It’s not really what you want to become. A celebrity. It’s just that life has happened. You are one of the top students in your class at Copperbelt University studying for a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting. Actually, you are the top student and you are sure Mable has slept with the lecturer to get a near-perfect score in the final exams. Mable is smart but not this smart. You do not contest your final score because in government universities, complaints like these are shelved among other complaints like these. You decide even though you will not graduate summa cum laude; you will still be the best accountant Zambia has ever seen.

You graduate and your plan is now in motion to become an accountant in one of the big corporations. You will move to Lusaka to live with your uncle, your father’s young brother, who works as a security guard at a pharmaceutical company. Even as a security guard, he is the richest person in your father’s family. You thought of him as such too, until you left the small town of Mufulira for the Copperbelt University on a government scholarship and you saw what rich people looked like. They drove Toyotas and Mazdas and BMWs instead of riding bicycles and lived in houses where the toilets and bathrooms were not detached from the main building.

The night before you travel to Lusaka, you press your outfit and place it beside you on the mattress as you sleep so that it’s quicker to reach for in the morning. You have had nightmares of your clothes disappearing and then you miss the bus because you found them too late. You have chosen the blue jeans you bought with your first bursary allowance and the white shirt you bought with the last bursary payment. You have added a gold chain, which births a rash on the circumference of your neck. But you will wear it anyway because it’s better to look stylish with a cheap chain in Lusaka than to look poor and mumbwa-mumbwa. 

Today, you wake up three hours earlier. You cannot sleep and resign to imagining what your life in Lusaka will be like. You have been there once when you were on holiday in your seventh grade and you stayed with your uncle. You remember little of the capital; what you know of it now is what you have seen on social media. The big malls, the tall buildings, and the nightclubs with the big bright lights. Places that make you question whether you live in the same country.

When the morning light begins to take over the darkness, you get up, bathe, and dress up. You do not eat breakfast even though you always do, and you leave for the station an hour earlier. As you walk out the door, you look back at this place you have called home for four years and think you will miss it after all. When you close the door behind you, there is a finality to it. The conclusion of a chapter in your life.

You walk off campus with your gaze turned to the ground to keep from conversations because some people are such good conversationalists that they make time stand still and all you will want to do is be in that moment. You catch a bus to the station and make it in time to choose the best seat, the one behind the driver. Here, there is little chance of sitting beside a chicken, or a goat, or a mattress, or being sandwiched between smelly armpits. The bus is a ‘time bus’ as the sales lady had told you and it departs when the ticket indicates it would. You are thankful for this. You put on earphones and listen to music you illegally downloaded. And really, you should be looking out the window at the hills covered in green, at the pink, purple, and red flowers that are in bloom because they are a sight to behold. But your eyes are on your phone.

You arrive in Lusaka a little after two in the afternoon and your uncle is at the station waiting for you. You make out his frame, which stands by a pillar next to a kiosk. When you disembark with your green suitcase that carries your whole life, he sees you and smiles. He walks over and hugs you. You stand there for seconds in each other’s arms. Then he looks you over and comments on how well you look and how grown you are, and you can see pride in his eyes. You smile, unsure of how to respond to honor. You avert your gaze and it falls on the black synthetic bomber he wears, ripped at the collar and on the chest and you know that all is not well. You go home with him. As you take a seat on a sofa covered in green doilies, which also cover the television set, table, and display cabinet, you concede that even though you do not remember your uncle’s house well, you do not remember the floor being so potholed or the cracks in the walls being wide enough to fit a baby’s hand. You had complained about your room on campus, built for two people but housed eight. Sometimes ten. Yet compared to your uncle’s house in the John Laing compound, the room is luxurious. You avoid staring. Your uncle’s lastborn comes over to greet you and take your suitcase to the kitchen, which you correctly guess will be your bedroom. Still, you are thankful to have a place to lay your head.

You know that part of being a good guest is entertaining your host, so you tell story after story of your time at university. You choose the light-hearted and funny ones lest you appear boastful as the first graduate in the family.

When night falls, you retire to bed so that your cousins can sleep in the sitting room. They have laid a mpatsa for you and you are thankful that the floor is less potholed in the kitchen. You calculate how to ease the discomfort of sleeping on a reed mat and decide that instead of covering with the blanket, you will lay on top of it. You hope that there are no mosquitos to suck your blood.

In the morning, it surprises you how refreshed you feel and you ask your cousin to show you around your new neighborhood and how to get into town. He shows you the nearest place to catch a bus and a footpath that leads straight into town. It lies along a railway where trains rarely move. Since this is your first day, you catch a bus into town and disembark at Kulima Tower bus station. You walk to the tall buildings along Cairo Road as it is the most logical place to start looking for a job. You expect to find big corporations occupying these buildings who will welcome you and invite you to apply for a job—an offer you cannot refuse. Didn’t your lecturers say that once you completed your degrees you would become managers in big corporations? However, many of the companies in the buildings are one or two-man-led and are not looking to hire anybody else because they cannot afford to. And the slightly bigger ones with a reception and a receptionist behind them, toss your application in a drawer and you know that they will not read it. You return to your uncle’s home, optimistic that tomorrow will be a better day. But the next day isn’t any better, nor is the next, or the next, or the next. You begin to see that your job-seeking days are all the same and so are the people in the offices, even though they carry different names.

Days turn into weeks, weeks into a year, a year into two, two into three, three into four and the possibility of not finding a job dawns on you. Your uncle and aunt who encouraged you in the beginning, are now silent. They carry scowls on their faces because they have a grown man to feed who goes into town to look for a job and comes back home empty-handed. One day, as you walk past a poster of Doctor Phiri from Malawi, it crosses your mind to call the number below the calabash. He promises among other things to bring back lost lovers, win court cases and success when looking for a job. Maybe this is what you need, you think. Perhaps this is what will help your predicament. A potion for good luck. But you remind yourself that you are a learned man and learned men do not believe in hexes, seals or spells. When you get home you find no food left for you to eat. It surprises you even though you should not be surprised. Lately, you have noticed the reduction in the food potions and also the delay in the meals. Your aunt, who sits in the sitting room watching TV, tries to engage you in a conversation as if she is not slowly condemning you to starvation. You go to bed hungry.

It’s as you lie on the mpatsa in the morning with your stomach growling and unable to find the physical and emotional strength to get up and go look for a job that you activate a five kwacha internet bundle with money you borrowed from your cousin. You pray the bundle will not deplete before you finish surfing. You open WhatsApp. There are three hundred messages in your university class group. Usually, you don’t read messages on the group, but the number of them makes you click because you wonder if someone has died or there is a video that has gone viral. It’s none of those things. Instead, you find photos of Fred. The guy with the big head who sat in the back, and who rarely studied but passed all the tests. It was joked that Fred’s head had enough capacity to grasp concepts once, so he didn’t need to study.

In the photos, Fred sits in the driver’s seat of a BMW, a Benz, and a Range Rover. He is in Dubai, Paris, London, and Shanghai. An article by a journalist for the Times of Zambia accompanies the photos. It’s long. You scroll through it quickly, but you pick out that Fred’s net worth is estimated at five million kwacha, which he has earned by being a local Twitter celebrity cum influencer and also by opening up his own businesses. The article ends by praising Fred, that instead of joining the millions of graduates looking for a job, he decided to create his own path and became a millionaire. You do not read the comments that follow but go straight to your browser and type in ‘Twitter.’ The internet is slow. You tap your fingers on the floor to keep your nerves from taking over your temper. Three minutes later, Twitter opens and you search for Fred’s page. You find it and scroll and scroll. You see that local musicians, actors, footballers, business men and women like and retweet Fred’s photos and tweets. They wish him happy birthdays, give him congratulations, and @ him in their photos and tweets. When your finger numbs from scrolling, you put the phone down and lie back on the mpatsa. You recount how many times you walked to town, under the heat, through the rain and the cold, yet still have nothing and in this moment you decide to become a Twitter celebrity cum influencer. You think that maybe you should think about it but there is nothing really to think about and so you download Twitter.

You use your real name Kabinga Mwansa. A name which in reverse your kinsmen use for the Devil. You do not know if your father has a wicked sense of humor or if he named you after stumbling back home from a drinking spree and having smoked chamba too. You randomly follow people. In one day, you manage over two hundred. You hope they will follow back and you do not go out to look for a job. You take a stool and sit in the backyard, viewing your Twitter page every other minute. You comment on tweets and do not receive any responses.

By the end of the day, you only manage one follower. There is no profile photo and their name is a number instead of letters. You view their profile and like you, they have no followers. It’s hard to admit it but you feel a little discouraged. Somehow, you thought that this would be easy. But you remind yourself that nothing worth getting comes easy.

You spend the next few days on Twitter viewing profiles of anyone who seems to be ‘someone.’ As you mentioned in your application letters and CV, you are a fast learner and quickly learn how to raise your profile on Twitter. You grab a pen and write down your list.

– Follow celebrities and successful people. Comment on, like and retweet their tweets.

– Create a catchy name. Persona.

– Wear fancy clothes, which become your trademark—hat, sunglasses, jacket.

– Drive (or at least be seen next to) expensive cars.

– Upload photos of yourself at ‘It’ places in Lusaka.

– Be seen as a hardworking man who wants to make it big. Tweet photos of yourself with a pen in your hands and add the caption, ‘Hard day at the plantation.’ Note that it does not matter if you do not have a job or business, simply create the illusion that you do.

– Be seen as a humble man by tweeting things that allude to achievements without naming them. Something like, ‘ I’m speechless. It can only be God.’

Finally, on your list, you write:

– TAKE TRIPS ABROAD. PREFARABLY USA, LONDON, PARIS, DUBAI. NOTE, IF WITHIN AFRICA THEN CAPE TOWN OR JOHANNESBURG. KIGALI OKAY. FEEL FREE TO ADD OTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. AVOID RUSSIA.

Your list looks good and you ponder your last and most important point. How will you create the illusion of travel? This sits with you for most of the day and you decide to leave it for later. You deal with creating a catchy name first. After much thought, drafting, and redrafting, you create a name you like and settle for. King Kabinga. You update your Twitter and then you walk to town to buy a pair of sunglasses and get a haircut. When you get back home, you wear the blue suit you wore to your graduation and stare at your image in the mirror. It hangs on you a little more than it did on that day, but it still looks good. You get on a bus to Sandy’s Creation resort, where you sit in the lounge and take photos, which you tweet. Next, you go to Muzo, the neighborhood photographer who will take your profile photo. You negotiate a discount when you get there and he agrees to take your photos for half the price. For seconds, you have doubts about whether you should have come here. The chamba on Muzo’s breath makes you wonder how many joints he has smoked today. But Muzo expertly mounts his camera and the lights and this eases you. He asks you to pose with your hands in the pocket, staring at something in the distance. He snaps several photos, stares at them and nods. You are about to leave when through a stroke of genius Muzo picks a maroon scarf from the floor he bought for his dreadlocks, and places it over your shoulders. Muzo moves to the camera excitedly and asks you to pose again. He snaps one last photo, nods at it and smiles. He offers to sell you the scarf at a discount and you agree. Later in the evening, Muzo sends you the photos in black and white. Even you cannot believe it is you you are seeing and you wonder where this person has been all your life.

You upload the profile photo and in the morning you see that you have ten new followers. They are first-year university students who, you correctly guess are hoping to make connections. One of them has been leaving message after message of business ideas on Joseph Zulu’s account, the founder of TechLite Zambia, a 5G internet service provider. This is not the kind of follower you want but he adds to your numbers so you will keep him. You follow more celebrities, businessmen and women and tweet about the exchange rate and share prices. Information that you get off the internet. The day ends with no new followers.

Soon, you learn something else about rising as a celebrity on Twitter. That it’s not enough to follow, like, tweet and retweet. You have to be accepted into the enclave of the successful. Since one thing you know for sure is that all men possess a god complex which if left unbridled, creates a hole that can only be filled by praise and worship, you start giving them praise and worship. This, coupled with photos of you beside a Range Rover in your trademark suit, sunglasses and scarf makes them warm up to you. They now respond to your comments and call you ‘bro’, ‘young man’, ‘boi’ and their acceptance of you not only gives you visibility but credibility too and you gain more and more followers.

You interact with them for a while before some propose taking things off cyberspace. They invite you for drinks so they can get to know you better. You accept and meet them at the Taj Pamodzi Hotel. There, you meet Richard, who sells emeralds and looks only like a resemblance to his profile photo. Jack and Ruth who own a stationery company and look wider in real life and George whose business you do not know and is smaller than you had imagined him. Richard talks the most and about many things, but mostly the importance of ‘us successful people supporting each other.’ You agree. Richard orders a round of beer.

When it’s done, Jack orders another one and when it’s clear it will soon be your turn, you retrieve your phone and respond to a message which you say is from the special assistant to the president who needs your input on a report urgently. It surprises you how quickly you have come up with this lie, but the admiration and respect snuffs any shame you should feel. Before you leave, Richard rises and shakes your hand with both of his.

It’s at 9:30 the next day when you receive a direct message from Sam, a PR executive from Check Motors. You have seen him in photos with Richard. In nightclubs, on boat cruises, watching football. He says he has been noticing your Twitter profile for a while and is wondering if you would be interested in becoming a brand ambassador. You close the message, let it sit and then bring it up again. You read it repeatedly and respond in the affirmative because how else would you respond? Sam writes back immediately and asks you to come in for a meeting. Would noon be okay with you? You arrive at Check Motors by 11:00 and at noon, you ask to be directed to Sam’s office. By 12:30, you have signed your brand ambassadorship contract. You walk out of Check Motors feeling like a new creation. When you get home, you do not tell your aunt and uncle about this and you wait patiently for the text that will confirm that the first part of your payment has been deposited into the bank account you opened years ago as a student. You do not even mind that today again you are sleeping on an empty stomach.

The text comes through by mid-morning the next day and you stare at the figures on the screen. You decide that the first thing you will do with the money is get a proper meal at the Taj Pamodzi. You take a taxi to the hotel and sit near the pool. A waitress comes over to take your order. You begin with a starter, then the main and then the dessert. When you finish your meal, you try to remember when your stomach was full and you make a promise never again to go hungry. It’s a weekday so there aren’t many people at the restaurant. The quietness helps you think better and you find creative ways of promoting Check Motors. You tweet and tweet and your tweets go viral. It’s your first day on the job and you are already exceeding expectations so much that Sam DMs you a fist bump. When dusk begins to circle the sky, a thought crosses your mind to spend a night at the Taj Pamodzi Hotel. You ignore it but it persists. You give in. Even though the rate per night is equivalent to the salary of a junior accountant, you can afford it and you are glad you have decided to sleep over. You have never been in a bed so soft, showered in bathrooms so clean, wrapped in towels so fluffy, or applied lotion so smooth. And you learn, only after a night at the Taj Pamodzi, how easy it is to get used to the finer things in life. When you go back to your uncle’s home, it’s only to pick up your clothes and leave your aunt a little money for groceries and a promise to visit soon and often, which you do not honor. You spend three more nights at the Taj Pamodzi and then move into a fully furnished apartment in Salama Park.

It is here you learn another lesson about having money and it’s that it sets you free. It frees your time, frees you from lack and worrying about lack. What is it they say about an idle mind? It is indeed the Devil’s workshop. So now in your newfound freedom, you discover Twitter wars. T-wars for short. In the beginning, you are not keen but you come to see that with the right dose and strategy, it does not hurt to be a mudslinger. Like sheep, people are looking for a shepherd and emerging victorious in a T-war makes you look stronger. Also, you come to see that you are the voice of those who are too afraid to speak their minds. When a well-known lawyer’s indecent video is leaked in which he and another man feature, you are the first to retweet the story, to share the link, to tag him and his wife and his children. You joke about the video and call for him to be fired which he is that very same day and you are hailed as a hero. So you continue to sling more mud. Sometimes you overdo it and you know it too. Your followers comment with something like ‘um’ or ‘hmmm’ but add a smiling emoji to ease their disapproval. This does not deter you. You’ve tasted blood and you like it. It fills you with euphoria to single-handedly end a career, get someone to have to deactivate their account, or see a fall from grace. You are powerful, someone to align with and not to mess with. Plus T-wars bring in more followers, which means more money.

Here, you learn too that money is a magnet for women. You have always been handsome but you have never had this kind of attention before. With this newfound attention, you sleep with many of the women you meet on Twitter. It’s a secret you are all willing to let fade into a dark abyss because the women have official boyfriends to whom they tweet lengthy declarations of love. You go on like this for months and you become quite skilled at handling women. One day a fair-skinned girl called Tasheni DM’s you. She is slender and feeble-looking. Though your type is thick and chocolate, you DM back and there is a back-and-forth before you ask her out on a date. She gladly accepts. Unlike the other women, she isn’t forward and you correctly sense that it’s not about the money. You come to learn that her father is a minister in the government and her mother is a CEO of a quasi-government institution. She graduated from Trident College and went to Manchester University to study for a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry and is now back to see what is next for her. She is twenty-two, eight years younger than you and talks a lot about finding true love. You are not looking for true love or to give true love but you make her believe that you love her. You go on more dates. She finally agrees to be intimate. Something she thinks makes your relationship official. But the next day when she calls your number it rings and rings and rings. The messages she sends you on WhatsApp are left on two blue ticks. She thinks that maybe you are busy and you will call back when you can. But then a week goes by and then two and you are still silent. In this time, she has called you about a hundred times.

It’s in the third week when you open your Twitter that you see a flood of tweets.

Miss Jennifer @J3nnifer: Iye sure, how can someone do this?

Stella Tha Babe @StellaTembo: Mwamuna uyu ni

Some of the men come to your defense.

Charlie @CharlieKay: Leave him alone, ni munthu chabe.

Tom Chanda @uncletom: Women will vilify a good man.

And the tweets go on and on and on.

You read the tweet Tasheni has tagged you. It’s a lengthy post on how you took advantage of her and tossed her away like she did not have any worth. To keep from any confusion about who she is referring to, she adds a photo of you. You should keep quiet and let this storm pass away but you have walked similar streets before and emerged victorious. You go to war and tweet and tweet and tweet. You end your last tweet by writing, ‘You came onto me. What did you expect me to do? I never loved you, and most likely never will because you aren’t that great.’

Before you tweeted, Tasheni liked and retweeted what people wrote in her support. You want to take this as a victory but something stirs in your soul that all is not well. Twitter goes quiet for hours. Your latest war slowly becoming a thing of memory.

Then in the morning, Twitter alights with screenshots of the Times of Zambia with Tasheni’s face on the front page. The headline reads, ‘Minister’s daughter attempts suicide.’ You zoom in on the article and read that she is on life support and has battled with depression for years and that this is her second attempt at taking her own life. Her parents are perplexed because recently she seemed a whole lot happier. The doctors say they do not know if she will make it. This is the first time you feel remorse after a T-war, and the mudslinging you have done to others now comes back to you. Because of the gravity of the situation, many people call you many things. Those who supported you earlier also turn on you. Though you have taken being called things before, today you crush under the weight of words. You lose followers and brand ambassadorships as quickly as you earned them.

The things they say about you create a darkness in your soul. The harder you try to get up, the more it pins you down and you watch helplessly as it takes over all of you. You think of Tasheni. You pray she will make it through. You will apologize to her. Maybe you should think about it but there is nothing really to think about so you tap on the navigation menu, then settings and deactivate your account.

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  • Emily Pensulo is a Zambian writer and economist whose work has earned recognition both regionally and internationally. She was longlisted for the inaugural Kalemba Prize in 2018 and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2024. In the same year, she was shortlisted for the Hope Prize. Emily was also a scriptwriter for Lifeblood (2020), a project directed by a BAFTA-nominated filmmaker. Her short stories have been featured in Captive: An Anthology (2024).

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