Daniel Mulilo Chama is a former street child from Lusaka, Zambia. He currently works as an outreach worker for a consortium of non-profit organizations as he completes his degree in social work at the University of Zambia.
Chama is the co-author with Chris Lockhart of Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka, forthcoming from Hanover Square Press in February 2022.
Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka
by Chris Lockhart and Daniel Mulilo Chama
Hanover Square Press, February 2022
For readers of Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Nothing to Envy, this is a breathtaking real-life story of four street children in contemporary Zambia whose lives are drawn together and forever altered by the mysterious murder of a fellow street child.
Based on years of investigative reporting and unprecedented fieldwork, Walking the Bowl immerses readers in the daily lives of four unforgettable characters: Lusabilo, a determined waste picker; Kapula, a burned-out brothel worker; Moonga, a former rock crusher turned beggar; and Timo, an ambitious gang leader. These children navigate the violent and poverty-stricken underworld of Lusaka, one of Africa’s fastest growing cities.
When the dead body of a ten-year-old boy is discovered under a heap of garbage in Lusaka’s largest landfill, a murder investigation quickly heats up due to the influence of the victim’s mother and her far-reaching political connections. The children’s lives become more closely intertwined as each child engages in a desperate bid for survival against forces they could never have imagined.
Gripping and fast-paced, the book exposes the perilous aspects of street life through the eyes of the children who survive, endure and dream there, and what emerges is an ultimately hopeful story about human kindness and how one small good deed, passed on to others, can make a difference in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
*A New York Times Book Review Notable Book*
*An NPR Best Book of the Year*
“A vibrant account of the lives of street children in Lusaka…. [the authors] allow us to slip inside this world as effortlessly as one might slip into a swimming pool…. a fluid, elegant crime story, without an ounce of excess, all the more powerful because it is true….. it evokes a world in its entirety: the fleshy, sticky smell of a subtropical bus station, the grimy windows and dark hallways of a police precinct. It shows how fluctuations in the price of oil reverberate, reaching the lives of the world’s most vulnerable people. Its pages vibrate with life. Most of all, it tells the story of children who, under impossible circumstances, manage to survive.” –New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice
"A vivid, unforgettable account of life at the margins of the margins. This book will transport you to a world you didn't know existed but that you will never fully leave behind. Chris Lockhart and Daniel Mulilo Chama have achieved something extraordinary: reporting so deep that you'll want to read passages again and again, combined with storytelling so propulsive that you'll need to forge ahead to the last page." — Ty McCormick, senior editor of Foreign Affairs and author of Beyond the Sand and Sea: One Family's Quest for a Country to Call Home
“An astonishingly beautiful book. Beautiful in its biting reality. Beautiful in its unearthing of life’s deepest, darkest voids. Beautiful in its depictions of land and cityscapes, great and small. Walking the Bowl is one of the most revealing, and heart-rending books I have ever read.” — Thomas Lockley, coauthor of African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan
“A powerful, beautiful book. Lockhart and Chama throw us into the whirlpool of cruelty, solidarity, triumph and resilient survival of street children in Zambia, Africa, telling the beautiful stories of these kids’ humanity and forcing us to recognize that most are dying much too soon and too hard.” — Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio
“Told like a picaresque adventure story, Walking the Bowl captures magnificently the spirit of a hard, hard world. An enviable feat of writing and of sympathy.” — Jonny Steinberg, author of A Man of Good Hope
“A book about the forgotten of the forgotten. A powerful book. No frills, just hard, spare prose. An intimate account of friendship, betrayal and salvation that requires no atlas to engage and enlighten us.”
— Wolfgang Bauer, author of Stolen Girls: Survivors of Boko Haram Tell Their Story
