Imiti ikula

Some 75,000 street children live in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia and one of the poorest cities in Africa. Most of them are orphans and infected with HIV. One example is Memory, eleven years old and living on the streets since she was three. She refuses to be called a street child; she has paid for what she owns and states proudly, ‘I’m a human being.’ She would prefer to be a boy, which is also how she behaves. She has close-cropped hair and fights with her friends. But she is still a girl, which makes life on the street even harder. She cannot remember how often she has been raped. Despite all this misery, directors Sampa Kangwa and Simon Wilkie made an optimistic portrait of the buoyant and zestful young vagrants. They managed to win the trust of the generally shy children, who are used to constantly being chased away. Kangwa and Wilkie stay in the background, showing the life of Memory and her friends through a succession of small events. The pauses in between are filled by nocturnal gatherings around the campfire. There, the heroic actions are discussed of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the strongest man on earth, who beats up people that pester children and hands out clothes to the poor. The children’s faces gleam in the radiance of the fire. In the daytime, they hang around or try to earn a petty sum by picking beans or cleaning. Memory has a special purpose for her earnings: she wants to buy spectacles to watch the solar eclipse.