In 2017, two men were arrested at a hotel in Kapiri Mposhi, a small town north of Zambia’s capital of Lusaka, after a staff member said she saw them through a window having sex. The state charged the men with crimes against “the order of nature” under Section 155 of Zambia’s penal code. Two years later, they were sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The book cover for The Lions' Den
The Lions’ Den, Iris Mwanza, Graydon House, 272 pp., $24.99, June 2024
The case sparked a diplomatic spat. When Daniel Foote, the U.S. ambassador to Zambia at the time, expressed outrage at the sentencing, he was harshly rebuked by many Zambians, including then-President Edgar Lungu, and eventually recalled to Washington. “We know that there could be people who are homosexual in Zambia. But we don’t want to promote it, because we frown upon it,” Lungu said in late 2019, reaffirming his government’s position. “Most of us say it’s wrong. It’s unbiblical, it’s un-Christian, and we don’t want it. Even animals don’t do it.”
Lungu pardoned the two men in 2020 as part of a national amnesty event that saw nearly 3,000 incarcerated people freed. But same-sex relations are still illegal in Zambia, as they have been since the British imposed anti-gay laws in the late 19th century. Enforced across the empire, these codes sought to Christianize local cultures while also preventing soldiers and officials from engaging in “sodomy.” Like many of Britain’s former colonies and protectorates, Zambia has not escaped this poisoned inheritance, and colonial-era social, moral, legal, and religious norms still stigmatize same-sex relations.
Set in 1990 during the AIDS crisis, Iris Mwanza’s debut novel, The Lions’ Den, powerfully dramatizes Zambia’s enforcement of anti-gay laws and the brutality that they enable. In telling the story of a young lawyer’s quest to free a 17-year-old cross-dressing dancer arrested for having sex with another man, Mwanza’s scorching legal thriller unravels how queer identity in the country is hostage to the legacies of empire, the strictures of religion, and the vicissitudes of political gamesmanship.
The Lions’ Den opens outside the “maw”of Lusaka’s Central Police Station, a striking if decrepit colonial-style building. Grace Zulu, who is there to meet her client, Willbess Mulenga, is undaunted: After months thumbing through dossiers as a newly minted lawyer, she is excited to start work on her first-ever case, which she has taken on pro bono. Grace’s immediate task is to hear her client’s version of events and hopefully get him released on bail. Little does she know that she will soon enter the dark, mazy world of carceral bureaucracy—overseen by corrupt, lecherous, and homophobic officials.
Inside the police station, the officer in charge compliments Grace for being “tall like a giraffe, and just as beautiful” and asks her about her marital status. As she waits for her client—whom she is only allowed to see after agreeing to bring the officer a “token of appreciation” the next time she visits—she mulls over his supposed crime: “Homosexuality was part of nature, of that she was sure. She had seen it in both the animal and human worlds, and so read Section 155 as an effort to rewrite the laws of nature.”
When Willbess is finally brought out, Grace sees that his “light skin was bruised on the right side of his face, his right eye swollen shut, and one of the two front teeth that seemed too big for his mouth was badly chipped.” Distraught, Grace confronts the officer in charge. The meeting ends prematurely, with the officer shoving Grace to the ground and taking Willbess back to his cell. This is the first and only time in the novel that Grace sees Willbess. As she strives to free him, the chilling possibility that he may no longer be alive becomes hard to ignore.
The Lions’ Den is an angry and heartrending novel, told with verve and a deep understanding of systemic cruelty. Mwanza, a corporate lawyer-turned-novelist who has worked in both Zambia and the United States, conveys her young heroine’s disillusion and powerlessness with sororal intuition. “In the cases she studied, lawyers presented clever arguments, the courts were fair, the judges wise and their decisions just,” Mwanza writes. “There was nothing in her law books about battered clients, corrupt cops, a system that would abuse procedure to deny a person justice, or a surly court clerk who told her yet again to check back the next day for a bail-hearing date.”
A guard in uniform stands atop a vehicle bed in which men are transported to a jail, seen behind them.
Men charged with having same-sex relations are transported to the Kapiri Magistrate Court on May 8, 2013.AFP via Getty Images
Through Grace’s journey, Mwanza illuminates the realities of queer life in Zambia without resorting to overt social commentary. In one scene, Grace decides to seek out Willbess’s friend Godfredah, a dancer at the MacGyver, an underground gay bar: “There was no sign, but several cars surrounded an unassuming grey box of a building with one visible door.” It is equally nondescript on the inside. “I thought a gay bar would be fun like the ones in London, but this place is a real dump,” Grace’s friend remarks. The irony is hard to miss: London, once the heart of the British Empire, boasts vibrant spaces for sexual minorities, whereas Zambia, burdened by colonial-era statutes, has only modest venues ever at risk of being shuttered.
The MacGyver, it turns out, is also a male brothel. In exchange for money, Godfredah fills Grace in on the details of the night he last saw Willbess, who also worked there. A group of men entered the bar, and Willbess, visibly upset, followed one of them—who may have been his regular client—outside. Once they returned, the man punched Willbess in the stomach. (“People ask us for freebies all the time, but we tell them no money, no honey,” Godfredah tells Grace.) Godfredah’s revelations throw her off guard, and she decides to look into the possibility of having Willbess’s prosecution dropped through a plea bargain.
As the novel picks up pace, the biblical imagery of its title—of Daniel alone with his faith in a den full of lions—takes on significance. Grace fights to get the charges dismissed, but Zambia’s director of public prosecutions (DPP), she is told, has been “ranting about divine law, and how he won’t allow Lusaka to become Sodom or Gomorrah.” Halfway through the novel, in a moment of rare departure from realism, Grace has an eerie premonition: A leopard appears to her in a vision and tells her that Willbess has crossed over, which she takes to mean that he has been killed in custody.
Not long after, Grace discovers that the DPP has dropped the case and that her client, whom she can’t track down, has been allegedly released. Though Grace believes that the police murdered Willbess and the DPP helped cover it up, her boss sees no reason why the DPP would do so. As far as he is concerned, the matter is closed. He asks Grace to let it rest and take a break from work.
But Grace knows things that her boss doesn’t. A tense encounter with the MacGyver’s owner has clued her in on the hooded powers protecting the “missing link,” the man with whom Willbess had an altercation before his arrest. (“I’m not your enemy, Lawyer Grace,” the owner tells her. “Your enemy is much more powerful than me.”) A friend working at the DPP’s office has also tipped her off that Willbess is dead and warned her about the risks involved in the case. “If you care about your career and maybe even your safety, you’ll get as far away from this thing as you can,” he tells Grace.
The rest of the novel is a compelling, if emotionally grueling, account of Grace’s struggle to make a successful habeas corpus petition. If granted, this would force the police to present Willbess to the court. The aim, as DB—Grace’s unexpected ally and the founder of her law firm—puts it, is to “use this procedure to expose murder at the hands of the police.”
DB has bigger ideas still. He recalls his experience defending Kenneth Kaunda, who would become Zambia’s first and longtime president, against sedition charges pressed by the Crown and the supportive crowd that showed up and convinced the judge that “the colonial era was over.” “Power has corrupted my friend KK and he’s forgotten what we fought for,” he tells Grace. When she fails to see the connection with the case at hand, he explains, “When the police kill children with impunity, they are saying that the rule of law is dead.” DB believes that public protest is necessary to challenge the status quo and hold power to account. He urges Grace to rally friends and acquaintances.
A paster with on ehand raised stands behind a lectern draped in a white cloth at the front of a church. People are seen behind him.
A pastor leads prayers at a church in Chirundu, Zambia, on Oct. 26, 2008. Gideon Mendel/Corbis via Getty Images
I won’t spoil the outcome of Grace’s battle, but I will end with a brief mention of a revealing encounter late in the book between Grace and opposition leader Frederick Chiluba, a real-life politician who went on to become Zambia’s second president and, in 1991, declared the country a Christian nation, which it officially remains today.
Chiluba meets with Grace because her case could boost his credibility as a human rights champion and help him topple Kaunda’s corrupt regime in upcoming elections; having DB, a former defender of Kaunda, on his side could also play to his advantage. In turn, Grace believes that Chiluba’s support could benefit her fight. However, he decides that the case is too “controversial” to get behind. Most Zambians regard gay people as “abominations,” he tells her, and he refuses to put his reputation on the line. “I won’t have my good name associated with a homosexual,” he adds. (Chiluba eventually backs the case but only after receiving a hefty donation from DB.)
In this scene, Mwanza suggests that political cowardice, insecurity, and self-interest are as much a part of the problem as religious fervor. The fear that supporting gay rights might result in a loss of popularity drives leaders to remain outwardly homophobic or, at best, noncommittal on the matter.
Indeed, when Zambia’s current president, Hakainde Hichilema, took office in August 2021, his position on homosexuality was unclear. Progressives and human rights advocates hoped that he would repeal the colonial-era law against same-sex relations. But in May 2022, Hichilema publicly criticized the opposition for misleading people into thinking that he endorsed LGBTQI+ rights; he reaffirmed Zambia’s “Christian” values and stated in unequivocal terms that his government does not support homosexuality.
Mwanza’s novel brings clarity and wisdom to this fraught discourse. The book is bleak but powered by invulnerable hope—and a protagonist who “understood that the truth had to be told, the wrongs admitted, the injustices redressed before justice could be restored and the systems and the cycles of oppression ended once and for all.”