The Invoice

And so, it was revealed that load shedding was a conspiracy to siphon all the country’s electricity and use it to resurrect an ancient, ancestral spirit. Small groups of speculation pundits and theorists claimed that extraterrestrials were responsible for draining the current, but aliens are nothing but an American fantasy. Anyone with a working mass...

Inside the Bowels of the Livingstone Museum

With its dark staircases and the scarcely lit corridors synonymous with most government-run institutions; the Livingstone Museum is a bit of a labyrinth. It’s also the oldest and largest museum in Zambia. Located in (you guessed it) Livingstone, it houses exhibits chronicling the country’s past, including eerie “witchcraft” relics and prehistoric artefacts from the Stone...

The Mysterious Mystery of the Missing Guide

I wrote this in 2020 after the first wave of the pandemic had subsided and society was dipping its toes into the "new normal" (yuck). The events are based on an assignment I'd taken to write a staycation piece about a lodge just outside Lusaka. Names were changed to protect people's identities. * I looked...

A Corpse Along the Dirt Road

Word that there was a corpse along the dirt road travelled at the speed of morning gossip, and speculation about the cause of the man’s death droned like the flies jealously guarding his body. He was in debt with jerabos. He was drunk and capsized on a rock. His wife had sent assassins after him....

Are We Losing The Imitation Game? – The Perils and Pitfalls of AI

Ever seen The First Horror Movie Written Entirely by Bots? The one where "Mr Puzzles Wants You to be Less Alive"? It's a bizarrely funny blend of horror tropes Netflix released on YouTube sometime in 2021. They claimed that its script was the freakish creation of a bot that watched over 400, 000 hours of horror movies. Its low-budget 3D animation, weird text-to-speech computer voice acting, and disjointed threads were the absurdist comedy gold I didn't know I needed. I laughed hard at the mechanical storytelling and the inability of this artificial intelligence to comprehend the complexities of human terror. But the joke was on me.

Krytical Mass: The Rise and Rise of Krytic

gall /ɡɔːl/ noun  Rudeness and the quality of being unable to understand that your behaviour or what you say are not acceptable to other people.   ★   Gall is something that Victor Muligisa has in abundance, and on most days, he even oozes it. It’s on these days that he’s waxing poetic over American...

For The Culture: Club Zed’s Hip-Hop Connection

My lunch options are either some parody of a home cooked meal from the deli at the mall next to the office, or junk food—also from the mall next to the office. The fancier options are now literally off the table because I have to break him off something for gas if he’s to pick...

Of Thunder & Human Swamps

My eyes stung a little and remnants of teargas caused tears to stream down my cheeks. I could barely see the man I was negotiating my cab fare with. It was hard to tell whether this was because of the leftovers of the riot control gas or the mini-bar fridge’s worth of beers I’d consumed.
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