Mulenga Kapwepwe: Art, history, and culture belong together

Mulenga Kapwepwe: Art, history, and culture belong together

by Betty Kankam-Boadu

Mulenga Kapwepwe is passionate about preserving history and culture, particularly women’s role in it. She speaks to Inspiring Open’s Betty Kankam-Boadu about African history, culture, and language.

At age 11, Mulenga Kapwepwe wrote a composition in school that caught the attention of her politician father, Simon Kapwepwe. Wowed by the content of his daughter’s composition, Mr. Kapwepwe decided to keep it safe somewhere.

Many years later, when Mulenga was now old enough to pick a career path, her father showed her the composition she had written as a kid. It was centered on culture and history. Incidentally, Mulenga has grown up to become a woman who has taken an active role in using arts to preserve Zambia’s culture and history.

“The thought process in that composition of that 11-year-old is literally the same thought process for me now. The importance of preserving our own culture, the importance of our history,” she said on the Inspiring Open podcast, drawing parallels between her young and old self.

Mulenga was born in colonial Zambia and, as the daughter of a former Vice President, she grew up with both privileges and opprobrium.

Sometimes the popularity of her father opened doors for her but other times, it also caused her hard work to be discredited. All that, however, shaped her life into one of service. 

“Sometimes no matter what you do, people are like ‘it’s because her father this and that’. Even if it’s your own effort and sweat, some people kind of tend to write you off,” she confesses.

As an author and a person involved in creative arts, Mulenga cites her father as one of her inspirations. An author himself, Mr. Kapwepwe constantly encouraged his daughter to chase her dreams and not look back.

That is how Mulenga’s playwright career got the wings to fly. Having worked in a corporate company after her university education, she always felt she was boxed. But going into creative arts wasn’t a walk in the park either. She had to learn from scratch as she didn’t have any prior education in theatre.

“The first play that I wrote, I had no idea how to write a play,” she recalls, amidst laughter. “I was just like, ‘what’s a scene?’ ‘What’s an act?’ ‘Okay, what’s the difference between this and that?’”

Willing and ready to learn, she engaged an experienced playwright and asked to be taught the nitty-gritty of theatre. Ironically, her debut play swept all the national awards that year, including best script and best producer.

“Every play, whether it has been successful or not, has taught me lessons. A lot of the lessons have come from failure as well,” says Mulenga.

She acknowledges the legacy of her father but she’s now writing her own script, charting her own path. Mulenga has been striving to preserve the culture and history of her people through her works.

“For me, that point of contact between history and culture has been very important in the way that I’ve articulated my art,” she emphasised. “When I’m writing a play or book, those two always come together for me because I’m always worried about losing our culture.”

To ensure this never happens, Mulenga has been building libraries in Zambia’s capital to help young children educate themselves. She is also the co-founder of the Zambian Women’s History Museum, an initiative to spotlight Zambian women who have contributed to the country’s traditional and contemporary history.

This was inspired by her realization of a dearth of women’s history, in that while her father’s story was well-known, that of her mother, who played a huge role in her father’s successful political career, completely flew under the radar.

The aim of the museum is, therefore, to preserve the history of every woman who has done so much for Zambia – from the liberation struggle to breakthroughs in their own professions that haven’t been highlighted enough.

“My friend and I sat over coffee one day and decided to do something about it. If not, who will do it? So we sat down and said there was no women’s history going on around here, so why not establish a women’s museum?”

Mulenga and her partner went on to create a virtual museum and it has grown over the years, bringing visibility to women and partnering with Wikipedia to train more women to write about the history of Zambian women.

Thanks to this initiative, Zambia currently has more women on Wikipedia than any other African country. Mulenga, who also owns a football academy for women, believes there is a lot about African culture that is yet to be explored.

“Sometimes I think we Africans have left so many aspects of ourselves unexplored because we fully take the framework of the western, then try and fit ourselves in there,” she laments. But also she believes adopting openness will go a long way to bridge this gap. For me, being open means really being able to look at something from many different perspectives, not judging something when it’s in front of me without any cause,” she said.

“For me, a lot of my openness is about seeing opportunities, not for just myself but for other people as well. To being open so that I receive the opportunities and information or what I need at a particular time.”

Mulenga has won several creative writing awards as a result of her impressive works and, at 63, she can feel fulfilled by what she has accomplished so far. For a woman who sits on the board of the Zambia Commission for UNESCO and the Arts Institute of Africa, and also doubles as the chairperson of the Arterial Network, she certainly deserves her flowers.