“A French phrase captures the mood: “La mort poursuit toujours les coupables”—death always pursues the guilty. Whether guilt lies with the man, the state, or the silence of institutions, the haunting is undeniable.” On a dim January morning, the ghost of Shakespeare’s Macbeth seemed to whisper across Lusaka: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” Yet here, death itself refuses silence. Edgar Chagwa Lungu, Zambia’s sixth President, lies suspended in Pretoria’s cold vaults, eight months unburied, eight months haunting the living.
The Daily Nation ZambiaAsk Chawama, soon Kasama, I hear ECl will be there. The tragedy recalls Macbeth’s tortured nights, where guilt and ambition conjured daggers in the dark. In Zambia, it is not daggers but legal writs that keep Lungu frozen, a court order halting his widow, Esther, from laying him to rest by the chief government lawyer, so-called AG.
The Attorney General’s silence deepens the mystery, leaving citizens to wonder: is this justice, politics, or punishment beyond the grave? Whether guilt lies with the man, the state, or the silence of institutions, the haunting is undeniable. Bookstores across Lusaka echo with demand for Lungu’s autobiography, Against All Odds, Edgar Lungu.
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At East Park’s Bookworld, shelves thin quickly, readers hungry for fragments of a life now trapped between history and limbo. Only five copies remained on the shelves on Tuesday. The irony is sharp: a leader who governed seven years against storms of criticism now governs memory itself, his frozen body a symbol of unresolved power.
Citizens murmur that ECL haunts the corridors of justice, the whispers of politics, the conscience of those who delayed his burial. Like Macbeth’s ghost at the banquet, his presence unsettles the feast of the living. Ambassador Anthony Mukwita, author of the biography, recounts how even strangers urge him to write more, to supply more copies, to keep the story alive.
He promises free editions, many free editions in Lungu’s memory, a gesture of defiance against silence. In Zambia today, the book is more than paper—it is a candle against the frost, a reminder that history cannot be frozen indefinitely.
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