Gender and Culture in Postcolonial Zambia: The Life Experiences of Yolanta Chimbamu Mainza Chona

When I was four years old, in 1991, my family moved from Canada to Kenya. My earliest memories are of our house on the college campus in Nairobi where I grew up. Along with my older brother, I attended an international private school that served mostly missionary families. My parents were missionaries: my father was the Academic Dean of the Bible College that trained pastors, and my mother taught classes as well. As kids, we played with the children of the college students, who had come from countries all over Africa, including Ethiopia, Sudan, Zambia, and the Congo. My younger sister was born a year after we arrived. I learned Swahili and had an intimate experience of what it meant to be in Kenya.

In 1999, my family returned to Canada in the dead of winter. It was very hard for me as I had a hard time fitting in at school. I had no cultural literacy in terms of current televisions shows or movies; in Kenya we had had four local television channels. The first time I went to McDonald's I didn't know what they served. My parents didn't have enough money to buy me the newest, trendiest clothes, and I had such different experiences than the other kids that I found it hard to relate, and they found it hard to relate to me. I was weird and foreign and different.

A white girl in Canada, I felt like I was African. Everything was different in my new environment. Loss had been a part of friendships at my international school as people came and went but this loss was different. I had wanted to come to Canada and had been looking forward to it but it was not what I had imagined. In Kenya, I had somewhat stood out as a mzungu or foreigner, but here, I didn't wear my cultural difference on my skin. People expected me to be a normal Canadian kid, but

I certainly didn't feel like one.

This project then grew from my desire to go back to Africa – an Africa that is now in the fifth decade of independence from British rule. I had always been interested in different cultures, alternate lifestyles, and human experiences – probably stemming from my diverse friendships at the international school – which led me to focus on Fine Arts Cultural Studies and African Studies in my undergraduate degree. The subject-matter for this project is a culmination of the things I have studied up until this point, and the Faculty of Environmental Studies was the perfect, interdisciplinary setting in which to do it. On the surface, I was intrigued by the life of Yolanta Chimbamu Mainza Chona, on whom this project focuses. Her story is interesting in the way that might engage an audience; but on a deeper level, it speaks to some important issues. I was introduced to Yolanta through her son, Thomas Chona, who is a close friend of my family here in Canada. Her life story encompasses the environmental changes that occurred within Zambia as she straddles the colonial and anti-colonial eras, encounters issues of Black and White, engages with Christianity, and inhabits her womanhood in specifically negotiated ways. For this reason I have entitled this project Gender and Culture in Postcolonial Zambia.

Yolanta Chona's life is an extraordinary life to study because of her multi-faceted, multi- cultural, and multi-generational experiences. Born in colonial times in a rural village, but then living in the State House at the Zambian Presidential compound, and travelling as a Diplomat's wife, she has experienced both sides of privilege. I, myself, have always enjoyed certain amounts of privilege as a white, Western person, both in Kenya and here in Canada: privilege of which I was not always aware. But when I begin to think of my life as compared to Yolanta's, I can only imagine the privilege that must have accompanied being the wife of the Vice President in the newly liberated nation of Zambia. Privilege is often thought of in terms of absolutes – one has or has not – but through this work, I am starting to see it as relative. As I will show, I have come to understand through this work that a life like Yolanta's life, is a complex mix of privilege and pain, of power and powerlessness.

Within this paper, I have done my best to tell Yolanta's story, heavily relying upon her own words, within a framework of the larger Zambian situation. (I do not use the terms Northern Rhodesia and Zambia interchangeably but rather to signify the colonial entity and the postcolonial nation respectively.) The questions I intend to answer are, "What does it mean for me, a young scholar formed in a Canadian academy to write the life of a Zambian woman, and what does a close study of Yolanta's life reveal about the challenges facing women in this period?". There is no existing literature on Yolanta Chona, but my final product will highlight some of the events of her life and explore how she has made meaning from them. I will engage with the writings within the feminist, historical, and postcolonial discourses in order to gain an understanding of the contexts wherein Yolanta's life experiences have occurred. Juxtaposing interview excerpts and anecdotes of Yolanta's experiences with literature review on each of these subjects I will produce a record of Yolanta's life story. I will argue that Yolanta Chona critically navigates and makes meaning of her life experiences by using certain tools that were made available to her – education, Christianity, and a strong work ethic – thus allowing her to adapt to the environmental changes that occurred within her life, be they political, geographical, or relational.

After two semesters of coursework, I travelled to Lusaka, Zambia, to meet Yolanta and stay with her on her farm for ten weeks; a year later I returned for nine short days to glean some more before completing the task of writing this paper. Meeting Yolanta and being there with her in person made this project come to life for me in a way that it could not have if it were done through coursework and reading alone, as I was able to have an intimate experience of getting to know her in a personal way. I was able to learn so much in my time there.

In conducting this study, I found that I needed to reflect on my own social position before being able to approach the challenge of undertaking this study. I have described some of the results of that reflection above in terms of how it motivated me. Throughout the process of conducting the research I also continued to be self reflexive. Part of this reflexivity was my attentiveness to careful study of the context. For this work I drew on the work of scholars of colonization and of Southern Africa. The methodological tools emerging from these theories and from some veins of feminist research methodology were helpful in writing the life of Yolanta. I would argue that my approach can be helpful in writing the life history of any person different from oneself. I gathered primary information frominterviews with Yolanta and specific members of her family, as well as by living with them and spending time getting to know each of them. I recorded and transcribed the audio from the semi- structured interviews, and took notes regarding some more candid conversations and my own observations during that time.

In the first chapter I will begin by engaging in a theoretical discussion of the process of colonization in Northern Rhodesia, which is present-day Zambia, and examine the role of education in that process. This will provide a backdrop onto which Yolanta's life is set. I will then discuss hybridity as a process of cultural negotiation and how it relates to colonized peoples. Then I will look at anti- colonial resistance in Northern Rhodesia. These discussions will help me to answer how Yolanta's life offers a demonstration of the challenges the women in that time and place encountered. Next I will engage in a discussion of life history writing as a methodology to explain what it means that I am writing her story. I will explain that these are the particular tools that are helpful in writing the life story of another woman

In the second chapter I will provide some historical context for the specific Zambian situation. I will discuss briefly the Tonga social life prior to colonization and I will lay out some of the ways in which colonization transformed life for men and women. By looking at the society in which Yolanta was raised, and the particular form of colonization that occurred within Northern Rhodesia, this context will contribute to an understanding of the challenges that faced women at the time of Yolanta's birth and early life. I will then discuss education and Christianity's interjection in relation to colonization.Then I will discuss the anti-colonial efforts of which Yolanta and her husband were a part, and explain how women did and did not benefit from Independence.

In the third chapter I will tell Yolanta's story, referring to her own words, as it explains thechallenges she has faced in her life and how she overcame them and carried on. Her story is not meantto be exemplary of the average Zambian woman's experiences but instead is one specific example of awoman who navigated several social spheres, political changes, and relational interactions and is at peace with her life's choices.

I will discuss the significance of Yolanta Chona's life, not just as a historical figure in Zambia'santi- and postcolonial history, but as a person whose experiences and decisions speak to issues such asAfrican feminism, hybridity, and colonial education. I will discuss what it means that I have writtenher story, and how this contributes to a better understanding of women in Zambia's colonial, anticolonial and postcolonial eras.