Alessandro Rota

Neocolonialism is a term coined by Kwame Nkrumah, first post-independence president of Ghana, to refer to the practice of using capitalism, globalisation, and cultural forces to control a country; it could also be used to refer to the massive presence of trans-national identities which interfere to an autonomous self-definition of needs in the emerging economies.

Filled only with preconceived ideas, I felt the need to experience, first hand, the streets of Southern Africa. I begun my six-weeks road trip across Zambia and Tanzania four months before the political elections of President Michael Sata: member of the Patriotic Front, he unseat, in September 2011, the Movement for Multi-party Democracy which had held power for the previous 20 years.

Zambia ranks 15 on the scale of natural resources out of 196 countries worldwide.
In 1964 Zambia made a peaceful transition to independence from the British Empire. However, its historical dependency on copper exportation caused a financial collapse in the 70’s, when the value of copper has been dropping on the international market. The economic rebirth of country began in the late 1990s when the privatization of the mining sector drew in foreign investment, especially from China and South Africa. In 2000, Zambia was re-classified as a middle-income country by the World Bank but poverty is not defeated.

The lack of a strong Zambian identity, which is a mixture of 74 different tribes that moved to this region to escape tribal wars between the 12th and the 13th century, makes Zambia’s future shrouded in uncertainty and subject to an uncontrolled desire of emulating welfare stereotypes of the “West”.