The Lions’ Den by Iris Mwanza is a historical thriller that reaches into many different corners of its characters’ lives, writes The JRB Editor Jennifer Malec.
The Lion’s Den
Iris Mwanza
Canongate, 2024
The Lion’s Den, the debut novel by Zambian–American author Iris Mwanza, is described as a legal thriller, and like the best of its genre, it reaches into many different corners of its characters’ lives. The novel follows Grace, a newly qualified lawyer in nineteen-nineties Lusaka, as she pursues the case of a young queer dancer who has been arrested after being caught in an act of sexual misconduct with another man in a bar—a crime ‘against the order of nature’, according to Zambian law.
Grace has only recently broken free from a precarious rural childhood on a subsistence farm in a remote village—escaping an arranged marriage to a much older man in the process—to graduate at the top of her class at the University of Zambia, where President Kenneth Kaunda calls her ‘the brightest in a constellation of shining stars’. In the process, however, she has destroyed her relationship with her mother, and is still struggling to find her feet in an environment where classism has joined the sexism and patriarchal injustice to which she’s already accustomed.
The Mulenga family and their 17-year-old son Bessy, the young man whose story forms the heart of the novel, offer a nuanced portrait of attitudes to homosexuality in Zambia at the time the novel unfolds. Despite his refusal to hide who he is, and the shame and danger this brings to both him and his family, Bessy is clearly adored by his siblings and his parents. His relationship with his mother, however, is troubled, and she lies to her friends about his occupation (a drag dancer in a seamy nightclub) and veers towards anger when forced to confront the truth about her son’s sexuality.
Bessy is something of a cipher. Grace meets him just once, briefly, in an interrogation room, where it is revealed that he has been beaten by the police, and he is not even given a chance to speak before being dragged back to his cell. But when he catches Grace’s eye, it is as if an ‘electric shock had run through her body’. Bessy’s official criminal charge is that he was seen ‘in flagrante delicto’ with another man, and despite his absence, the embers of his personality and character burn through and fuel the novel.
Bessy’s case, which evolves into a habeas corpus action when he disappears, is elevated to the highest echelons of power. In championing this small life, Grace manages to enlist the support of a scruffy young political aspirant in hiding (the future president, Frederick Chiluba) and his nascent opposition party, who organise a protest outside the court, singing Kaunda’s favourite freedom song to rile him. In this way—and disbelief will need a sprinkling of suspension here—Bessy becomes the catalyst for the end of Kaunda’s ‘president for life’ regime.
Perhaps the most affecting narrative thread in The Lion’s Den lies in the friendship between two other small lives, however: Grace’s late father and the village shopkeeper, Mr Patel. The bond between the two was formed in childhood, when Grace’s father worked as a child servant for Mr Patel’s family, and was solidified when Grace’s father saved his friend from his father’s belt. Despite enduring immense cruelty from his community, because of his homosexuality, Mr Patel’s good humour is a bright spot in the novel. It is he who finds the money necessary for Grace’s education, and he is the only family to make it to her graduation, jumping up and down and waving frantically with happiness.
Grace takes on Bessy’s case, a pro bono matter heartily rejected by her colleagues, because she firmly believes that he has not committed a crime: ‘Homosexuality was part of nature, of that she was sure. She had seen it in both the animal and human worlds.’ She fights his corner with a fiery determination, and becomes increasingly frustrated by the brutality and callousness of the police, who refuse to allow her or Bessy’s family to see him, as well as the iniquity of the justice system. One day, after an unproductive trip to the public prosecutor’s office, she bares her soul to her landlady, ‘the sweetest old lady’, Mrs Njavwa. A former freedom fighter in the struggle for independence, Mrs Njavwa had been frozen out when Kaunda formed his first cabinet. ‘I was like a spitting cobra,’ she says. But she advises Grace to take a different approach:
‘In hindsight, I realised that KK was right. All I knew was fighting. Fight! Fight! Fight!’ Mrs Njavwa lifted a fist into the air. ‘I was a freedom fighter and it was a good thing during the struggle, but independence was a time for diplomacy, and I didn’t know how to play nice. I was a hothead like you, but if you don’t learn when to fight and when to use diplomacy, you’ll fail too. Do you understand?’
Grace tries to follow this advice, with varying degrees of success, but it takes a new political regime and a significant promotion for her to achieve any kind of justice for Bessy, and it doesn’t come without consequences for herself.
Perhaps as a symptom or a consequence of its scope, The Lions’ Den can feel ungainly at times. Under the burden of so many worthy themes—sexism, homophobia, the Aids crisis, corruption and classism—the novel’s pacing suffers. Tonally, it also feels uneven. Some characters are cartoonish, like the ‘horse-faced nurse’ attending Grace’s boss, or the ‘toad-like’ Officer Lungu guarding Bessy, with his ill-fitting uniform and comically large eyes and head. Avaristo, Grace’s senior at work, is similarly afflicted, with a hooked nose, weak chin and ‘eyes far apart like a fish’. As amusing as these descriptions may have been intended to be—and thankfully appearances are not always equated with character—they don’t quite capture the spirit of the novel, which is, overall, witty but wise.
Mwanza has a keen insight into what makes characters come alive. Grace’s harsh village childhood can only be keenly felt—as a child, she ‘thought brimstone was the English word for drought, because that was her experience of hell’—and her relationship with her mother, who mistreats her both mentally and physically, is a twist of the knife:
Grace hated the harvest. When she was young, it meant being pulled out of school to twist maize cobs off their stalks, or to heave cassava tubers out of the ground. […] When she was older and refused to leave class, harvest meant battling both her mother and hunger. ‘If you want to eat, you work. If you want to study, you better get full on your books.’
Grace’s mother and father are devoutly Catholic, but after losing more than one child, her father calls an nganga on the night of her birth to embed medicine into the skin of her face and back to protect her from the evil spirits that had taken her siblings. Grace is a strict Catholic too, but when her ancestors are near her scars grow warm, and she holds on to both forms of spirituality. When a priest tells her to stop believing in ‘mumbo jumbo’, she finds his resistance to these beliefs illogical: ‘He accepted angels and the Holy Spirit […] either you believed in spirits or you didn’t.’ But while Grace’s moral compass is indefatigable throughout the novel, she also allows herself to be brow-beaten and taken advantage of by her friends. She is full of contradictions and richly drawn, if a little too virtuous, and it is impossible not to be caught up in her crusade.
The Lion’s Den is a poetic delight in places. When Grace sees a photograph of herself from her university days, for example, she finds it disconcerting, ‘like a snake happening upon its old, dead skin’. She meets up with an old friend, where a flamboyant tree ‘scattered the afternoon sunlight and red flowers across the outdoor café’. During her graduation, a group of Lozi dancers move ‘in perfect unison, as if rowing their Litunga across the floodplains to higher land’. One wishes there were more moments in which the writing was given space to breathe in this way.
Today, more than thirty years after the events of The Lion’s Den, the laws criminalising homosexuality—one of colonialism’s many legacies—are still on the books in Zambia. Mwanza, who lives in the US but still considers Zambia her home, has described the response to the book in Zambia as ‘very disappointing’. Two launch events in Zambia were cancelled, because the organisers, one being a book club, the other the US embassy, feared repercussions from their communities and the government—and not without reason. In 2019, President Edgar Lungu ordered the US ambassador out of the country after he spoke out against a fifteen-year prison sentence handed down to a gay couple.
A launch for the book eventually did take place in Zambia—in a secret location—attended by members of the local community. In a conversation with Namwali Serpell, Mwanza said: ‘I was really moved at how many felt so thankful and grateful to tell their story. I felt very humbled that they were reading so much into the book and that they were so delighted and proud to have been represented in the book, which made me delighted and proud.’ Mwanza has remarked that one of her main motivations for writing The Lions’ Den was to open up a space for conversations to happen around the acceptance of same-sex relationships, and to create a character that young queer readers could relate to.
If one believes that literature can be a point of departure for social progress, books like The Lions’ Den can only further that cause. However, at a time when it feels like the balance of power in the publishing of African literature has shifted to the juggernauts that are European and North American publishing houses and their titanic markets, African novels dealing with queer issues raise some pressing questions. Is The Lions’ Den available in bookshops in Zambia? Would a Zambian publisher have been able to produce and distribute it, without economic or personal risk? Would a writer living in Zambia have been able to write it? In other words: Who gets to tell these stories, and who gets to hear them?
According to Mwanza, The Lions’ Den is available in one bookshop in Zambia, after some determined ‘arm twisting’:
Initially they asked that I prepay for the books and they would sell them for me on commission. I refused; they finally relented and ordered only ten copies. These sold out immediately but I still had to WhatsApp repeatedly to ask them to order more, based on requests I was getting directly from people unable to find the book. I’m not sure if it’s inertia or resistance to this book, but it’s been a personal struggle to keep my book in stock in Zambia.
Putting the temptations of cynicism aside, there’s no denying that The Lion’s Den is another welcome addition to the growing body of contemporary African literature with a focus on queer culture, and indeed to the current renaissance in African historical fiction. The novel is an incisive portrait of a society grappling with change, and its characters and their stories linger in the mind. Writing is a tool for resistance, and if books like The Lions’ Den continue to push boundaries, one can only hope they will also open doors.
~~~
- Jennifer Malec is the Editor. Follow her on Instagram.
