By Maxwell Simbuwa 

Senior Honors Thesis 

Department of Anthropology 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2026 

Approved:                                                                                           

______________________________________________ 

 Dr. Colin Thor West, Thesis Advisor

   Dr. Kathryn Mathers, Second Read

Dr. Adrian Drummond-Cole, Second Reader  

© 2026 

Maxwell Simbuwa

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Ackonwledgements

This project was supported by the Gump Family Undergraduate Research Fund administered by Honors Carolina.

The following acknowledgments are in order. 

To my advisor, Dr. Colin Thor West, and my readers Dr. Kathryn Mathers and Dr. Adrian

Drummond-Cole, thank you for all your support. Thank you to the Robertson Scholars Leadership

Program (RSLP) for funding my education, which enabled me to carry out this thesis. Thank you to my friends and my family, for loving me and keeping me grounded. Thank you to my thesis class and

instructors, we did this together. And a very special thank you to my interlocutors, without whom this important work would have been impossible to make. Thank you for sharing these personal and intimate stories of your life with me. I am eternally grateful.

IRB Study #: 25-1306

ABSTRACT

Climate change has predominantly been framed in technical, environmental, and future-oriented terms. It becomes a matter of targets, thresholds, and emissions trajectories. This framing has its merits. Most importantly, when used appropriately, it allows us to identify and assign responsibility to those actors most responsible for the crisis. However, it falls short in a crucial way. This framing depoliticizes climate change and its impacts, obscuring the global power relations that shape everyday life in countries like Zambia. As a result of this depoliticization, the people who bear the brunt of the crisis are rendered invisible, and their suffering is ignored. Stories like those presented in this thesis, therefore, are important because they repopulate the problem with real people living the social, political, and economic realities of climate change. With the 2023-24 drought as a backdrop, this thesis uses conversations with everyday Zambians and my own positionality as a Zambian living in the West to challenge this framing. Drawing on ideas of slow violence and necropolitics, I argue that climate change is not simply an environmental problem to be solved through technical coordination, but a deeply political phenomenon structured by global inequality rooted in imperial capitalism.     

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………..3

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………4

Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………………..5

Introduction             6

       Study Objectives                   11

       Methodology     12

       Overview           14

Chapter One: Literature Review………………………..……………………………………………15

   Climate Patterns and Trends                15

  Impact on Agriculture and Food Security   17

           Impact on Power Supply            18

Increasing Precarity…………………………………………………………………………………19

Chapter Two: Blackout – The Story of Load Shedding………………………………………….22

Chapter Three: A Soaring Cost of Living, and Rising Food Insecurity………………………33

Chapter Four: Climate Change – A Gendered Experience………………………………………48

Chapter Five: Slow Violence and Living Death – The Necropolitics of it All………………..59

Works Cited and Bibliography………………………………………………………………………76

Introduction

I was born and raised in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, a landlocked country in Southern Africa. I had a very happy childhood. We did not have much money, but what we lacked in material wealth, we made up for in kindness, hearty laughter, and the privilege of a relatively stable economy. Some of my most vivid memories are of the predictability of the weather. January to March marked the rainy season. The ground stayed wet, the plants impossibly green, and the seasonal maize, gourds, and pumpkins tasted ever so delightful. Because the academic year begins in January, this period was both exciting and inconvenient. There was water and mud everywhere. Mud that clung to our shoes and uniforms, turning the walk to school into a careful negotiation, and water that pooled in the yard and drummed relentlessly on metal roofs. There was also the occasional leak in the roof, and far less time to play outside with friends. April ushered in the cold season. The rains were nearly gone. The air turned dry, crisp, and chilling to the bone. It grew even colder and windier as the months passed. June and July were the coldest. August was the windiest and therefore the dustiest. Everyone was sneezing. I have always hated this season. As a child, the one saving grace was that my birthday falls in June, and that has always been a cause for celebration.

September to December was the hot season, my favourite time of year. The days were longer, the fun lasted forever, beginning at school and spilling into the afternoons at home. But saying goodbye to my friends at the end of each day, when the sun finally dipped and we were called inside, was always a sad event. Our annual trip to the water park usually took place in October. By early November, the first rains returned, carrying that intoxicating petrichor that signalled the start of a new cycle. This is the season of juicy mangos, aromatic mushrooms, and the sweetest sugarcane. When the flying termites, the inswa, emerged at night, it was always a joyful moment. Even though it rained often, the usual heat helped, and there was no better place to be in December than on the African continent, because Detty December^[1] was the best time of the year.

Fast forward to 2024, and these rhythms, once so dependable, have become increasingly erratic. After two years of studying abroad in the US, I was finally able to go home for a decent amount of time during the American summer holidays. I returned in mid-May and stayed until the end of June. By then, Zambia had endured about half a year of a terrible drought, the worst in over forty years. The rainy season that usually began in November and lasted through March was nowhere to be seen. It never arrived. June temperatures that once had me reaching for a blanket were now warm enough for shorts. While I enjoyed this because I hate the cold, I understood that something was fundamentally wrong. Crops failed and Zambia’s reliance on hydroelectric power led to a dramatic drop in power supply. Life was the most expensive and difficult I had ever seen it. Food and economic insecurity were rife. The prices of basic items such as bread, tomatoes, and mealie meal, Zambia’s staple food, had skyrocketed from what I remembered them to be, which was already high. During this visit, each day, I experienced roughly thirteen hours of planned shutdowns of electricity supply designed to relieve pressure on, and prevent the total collapse of the electrical grid, or as is the common parlance in Zambia, load shedding. I had experienced load shedding before, between 2015 and 2016, following another drought, but it had never been this severe. The longest I had known was eight hours. I did not think it could get worse, but I was mistaken. When I returned home again in December for the holidays, I experienced up to forty hours of load shedding at a time, followed by only three to four hours of power. As if life were not hard enough with the already high cost of everything, small businesses suffered significant losses. No power means shops, restaurants, and other service places operate under severe constraints or are forced to shut down entirely. Additionally, many families, including my own, were forced to live on much tighter daily budgets. Without a working refrigerator, it is impossible to buy perishable foods in bulk, which is much cheaper.

Even though I was excited to be home and spend time with my family, I was very eager to leave and return to the US, a privilege not many people have. Realizing this filled me with a great deal of guilt. My relationship with home has become complicated. On one hand, it is a source of immense pride and joy. I love being Zambian. My fondest memories and most sacred relationships are forever tied to this land. There is no me without Zambia. But at the same time, it is a source of great sorrow. Life is hard, and I’m not one to glorify suffering. To this day, as 2025 comes to an end, almost every time I call home, my family answers in the darkness. There is no end in sight. I have had the painful privilege of leaving and looking from the outside. This is not the reality for most Zambians.

It is easy to imagine that Zambia’s climate crisis is an isolated event, one simply born of nature and devoid of politics. As Binyavanga Wainaina satirically illustrates in How to Write About Africa, the continent is often portrayed as a place of timeless suffering, where crises are presented as natural, inevitable, and detached from global power relations (2005). He writes, “Treat Africa as if it were one country…[a place of] people who are too busy starving and dying and warring” (Wainaina, 2005). But this is far from the truth. Everything is political. In this thesis, I use the terms Global North/West to refer to those industrialized, economically dominant countries that have historically instituted and benefited from colonialism, extraction and uneven development. In contrast, I use the terms Global South/imperial periphery to refer to those countries that have been structurally marginalized within the global political economy – former colonies, historical and contemporary sites of violent resource extraction and on the short end of uneven development. The African continent accounts for less than 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is one of the world’s most affected regions (Fonjong et al., 2024). While droughts, floods, and other shocks are normal, the current rate at which they occur is not (Fonjong et al., 2024). By all metrics, the frequency and severity of these extreme events have increased and continue to rise. Rich countries in the Global North, such as the United States and the countries of Western Europe, are overwhelmingly responsible for the climate crisis. Yet, it is Global South countries like mine that face the brunt of its impacts. Decades of exploitation, structural adjustment, and parasitic debt servicing imposed by the West with very little accountability have eroded our ability to address the effects of a problem we did not create. The reduced rainfall, debilitating heat, poverty, high prices, increasing hunger, constant survival mode, underwhelming Detty December, and even my complicated relationship with home are tied to a global capitalist system built on Western imperialism and dependent on the continued impoverishment of countries like mine. This thesis examines how these structural dynamics are produced and experienced, tracing the connections between global political-economic forces and everyday life in Zambia.  I will trace these impacts through interviews with Zambians from different walks of life. This thesis paints a picture of the impacts of climate change on Zambians through these conversations and my own experiences and perspectives. 

Though the full extent of its effects is yet to be realised, climate change is no longer a distant event to be prevented. It is real, it is here, and it is devastating the lives of many real people around the world, most in countries of the imperial periphery like Zambia. Temperature levels in Zambia have shown an alarming increasing trend. According to projections reported in the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) 2023, the average temperature in Zambia is expected to increase by 1.9°C by 2050 and 2.3°C by 2100 (Hamududu & Ngoma, 2020:1). The African Development Bank (AfDB) Group projects even higher average temperature increases, up to 3°C by the 2050s, and a decrease in annual rainfall of up to 35% by 2100 (AfDB Group, 2022). In a country where roughly 60% of people’s livelihoods are dependent on rain-fed agriculture, these changes have been and will continue to be catastrophic (Mubanga et al., 2020). From 2023 to 2024, Zambia endured a devastating drought, the worst in over 40 years. This drought highlighted the acute vulnerability of countries like Zambia to the impacts of a rapidly changing climate. 

While research on the unfolding and effects of global climate change has grown significantly, much of this work is focused on mitigation, technology, or adaptation frameworks developed in the Global North. Far less attention has been paid to the lived experiences and structural conditions that shape climate vulnerability in contexts such as Zambia. This study examines the lived social, economic, and political realities of climate change among vulnerable communities in Zambia. To achieve this, I draw on the critical frameworks of capitalism, slow violence, and necropolitics. In this context, capitalism is not simply an economic system, but rather a social and political-economic world order built upon and maintained through violent structural extraction, accumulation and staggering unequal distributions of power and vulnerability. Therefore, within this system, climate change and the different ways it is experienced are natural and predictable progressions of a rotten model based on never-ending extraction and exploitation.

In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon introduces the concept of slow violence. He defines slow violence as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2011: 2). Unlike conventional conceptions of violence, which are often explosive and immediate, slow violence lacks the same visible characteristics, allowing it to not be considered violence at all. It lacks the shock factor that makes conventional violence popular. Nixon writes,  “In an age that venerates instant spectacle, slow violence is deficient in the recognizable special effects that fill movie theaters and boost ratings on TV” (2011: 6). 

Building on this, in Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe argues that the highest expression of sovereignty lies in the power to govern life through death – “subjugating life to the power of death” (2019, 92). Necropolitics, then, is concerned with the capacity to decide who lives and who dies. Mbembe further argues that “necropolitical power proceeds by a sort of inversion between life and death, as if life was merely death’s medium. It ever seeks to abolish the distinction between means and ends. Hence its indifference to objective signs of cruelty” (2019: 38). Within this framework, Mbembe introduces the concept of “death-worlds,” which he defines as “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead” (2019, 92). 

Using these lenses, I argue throughout this thesis that climate change, as experienced in Zambia, is an ongoing deployment of Nixon’s slow violence and Mbembe’s living death, conferring upon the people of Zambia what I call slow death – a violent, and sustained, yet unspectacular act of mass murder wherein both the crime and the perpetrator are rendered invisible, and the victims are robbed of justice.

Study Objectives

I have three main goals in this thesis. First, I aim to investigate and document the social, economic, political, and environmental impacts of prolonged drought, floods, and power rationing on vulnerable communities in Zambia. Second, I will critically examine the profound global inequities of the climate crisis, particularly the disproportionate burden placed on Global South nations by the emissions and historical actions of countries in the Global North. Finally, this research aims to contribute to broader discourses on environmental justice and climate accountability by incorporating ethnographic perspectives, centring on the experiences and narratives of the too-often-ignored voices of those most vulnerable to and affected by climate change.

Methodology

This research adopts a qualitative, ethnographic approach informed by the frameworks of political ecology, postcolonial theory, and necropolitics. I draw primarily on remote interviews with 8 participants from rural and urban Zambia, conducted between July and November 2025.

These interviews typically lasted 30-60 minutes and were conducted in English and Nyanja via Zoom. Participants were recruited through personal networks and referrals, allowing access to individuals directly experiencing the various effects of climate change. Select participants also took part in a photovoice activity, using accessible devices such as mobile phones to visually document aspects of their daily lives and interpretations of the climate crisis. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). All participants provided informed consent, and interviews were audio-recorded with permission. Recordings were transcribed verbatim, and identifying details were removed to protect participant anonymity. Below is a table and map situating my interlocutors.

Interlocutor	Relevant details
Bupe	30 year-old Juvenile mental health professional, primarily based in Kazungula, Southern Province.
Comrade Kwilanzi	61 year-old Veteran photojournalist based in Lusaka but covering stories from all over the country.
John	22 year-old field electrician, children’s rights activist and radio show presenter based in Lusaka.
Josein	28 year-old adolescent health professional from Lusaka, primarily based in Nyimba but working throughout the Eastern Province.
King	24 year-old photographer and student at the University of Zambia (UNZA).
Kitel	19 year-old student at Kwame Nkrumah University, based, at the time of our interview, in Livingstone, Southern Province, working as a retail store manager.
Njavwa	23 year-old student at Copperbelt University (CBU) from Lusaka but primarily based in Kitwe, Copperbelt Province.
Uncle K	51 year-old veteran journalist and children’s rights NGO executive primarily based in Lusaka but working throughout Zambia, including in Solwezi, Northwestern Province.

Overview

The research is organised into five different chapters. The main themes explored in this study, as they relate to the climate crisis, include nutrition and the cost of living, productivity and load shedding, sex and gender, necropolitics and global inequities,. Chapter One is a review of existing literature as it relates to the aforementioned themes. The purpose of this review is to engage critically with current scholarship, to situate the study within historic and contemporary debates, and to outline future projections that inform the questions and arguments developed in the chapters that follow. The second chapter focuses on the experience of energy poverty, the resulting decline in productivity, and the increased precarity that follows. Chapter Three traces rising costs, food insecurity, and reduced nutritional quality as experienced by my interlocutors. The fourth chapter focuses on the unique experiences of women and girls, including period poverty, gender-based violence (GBC), and engagement in transactional sex as a survival strategy. Lastly, Chapter Five, drawing on Achille Mbembe’s (2019) Necropolitics and Rob Nixon’s (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, examines the global forces that are actively shaping the precarious living conditions of many Zambians, and how these conditions are facilitating a slow death. 

Literature Review

 In this chapter, I provide an overview of the relevant existing literature as it relates to the mechanics and technologies of climate change in Zambia. I have organized the review into different categories, each a particular area of interest and for consideration, namely, climate patterns and trends, impact on agriculture and food security, impact on power supply, and increasing precarity.

Climate Patterns and Trends

The climatic conditions in Zambia have grown increasingly burdensome due to climate change. The general consensus in the literature is that rise in temperature, low precipitation levels, and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, are increasing at alarming rates. 

The region of Southern Africa in which Zambia is situated has been designated a global climate change hotspot by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018). Human-induced temperature increase in this region happens at approximately double the rate of the global average temperature increase (IPCC, 2018). The average temperature in Zambia is increasing by 0.4°C per decade (Mubanga et al., 2020). It is getting too hot too fast. In a longitudinal study by Memory Zulu, which analysed extreme temperature and rainfall events in Zambia over 40 years, from 1981 to 2021, the results show a trend of increasing maximum daily temperatures and the frequency of hot days, defined as days with a temperature exceeding 35°C.

This is especially the case in the Southern, Eastern, and Central parts of the country (Zulu, 2025).

This trend is corroborated in the NAP 2023, which reports that Zambia is experiencing warmer winters and hotter summers, along with a general increase in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves and heat stress (NAP, 2023).

This increase in temperature is coupled with an increase in rainfall variability, with a general trend of decreasing rainfall over time. It is raining less and less in most parts of the country. Zambia is divided into three Agro-Ecological Regions (AERs), all of which have experienced a decrease in annual rainfall of 2.3% per decade (approximately 1.9mm per month) since 1960, particularly during the December to February rain season (MTENR, 2010; UN,

2012). Projections indicate that rainfall is expected to decrease by as much as 35% by 2100. With these statistics, it is no surprise that the prevalence of dry spells and droughts has increased in recent years and is projected to continue growing in frequency and intensity. The 2023-2024 drought in Zambia, the most severe in over 40 years, was associated with the El Niño phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate cycle. El Niño events bring anomalously warm Pacific sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) that alter global atmospheric circulation, typically producing droughts and dry spells in Southern Africa. Although El Niño is a natural climatic phenomenon, recent scholarship indicates that it is being influenced by anthropogenic climate change. Global climate models project stronger and potentially more frequent ENSO events under future warming scenarios, with significant implications for drought risk in Southern Africa (Yang et al., 2018; Cai et al., 2023). 

Paradoxically, despite the overall trend of reduced rainfall and increased risk of droughts, Zambia simultaneously faces a growing threat of floods. Although the total number of rainy days is decreasing, the number of days with extreme rainfall (above 20mm/day) is increasing and is projected to increase by up to 50% by 2100 (NAP, 2023; Zulu, 2025). Zambians are thus confronted with the double-edged sword of extreme droughts and floods. On their own, each is devastating. Together, their impacts are unfathomable. 

Impact on Agriculture and Food Security

For a country like Zambia, agriculture is a vital pillar of this society. A country’s ability to grow its own food and feed itself cannot be overstated. As with the changes to precipitation and temperature discussed thus far, agricultural conditions are getting worse. Agriculture in Zambia is heavily dependent on rainfall. The trend of rising temperatures and reduced total rainfall results in a decline in agricultural productivity. The increased frequency and intensity of droughts and dry spells contribute significantly to “reduced crop yields, failed harvests, and challenges in animal farming” (Zulu, 2025; NAP, 2023). This is harmful to so many people, especially smallholder farmers, 76% of whom are vulnerable to climate shocks (Ngoma et al., 2023). Zambia’s dependence on maize, its staple food, exacerbates the threat of food insecurity due to these climate shocks, particularly drought. 

During the 2023-2024 El Niño-induced drought, “a total of 982,765 hectares out of an estimated 2,272,931 hectares of maize planted” were destroyed (OCHA, 2024). Food insecurity during this period was also rife. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), between August and September 2023, 1.59 million people, 17% of Zambia’s population, were classified as in crisis (IPC phase 3) or worse, and in dire need of humanitarian assistance to prevent acute malnutrition. This number rose to a projected 2.04 million people (23% of the population) between October 2023 and March 2024. This means that over 2 million Zambians were hungry and unaware of when and where their next meal would come from. 

However, as the impacts of the El Niño-induced drought worsened, this number skyrocketed to 5.8 million people (33% of the population) across 89 of Zambia’s 116 districts between October 2024 and March 2025. 5.6 million people were classified under IPC phase 3

(crisis), and 236,000 people were classified under IPC phase 4 (emergency), one point shy of an IPC phase 5, which would indicate a full-blown famine (IPC, 2024). Zambians were starving.

7.2% of children under five were treated for Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) (ACAPS, 2025). Smallholder farmers, who account for 82% of Zambia’s total agricultural output, compared to only 10% for commercial farmers (Zambia Development Agency, 2024), were severely affected. Zambia, which is usually a net-exporter was forced to rely on expensive food imports to counteract the impacts of the crisis. The need for urgent humanitarian assistance was even more pronounced during this period. This level of food insecurity is unprecedented in Zambia’s recent history and directly reflects the compounding climatic and structural vulnerabilities discussed above.

Impact on Power Supply

Roughly 80% of Zambia’s electricity supply comes from hydropower (Brandt et al., 2023). While this is commendable, as hydropower has a much smaller carbon footprint when compared to fossil-fuel-based sources of energy, it is highly susceptible to climate shocks, especially droughts. As rainfall patterns shift and droughts intensify, Zambia’s energy system becomes increasingly fragile. 

The most significant consequence of this is the planned and sustained practice of scheduled power cuts, commonly referred to as load shedding. As of 2024, some parts of the country experience load shedding for up to 20 hours a day (Musonda, 2025). With the most recent El Niño-induced drought, loadshedding hours have increased, as will be seen in later parts of this paper. Understandably, this has terrible consequences on economic activity and people’s livelihoods in general. 

Increasing Precarity

It is undeniable that poor people in so-called ‘developing countries’ are the most affected by climate change. Increasingly recognised as a ‘threat multiplier’ by entities like the United Nations (UN) and the Centre for Climate and Security, climate change takes existing social, economic and political problems and inequalities and makes them much much worse, pushing already precarious communities into deeper insecurity. As of 2022, 64.3% of Zambia’s population, amounting to roughly 12.6 million people, live below the international poverty line (IPL) of $2.15 (World Bank, 2025), which itself has been criticized for being too low a measure of poverty, painting a picture that undermines how dire the situation is. In his final report as UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston contends that it gravely misrepresents global human suffering, creating a false and dangerous narrative of development. He goes on to describe the IPL as “a standard of miserable subsistence”, saying that it is designed to reflect a “staggeringly low” and undignifying standard of living. He highlights, “Under the measure, one can ‘escape’ from poverty without an income anywhere near that required to achieve an adequate standard of living, including access to healthcare and education”

(Alston, 2020). Jason Hickel, in his book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions, shares similar sentiments and recommends a new IPL of $5 per day, which is far from perfect, but certainly closer to accurate than current figures (Hickel, 2017). If such a more realistic measure is applied, Zambia’s poverty levels rise dramatically.

Climate-induced disasters make it significantly difficult to escape poverty. Since poverty reduction is primarily driven through asset accumulation (Moser, 2008; Baulch, 2011), climate shocks, such as crop failure, livestock loss, and the disruption of economic activity through load shedding erode assets, reduce income, and slow or reverse pathways out of poverty (Hallegate et al., 2018). The relationship between poverty and climate vulnerability is therefore cyclical. Hallegatte et al argue that “poverty is one major driver of people’s vulnerability to climate-related shocks and stressors, and this vulnerability is keeping people in poverty” (Hallegatte et al., 2018). This is particularly pertinent, for example, for the 60% of the Zambian population whose livelihoods depend on rain-fed agriculture (Mubanga et al., 2020), the majority of whom are poor and rural smallholder farmers. 

Ngoma et al. similarly find that increased climate shocks not only heighten vulnerability but simultaneously erode resilience, further weakening the capacity to cope with future climate events and deepening long-term precarity (Ngoma et al., 2023). Poverty begets climate vulnerability, which in turn begets poverty, which in turn begets more vulnerability. It becomes a vicious cycle. This cyclical relationship is not incidental, it is structural, shaping both exposure to risk and the ability to respond.

In this review, I have attempted to present and synthesise the most relevant and available scholarship on the impacts of climate change in Zambia. This review has drawn primarily on quantitative data. This reflects both the nature of the data and its limitations. While these data provide an appropriate foundation for understanding the scale and severity of climate change impacts in Zambia, they often obscure the lived, everyday realities of climate change. Bridging this gap is central to my thesis. Part of my motivation for pursuing this thesis is to contribute more data to climate change scholarship in Zambia that is rooted in people’s lived experiences.

Over the next four chapters, I will be doing just that, focusing specifically on the impacts of load shedding, cost of living and nutrition, the unique experiences of women and girls, and a theoretical framework of slow violence and necropolitics.

Blackout – The Story of Load Shedding

When I first started conducting my interviews for this thesis in late July 2025, it had been almost exactly three years since I left home to begin my undergraduate studies in the US. When I moved on that third day of August 2022, I went from being in the physical presence of my family pretty much every single day to not knowing when next I would see them again. One way we stayed connected was through weekly video calls on WhatsApp. Because of the time difference between the US and Zambia, with Zambia being at least 6 hours ahead of the US on the East Coast, 7 hours after the daylight savings reset, I would normally call my family when it was around 19:00 or 20:00 in Lusaka. By the time I started conducting these interviews, I had gotten used to barely seeing their faces when I called home, because they were almost always engulfed in darkness. Load shedding had become the natural order of the day. 

This reality is a central character in the story of my interview process. Load shedding did not merely inconvenience my research; it structured it. For three of my eight successful interlocutors, we had to reschedule the interview at least once. After texting back and forth about the project and my request for an interview, we would set a date and time for the Zoom interview. A few hours, or a few minutes before the scheduled start of our interview, I would receive a text asking to reschedule. Take Comrade Kwilanzi, for example, we had to reschedule twice. The first time, we were scheduled for 22:00 CAT (16:00 EST). Twelve minutes before, I texted, “Are you still available?” and Comrade Kwilanzi texted back, “I am available, just this embarrassing blackout, no power, and phone is at 8 per cent power. Let us do tomorrow.”

Sometimes the text would come hours after our scheduled time. This was the case with King. Thirty minutes before our scheduled start time (13:00 EST), I texted him, “Hey boss. Just checking in to see if we’re good for today?” I did not hear back from King until the following day, when he texted me at 16:34 EST, writing, “Hey bro. I hope you are okay. Pardon me for the silence. We had a power crisis, and I was unable to stay online [long] enough to communicate.” With four other would-be interlocutors, the rescheduling was never successful. As unfortunate as this was, it was also very telling. Figure 1 shows text messages between my interlocutors and me, who had to reschedule. 

Figure 1. Text messages between five of my interlocutors and I showing the impact of load shedding on scheduling.

 Comrade Kwilanzi, a veteran photojournalist, finally spoke with me one Tuesday evening after a long day of work at around 22:00 CAT. Despite being tired, he spoke with great generosity and calm. When I asked him what changes he had noticed and experienced living under a drought, the first thing he said was, 

“Well, as we speak now, if I put on my video, you’ll notice that I’m in the dark. Power only comes for about two hours every day. It only comes from 24 hours [midnight]. We’re on the stage where power is coming at 24 hours, until 02[AM], and then it goes.” 

Two hours of electricity a day is absolutely abhorrent. In a week of 168 hours, this translates to electricity access that lasts for only 14 hours. In a month, which has 672 hours, there are only 56 hours of power supply. These conditions have forced Comrade Kwilanzi and many others to completely change the way they live to survive. Hours that would normally be spent sleeping are instead spent on high alert. Comrade Kwilanzi adds, 

“You’re now forced to adjust. Most people could be sleeping, but the moment electricity comes in the night, everyone will wake up. They will be charging their phones. Those that have contracts to supply bread to supermarkets, scones to supermarkets, or cakes will be baking. Welders, those that are doing carpentry, they’ll be forced to work in the night to finish their products. People are forced to work at odd hours, so you have to adjust.” 

King also shares this sentiment, noting that, “Whenever power is available, you have to take advantage of it.” In a tone that captures the ridiculousness of the situation, almost chuckling, Comrade Kwilanzi adds that, “Imagine every week, the timetables change every week. So you find that this week, you’re between the 24:00 to 2 AM, the other week, maybe 02:00 to 04.” To make matters worse, the changing schedules, which are already confusing and insufficient, are not always adhered to. In some cases, two places in close proximity might have two different schedules, fueling frustration. This is shown in Figure 2 below, submitted by Comrade Kwilanzi.

Figure 2. “Houses on the same road; ones on the left with lighting and ones on the other right side in darkness in New Chilenje Township, Lusaka, on Saturday, 11th October 2025” – Comrade Kwilanzi.

Kitel, a recent high school graduate from Lusaka but working in Livingstone, and also the first person I interviewed, shared that she has experienced “sometimes over three days without power.” When I spoke to Josein, an adolescent health and wellbeing worker living in Nyimba District but working throughout the Eastern Province of Zambia, this particular conversation briefly took a comic turn. She likened having power to being like a rumor, saying, “Sometimes you miss it, like [if] you oversleep, you just hear that power came,” and I chime in with, “and power went.” At this point, we were laughing at the reality of going to bed with no power and waking up with no power. Laughter, in this context, does not signal triviality. It signals normalization. Absurdity has become routine. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once put it, “it is funny, in the way that sad things are funny” (2017). 

 Climate change-induced load shedding in Zambia has significantly eroded the country’s productivity and, by extension, the lives of millions of Zambians. As many of my interlocutors pointed out, a noteworthy amount of jobs require electricity, and its sporadic (at best) availability has significantly affected people’s ability to support themselves and their families, a feat that was already hard to do. I spoke with Uncle K, a veteran journalist working in the Human Rights Civil Society sector, with a particular focus on children’s rights. Uncle K serves as the Executive Director of a prominent children’s rights organization headquartered in Lusaka but serving all 10 provinces of the country. When I asked him whether his work and income have been affected by load shedding, he lamented, 

“As a person who depends on writing proposals and doing reports, I also do consultancies for communication strategies, awareness raising strategies and campaigns, it becomes difficult to sustain your life without power.” 

Uncle K also spoke to how load shedding creates more expenses in trying to get work done, adding, 

“So you have to go to maybe a nearby restaurant where there’s power all the time, maybe powered by solar or a gen set, and then you are required to get something there as you work, and that’s the inconvenience of leaving your office to go and work elsewhere, which many others may not manage. So productivity has gone down…and it affects the way you produce results.” 

Josein, reflecting on the meetings she needs to attend and reports she has to write for her work, echoed similar views, stating plainly, “Sometimes I just don’t get to work effectively. If there’s no power, my gadgets are down, then, [I] just need to wait until power comes back.”  Productivity, then, for Zambians is no longer about skill or discipline. Instead, it is about infrastructure availability. Load shedding suspends labor. Time is no longer used, but wasted. Slow violence and capitalism operate in ways often obscured from immediate view. Capitalism demands that people work, be ‘productive’ and earn money to be seen as valuable. Under capitalism, currency is not just what one earns (ZMK, USD, and so on), but also a proxy for one’s worth. Yet load shedding systematically undermines the very conditions required to meet these expectations. The popular adage holds that “time is money.” But what happens when one has a lot of time on one’s hands, the willingness to work, and the need to earn, yet is structurally prevented from doing so? A new form of dissonance is produced, wherein failure is internalized despite being externally imposed. I discuss the mechanisms of this phenomenon in more detail in Chapter Four. 

Civil Society is an important faction of any society. It promotes accountability and works with different stakeholders to help fill the gaps left by the government. Small to medium Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) like the ones Uncle K and Josein work for are constantly at risk of shutting down. Even before the drought, funding was very volatile, and every day is a fight for survival. For many of these organizations, beholden to foreign donors, low productivity can be fatal. Donor funding is performance-based. Reporting delays threaten renewals, and missed deliverables jeopardize grants. This creates a difficult paradox. As Uncle K argues, the climate crisis on its own increases the burden on Civil Society to fill the gaps where the government falls short. Yet, its ability to do so has also been affected by this breakdown. 

 Uncle K and Josein, as precarious as their work has become, work in the formal sector, which accounts for 31.7% of the employed population, according to the 2024 Zambia Labour

Force Survey. The vast majority of Zambia’s labor force (68.3% of the working population), however, is in the informal sector (ZamStats, 2024:51). If the formal sector, which offers some degree of predictability and stability with its salaried structure and institutional backing, is struggling, then the informal sector, which is structurally more vulnerable, is in even greater danger. John, a 22-year-old Field Electrician and children’s rights activist, who also works part-time as a radio show presenter, stated, “Loadshedding is affecting individuals and businesses. The lack of electricity has made it impossible to do business.” As an electrician, the lack of electricity made John’s job null. Speaking of his company, John remarked, “We can’t really work. We can’t diagnose something that is not on.” With load shedding, John’s skill becomes unusable. His expertise is rendered idle. The very condition that creates demand for electricians (electrical systems) simultaneously eliminates their ability to work. Work slows, productivity drops, deadlines are missed. In the informal sector, work disappears, income vanishes, and survival becomes daily improvization. Climate-induced infrastructural breakdown does not affect everyone equally. It amplifies pre-existing stratification.

 When I asked Josein about the impact of load shedding on the adolescents she works with, she described ways in which strain on parents and guardians often transfers to children. She states, 

“So we have people that do welding, that’s their source of income. People that have salons, that’s their source of income, you know, restaurants, bars, and so on…That’s where people actually depend on to be able to even provide for their families. But if I am experiencing that [load shedding] as a business owner, and maybe I have three employees, I will eventually need to make a decision, because I don’t need all of them. I’m not able to meet their needs, because mine as well, are not being met…These are the guardians, these are the parents for the adolescents that we work with so indirectly, that also affects the young people because parents are no longer able to meet the needs of their children. They cannot get them everything they might want or need.” 

Research indicates that not only can climate-related events directly impact children and adolescents, they can also affect them indirectly through their parents. A 2024 study published in the Journal of Global Health argues that “Climate-related events are associated with increases in posttraumatic stress and other mental health disorders in children and adolescents” as well as “disruptions to responsive caregiving and family functioning, which can be linked to poor caregiver mental health, stress and loss of resources” (Proulx et al., 2024). 

 One area where load shedding directly impacts children and adolescents is their education. All my interviewees mentioned how studying becomes virtually impossible to do at night because of load shedding. Bupe, a clinical psychologist working in Kazungula District in the Southern Province, and a part-time university student, asks, “How do you study when there’s no power?” As a university student constantly pulling all-nighters (it is almost 2 AM as I type this), the answer is simply, you don’t. I cannot fathom studying, getting assignments done on time, and doing well. It feels so out of reach. 

In Zambia, all Grade 12 students sit for their General Certificate of Education (GCE) exams, usually just referred to as ‘Grade 12 exams.’ These exams are incredibly important. They can determine whether someone gets to attend university or even gets a job. For many, they are also considered the culmination of the last 12 years of one’s educational career. Completing grade 12 is often regarded as the step before entering society. Understandably, doing well is significant. In 2024, at the height of the drought and load shedding, Kitel was in Grade 12 and doing her best to prepare for the exams. When I interviewed Kitel, her results had come out not too long before. While they were objectively acceptable and earned her a certificate and university admission, she wasn’t very happy with them. She felt that she could have done much better. I asked her what role load shedding played, to which she replied, 

“On a scale of one to ten,  I’d say seven. This is simply because I had less or no time at all to study at night. I’d come back  from school every day tired because I was walking. Time to study was only at night and by that time you’d find power has gone.” 

Supplied by Kitel, the pictures in Figure 3 below illustrate her struggles as a student experiencing load shedding.

Figure 3. Screenshots from a video made by Kitel illustrating her struggles as a student experiencing load shedding.

Kitel, like many other students, is a victim of infrastructure failure. Her present and future, framed by neoliberal capitalism as the product of individual responsibility and are therefore entirely in her own hands, have been compromised by circumstances over which she had no control.

Njavwa, an engineering student at the Copperbelt University (CBU) in Kitwe, reflected on 2019, when he was in high school, and Zambia was already experiencing load shedding. He recounted, 

“I struggled to like, go about my studies and daily life because of the power rationing. So sometimes power would go during the night and night time was the only time I had to study, so it was a bit inconveniencing.” 

Somewhat luckily for Njavwa, though this most recent wave of drought-induced load shedding is more severe, his university campus, like most major public university campuses in the country, maintained an active power supply. However, he adds, “Majority of students stay in boarding houses, and those happen to be in residential areas that got load shedded.” As a remote learning student, Bupe echoes that “Students not living on campus are deeply affected.” Although having access to electricity on campus is certainly a positive, it wasn’t without its problems. Njavwa argues that “Since most students couldn’t do their studies from the comfort of their places, most would opt to do it on campus. This now gave birth to a whole new world of problems.”

Elaborating further:

“Load shedding made things even worse because public institutions usually don’t get load shedded, so you have 24/7 access to power, but residential areas where majority of the students stay usually get affected…so they [students] would heavily rely on campus…and I was one of them at the time…Now, there’s a student that has a desperate need of doing an assignment or preparing for an important test, and risks their safety for that by walking back home in the night or coming to campus late at night…so we had an increase in the number of attacks…thugs and criminals would take advantage…we had, like several cases of students being attacked by thugs, having their belongings stolen, being beaten in the process. We actually had one that was beaten so bad that he succumbed to his wounds and died, unfortunately. So we had such cases. It just means it just gave birth to a lot of problems.”

This tragedy did not occur in isolation. It is a logical conclusion of infrastructurally produced vulnerability. The dream of acquiring an education forced students into operating at ungodly hours, normalizing risk in the process. 

Load shedding, as a product of climate change, itself a consequence of capitalism, doesn’t just remove electricity. It removes control. In fact, it steals it. Control over time, control over productivity, control over sleep, and control over planning. This gross infrastructure failure is not just technical, it has far-reaching consequences, infecting virtually every aspect of life and, in extreme cases, taking life, outrightly and permanently. 

A Soaring Cost of Living, and Rising Food Insecurity

“Food has become quite scarce. Although it’s in abundance, in shops you find the food, but the scarcity comes in the fact that, because of things to do with, probably exchange rates, and the fact that the farming communities now have to struggle to produce food, and the cost of production has gone up, so you find that even millie-meal, our staple food…Nshima…Prices have skyrocketed. They’re beyond the reach of the people…so it’s not that easy for people to have three straight meals in a day…Most of the things have gone up. Things like sugar. Things like, even just generally vegetables, or any other things that people need to make ends meet, you find that they’ve [prices] gone up.” 

Comrade Kwilanzi offered this reflection when I asked how life had changed over the last few years, particularly regarding food access. His words point to a critical paradox: food remains visible in markets and shops, yet it is increasingly inaccessible to those who need it most. Comrade Kwilanzi’s reflection captures a broader reality emerging across my interviews. Amid prolonged drought, the cost of living has risen dramatically, severely undermining food security. The relationship between drought and food access is a matter of both availability and affordability. As noted in the introduction, the 2023-24 drought resulted in poor harvests and severe food shortages across the country. This alone forces many people to adjust their plates. Additionally, however, this also means that the limited food available has become that much harder to afford. As Kitel recounts, “We didn’t have a good harvest, mealie meal is expensive, all food prices went high.” King shares the same reflection, “Everything has really changed. 2023-2024, the most tragic drought we’ve ever experienced as a nation. Some foods became unavailable because of price hikes.”

Figure 5, supplied by Kitel, offers a personal take on what food insecurity looks like for her and her family. 

Figure 4. An empty vegetable rack, signifying food insecurity.

This is a trend that my family and I have also experienced firsthand. I grew up bothering my mother in the kitchen. I have loved to cook since I understood what it was and what it meant. The ability to transform raw and often bland ingredients into something tasty and nourishing is one of my life’s greatest joys. One of the very first meals I learned to make in the kitchen was a breakfast sandwich. A fried egg, sunny-side up, topped on a bed of tomato slices, garnished with onion and green pepper slices, seasoned with salt and pepper, and sandwiched between two slices of bread. It is very simple, but very tasty. One of my earliest memories is being sent by my parents to buy a loaf of bread from our local bakery. The exact year eludes me, but I must have been aged 7 or 8, so around 2009/2010. What I do remember, though, without a shadow of a doubt, is that for a while, a loaf of City Bread sold for K3. At my local corner shop, the Ka

Ntemba, a single egg could be bought for K0.8. We usually bought 10 at a time, for a total of K8. With a K2 budget per item, I could buy 4 onions, 4 tomatoes, and 4 green peppers. With a K20, I could make a breakfast sandwich for my entire family, which at the time was just my parents and me, and have ingredients left over to be used for other meals. Today, the same loaf of bread that was once K3 is now selling for over K25. That is an over 800% increase in just 15 years. At the height of the drought in 2024, a single tomato was selling for almost K5. This was true for green peppers and onions as well. It would now cost at least K115 to afford the very items I could once buy on a K20 budget. While rising food prices are a global trend, the climate crisis compounds these pressures in particularly devastating ways. Kitel’s caption, “it is not just an empty rank [sic], this is the impact of climate change in many communities. Hunger strikes are killing communities” points to a form of harm that is neither immediate nor spectacular. Hunger doesn’t kill instantly, but its effects accumulate over time. As food, the very essence of our physical being becomes increasingly scarce, bodies and minds are not abruptly destroyed, but gradually worn down.

As a reminder, roughly 60% of Zambia’s population depends on rain-fed agriculture (Mubanga et al., 2020). Smallholder farmers, the backbone Zambian society, are doubly affected by climate shocks such as the 2023-24 drought and the simultaneous floods that occurred when it did rain. The food they produce is not only their primary source of nutrition, it is also their primary source of income. Because of low agricultural productivity, it has become nearly impossible for farmers to feed the nation, as they can barely feed themselves. Uncle K, a part-time farmer himself with a farm in Rufunsa District, reflects on the impacts of rainfall uncertainty on farmers, a community that has historically relied on rainfall predictability. He explains, 

“As a family, we did plant the other year [2023]. We planted maize, popcorn, sunflower and soya beans, and sweet potatoes. We didn’t have anything. The sweet potatoes tried, but it wasn’t profitable. We were affected largely such that the previous rainy season [2024-25], we didn’t plant, and that’s when there was good rainfall, so we lost out in that regard.” 

Uncle K further notes, 

“We’ve seen unpredictable rainfall patterns because, as a country, rainfall was a predictable phenomenon. We didn’t even think about it in terms of the cycle of planning, you know? People would just start preparing for the rainy season…We were used to having rainfall, harvesting, in fact, for some families, they would even harvest enough for the whole year and be able to sell some of that.” 

Bupe tells a similar story, stating, “Kazungula is a farming area, and not many people have been able to do their farming, unable to produce enough, even to eat.” The fate of farmers is very similar to that of John, our electrician introduced in the previous chapter, whose work becomes impossible during periods of loadshedding. A farmer without water and food is like an electrician without electricity. Following the same trend, Josein gives a more detailed breakdown of this disruption. 

“My family has had that challenge because we do engage in farming. So you discover that maybe the inputs that we’re going to use in agriculture…the outcome will not be equivalent to what we invested in. Like you buy seed, you buy the chemicals for pests, you get fertiliser. So now, when you don’t get to experience, you know, good rainfall patterns, those seeds are destroyed. You need to kind of replant…By the end of the rainfall season, maybe those crops have not, even, you know, matured enough for you to harvest and just make a good return from what you’ve invested. So there’s been like [a] shortage in terms of food. And it’s also the same for other people in my community, because the communities that I’ve mentioned, where I’ve lived or where I work from, these are rural communities…They depend on agriculture. So now they are not able to meet day-to-day needs for the family. So the homes are food insecure, communities are food insecure, including the nation at large.”

Figure 5 below shows crops simultaneously destroyed by drought and floods.

Figure 5. Pictures showing crop failure due to drought and floods in Solwezi, Northwestern Province, supplied by Uncle K through his organization’s work.

The economic strain extends beyond agricultural losses themselves, reverberating through extended family networks. Uncle K describes how financial pressures increasingly circulate through kinship ties, adding, 

“There’s a huge burden on the families, you know, where they now call for help, for anything, especially people in the rural areas, those relatives of ours. Someone wants to pay school fees, they call…Nowadays, we have WhatsApp, so we have to do an appeal online for people to contribute.”

As food prices rise and agricultural yields decline, many Zambians have taken to small-scale gardening to alleviate the burden. However, even this has proved challenging. A common experience of drought, as reported by my interlocutors, has been the reduced water supply by the relevant authorities. In Lusaka, this is the Lusaka Water and Sewerage Company (LWSC). King recounts, “It’s become increasingly common to not have a water supply, about 4 times per week…It’s even more difficult for people to grow their own food because access to water is also a problem.” Comrade Kwilanzi sings a song to the same tune, adding,  “Nowadays, people are struggling to make ends meet. So, even if we want to have a garden, you can’t grow any food domestically because the water authorities can’t give you sufficient water. So that tends to compromise your food security situation. And even if you have, like, a small holding on the outskirts of the town or in the village, you can’t grow sufficient food for you to sell. So you find that has really created a problem.” 

In rural areas, where water supply is largely from naturally occurring streams and rivers, the problem persists as well. Josein explains, 

“…Then we don’t have water. These are people that depend on gardening. So, also that becomes a challenge to grow crops. Chipata is a district where we have a lot of farmers, people that do gardens, people that do winter maize. The streams are drying.” 

Figure 6 below, supplied by Comrade Kwilanzi, shows two struggling gardens in

Chilenje, Lusaka, that reflect these realities.

Figure 6. “Crops and plants struggling to grow in Lusaka, Zambia. – Pictures taken on Friday, 10th

October 2025” – Comrade Kwilanzi

Low wages combined with an ever-increasing cost of living have made survival increasingly difficult for many Zambian households. These rising pressures are reflected not only in personal accounts but also in national economic indicators. During our interview, Comrade Kwilanzi cites the Basic Needs and Nutrition Basket (BNNB) by the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection (JCTR), a CSO working in Zambia. The BNNB, introduced in 1999, is a monthly tool, specific to certain cities and regions, which “tracks the cost of essential goods and services necessary for a family of five to live a decent and dignified life” (JCTR). These goods and services are classified as essential food items, such as mealie meal, (sweet) potatoes, eggs, chicken, Kapenta (sardines), vegetables, fruits, and salt, as well as essential non-food items, including housing, charcoal, soap, and toilet paper. When we spoke in October 2025, Comrade Kwilanzi reflected, “You find that for a family of five in Zambia today, people need approximately K11500 (~USD500) [per month] to survive…But you find that most of the people, their earning is less than, is below the threshold. The minimum wage is probably K2500, that the government has set.” Using publicly available data on JCTR’s website, I calculated the average BNNB cost for Lusaka for the years 2023, 2024, and 2025. I plotted these figures in the graphs below (Figures 7,8,9,10).  

Figure 7. Average Cost of Essential Food Items for Lusaka from 2023-2025

Figure 8. Total monthly cost of living for Lusaka from 2023-2025

Figure 9. Cost of essential non-food items for Lusaka from 2023-2025

Figure 10. Average BNNB and essential food and non-food items for Lusaka from 2023-2025                              

The average in 2023 was approximately K9,166.80 per month, with the highest peak in July at K9,301.18 and the lowest in March at K9,003.21 (JCTR, 2023). In 2024, the average

BNNB rose to K10,451.51, a near 14% increase from the previous year. The highest peak was in December at K10,833.49, and the lowest in January at K9,555.53 (JCTR, 2024). Of the three years, 2025, the year I began my research, was the worst one. The average BNNB rose again by

7.76% to K11,330.57. In July, it went as high as K11,763.38. The lowest it had been was in January, when it stood at K10,800.56 (JCTR, 2025). This increase in the BNNB is due to higher costs for both essential food and non-food items. The average costs of essential food items for 2023, 2024, and 2025 were K3,469.53, K4,298.59, and K4,856.42, respectively, while the average costs of essential non-food items were K5,697.27, K6,152.92, and K6,474.38, respectively. While both categories increased, essential food items accounted for the lion’s share of this meteoric rise. Within only two years, the average cost of essential non-food items increased by approximately 12%, while the cost of essential food items rose by nearly 29%. While the cost of living has soared, average income in Zambia has remained overwhelmingly low. The 2024 Labour Force Survey by the Zambia Statistics Agency (ZamStats) revealed that

55.2% of paid employees earned K2700 or less. Even in a household headed by two parents with two sources of income, the cost of living is simply too high for people to live a decent, dignified life. As such, Comrade Kwilanzi rightly asks, “Now, if you are getting paid K2500, where do you get the extra K8000 or K9000+ for you to cope with the needs that the family has? So you find that there is quite a challenge.” 

Sacrifices inevitably have to be made. What sacrifices are these? For many of my interviewees, it has meant reducing the number of meals an individual or family can eat. During my conversation with King, he stated, 

“It’s a little bit difficult to say every average human being is able to fend for themselves. People are already struggling, and with the hiking of food prices, access to food has become more difficult now…Not everyone can afford to purchase the most basic meal, an extremely vulnerable basic meal.” 

Kitel, sharing a student perspective, adds that 

“Students go to these overcrowded classrooms on an empty stomach. People are living on less than a dollar a day, rationing food portions because of cost, which is severely unsustainable. People are hungry. No one is able to afford a bag of mealie meal every month.” 

Comrade Kwilanzi puts it plainly, “Well, most of the sacrifice is…reduce on the amount of meals that you take.” Similarly, Bupe shares that, 

“People can barely eat three meals in a day, which has contributed to, like…children having conditions like malnutrition because they can barely eat three meals in a day. Their parents cannot manage to give them [the] food that they require…children can’t even eat porridge with groundnuts.” 

Njavwa tells the same story, “We’re not living like we used to…Having three meals in a day, you find that now you cut to one meal a day, most young people do that.” He goes on to add that many young people, particularly students like himself, try to use 

“the busyness of the day to at least help their minds to get away from the fact that, or the thought of them not eating, or having breakfast, or having lunch during the day…the only meal they get to see or have is that which is had during the night. Unfortunately, I’ve also had to go through the same, so I know this hurts my health to an extent because I’m not having proper meals in a day…it’s been hard for me to survive on a small budget.”

The quantity of meals is not the only thing that has been reduced. The quality of meals accessible to many Zambians has also diminished. For many, a nutritionally balanced diet is increasingly out of reach. Comrade Kwilanzi relates some of the food items he and his family have had to remove from their diet, stating, 

“Let’s say, like, breakfast…You have to do away with milk, you have to do away with butter, you have to do away with…things like meat…Meat is very difficult to purchase. Chicken is about K140. So you find that not many families can afford to pay K140 for a chicken. That’s before even you add issues of tomato, preparation, energy to get charcoal for you to prepare a meal, so you find that, at the end of the day, for you to have just a meal, you’re talking about maybe K300.” 

Bupe shares woes of her own, fervently stating, 

“Because of drought and everything, food has become so expensive, where you need to sacrifice not to eat certain foods you used to enjoy…I can’t satisfy my body, my needs, because I can’t afford them, they’ve just become too expensive as a result of drought…A tray of eggs is almost K90…I can’t eat chips. I miss chips!” she declares. In Zambia, chips (fries) are somewhat of a luxury delicacy.

Bupe continues, 

“I can’t afford a bag of potatoes. A bag of potatoes right now is about K250, roughly, you know? I can’t afford it, because I look at other things I need to buy, is it going to be worth it for me to get a K250 and buy just a bag of potatoes when I need other things to buy…I can’t afford to buy mayonnaise, my favourite! I can’t afford it, it’s about K70. We used to buy it at 20-something, but now it’s at K70, going to K80. We’ve moved away from the wants. We’re just concentrating on the needs. What do I need? I need a bag of mealie meal, I need cooking oil…sugar if you’re a tea lover…but most of the time I don’t get to buy sugar, because even sugar has gone up. So we’re just living with the needs. Things we can’t live without. As a Zambian, I cannot live without a bag of mealie meal, because I’ll faint if I don’t eat Nshima in a day…I’ll wake up in the ICU,” she declares. 

At this point, we were both laughing uncontrollably. For many Zambians, Nshima is almost as important as air. Bupe continues, 

“The wants don’t exist anymore in our vocabulary. Like, who even buys fruits anymore? Bananas? Do you know how much one banana is? It’s K10… It’s only the sick, when your relative is sick in hospital, then you’re like, let’s take them fruits, otherwise…Maybe once in a month, once in a month, when you have that opportunity, maybe [when] you’re paid, and you come across ka banana, ka apple, but not…Oh, I have to eat fruits every day? No! You can’t afford fruits, fruits are expensive. Maybe wild fruits. Now here we don’t even have wild fruits in Kazungula. You can’t afford fruits. An apple? Orange? One orange is K10. Maybe mangoes, but you know, mangoes are seasonal. It’s that bad, fruits yeve don’t even go there, people don’t eat fruits, [they’re] for the rich. Even juice is not seen.

Niyokosa (it’s hard).”

As with hunger, the consequences of nutritional deficiency are not immediate. They are silent and gradual. 

The vast majority of the stories and analyses in this chapter focus on the impact of climate change on farmed foods. However, the implications of the climate crisis are not limited to these alone. Bupe, who lives in Kazungula, a town on the banks of the Zambezi River, sheds light on the impact of the drought on fish populations and the local fishing industry. She recalls,  “When I came in 2022, they would say ‘there’s a lot of fish, you’ll be enjoying fish’…but to tell you the truth, from the time I’ve been here, three years, there’s no

fish that I can [with satisfaction] say ‘okay I’ve eaten fish!’ Even fishermen…they’ve not really been doing their thing because…there’s no water…the drought has really affected everything…even the fish is not there! People depend on fishing to feed their families…businesswise, for the fishermen, it has also gone down,” 

 Josein shares a similar story, but instead of fish, it is about livestock. Referencing the drying streams impacting gardening discussed earlier, she explains, 

“We also have livestock. So the goats, the cattle also depend on the same water, but the streams are dry. There’s no water. So…keeping domestic animals is also a challenge. And if we say we kill, maybe the cattle, we want to take to the market,

Butcheries don’t have power to be able to make sure that the meat is fresh. Again,

that also becomes a challenge, because they cannot keep it for more than a day. It needs to get sold. But if people don’t have money, and they don’t have electricity, so people need to make harder decisions. So maybe they might decide to sell the meat at a cheaper price, so that everything just goes to avoid it getting rotten. Yeah. So these are decisions that indirectly will just affect a young person, because their caregivers no longer thrive in this economy.” 

Just like the fishermen in Kazungula, the pastoralists in the Eastern Province also suffer economic hardship. Josein’s reflection is the perfect segue into the final part of this chapter, the impact of load shedding on food security.

 Across all my interviews, the inability to store perishable foods for long due to load shedding emerged as a prominent problem. As Comrade Kwilanzi explains, 

“Since refrigerators now don’t work because there’s no power, you find that you can’t even buy food in bulk. Or if you bought food in bulk, it goes sour [bad]. And again, even when you have dry food, or you have any type of food…it’s cook and eat, cook and eat. Each time you want to eat a meal, you have to cook, you can’t store food, because the weather is very hot, and if you don’t put food secure in the refrigerator, the food…will not be edible to eat.” 

The problem with not being able to store food is not just that it forces individuals and households to prepare full meals every single day, but also increases the amount of money spent on food. Kitel notes, “Food gets spoiled quickly, decimating finances, and you can’t buy in bulk, which is often cheaper. Budgeting has become very hard.” Bupe reflects on the old days,  “At least those days you would buy relish for a month. This time around, you have to buy relish for a day…Because if you want to buy for a week, food will go

bad. So imagine making a budget for everyday buying relish…How much do you spend in a week?” 

Likewise, King asserts, 

“You can no longer shop in bulk because you never know when you’ll have power…Things like meats, you can’t buy in bulk, which is much better and more economical. At this point, it’s different. You’re not saving enough and don’t have the storage facilities…Financially, it’s a stretch because you’re no longer projecting and budgeting. And finding alternative sources of power, in addition to an already struggling economy.” 

Food insecurity is one of the most intimate ways in which the climate crisis invades people’s lives. Across these testimonies, drought appears not only as an environmental phenomenon but as a force that restructures everyday life. Declining agricultural productivity, rising food prices, and persistent energy shortages have converged to make something as basic as eating increasingly precarious. For many households, everyday life now involves constant negotiation over what can be afforded, what must be sacrificed, and how far limited resources can stretch. In this sense, Comrade Kwilanzi’s reflection at the beginning of this chapter captures the paradox that many Zambians now live with: food remains visible in markets and shops, yet it is increasingly beyond the reach of those who need it most. As these pressures intensify, the boundaries between living and merely surviving grow increasingly thin, a condition that echoes what Achille Mbembe describes as forms of “living death” (2019). Chapter Five explores this dynamic more explicitly through the lens of necropolitics. 

Climate Change – A Gendered Perspective

One question I asked my interlocutors was whether certain groups of people were uniquely affected by climate change. The answer was unanimously, “yes.” Some, like John, mentioned the elderly and people with disabilities, whose movement is made much harder during extreme weather events, especially when it is too hot. Others, like Njavwa, specifically highlighted the plight of rural populations, arguing that “If it’s this bad for people in urban areas, it must be significantly worse for people in rural areas.” However, nearly everyone recognized the impact of climate change on women and girls. Like in many places in the world, Zambian women and girls remain socially, economically, and politically marginalized (Chibwili, 2025). As a threat multiplier, climate change has exacerbated these inequities, forcing many women and girls into increased precarity. In this way, climate change is not simply an environmental crisis, but also a social force that interacts with existing structures of patriarchy, amplifying the vulnerabilities women and girls already face. Josein gives an overarching reflection on how patriarchal structures in Zambia intensify the impacts of climate catastrophes, such as droughts, on women. She contends,

“For women…they need to look at other kinds of business opportunities which are not there because our communities are still, you know, male-dominated societies, so a woman has a small space within that…so like there’s drought, they don’t get to maybe, have their own harvests or crops that they can be able…to sell to take care of their children. It becomes hard because they depend on a man.” 

Josein’s observation highlights how structural gender inequalities shape women’s ability to respond to climate shocks. 

It is no secret that European colonialism in Africa fundamentally changed, in many aspects, the social fabric of the continent, including gender roles and norms, resulting in societies that disproportionately disenfranchise women socially, politically, and economically (Otseng, 2024). Specifically, the introduction of cash economies during the colonial era disrupted traditional gender roles, especially in agriculture. Otseng notes that “men were often recruited for wage labor, while women remained in subsistence farming, altering their economic and social statuses” (2024: 5). Additionally, the formalization of colonial education in Africa looked different for boys and girls, resulting in further stratification. Citing Alman (1991), Osteng contends that,

“Colonial education systems were designed to provide different types of education for boys and girls, reinforcing gender stereotypes. Education for girls was frequently focused on domestic skills, while that of boys was focused on professional skills. Thus, colonialism significantly impacted gender identities in Sub-Saharan Africa, often reinforcing patriarchal structures and reshaping traditional gender roles and relations. This period saw the imposition of European gender norms and economic and legal changes that affected societal gender roles. The legacies of these changes continue to influence gender identities and relations in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa.”  (2024: 5).

Even though under colonialism, both African men and women were relegated to second-class human beings, these colonial impositions of wage labor and formal education created a hierarchy wherein African men were above African women. The meaning of work also fundamentally changed. Wage labor became the default, and the more domestic work, of which women were the primary laborers, became undervalued, underpaid, or entirely unpaid. Capitalism, by privileging wage labor while systematically excluding women and girls from full participation in it, produces forms of dependence that are not only economic but deeply embodied. Under

conditions of climate shocks such as drought, these structural inequalities are further intensified. 

This is important context for Bupe’s reflection below. She explains,

“In each and every community, women are always the vulnerable ones. Years back, our women never used to work. Women never used to work, never used to go to school, so they would always wait upon their husbands, or their providers, to bring food for them…To date, we still have a lot of women, especially here [Kazungula], who are not working. They entirely depend on their children, their husbands…”

So, when Bupe speaks of women “not working,” she is referring specifically to wage labor, a relatively recent form of work introduced to the African continent largely by way of European colonialism. It is true, then, that historically, the wage labor market has been dominated by men. However, as feminist scholars have long argued, the work predominantly done by women has been systematically excluded from what counts as work. Naila Kabeer argues that patriarchy has produced

“an asymmetrical gender division of labor which assigns primary responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work to women and girls within the household while giving men privileged access to material resources and economic opportunities. This asymmetry, and the form that it takes in different contexts, is foundational to the varying patterns of gender injustice we see across the world” (2025).

Yet despite this dependence on men, women remain responsible for ensuring that families eat. Bupe continues,

“You know, in an African home, a woman is the one who is supposed to find food. A woman has to cook, has to draw water, has to make sure that everything is in place, they have to make sure that the children are well-fed and everything…If a man comes home and says, ‘I don’t have money for food,’ it’s up to you as a woman to make sure that your children are fed.”

The activities Bupe describes – cooking, cleaning, fetching water, and childcare, are all forms of labor, and the world as we know it would collapse if this work went undone. 

This responsibility becomes even more burdensome in contexts of energy poverty. King highlights how load shedding has forced many households to rely on charcoal or firewood for cooking, exposing women to additional health risks. He explains,

“Rural and low-income societies are very affected. Now the source of cooking is charcoal or firewood. Mostly, women are the ones preparing meals for their households, so they have to be on their toes. If you’re sitting around a brazier for hours at a time, you’re likely to be affected by the carbon monoxide and everything.”

Otseng, Bupe, and King show that the women who do this important work are undervalued, unpaid, and rendered invisible. Their contributions are made secondary to men’s wage labor. However, even this is not the full picture, as it is also common (in the 21^st century) for women to be breadwinners, either because a single income is simply insufficient to meet family needs (as is increasingly the case) or because some men absolve themselves of responsibility. Climate disruptions have made this responsibility even heavier for women. As Bupe illuminates, 

“Some of these men don’t care. If you, as a woman, don’t work hard, then your children are not going to eat, and which woman is going to be happy to see their children sleeping with hunger?… We still have a lot of women who don’t have [formal] education, who depend on small businesses, they depend on farming, so if in that particular year, mvula sina loke (it didn’t rain), maybe she used to depend on a ka^[2] small garden, then there was no mvula (rain), she’ll harvest nothing. So it’s not easy for the women…They end up doing ma^[3] small piece work, but still…So I’ve seen women here that are the ones providing for their homes…some of these men are too comfortable to just sit home and wait for their wives to cook for them food. They don’t care where that food has come from, so long as beve badia (they themselves have eaten). It’s very common in rural areas.”

You may be noticing the dissonance here. This absurdity is what my friend Campbell Lindquist sarcastically calls the “magic of patriarchy”. Women are systematically disenfranchized and forced to be dependent on the men in their lives, and at the same time, bear the responsibility of keeping everyone alive and fed. 

As climate pressures intensify, women increasingly become the primary shock absorbers of household survival. These pressures shape the difficult decisions women must make in order to support themselves and their families. Four of my interlocutors reflected on how economic precarity has forced a lot of women and girls to engage in transactional sex as a means to make ends meet. Josein shares how this reality manifests, especially in border towns, stating,  “When homes are food insecure, we don’t have food, so now this forces this young person who a parent has failed to provide for to start to engage in transactional sex for them to just…to be able to buy maybe [menstrual] pads,

sometimes even just to buy lotion, sometimes to just buy any food that they can be able to afford…Where I work from, these are border towns, so there are a lot of…trucks that just move up and about. Maybe they might be coming from Malawi, or they might be coming from Mozambique. So there are other times where someone will just engage in transactional sex because those trucks, they have food, just to be able to get food, maybe they’ll give them the goods that they have, and so on.”

Comrade Kwilanzi reflects on this reality for university students, noting,

“The other ramification…girls…opt to do another thing for them to earn an extra income. People are forced into sexual, gender-based violence. Because you find that for them to eat, they have to compromise, to make ends meet…Even at senior level, people in university are compromised…for them to cope with the cost of fending for themselves in boarding houses, they compromise their sexuality. They are sexually abused by people with disposable income. So that’s the challenge that people are confronted with.”

Similarly, Uncle K adds,

“It’s also felt in rural areas where we are seeing more and more learners, students in universities, even within Lusaka, are involving themselves in sex work and other things that may not contribute to their progressive development. So it’s

[climate change] a cycle that has had a lot of devastating impacts on our lives.”

I want to clarify that my framing of these experiences as negative is not a critique of sex work itself. Rather, my goal is to highlight the structural realities that necessitate women’s participation in sex work. These narratives are consistent with data showing the correlation between environmental shocks and an increase in sex work performed by African women. In a 2010 paper titled “Sex Work and Human Rights in Africa,”gender justice and human rights scholars Chi Mgbako and Laura Smith write,

“Each sex worker has her own individual story, but many African sex workers enter the trade due to economic stressors. The lack of financial support from male partners or extended family members, economic pressures of single motherhood, and relative instability of informal sectors, such as subsistence farming and petty trading, can lead African women to view sex work as an economically viable option for themselves and their families. Women engaged in sex work part-time often do so in order to supplement meager earnings in low-paying trades or to provide their families with economic buffers during lean harvests or times of drought” (2010:1179).

There are many conversations to be had about the morality of sex work, but that is beyond the scope of this thesis. For more, you can read Mgbako and Smith’s paper quoted above. From Josein, Comrade Kwilanzi, Uncle K, and even Mgbako and Smith, it is clear, though, that many women and girls don’t engage in sex work necessarily because they want to, but because survival demands it of them. So the more important question is not whether sex work is moral or not, but whether it is safe and beneficial to all parties concerned. Former sex worker and activist J. Leigh Oshiro-Brantly argues that “sex work has always been around and it always will be around, so the question is, is it going to be protected work? Is it going to be good work? Is it going to be non-exploitative work?” (BRIC TV, 2021). In Zambia’s case, the answer to all these questions is no. Sex work is illegal, looked down upon and highly exploitative. Comrade Kwilanzi’s characterization of the practice as “sexual, gender-based violence” is appropriate. In many of these situations, there is an imbalance of power between the women who engage in this work and the mostly men who pay for it. 

While much of this discussion, especially regarding the validity of sex work, has focused on the plight of adult women, my interlocutors’ reflections suggest that these survival strategies extend further, into disturbing dimensions of the phenomenon. In the reflections shared by Josein, Comrade Kwilanzi, and Uncle K, it is evident that a significant number of the people engaging in sex work are not women making constrained choices, but girls, minors, while the men who pay for this work are adults. The truck drivers Josein talks about are adults. When Comrade Kwilanzi says girls are being “sexually abused by people with disposable income,” it is true. This is not a separate issue, but the most severe manifestation of the same problem, climate change-induced precarity. Under these extreme conditions, what is a gendered coping mechanism is at the same time, a site of outright exploitation.

 This climate-induced child abuse also manifests in child marriages. Bupe notes how climate-induced vulnerability has led to an increase in child marriages, of which girls are the primary victims. She argues,

“Because of the hardships from their homes…most of them have ended up being exploited in so many ways, to an extent where some children are going into early marriages because, at home…you feel like nothing is happening. Your parents can’t take you to school, and your only resolution is getting married.”

Zambia has one of the highest rates of child marriages in the world, with “almost one-third of girls married between 15 and 19 years” according to a 2024 UNFPA article titled “Drought emergency in Zambia: Child marriage, HIV and hunger on the rise for women and girls” (2024).

The same article reports that “as families struggle to put food on the table, more girls are reportedly dropping out of school, with fears they will be forcibly wed…the challenge is hunger.

Because of this drought, some [girls] are forced to be married” (UNFPA, 2024). A report by

Girls Not Brides, in partnership with UNICEF and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), found that in areas such as West, East and Southern Africa where bride price is popular, droughts are linked to a 3% increase in child marriages involving underage girls, while boys face increased pressure to provide for their families (Girls Not Brides et al., 2025). 

For many women in domestic situations, there has also been an increase in domestic abuse at the hands of their male partners. Uncle K shares,

“Women, it’s affecting them in terms of maybe preparation of meals…maybe the husband is a drunk person, he’s come and doesn’t find meals, there’s gender-based violence there because he doesn’t want to understand the impact that this drought has brought.”

Josein also discusses domestic abuse, highlighting the dilemma most women find themselves in, forcing them to stay in abusive situations, noting,

“And other times, other men are abusive. I cannot afford for myself, then this man that is abusive I cannot stand up to them. Why? Because at that point, I depend on this very person to be able to provide for my day-to-day activities.” 

While domestic violence itself fits into traditional conceptions of violence in that it is immediate, and fairly visible, the mechanisms that allow for it persist are not as evident. Because of economic vulnerability, and the realities of a patriarchal capitalist system, leaving is not always a suitable option, as it can mean exposure to extreme precarity, including hunger and homelessness. As such, women and girls are forced to endure domestic abuse. Abuse, then, is not just an event, but a condition produced and reproduced through material dependence and structural inequality. These conditions are intensified during times of climate stress such as drought. In this way, climate change once again manifests as slow violence. Though it does not directly cause domestic abuse, the heightened economic insecurity, and narrowing avenues for survival force women and girls to stay in abusive relationships, reinforcing continued exposure to violence in the household. 

 The impacts of the climate crisis on women and girls are deeply embodied, extending to the most personal. Kitel sheds light on the consequences of the climate crisis on menstrual health. Reflecting on the impact of extreme weather, she relates,

“At times, you can find that, for us women, when the temperatures are high or low, any sort of, you know…environmental disruption…you find that we miss our periods at times, irregular periods in short…so at times you find that exposure to these heats, at times you even get to have stress. You know, it disrupts the hormonal balance…So you find…maybe you’re supposed to have your period every first week of the month…you find that you do not have them…Or not at all, maybe for three, four months, you do not have your period. It’s, it’s quite, it’s quite devastating.”

She goes on to discuss how diminished access to water and proper sanitation is detrimental to menstrual health, adding,

“You find in some cases…the rise in temperatures, extreme weather events…disrupted access to clean water…no proper sanitation, it can be challenging for women’s periods. It’s not easy for them to manage their periods…you risk having infections.”

As with almost everything discussed in this thesis, there is also a cost element to menstrual health under climate stress. Cost severely restricts access, which often pushes many women and girls towards unsafe alternatives. Kitel laments,

“…You find that women don’t even have access to…menstrual products…sanitary towels…pads and all that for us women to help ourselves through our period process…So you find that those people who aren’t able to fund themselves, or rather, buy these menstrual products…economic hardships and displacement due to climate change can even make it difficult for women to even afford these menstrual products. It’s so not easy for them to access these menstrual pads…they now start using different materials to help themselves out during their period processes…unsafe clothing, unsafe water, unsafe whatever just to help themselves go through that period.”

Many conversations with my female friends and exposure to TikToks and YouTube videos on the topic have taught me that menstruation, for many, is a painful and uncomfortable experience, as it is. The social stigma that many women and girls face as a result is deeply unwarranted and makes this already distressing, albeit natural, experience that much more distressing. It is simply unfair that this distress be compounded by a climate crisis borne of, in the words of bell hooks, “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 1984). The effects of climate change on the menstrual health of women and girls are a reminder that the structural is personal and the personal is political.

Climate change does not create gender inequality, but, because it is a slow violence, it intensifies the conditions under which it operates, magnifying the burdens, vulnerabilities, and violences that women and girls already face.

Slow Violence and Living Death – The Necropolitics of it All By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

1. The United States Ambassador to the United Nations shall immediately submit formal written notification of the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on

Climate Change…The United States will consider its withdrawal from the Agreement and any attendant obligations to be effective immediately upon this provision of notification. 

• The United States Ambassador to the United Nations shall immediately submit written formal notification to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, or any relevant party, of the United States’ withdrawal from any agreement, pact, accord, or similar commitment made under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
• The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, in collaboration with the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury, shall immediately cease or revoke any purported financial commitment made by the United States under the United Nations Framework Convention on

Climate Change.

On the 20th of January, 2025, the first day of his second presidential term, U.S. President

Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14162, which included the above, withdrawing the

United States from the Paris Agreement and other international climate agreements for the second time. This move, executed unilaterally and with immediate effect, underscores the fragility of global climate governance and the uneven political will underpinning it.

At the 21st United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP21) in 2015, 195 parties (194 countries and the European Union) came together to adopt the Paris Climate Agreement, committing to limiting global temperature rise to well below 2°C, with efforts toward 1.5°C (United Nations Climate Change, 2026). This was hailed as a historic moment, and in important ways, it was. Yet, as Raymond Clémençon argues, the Agreement is “better than no agreement” (2016), a qualified endorsement that points to its significant limitations.

Climate change has predominantly been framed in technical, environmental, and future-oriented terms. It becomes a matter of targets, thresholds, and emissions trajectories. Interventions like the Paris Agreement reinforce this model, communicating that solving the climate crisis is ultimately a question of numbers. This framing has its merits. Most importantly, if used critically, it allows us to identify and assign responsibility to those actors most responsible for the crisis. However, it falls short in a crucial way. This framing depoliticizes climate change and its impacts, obscuring the global power relations that shape everyday life in countries like Zambia. As a result of this depoliticization,  the people who bear the brunt of the crisis are rendered invisible, and their suffering is ignored. Stories like those presented in this thesis, therefore, are important because they repopulate the problem with real people living the social, political, and economic realities of climate change. The goal of this thesis is to challenge this framing. I argue that climate change is not simply an environmental problem to be solved through technical coordination, but a deeply political phenomenon structured by global inequality. Capitalism, and its most powerful champions and beneficiaries in the Global North, does not merely contribute to the climate crisis, it produces and sustains the conditions under which its most devastating impacts are unevenly distributed. Plainly, capitalism, and its most powerful champions and beneficiaries in the Global North, are killing us.

Rob Nixon’s slow violence provides a compelling lens through which to understand climate change in Zambia. The tragedy that was the 2023-24 drought in Zambia is a product of decades of pollution and environmental degradation, largely at the hands of wealthy countries in the Global North. The starting point for human-induced climate change is usually set in the 19th century, with some scholars specifically citing the 1830s, which coincides with the height of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America (Abram et al., 2016). When it comes to historical emissions, Carbon Brief reports that no other country is more responsible than the United States, accounting for 20% of all emissions since 1850 (2021), or 532 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) as of 2023 (2024). In 2023, China for the first time surpassed the EU’s historical emissions, reaching 312 GtCO2, overtaking the EU’s 303 GtCO2 (Carbon Brief,

2024). Although, “China’s 1.4 billion people are each responsible for 227tCO2, a third of the

682tCO2 linked to the EU’s 450 million citizens – and far below the 1,570tCO2 per capita in the US” (Carbon Brief, 2024). Meanwhile, Zambia’s GtCO2 sits at a humble 5, less than 1%. This history of emissions, spanning almost 200 years, is responsible for the effects of climate change in Zambia. This history, coupled with contemporary emissions, which follow the same trend, is responsible for the droughts, floods, and other calamities projected to hit Zambia and its people in the future. This violence has taken place over such a long period of time, over generations, quietly and without spectacle, that the designation of violence seems inappropriate. But it is violence, and a systemic one at that.

The stories I have curated throughout this thesis reveal a slow violence. Load shedding begins with five hours, then thirteen, then twenty-two, then eventually forty hours. Low harvests and the hunger that ensues don’t appear as a singular event. Meals reduce gradually, from three to two, then to one. Nutritional quality erodes in a similar fashion. First, you do away with your favourite fruits, or fruits altogether, because they’re too expensive. Then no more meat. If you’re like Bupe and the fishermen in her community, the number of fish in the river you’re used to dwindle season after season, until there’s barely enough for you to eat, let alone to sell and earn a living. If you’re a woman, you go from having enough sanitary products for every day of your period, two months later, you can only afford half, two months after that, you’re forced to use your own clothes. 

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of a slow violence such as climate change is that it is self-normalizing. The living conditions I’ve described above and throughout this thesis are part of many Zambians’ everyday reality. For many people, this precarity is just how life is. Life = hard. Three meals a day is a luxury. As Bupe declared, “Fruits are for the rich.” It is normal. The implication of this normalization is, for one, that as a corollary consequence of this violence being rendered invisible, the perpetrators of this violence are also rendered invisible, making it difficult to call for justice and accountability. This normalization is not a neutral process. It is shaped by constraint and necessity. For many, dignifying conditions are limited, unaffordable, or entirely nonexistent. Adapting to these conditions, therefore, is not merely acceptance, but forced accommodation. Herein lies the conundrum. This adaptation, essential for the victims of slow violence, has political consequences. When hardship becomes ordinary, it becomes less visible as a site of injustice. As Rob Nixon suggests, slow violence depends precisely on this lack of visibility. It persists because it does not register as crisis. In this way, normalization performs a kind of political work. It obscures responsibility, diffuses accountability, and allows harmful conditions to endure without urgent intervention. What appears as resilience at the level of everyday life can, at a structural level, enable the continuation of violence. What’s more, normalization also reshapes how responsibility is understood. As structural causes fade from view, accountability is displaced onto those most affected, who come to interpret systemic harm as personal or collective failure.

This erasure of political harm by normalization is evident in my conversations with my interlocutors. In all my interviews, one of my final questions was, “Who do you believe is to blame for the climate change affecting Zambia?” Five of my eight interlocutors assigned personal or collective blame before attaching any responsibility beyond Zambia’s national borders. Kitel replied, “Everyone is to blame, including me.” Comrade Kwilanzi declared, “Can’t point fingers. We are all collectively responsible.” Similarly, King noted, “everyone is to blame for this particular change.” Likewise, Josein quipped, “It’s everyone…it’s an individual responsibility.” In 2021, I made the choice to become vegetarian in order to reduce my carbon footprint and help offset the pollution caused by the meat industry, so I fully understand the impulse to take on responsibility for something as ghostly as climate change. I’m still vegetarian, and I stand by my choice and convictions. However, while there are things we do at the individual and societal levels that contribute to climate change, such as deforestation and charcoal burning, our responsibility to the climate crisis pales in comparison to that of wealthy countries and corporations in the Global North. My being vegetarian has done more for my sense of self than it has for the environment. Solving climate change is not an individual problem. To the same question, John responded, “40% our ancestors for their deforestation. 60% the Western world. Their industrialization is so much that it has severely affected developing countries like Zambia.” His calculations may be flawed, but his reasoning is sound. Bupe declared, “As

Zambians, I think we’re just the end user. It’s starting somewhere far.” Uncle K echoed this sentiment, arguing, “It’s the West…and the problem is that they don’t want to mitigate the impact of climate change. They keep promising, but each day that passes…things are getting worse.” By redirecting blame inward, the slow violence of climate change not only conceals its structural origins but enlists its victims in sustaining the very conditions that harm them. Yet, while the concept of slow violence helps explain how this harm unfolds and escapes recognition, it does not fully account for the forms of power that allow such conditions to persist. To grasp this, I turn to Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics.

Read through the lens of Mbembe’s necropolitics and especially the idea of death worlds, climate change in Zambia does not simply produce vulnerability. It produces conditions of life that increasingly resemble what Mbembe describes as a death-world, where many are forced to endure forms of living death. Here, death is not an event but a condition, evident in the gradual deterioration of everyday life. Chronic energy insecurity through load shedding, prolonged hunger, child marriages, constrained access to menstrual health resources, and the increasing necessity of survival strategies such as transactional sex all signify a living death. 

The death-world manifests when, as Comrade Kwilanzi contends, “one hasn’t eaten, concentration is compromised.” For Kitel, it manifests when she is forced to “…walk from school to home because we didn’t have enough money.” Imagine having to walk in the blazing heat while being hungry, potentially on your period, not having been able to study the previous night because of load shedding, all while returning to a house that reminds you of your condition every day. That is living death. When we spoke, John shared that as a result of a condition called Multiple Hereditary Exostoses (MHE), “when it’s too hot, I can’t move easily. I have muscle spasms.” Having to constantly endure painful spasms because of increased heat is living death.  Homeless children are living in a death-world. Kitel reminds us, “Climate change is not just about the weather…Not having a home makes it worse.” Not having shelter to protect oneself from extreme heat and extreme rainfall is exactly what living death entails. Many children have been forced into work at the expense of their education in order to help make ends meet. Josein shares this reflection,

“There’s this issue of children being cow headers. Instead of the children going to school, they won’t have that opportunity because parents expect them to go and look after the domestic animals, so they’ll be like in the bush taking care of the cattle instead of going to school. So parents prioritize their children to be going for these activities where they know that now if they sell a cow, at least they’ll have money to cover up for the bills at home. Then, other than that, there are also instances of children not going to school because they go and help out parents at the farm. So in a particular school, the numbers have reduced because the children are involved in agricultural activities.”

The necropolitical conditions of the climate crisis in Zambia force families to give up on their education so they can eat, and even then, a meal is not guaranteed. 

As I discussed in Chapter Three, water, a resource often referred to as life itself, has become increasingly difficult to access in Zambia due to climate change. King recounted, “I had an experience where I visited a relative of mine…The[ir] whole yard was dry to the core, and this went on for about 4 days. And it was very normal for these people to say, if we don’t get water by 6 AM, we have to go to a certain point, where they have to PAY for water.”

King emphasized the payment in this case because of how absurd it is to pay for water. Comrade

Kwilanzi did the same, specifically discussing cold drinking water. He notes,

“You can’t cope with the weather, and you have to spend much more money now on buying commercially distributed water. In the past, it used to be, like, something that was unthinkable. Someone walking into a shop to buy water, because in the past, we would just get tap water and put it in a refrigerator, and it was cold.”

Having to pay for something as essential as water in an economy already struggling is the definition of living death. In some rural areas, like where Josein works, the risks associated with water are even higher. The death in living death is more present due to the increase in the risk and incidence of human-animal conflicts. Josein notes that,

“…Where I am, there’s the Luangwa River. So when we don’t have good rainfall, families now will move with their children to go closer to the river…they depend on the water from the river to be able to grow the crops so that they will be able to have food…So there are those animal-human conflicts. And also along the Luangwa River, that’s a game management area, so it’s not just crocodiles, we have elephants, we have different kinds of wild animals in those spaces. So there have been instances where you hear someone has been attacked by a

crocodile…there is that risk of getting in contact with either a crocodile or any other wild animal.”

The Luangwa Valley is a biodiversity hotspot, including being home to four of the Big Five (lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo) and some of the largest concentrations of hippos and crocodiles in Africa (Remote Africa Safaris). It is as dangerous as it is beautiful. Many of the people forced to move into closer contact with these animals don’t have the privilege of armoured vehicles, guns, or extensive life insurance policies. For them, getting close is not a choice. It is a matter of survival. The only options are slow and excruciating assured death by hunger and thirst, or almost assured death by nature. People in this condition are constantly looking death in the face.

Living death is facilitated through real, plausible fear and risk.

 Because of chronic load shedding, many Zambians have had to find alternative sources of energy. All my interlocutors mentioned how expensive and, therefore, inaccessible solar is. The little that is affordable is only enough to cover some lights, and maybe charge a few devices for a short period of time. When it comes to high-energy needs such as cooking, many Zambians have resorted to the use of charcoal as an alternative. Now, for as long as I can remember, charcoal has always been a popular cooking option in Zambia. In many rural areas, it is the only option. In urban areas like Lusaka, during times of regular power supply, charcoal was reserved for making foods that take a long time to cook, such as beans, dried fish, and Katapa, the local name for cassava leaves. Due to load shedding, however, the use of charcoal has become ubiquitous. As King notes,

“We never run out of charcoal in our house. 25kg bags come in every two weeks. It’s actually strange to hear that people cook off electricity. Everyone is running around with black on their fingers from handling charcoal.”

This has significant health effects, including a range of “respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular diseases, and the increased risk of developing carcinogenic conditions” as a result of emissions exposure. And as noted in Chapter Four, this is a very gendered experience, affecting mostly women and girls. The demand for charcoal has inadvertently caused a rise in deforestation. Bupe rightly declares that “People are surviving as a result of deforestation.” Uncle K shares a similar observation, adding,

“There is a lot of appetite to get charcoal, which is perpetuating the impacts of climate change…We have people in rural areas that have now taken advantage by producing more charcoal. It’s an income earner for them but it’s adding more again to climate change which will disrupt the rainfall pattern and throw them into perpetual poverty. So the charcoal business has grown…In fact some learners have even stopped going to school to concentrate on the charcoal business because of the deficit.”

To live to see the next day, many Zambians are forced to cut down the very things that give them life. Trees not only provide shade and shelter for people and other animals, but, as carbon sinks, they also provide the fresh air that is increasingly in low supply. In a bid to stay alive, many Zambians are forced to slowly kill themselves. This is living death.

Throughout my conversations with my interlocutors, a common thread that emerged concerns the experience of time. The biggest culprit here, again, is load shedding, and its contribution to the high costs of living. In Chapter Three, when discussing the impact of load shedding on productivity, I mention how energy poverty suspends labor, by making it incredibly difficult, and in many cases, outright impossible, for people to carry out their work. Capitalism here operates not through productivity, but through the enforced impossibility of productivity.

This results in a situation where, instead of being used, time is wasted. Many people are now, in Bupe’s words, “destitute.” But what does this mean when examined through the lens of capitalism? The consequences are at least two-fold. First, there is an erosion of one’s sense of self. In a world where one’s worth is intrinsically tied to how much money one can make, the removal of the ability to even try to make that money, for many, communicates diminished value. The failure of the system is internalized as a personal failure. This is made even worse for people with dependents. Based on conversations I’ve had with my own parents, parents see the suffering of their children as an existential failure, an eternal stain on their conscience. As this mostly affects already poor people, it reinforces the idea that poor people are worth less, that they are disposable. As with slow violence, victims of living death internalize the blame for their suffering. 

The second fold, exists when some people externalize their precarity. This is most evident in the rise of violent crime. Bupe boldly declared that because of increased poverty, “the crime rate has gone up.” Uncle K cites a specific manifestation of this, noting that in many areas of Lusaka at night, “security has been impacted…street lights are not working. We are hearing more of these abductions…someone is abducted and sexually abused, you know, I’ve heard those stories.” Capitalist conditions do not simply expose people to death, they compel them to participate in its distribution. In this case, everyday Zambians become active agents of death, and many more are forced to live in fear. Some, like Njavwa’s schoolmate, never make it back home. In those instances, death is permanent. And even then, a condition of living death continues, out of fear, and if you are a loved one, also out of loss.

This experience of time takes on a unique texture when it is applied specifically to children. During our conversation, Bupe and I discussed the issue of boredom among children. She noted, “You know children can’t even watch their favourite cartoons anymore?” I reflected on my own childhood, and when my siblings were younger. In the past, our parents, like many others, would use the TV as an incentive to get us to do our chores, and as punishment for not doing them. Today, for many households, this simply cannot be done. There is no TV to use as leverage anymore. Because children are so chronically bored when they are not in school, they end up spending a lot of time outside. 

On its own, this is not a problem. In fact, in a world where many children are zombified by the active presence of screens, more children need to play outside. However, in such times of increased precarity, the outside is no longer safe. Parents, and older siblings like myself, fear for their young children, both for their physical safety and for their minds and hearts. Bupe and I discussed how impressionable children and teenagers are. It is very easy for them to get entangled in the wrong things. For many parents, and society at large, life is lived in constant worry. Nelson Mandela once said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children” (1995). 

This death-world operates like an invasive species. As Bupe rightly declares, “There’s poverty here. Serious poverty here…Climate change has touched every sector of life…It hasn’t left anything untouched.” In addition to the afflictions already discussed throughout this thesis, climate change, as an agent of living death, also manifests as a thief of joy. As the environment is destroyed and many are pushed deeper and deeper into poverty and a constant state of survival, the simplest pleasures of the good life are stolen from them. Even the mundane is not exempt from the death jaws of climate change. During our conversation, when discussing the things he hated the most about his condition, King shared that “One of the most hurtful ones is you can’t even experience fresh air like you did back in the day. You can’t even take a stroll without sweating your lungs out.” In a similar light, Bupe noted the erosion of social life at the hands of climate change, adding,

“You can’t go out, you can’t take yourself out on a nice treat…Transport has become very expensive…So I’ve even minimized on my movements, like, I rarely go out for my social activities because…How are you going to socialize,

[when] you don’t have money? How are you going to link up with your friends,

[when] you don’t have money? People don’t even celebrate birthdays. If it’s here [Kazungula], a few years back, I’d see people going to celebrate birthdays for their children. This time around, I don’t see them do that.”

Under these harsh conditions, something as simple as taking a walk, as fundamental as breathing fresh air, is taken away. In such times of hardship, when community should especially be fostered, the ability to do so is out of reach, too expensive to afford. Moments that are special and should be celebrated, such as one’s birth or that of a loved one, instead, ironically become living experiences of death. The inability to afford a social life is not the only way community is eroded. These precarious conditions breed negativity and can cause animosity. King explains,

“Everyone is just looking out for themselves and hoping they don’t leave this Earth because they were hungry or didn’t have food, and the frustration is going towards the community because people don’t fully regard the community as the community.”

This can be even worse when some people seem to be doing well, or simply better. For example, if they can afford solar technology to light their homes and power their devices, or have a borehole on their property, allowing them a guaranteed supply of water. King admits that, “It’s saddening. When you start to compare yourself, you get a sense of inferiority complex, because life for others is getting better, because they are better able to adapt.”  In a climate crisis, where resources are limited, and every day is a fight for survival, friends become strangers, neighbours become adversaries. The very ties that should ease the effects of slow violence become sites of necropolitical violence. The attrition of community ties under these conditions facilitates a social death, itself a condition of living death.

How can this happen? The stories I have curated throughout this thesis are nothing short of tragic. How can such levels of slow violence and conditions of living death persist? Why does it seem that it is okay for millions of people to be relegated to life in death-worlds? How can we say “never again” and then again and again and again? I argue that the answer to these questions, is capitalism. Capitalism is many things, but for the purposes of this thesis, it is three things, and they are all significant. First, capitalism is an economic system organized around the private ownership of the means of production. Herein lies the first problem. The resources of the Earth are public goods, or at least they should be. However, with capitalism comes privatization, which is definitionally exclusive. Resources meant to benefit the majority become accessible only to the few, giving them immense power and privilege. Second, capitalism is predicated on constant growth and the desire for profit. The powerful and privileged few seek more power and more privilege. They seek more resources and more money, regardless of the cost to other people and the planet. The climate crisis is deeply rooted in this obsession with constant growth and profit. Billionaires, seeking more money and power, have pushed the planet beyond its limits. As Lauren Pollock argues, “Global economic growth leads to the increased consumption of natural resources, pollution, and loss of biodiversity and simultaneously widens the income gap between the wealthy and the poor” (2020). A system predicated on competition and the endless pursuit of profit and accumulation inevitably produces inequality. As Karl Marx argued, capitalist accumulation is driven by the extraction of surplus value, the difference between what workers are paid and the value their labor actually generates (Angus, 2023). Profit, in this framework, is not simply a reward for innovation or efficiency but the direct outcome of appropriating the excess value created by labor. The more surplus value extracted, the greater the profit, and the greater the profit, the deeper the underlying exploitation. This brings us to the third thing that capitalism is, an ideology that imagines and shapes conceptions of human worth, efficiency, relationships, and power through the lens of capital accumulation. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey argues that under capitalism, the value of individuals, institutions, and even nations is measured by their productivity and capacity to generate economic return (Harvey, 2005). Together, these three criteria – private ownership, desire for perpetual growth and profits, and the evaluation of human worth based on how much money one has create the conditions for slow violence and living death. Wealthy individuals and corporations, and by extension the wealthy countries in which they are mostly situated, have privatized and hoarded resources, preventing true, sustained development in countries like Zambia, impoverishing the people in the process. Poor people and poor countries like Zambia are devalued precisely because they are poor, justifying, under capitalist logic, their continued oppression. The experiences of climate change discussed throughout this thesis cannot be divorced from capitalism. The slow violence that is climate change and the death-worlds and conditions of living death it has created in countries like Zambia are direct consequences of capitalism. Together, they bring about slow death, which I defined in my introduction as a violent, and sustained, yet unspectacular act of mass murder wherein both the crime and the perpetrator are rendered invisible, and the victims are robbed of justice. So when I say that capitalism and its biggest champions and supporters are killing us, this is what I mean.

 When I asked King what emotions he mostly associates with this experience, he said,  “I am furious. That’s the first emotion I feel when I think about this. Having to deal with electricity crises all my life is very frustrating, and now it’s even worse. It’s a natural disaster, but it didn’t just happen. Decisions were made.” This is true. Decisions were made. This begs the question, who made these decisions? When Kitel declares that, “You can’t control what’s uncontrollable,” one must ask, who has the privilege of control? Mbembe contends that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die” (2019: 66). It follows then, that the most powerful, the most sovereign, are those that have the largest capacity to “kill or to let live” (Mbembe, 2019: 66). So, if necropolitics is concerned with sovereignty, one must ask, who is sovereign? Who has “the capacity to define who matters and who does not? Who is disposable and who is not?” (Mbembe, 2019: 80). I argue that it is the wealthy nations of the Global North who are the primary sites of sovereign power. Fueled by capitalist greed and the gaping hunger for profit, the decisions meting out a slow death in Zambia are made in the halls of Washington D.C, London, Paris, and Brussels. The sovereigns are those who unilaterally withdraw from international commitments, like the Paris Climate Agreement, twice, no less, without regard for the implications for the rest of the world. The sovereigns are those who, ignoring decades of climate science, pursue a policy of “drill baby drill.” They are the ones with the power to decide who lives and who dies, and they have no qualms about exercising their sovereignty. Not just historically through centuries of slavery and the slave trade and decades of colonial rule, but also presently through decades of neocolonialism in the age of neoliberal capitalism.

Early on in our conversation, King, discussing survival under drought conditions, argued that, “you have to go the extra mile to see yourself through the day…Whatever you were doing to survive before the drought, you’re doing it three times more.” In an environment where the temperature is constantly rising, social networks are stressed, productivity is diminished, and the BNNB is ever-rising, this quote by King crisply captures slow death. Through the lens of slow violence and necropolitics, constant survival is akin to a death. Together, Nixon’s slow violence and Mbembe’s living death facilitate a kind of slow death. Using this framework, the cost of living is not just economic, it is existential. The cost of living is dying. The cost of life, is death. 

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[1] Detty December is a popular end-of-year festive phenomenon in some parts of Africa, including Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia. Taking place throughout December, it is vibrant and energetic, filled with music, cultural festivals, family reunions, and Christmas and New Year’s parties.

[2] In Nyanja, and many other Bantu languages, ka is a prefix denoting smallness/littleness. A ka small garden is just a small garden, but the ka is used to emphasise this smallness. 

[3] In Nyanja and many other Bantu languages, the prefix ma is used to indicate a pluralization of a usually singular thing. Ma piecework is just multiple piecework.