The Shipikisha Club is a book of “little wisdoms”. It is the work of a writer coming to full maturity.
By Azubuike Obi
The interiors of women’s lives, the ways culture shapes the desires of women, the ways women themselves propagate some of the cultures that impede their selfhood, and the ways they triumph, often with the aid of other women, are at the centre of Mubanga Kalimamukwento’s oeuvre.
In her debut novel, The Mourning Bird (2019), eleven-year-old Chimuka is flung against the backdrop of AIDS in an unstable Zambia; in her collection of stories, Obligations to the Wounded (2024), girls become women, and readers are transported into the shared spaces of this becoming; in the hybrid Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies (2025), she chronicles her mother’s death and the rioting emotions that followed in a mixture of prose and poetry. And, in The Shipikisha Club (2026), this fidelity to women’s lives continues; however, the aperture widens.
The Shipikisha Club follows the trial of a young wife and mother. Beyond the spectacle of legal drama, the novel tells the story of the concept of Shipikisha via three distinct perspectives—Nyashé’s, Sali’s, and Peggy’s—moving inwards and outwards, charting several different time periods in a bid to understand and present the case of Salifyanji Ada Nanyangwe-Penda.
In addition to the multi-generational voice of the novel, Kalimamukwento interrogates womanhood as a concept, particularly in the cultural context in which the novel is set. Sali has grown up with a mother who attempts to mould her in the way society demands she raise a daughter. Upon marriage, she is made to take classes to prepare her for the arduous role. And just as her marriage begins to fall apart, owing to her husband’s infidelity and near-constant assault, Faye, a childhood friend, adds her to a Facebook group of married women—Godly Wives Group—where women share experiences and serve as anchors for one another.
Kalimamukwento is interested in the body as a historical archive; how the body bears witness, even when the horrors remain yet unspoken: “Peggy’s body holds record of the dread she’d been filled with at the threat of returning to her non-home, where she had been raised by a father who had no time for her…” The author’s refusal to gloss over details, to not shield readers from the messiness of the changes that occur in a woman’s body, is reminiscent of Karen Jennings’ depiction of the overarching wreckage of apartheid on Deidre’s body in Crooked Seeds (2024). So much so that it is uncomfortable, as a reader, to dwell close to that body for too long. And, in examining our discomfort, we reach back to behold the fate of she who is unable to run away from this body, she who is condemned to it. It is something close to this that Kalimamukwento achieves with her brazen descriptions of the impact of pregnancy and childbirth on Sali’s body.
In The Shipikisha Club, Kalimamukwento seeks to understand the tethers that bind mothers and daughters, the reasons women pass their deepest traumas onto their female children, and what “the world does to women who were once flowers”. In this seeking, she bears witness to the many violences that shoulder marriages—its perpetrators and victims. There is not just an interrogation of this violence; she pries further to understand why the women stay on, why and when leaving stops being a choice, and the implications of this—not only on those actively engaged, but on those passively absorbing this culture of violence: the children.
Kalimamukwento is at her best when she dwells in Sali’s consciousness. There is something alive in the first-person narration in which Sali’s voice blooms that enhances Kalimamukwento’s chronicling. The sentences sing; they pulsate, quaking with aphorisms and truths steeped in the experience of what it means to be female.
This stands in contrast to Ntashé’s earlier sections, where it is as though the author struggles to fully inhabit the consciousness of a younger woman. The narrative voice stalls, but eventually pulls through. One could, however, argue that this stalling, this stumbling on the road to becoming, reflects the situation of Ntashé’s coming of age in a home as fraught as that which Sali and Kasunga create for her.
Epistolary fiction, by its very definition, mirrors a letter. It may come in the form of a letter to oneself (a diary) or a letter from the narrator to another person. The latter is best exemplified by one—if not the earliest—work of epistolary fiction in African literature: Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1979). One thing that is present in both the former and the latter, though, is memory and its accompanying instability; events are remembered for their importance in the narrator’s life, and only when they are of particular importance are they rendered scene by scene. And even in this, there is an uncertainty to the voice that deepens verisimilitude.
This is absent in Sali’s supposed diary entries in The Shipikisha Club. The reader does not know from the outset that Sali’s passages are diary entries (this is a good narrative choice), but once that information is revealed, and further diary-entry chapters are read, disbelief creeps in. Is the author or the narrator at the helm? Whose pen chronicles these details with such novelistic virtuosity—Kalimamukwento’s or Sali’s?
In The Shipikisha Club’s rendering of women’s realities, Kalimamukwento longs for place; not longing as in wishing to return to a bygone time, but as in wishing to hold on, to not forget. Zambia becomes a person, a presence against whose shadow all of the actions of the characters are cast: Sali’s generation grows up on warnings of abstinence because of AIDS; Peggy is stunned at happiness occurring beside motherhood and marriage—an odd choice that was never available to women in the Zambia she knows; Nyashé unspools as her mother’s trial progresses, yet a steady presence abides: a welcoming Lusaka, one whose “crowded shanties” bloom “like wings on each side of Great North Road.”
In the novel, we find vignettes, small flashes of beauty, of a Zambia the author wishes to immortalise. Sometimes they appear in line with character, other times they appear as observational, shaded in the background of a character’s unravelling.
On the former phenomenon, we have, for instance, this passage on one of Sali’s university lecturers: “ …This was her retort to every fuel shortage, the inevitable price hike that would follow, every news of a looming campus protest—that Zambians were a people run by emotions.” And on the latter, we have: “I watched Lusaka slink past through my windscreen, my speed close to zero… On the other side of the road, a beggar was nestled at the foot of a mango tree with a baby in the nook of her arm. She lapped out one flattened breast to feed the child. Blue-and-white minibuses inscribed with misspelled movie quotes and popular local sayings snaked through the congestion on the narrow road in front of them. Dye Another Day whizzed past. How Be Back. House the La Vista Baby hooted at Don’t Ate the Player, Ate The Game and Waulesi Asadye.”
Kalimamukwento’s prose is lively, unflinching. She refuses to look away, and her narration has a quietly observant, yet questioning quality to it. The writing itself has a pulse. A life of its own. This shines through from the commitment to Bemba proverbs in the epigraphs to the lively metaphors and wise aphorisms rooted in lived experiences. The Shipikisha Club is a book of “little wisdoms”. It is the work of a writer coming to full maturity.
Azubuike Obi is an Igbo storyteller who believes in the transformative power of language. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared online and in print in The Republic, Efiko Magazine, Afapinen, Afrocritik, Naira Stories, and elsewhere. He was nominated for Chika Unigwe’s Awele Creative Trust Award and H.G Wells Short Story Competition in 2024, and is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature.