Shopping in Zambia is vastly different from shopping in the United States. Instead of Walmart we have open markets. Instead of Hobby Lobby we have homemade wood carvings and different curios. Instead of fast food chains we have women frying sweet potatoes over charcoal fires. Shopping is certainly a whole different experience, but it’s not necessarily a bad one!
First of all, just to clarify, there are grocery stores and restaurants and malls in the cities. A common grocery store called Shopright is one of the most popular grocery stores in the country, but it was not brought into Zambia from South Africa until about 20 years ago. The majority of Zambians still go to the markets to buy a lot of their essentials, and these markets come with a whole new level of excitement that you will never find in a first-world country shopping trip!
Standing Out
Until I came back to the United States I never knew what it was like to go shopping and not get stared at. Because my family and I look so different from the Zambians, it was completely normal to have people shouting muzungu (moo-zoon-goo) at us everywhere we went. The term muzungu means white person, and the poeple obviously weren’t wrong that we looked different! I struggled with standing out for quite some time, especially during my teenage years. Often times drunk men would try to be inappropriate my my sisters and me because we were a novelty. The older we got, the worse the comments got, and the more uncommon it was for me and my sisters to go into town because we didn’t want to be stared at or bothered.
Although there were some negatives that I don’t miss at all, there were good things about the markets too. One of our favorite things to shop for when we’d go with my mom were traditional Zambian pieces of fabric used by women to wrap around themselves as a skirt, tie their babies onto their backs, or cushion a large load being carried on their heads. These pieces of fabric called chitenges (chi-tang-ayes) were always so bright and colorful and it was nearly impossible to find two of the same kind.
Muti
Several years after frequenting the markets multiple times, my mom and my sisters and I went exploring one of them in-depth The market in our town, called Masala Market, was quite large. In fact, it was large enough to cover several neighborhoods in American terms. As we came closer to the middle of it we noticed that there weren’t as many people walking around, and the further we walked, the quieter it got.
That’s when we saw it. An area of several rough booths and tables filled with odd objects such as turtle shells, snake venom, feathers, oddly shaped rocks and carvings, knives, and many more strange things. As we approached the area my mom began to speak to the vendor lady, asking her what she was selling. The lady was kind and friendly and explained to my mom that we were in the muti area. When the lady realized that we didn’t know what she was talking about, she began to tell us that muti was referring to witchcraft and that the items she was selling were for witch doctors to heal people. It was surprising to hear, crazy to see, and unnerving to think about. We never went back to that area again, but I’ll never forget how eerie it was to see all of those items.
Interesting Items
There are several other items that we’ve found over the years that were really fun to see. For instance, biltong made of kudu or springbok or water buffalo is not uncommon. One time we even found a loaf of bread that had been molded into the shape of a crocodile! Zambians can be really creative with their art, and it was always fun to take visitors into curio markets and help them barter with the Zambians for good prices. When my family and I would go to the curio markets by ourselves, the Zambians would automatically think that we were tourists and would try to charge us exorbitant prices, thinking that we did not understand the exchange rate well. I always had fun watching their faces after I would tell them that I was born in Zambia and knew exactly what a fair price was.
My final note about the markets (and probably my most missed one) is that the available produce we would buy was always unbelievably fresh. In my opinion, there’s no better place on earth to buy tomatoes and avocados than in a Zambian market! Although not a very sanitary place, as long as we washed the produce that we found in the markets, we were never dissatisfied or disappointed with the food we were able to find there. Disclaimer: the food photos to follow might make you hungry!