Zambia Fashion Week Diaries (Wednesday)

You know when you're participating in a week-long event and the beginning is so exciting as is the end, but the middle of the whole thing suffers a bit of a slump? Wednesday was that day, with the exception of Petros Giannakakis, whose lunch time show brought inspiration to casual wear for both men and women.

Giannakakis' signature symbol of "I (heart) PG" t-shirts were everywhere—models sported them proudly with comfy looking bottoms. But what wowed the audience the most was his one-piece outfits (or jumpsuits, if you will), complete in army prints, plaid and with a headlamp as an experimental accessory.

Having lived and designed in Capetown, the international experience brings the unique flair to Giannakakis' work. "I'm inspired by the future and culture. I design something exclusive and original," he said in an interview.

Petros Giannakakis

Petros Giannakakis

Petros Giannakakis

Petros Giannakakis

The unfortunate turn of events in the evening saw the Veronica Sampa collection being presented for a second time. Allegedly there was a tiff between the scheduled designer and some models, but the details are scatty. Not that it was a bad thing to see Sampa's work displays a second time, but her designs were not among my favourites to see for a third time (including seeing them at the Saturday finale). Luckily this was the only mild disappointment during the week.

Zambia Fashion Week Diaries (Tuesday)

After a successful first day, the bar was raised high for Tuesday's shows. Enos Malunga presented his collection of shiny satin eveningwear and casual attire, many of those outfits using neutral colours with a little chitenge action going on.

Malunga tends to take the more traditional route of design—the eveningwear line he showed us stuck to basic blacks and reds, with classy cocktail dresses and some romantic pieces suitable for the theatre or a very formal wedding. It would have been nice to see a little more experimentation with his designs as nothing really struck me as new and innovative. But if Malunga feels more comfortable with safe and traditional designs for formalwear and believes there to be the market for it in Zambia, then he is in the green.

Enos Malunga

Enos Malunga

Enos Malunga
Enos Malunga

It was difficult to find a theme to his designs—his sets, although the formal dresses were pretty and the casual wear was very down-to-earth and something the everyday woman could wear, were hard to find a focal point. Perhaps I just missed the message he was trying to communicate through his designs, but I found his work a little on the basic side and believe he could take more risk in experimenting with cuts, angles and patterns.

The evening show brought us Mary Kaira, a woman of little words when in the spotlight but extraordinary talent. Sticking to her traditional Zambian roots with bright chitenge fabric and crafting modern outfits for the style-conscious woman, Kaira was another highlight of the week by far. With three separate sets in accordance to style and colour, we saw originality including a black mini tube dress with a long teal-hued peacock tail sewn in back to maternity wear so chic that a mother will want to keep on producing offspring just to wear the fabulous frocks again.

Mary Kaira

Mary Kaira

Mary Kaira
Mary Kaira

Kaira's outfits were extravagant, simple, vibrant and classy all at different points in their sets. She knows how to flatter a woman's best features, with modern cuts mixed in with busy attention-drawing patterns and sleek and sophisticated casual wear that can do double time as a perfect outfit for a night out on the town. Her designs were fresh, inspiring, traditional and youthful as she clearly knows who her audience is and is not afraid to present her young, urban women clothes that any fashionista would vie for.

Zambia Fashion Week Diaries (Monday)

The Coca-Cola Zambia Fashion Week took over Alliance Française on Monday, October 20 with six days of action-packed shows featuring 13 local designers.

With shows twice a day, one during lunch-hour and another in the evening, fashion addicts were treated to a new designer each time. These designers, among the crème de la crème in the Zambian fashion industry displayed impressive quality, diversity and creativity in their designs, ranging from the traditional Zambian way of dress with a twist to haute couture meant for the most extreme of fashionistas.

Veronica Sampa was the first one up, presenting three sets of elegant and feminine outfits suitable for the everyday woman. Mixing in chitenge fabric in bold colours to spruce up neutral colours seemed to be a theme in many of her designs, which is a practical way of making both casual and office attire more fun and expressive.

Veronica Sampa

Veronica Sampa

Veronica Sampa
Veronica Sampa

Her designs are definitely geared for a more mature audience, but the bold colours and prints bring out a youthful and fresh vibe which show a woman's wardrobe never expires with age, it only shifts in creative direction.

The evening show brought us Fay Designs' principal designer Faith Mulanga Kabende, a woman who does not shy away from the fabulously extreme and colourfully outrageous. The type of lady who will be sporting any of Fay Designs' grandiose dresses is one who does not shy away from the spotlight and definitely loves being seen on a scene.

Faith Kabende, Fay Designs

Fay Designs
Fay Designs
Fay Designs

Kabende flirts with vintage-inspired patterns and designs in many of her romantic Victorian-style dresses. She does not shy away from any type of material; from crinoline to objects sewn in to the skirt, Kabende's attire clashes wonderfully with bold statements such as mixing bright yellow hues with chocolate in one skirt and beige for the bodice with feathers around the waist-line. Many discerning fashionable people say that mixing neutral colours with yellow is not safe but Kabende takes this to the next level and shows her audience that they should not shy away from colour clashing experimentation — clashing is not a negative thing (as she has proven).

Again with the Zambian flag theme seen in many of the designers' sets, Kabende took it back to the '80s and brought us both a fabulous prom-style dress, completely with crinoline and ribbon sewn around the bodice. Another eye-opener was the neon pink also '80s-inspired jacket matched with a tight black pencil skirt. Kabende seems balance between the Victorian era and 1980s' big dresses with big tops. She should continue her experimentation with the past as we are anxious to see what she'll bring out next.

Rollin'

Friday morning I met with the director of the Anti-Voter Apathy Project; he told me he was interested in having me join him on a trip through the Central, Copperbelt and North-Western provinces to take a look at the election monitoring situation.

I knew I wouldn't feel comfortable going on my own so I invited K along with me and we were to leave Saturday morning at 7 a.m.

The rest of Friday was spent proof-reading at The Supreme; I am really looking forward to start working here and going out in the compounds to do reporting on issues that affect ordinary people in communities. The stories the publication generates are fresh, interesting, have original and unique angles that others don't carry and I believe the paper will go far. Two stories, for example, covered American boxer Hondi Hernandez's loss against Zed powerhouse Esther Phiri...the sports reporter for the Supreme was having a drink at Rhapsody's when they noticed Hernandez getting wasted solo at a table and rushed over to join her. In the next hour or so, Hernandez came out to the reporter and said she lives with her girlfriend in the States and was soon joined by four other women who urged to take her out on the town. Apparently it was a messy night for the sore loser.

Another story looks at the brothel situation in an area of Lusaka called Emmasdale; the author spoke to concerned families, neighbourly tenants and angry landlords about the prostitution ring that has slowly emerged and branded the area as unsafe.

That evening I headed to the Oliver Mtukudzi show, a famous Zimbabwean artist that packed out the International School. A mix of reggae, roots and using traditional Zim instruments such as the merimba were included in the show which was a mostly muzungu audience (considering the $30 ticket price, that is understandable).

Oliver Mutukudzi and the band at the International School of Lusaka.

Waking up Saturday morning, K and I made our way to the AVAP office to meet Mr. Director. We embarked on the two-hour drive to Kitwe sharing banter about election conduct and pointing out the political paraphanelia people had pasted to their vehicles and billboards along the route.

It was so refreshing to get out of Lusaka; it had been nearly seven weeks since I had been out of the city. We stopped in Kitwe, picked up another AVAP staff member and headed into Solwezi. It was around ten p.m. when we got into the motel and went into the dark town to a completely deserted bar, the Blue House. Two drinks later and a serious lack of traffic brought us back to the Cave Man at the motel. Looking around at the sketchy crowd, including local prostitutes and old white men trying to pick them up, we retired to our rooms.

Sunday was comprised of a lot of unfortunate waiting around until the most exciting part of the day came; after being dragged around town to the district AVAP office and growing tired of discussing politics and election-related things, K and I were left to wait for nearly an hour outside of the community radio station we were supposed to tour. Frustrated and hungry, we ventured toward town and got stopped by a friendly South African who is a contractor for the Kansanshi Mines in Solwezi. Knowing our limited time, we went on a whirlwind tour of the copper and gold mines, which was beyond impressive. We learned all about the equipment, the copper market in Zed, how much things cost to produce and to sell and procedures in making the resources.

Producing copper in the Kansanshi Mines.

Solwezi as a town was interesting to see—as the largest town in the North-Western Province, its main industry is mining, thanks to the opening of the Kansanshi Mines. It's quite underdeveloped and the food situation is a rampant problem, especially finding affordable options. Ever since the Shoprite (the town's only big grocery store) burnt down, local supermarkets carry the weight of supplying enough for the town but their prices are hardly affordable for the typical family which lives on $1 a day.

At the same time, it has the potential to really boom because of the mine - that is, if the price of copper stays up, which, in a month, could potentially crash seeing how the global economic situation is standing right now. This would throw Solwezi into turmoil as hundreds, even potentially 2,000 people could lose their jobs and the town would be left with only government-related jobs as limited sustainable income for the few who hold those positions.

We left Solwezi later than expected and got to Kitwe to drop the AVAP staff member really late. I was getting concerned about where we would be staying because Kapiri was a nearly three-hour drive away and Mr. Director was tired - I wish we could have just stayed in Kitwe because the drive was one of the most frightening I have ever had to do; he kept swerving back and forth because of his fatigue and would stop dead in the road when another vehicle passed him. We got to Kapiri at one thirty in the morning (so unimpressed) and he tries to coerce us into driving to Kabwe which is another 50 kn away. We refused and checked in to the sketchiest motel I have every stayed in - my room had the following: no water except for a bucket with water in it that was potentially old, no toilet paper, a broken bed frame, transparent curtains, a broken mirror and a J.Lo-Britney-Shakira poster to top it off.

Broken mirror and J.Lo-Brit-Beyonce-Shakira poster. Classy joint.

Needless to say I didn't sleep much; I was looking forward to getting back to Lusaka. The drive back was brutal - Mr. Director, who had honestly been pissing me off all weekend with the way he treated his staff, tried to impress K and I and just loved hearing himself speak, yakked on his cellphone the whole way back (and shouted on it the whole time). I have never been so happy to get away from someone as I have after that drive.

The rest of today was spent covering Zambia Fashion Week - I attended two different designers' fashion shows; they were full of creative, unique, flamboyant, colourful and original designs. The shows are continuing throughout the week, twice a day, with a grand finale Saturday.

Roundabouts

The past week has been a trying test of my attitude and patience. There are a bunch of issues I can't elaborate on due to privacy sake, but things at work are not looking good and home life has been a bit of a test as well.
I'm sure everything will work out for the best as there are still other opportunities available to me for the remainder of my contract, some that look more areas of interest that I would normally pursue.
On Monday my bank card stopped working and I was left with no cash in hand - the debit card, in the ATM, has been getting read as a visa for some reason and said the card had expired. Apparently this had happened to a few others (I use Barclay's for banking) and after trying a few different branches, my card still failed to work. Realizing it was Thanksgiving back in Canada and Scotia would be closed, Barclay's helped me get in touch the following day and unfortunately there was nothing anyone could do to help me from back home.
Being strapped for cash for four days straight was interesting and luckily the card worked yesterday but I lost some money along the way because I had tried so many transactions and some of them registered as withdrawn successfully even though no money came out.
One high point this week was while waiting in the front entrance of my office, a guy passed me and said, "excuse me, I know you work for The Monitor, but where are you from?" After I told him, he said, "oh, do you know Brandon?" "There are a lot of Brandon's..." I responded, then he added that Brandon is a journalist. Turns out this a friend of one of the former JHR interns from the year before. This man started a publication a few months ago called "The Supreme," which comes out twice a month and focuses on reporting in the communities/compounds. I have been here for three months and still have yet to even go to a compound, which is pathetic considering I live right next to one.
I'm really looking forward to getting involved with this publication and will be going out in the field with the editor next week to do some community reporting. It will be a nice change from the usual entertainment (not that I don't live it) journalism and press briefings I have been attending and a break from election coverage.
I'm itching to get out of Lusaka - I haven't left the city since the first weekend of September and it was only for a day and a half to Livingstone. Possible excursions in the upcoming month include Siavonga, Zimbabwe, Chipata/Malawi, or Kitwe.
We had our first rain last Friday, the earliest Lusaka has seen in awhile. And rains like I have never seen in my life; it turned into small fist-sized hail eventually and as my street is unpaved and sandy, made it a challenge leaving the house (I also live at the bottom of a hill). I reckon I'll be buying my first pair of infamous rubber boots at some point otherwise moving to work will be literally impossible.
Tonight I am off to cover the Barefeet festival show, a theatre company which works with street youth, followed by Zimbabwean musician Oliver Mutukudzi (and potentially covering another beauty pageant, which personally I could do without).

Inferno

Radio Phoenix on fire (12th floor of Zimbo Building)

Event-packed weekend starting from this past Friday. During lunch hour on Friday, people were getting up and going toward the Zimco building just in front of us to check something out. Getting up to see what all the commotion was, the deal was that Radio Phoenix had caught on fire at the top of building, on the 12th floor.

With no visible fire department vehicles in sight, the crowds on the ground grew and people were gawking as the flames and smoke became thicker and more intense. Luckily everyone made it out of the building unscathed, but the radio station, one of the country's most respected ones, lost their recording studio and all its equipment as well as its accounts department, expected to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace.
Armed with my camera, as per usual (I have learned my lesson and carry it with me to work because you never know what is going to happen in this city), I started snapping shots of the inferno and the growing crowd.
Things turned political as people began fist-pumping and shouting, "we want change, we want Sata!" (He is a presidential candidate for the Patriotic Front, an opposition party).

A young politico amongst the fire observers.

Security personnel eventually had to shove the crowd into one corner as they were so close to the building and debris from the top was beginning to fall, creating a potentially dangerous situation.
Members of the rowdy crowd began to make signs saying different things like, "Zambia for sale" and "We want change now." Yelling, singing, chanting. You would think you were at a rock show waiting for the biggest act to show up.
Nearly 45 minutes later the fire brigade showed up, only they did not have enough water to put the whole blaze out. After calling a private company to supply backup water, finally things were on the go as the firefighters climbed the twelve story-building in the dark.
After getting some quotes from various Radio Phoenix personnel and bystanders, I decided it was time to climb the 12 stories too to snap some shots of the damage. Wearing my flip flops and rolling my jeans up, I mounted the stairs in the dark with only a cell phone lighting my way, dodging the hose on the way up while my feet were completely soaked.

Firefighters put out the blaze on the 12th floor

Once I reached the top, the damage was awful. With the ground, in parts, still burning hot, glass and debris everywhere, it was hard to imagine this was once a recording studio. Musicians lost all their recordings, equipment was damaged and would foresee to cost thousands of dollars and files were gone forever.
After a long and gruelling day, a relaxing and small concert to cover was most welcome that evening. I feel as though Lusaka has been over-saturated with the same performances as of late, which is why the turnout at Smugglers Inn was so but nevertheless, still always a happening party.
Saturday night, I covered the Face of Redds beauty pageant where the finalists were crowned and a new queen was chosen. It was basically the same set-up as last time except much more chic, being held at the Chrismar Hotel with a catwalk that was set up over a swimming pool. How the models managed to teeter down the shaky catwalk in five inch heels without falling, I have no idea how they managed to do so. Was very impressed.

Models at Face of Redds finals awaiting to hear their names announced for the crown

After yet another late night out, I have actually been looking forward to the work week. I start teaching my class again at Golden Gates (still need to finish correcting those exams) and am looking forward to the increasing election coverage that I will be doing over the next few weeks. Things are getting pretty heated up here and as much as I feel bad, I forgot to vote for the Canadian elections but am having far too much fun covering the Zambian ones. Jack Layton, here's hoping for you on the 14th. Fingers are crossed.