Zambia Hit Parade: The Radio Show That Gave Zambia’s Music a Voice There was a time when a song did not need a YouTube video, a TikTok challenge or thousands of followers to become part of Zambia’s national conversation. It needed something much simpler: a radio signal, a compelling presenter and an audience willing to stay awake and listen. Late at night, as homes across Zambia settled into silence, the radio could become a doorway into another world. For music lovers, that world was sometimes called “Zambia Hit Parade.” Broadcast on ZNBC Radio 2 , the programme became associated with one of Zambia’s most recognisable broadcasters and disc jockeys, Isaac Mulinda , popularly known by his stage name, Dr. Zambia . Today, in an age when music can travel across continents within seconds, it is easy to underestimate what radio once meant to an aspiring musician and an ordinary listener. Zambia Hit Parade belonged to an era when the broadcaster was not simply someone playing reco...
The Empire of Classrooms: How a Teacher’s College Rebuilt Kabwe and the Devastating Vacuum Left by Its Collapse
The Parglory Effect: Investigating the Economic Rise and Fall of Kabwe The Ghost of a Giant The camera of the mind pans across a desolate corridor in Kabwe, where the only sound is the rhythmic, metallic slapping of a loose corrugated iron sheet against a rusted frame. It is a lonely, industrial percussion. Dust motes dance in the shafts of afternoon light piercing through broken window panes, illuminating a scene of quiet decay. To a stranger, this might look like an abandoned factory or a skeletal relic of the colonial mining era that once defined this region. But it is not. This is the hollowed-out ribcage of an institution that, for a decade, held the very heartbeat of a city in its hands. In the surrounding townships of Chowa and Highledge, the silence is heavy the kind of thick, oppressive silence that follows a sudden cardiac arrest. For over ten years, Kabwe didn’t just host Parglory University College of Education; it fed off it, breathed through it, and eventually, built its ...