Lungu. ‘I wish to speak to my client alone.’ She expected the policeman to leave the room, but instead he moved closer to Willbess, his squat body blocking the fading light. The boy started to shiver despite the heat, and tears spilled out of his good eye.
Grace handed him her handkerchief, and as he took it, their eyes met for a split-second. She jolted in her seat as if an electric shock had run through her body, and for a moment she felt the full force of this boy’s anguish and terror. Grace had a strong urge to hold Willbess, to comfort and reassure him that she would save him from this wretched place, and that everything would be all right. She even reached out to touch him but his hands were already in his lap. Grace searched his broken face again to be certain that she didn’t know him, as she tried to understand this sudden, strong instinct to protect him that felt more primal than lawyerly. Perhaps she identified with the suffering so clear in his one good eye, or perhaps it was recognition that their lives were equally precarious and only the thinnest, invisible line put Grace on this side of the table of misfortune, and Willbess on the other. Grace shook off these strange sensations, reminding herself that she was there as his lawyer. She drew a sharp breath before she spoke, while glaring at Officer Lungu. ‘You have the right to speak to your lawyer in private, and you have the right to be treated with human dignity. The police have no right to beat you up.’ She glanced back at Willbess as she said, ‘They will answer for this.’
Officer Lungu’s big eyes narrowed behind his glasses. ‘Answer for what? I told you, he resisted arrest. I do you a favour and let you in, and now you want to start trouble?’
‘I have every right to interview my client, it’s not a favour.’
‘This interview is over.’ The policeman turned to Willbess, ‘Iwe! Get up!’
‘You end this interview and I’m going to file an official complaint against you for police brutality, and for soliciting a bribe.’
Officer Lungu sucked his teeth at Grace and then turned to Willbess and roared in his ear, ‘I said get up!’ When Willbess didn’t move, the policeman grabbed him by the neck and lifted him off the chair. Without thinking, Grace pounced to pull the officer off the boy.
‘Voetsek!’ screamed the policeman as he twisted and shoved Grace with such force that she stumbled back, flipped over her chair and hit her head on the concrete floor.
When Grace came to, she immediately looked for Willbess but found that the small darkening room was empty. She untangled herself from the chair, put it right side up, and then used it to pull herself off the floor and onto the seat. She touched the back of her head carefully and then felt around the base of her skull, where pain radiated. She checked her fingers for blood, but there was none. She stood up and pressed various points around her ribs; her left side was tender, but it didn’t feel like anything was cracked or broken.
