ZAMBIA TODAY
Terry Bergdall, October 2025
Pamela and Terry Bergdall lived 18 years in Africa, engaged in village development work. After beginning as staff members at the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) in Nairobi, Kenya, their final 13 years were in Zambia. Twenty-five years after his departure, Terry returned to Zambia. Below are some of his observations and impressions about noticeable change.
in 2000, about the same time that I returned to Chicago, the first large modern shopping mall opened in Lusaka across from the show-grounds on the Great East Road. Now numerous large shopping malls can be found throughout the city. The one by the showgrounds has quadrupled in size with a huge, expanded parking lot.
The Kabulanga neighborhood had a single grocery store -- Melissa’s (or MMM) -- though modest, it had the best stocked shelves in the city. During my years in Lusaka, it was the grocery store where I preferred to shop. Now the Kabulanga shopping area has spread over half a kilometer and is full of several large commercial businesses. MMM itself has moved into a much larger facility and rivals the supermarkets in physical size and inventory that I find in Chicago. A big surprise for me was a major new mall located directly across the street from the Co-op College where Pam and I both delivered training programs. During my time in Zambia it was far out of town and was reached by passing a long stretch of empty land and the city’s cemetery. Nothing else was nearby. Now it is the busy destination of many, many shoppers. These malls with busy shoppers are a huge contrast to long slow-moving lines outside small shops in the 1980s which were unavoidable for many people needing to purchase basics like ground maize and cooking oil.
Franchise Restaurants
An even a bigger surprise than the malls was the explosion of franchise restaurants that have appeared “everywhere:” Nandos’s chicken, The Hungry Lion, Debonaire’s pizza, Steer’s burgers and steaks -- most of these, I suppose, being South African fast-food chains. The number of these places is comparable to the McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Pizza Huts, etc., that have overtaken American cities. KFC is one franchise that seems to flourish in both countries. I never expected to see this in Zambia. There also are many new flyover bridges on widened roads to accommodate the traffic to and from the malls and fast-food franchises. Middleclass Zambians
Besides the sheer number of these eating establishments and shopping malls, I was totally unprepared to see them fully occupied by middleclass Zambians with the necessary disposable income, especially in the more urban areas, to frequent them. And these changes are not only in Lusaka. On the road to Victoria Falls, we saw the same supermarkets and food franchises in district towns like Kafue, Mazabuka, Monze, as well as the regional center of Choma. As widely reported elsewhere, the Chinese are a dominant presence everywhere. One of the major sponsors of the annual “chiefdom” celebration that we attended while in Choma was a Chinese mining company. Their Chinese managing director delivered a major speech during the ceremony.
Cell Phones
Cell phones are also everywhere in Zambia, including among those rural farmers who ride their bikes to market over-loaded with goods for sale. Telephone transfers of money are a major form of making payments. While we were in Choma, our host purchased a watermelon from a roadside vendor (i.e., an elderly woman sitting on a blanket as she attempted to sell a dozen watermelons and some cucumbers, tomatoes, and a few other vegetable) via a phone transfer of kwacha, Zambia’s currency. This is a very popular alternative to cash and credit cards.
