KABWE TIMES

   The Day a Voice from Katondo Became TAP C The morning I met the man behind the voice that would become part of my musical journey There are certain moments in life that seem completely ordinary when they happen, but years later, when you look back, you realise that they were quietly changing the direction of your life. For me, one of those moments happened in Katondo, Kabwe, on an ordinary morning when I was walking home with my high school friend, Hillary Chikoko. We had gone to the shops to buy bread, and as we made our way back, neither of us could have imagined that a simple walk through the neighbourhood would introduce me to someone who would eventually become part of my music story. As we approached my grandfather's residence, we heard a young man singing from the home of my grandfather's opposite neighbour, Mr Mukuka. His voice immediately caught my attention. He was singing K-Million's popular song "Niwe Weka," and there was something about the wa...

  From Plantation to Hustle: Why Zambia’s Young People Are Still Fighting to Own Their Future Author: Rodgers Mangwela There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from working all day and still wondering whether you have actually moved forward. You see it in the young man who wakes up before sunrise in Katondo, hoping that today's customers will be more generous than yesterday's. You see it in the young woman who has turned a small table outside her home into a business because waiting for formal employment stopped being an option a long time ago. You see it in the graduate walking around Kabwe with a folder containing certificates, hoping that somewhere, somehow, somebody will finally say, "We have a job for you." They are not lazy. They are not without ambition. They are part of a generation that has learned to improvise because life has given them very little room for error. Across Zambia, young people are discovering that education does not al...

  The K10 Illusion: Inside Katondo’s Quiet Online Betting Economy It starts with a small bet In Katondo, as in many neighbourhoods across Zambia, a football match can become more than something to watch. For someone sitting at home with a smartphone in hand, the match can also become an opportunity to place a small wager. It might be K10. An amount that, on its own, does not feel particularly significant. If the bet loses, another match is coming. If it wins, the money may be placed on another bet. Sometimes there is a live game. Sometimes there is an accumulator promising a much larger return. Sometimes the next bet is made almost automatically, because the betting application is already open and the money is available in the account. This is where the story becomes interesting. A single K10 bet tells us very little about someone's financial behaviour. But K10 repeated every day tells a different story. At K10 a day, a person would stake K300 over 30 days. At K20 a ...

  Pornography in Kabwe: What Zambia's Internet Data Reveals About Digital Sexual Content There is a quiet revolution taking place behind closed doors in Zambia. It does not require a nightclub, a cinema or even a computer. Increasingly, all it needs is a smartphone, a few megabytes of data and a private moment. In homes, boarding houses, student residences and rented rooms across the country, the internet has made enormous quantities of sexual content available almost instantly. Kabwe, a growing central Zambian town, is part of that digital transformation. But how much pornography is actually being consumed in Kabwe? The honest answer is that nobody can currently say with confidence . There is no publicly available traffic database that reliably records pornography visits specifically from Kabwe. What does exist, however, is a collection of national data, commercial internet estimates and evidence about the rapid expansion of mobile connectivity that allows researchers...

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...

  Before Smooth Talk , There Was Music Spotlight : The Television Show That Gave Zambian Music a Window to the World There was a time when watching a music video in Zambia was not as simple as reaching for a phone, opening YouTube and searching for a song. There were no smartphones, no social media feeds and no endless television channels competing for the viewer's attention. For many Zambians, discovering music depended on what appeared on the radio, what a friend brought home on a cassette or, if you were lucky, what the national television broadcaster decided to put on the screen. Then came Music Spotlight . Long before music television became a familiar part of Zambia's broadcasting landscape, Music Spotlight was helping audiences see music as well as hear it. Originally known as CC's Music Spotlight , the programme became one of the notable music shows broadcast by the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC) during the late 1980s and early 1990s. At ...

  From ZamRock to Kopala: The Sound That Changed Zambian Music There are periods in a country's musical history when something begins to change, although nobody can quite explain it at the time. The old sound is still being played on the radio, the established artists are still releasing records, and audiences are still dancing to familiar songs. Yet underneath all of that, a new generation is quietly searching for something different. That was Zambia in the years when ZamRock was giving way to ZamRap and a new generation of musicians was beginning to experiment with hip-hop, R&B, dancehall and other contemporary sounds. The country had musicians with ambition and producers willing to take risks, but there was still an unanswered question hanging over the industry: what was the sound of modern Zambia? It would take years of experimentation before the answer began to emerge from an unlikely place. The Copperbelt would eventually provide one of the strongest answers. T...