Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
The Shipikisha Club
by Mubanga Kalimamukwento
Dzanc Books
March 2026, $27.95, 298 pages, Hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-938603-75-4
“Welcome to the Shipikisha Club,” Koswe, an embittered colleague of the novel’s protagonist, Sali, ironically congratulates her upon learning that Sali, pregnant with her dead lover’s child, is engaged to be married. A synonym for marriage, “shipikisha” means “to relentlessly endure” in Bemba, one of the many languages spoken in Zambia. “Koswe” is the cruel nickname the other teachers at the Lusaka school have given to the headmistress. It means “rat,” also in Bemba. Koswe’s husband was caught in bed with Koswe’s niece a few months before he left her. No wonder she’s skeptical about marriage.
Sali tells us that the term signifies that marriage is “to become tethered to an unspoken misery.” But Sali, who is marrying a policeman who understands that his bride-to-be is carrying another man’s child, is confident that this will not be her fate. “I wasn’t joining the Shipikisha Club; no, I would make this work for me, just like I had done with everything else.”
Only, it doesn’t quite work out that way.
The Shipikisha Club is in large part a dialogue between mothers and daughters. Divided into three parts, the first alternates between chapters related in the first person by Sali in 2003, and chapters that focus on her sixteen-year-old daughter Ntashé, in the third person, set in 2019. The chapters in Sali’s voice are all prefaced by quotations from the Bible – Ecclesiastes, Galatians, Colossians, Psalms, etc. (her father is a preacher) – while in the chapters in which Ntashé is the protagonist, the epigraphs are all Bemba proverbs (Ubushiku bumo tabubosha nsofu – “An elephant does not rot in a day” – prefaces both chapters eleven and twenty-five).
Part two alternates between chapters in Sali’s voice set in 2003, again with Biblical quotations as epigraphs, and chapters focusing on her mother, Peggy, mostly set in 2019, with Bemba proverbs. These chapters are narrated in the third-person. Part three switches between first person Sali (2003, 2005, 2009) and third-person Sali set in 2019. The year 2019 is when her trial for murdering her husband takes place. How these three women – Sali, Ntashé, and Peggy – relate to men (in Ntashé’s case her slain father Kasunga) is a central theme in The Shipikisha Club, no less than how they relate to each other as mothers and daughters. The Bemba epigraph to one of the Peggy chapters reads: Nongambe pa bana taya. “A cow never runs away from her calves.”
Briefly, on October 5, 2018, fifteen years into their marriage, Kasunga returned home, drunk, from a night on the town, as he often did, and he and Sali had a fight, again not an infrequent occurrence. But on that particular night he brandished his gun, threatening to kill her, and indeed he shot her in the stomach, before she wrestled the gun from him and killed him in self-defense. Kasunga’s behavior – the drinking and affairs with other women – is generally excused in Zambia. “This is just how men behave.”
But the long-standing friction between Sali and Kasunga stems from the circumstances of their marriage. Sali had been the side woman of the prominent Zambian cardiologist, Doctor Eben Kuchiza Mayo, whose wife was unable to produce an heir. At first, Sali’s tone seems insouciant. Pregnant with Doc’s child, she fantasizes a life of luxury as the second wife. But everything changes when Doc has a heart attack and dies, leaving Sali pregnant and unmarried.
Sali is involved in a traffic accident when she hears the news about her lover’s death on the car radio, while driving in Lusaka. The police officer who comes to the scene of the accident is none other than Kasunga, who flirts with her and ultimately, after they have become intimate, marries Sali, knowing full well that she is pregnant with another man’s child. While he “generously” offers to become the father, he will later hurl it back at Sali, calling her whore, etc., suspecting she is having affairs when she later becomes pregnant with their two sons, Mbeka and Ipalo.
Knowing her daughter is pregnant and the shame the birth of a child to their unwed daughter will bring to her family, especially her preacher husband, Sali’s mother is quick to make the marriage happen. She’s also worried about her own welfare. “You will be giving your father the reason to nail me,” her mother tells her, “kick me out of the house. You will finish me.”
Kalimamukwento describes the traditional Bemba dowry negotiations between Kasunga’s family and Sali’s; the instructions from her nachimbusa, an older woman who among the Bemba people coaches younger women on marital issues, generally how to please their man, and later the wedding details, all in Sali’s voice, in the first part. Through it all, Sali frets about her mother, resentful but determined to please. Sali has always been a top student and is the first in her family to get a college degree.
The alternating chapters of the first part that focus on Ntashé as she attends her mother’s trial highlight the tensions between mother and daughter, as she witnesses the way her mother is changed “from the person she knew to the monster gaining color as the trial proceeds.” Though well aware of her father’s violence and drunkenness, Ntashé seems more inclined to sympathize with him than with her mother, whom she sees as a sort of bully. “Sure, his stammering sometimes turned to screaming, but only because her mother wielded words like tiny razors, cutting and cutting until he exploded.”
Similarly, Sali yearns for recognition from her own father, the preacher, who does not attend the trial. Sali’s mother always excuses Baba for being “too busy” with church affairs. Only the women, including Kasunga’s hysterical mother, Mayo, are in the courtroom (in the courtroom Mayo refers to Sali as “the whore” and has to be removed for disrupting the proceedings). Indeed, when her father finally does show up for her sentencing at the end of the novel, Kalimamukwento writes, “Eventually, Baba says, ‘The book of Isaiah says, “I won’t forget you.”’ Which is as close to I love you as he’ll get.”
At the courthouse, Ntashé gets to speak to her mother after the proceedings, and the exchange is difficult to read. There’s such a great misunderstanding between them and mutual pain.
Ntashé chuckles. “They’re calling me KD.”
“Who?”
“Everyone except the teachers and this one girl, my friend Vanessa.”
“KD?”
“Killer’s daughter is too long, I guess.”
Part two highlights the relationship between Peggy and Sali. It’s not unlike the relationship between Sali and Ntashé, the tug-of-war between obedience and resistance, the daughter caught in the middle of her parents’ fighting. At one point, Sali describes shaving her head after witnessing a bitter fight between her parents.
While the mother-in-law, Mayo, mother of Kasunga, tries to poison Ntashé’s mind against her mother, in another courthouse scene, Sali implores Ntashé to speak with her, telling Ntashé she loves her. Only, the girl turns away, and Peggy’s heart goes out to Sali. “She envelops her daughter in a hug, whispering, ‘Don’t worry, all daughters return to their mother’s fold eventually,’ in a tone so sure, she almost believes herself.”
Meanwhile, Sali’s treatment in prison is horrific. At one point, a guard smuggles in a man whom her policeman husband Kasunga had sent to prison, and the man rapes her, to “get even” with Kasunga, who is dead. Afraid she has HIV, Sali goes to the prison doctor, who treats her scornfully, but at least she doesn’t have to worry about AIDS, when she learns she is not infected.
Ultimately, plot-wise, The Shipikisha Club is a courtroom drama reminiscent of such books as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or novels by Scott Turow and John Grisham, highlighting the implicit injustice of so much of our justice system. The aggressive prosecuting attorney, Ms. Pichu, questions the witnesses before the judge, as does Sali’s attorney, Mr. Mlandu, a man whose cryptic counsel is not always reassuring. Sitting in the courtroom, Ntashé’s sympathies lie with her father when Sali describes Kasunga’s violent behavior. Ms. Pichu drills in, and the judge, Lungamo, seems to be on her side.
“Oh, did you report this to the police?”
Sali stretches out and guffaws.
Ntashé knows this sound to be like the ones she poured out when her father tried to hold her hand after one of those fights.
“Police? How can I report it to the police?”
“So, did you ever report to the police?” the judge chimes in.
Ntashé knows this question is posed to her mother, yet somehow the accusing finger feels pointed in her direction.
“No,” the mother and daughter say together.
What a loaded question! Kasunga is the police! Of course, it’s the patriarchal society that’s ultimately the problem, the imbalance between the rights of women and men, which is true everywhere, but more exaggerated in the Bemba community that Kalimamukwento describes.
The novel closes in an epilogue set in 2022, three years after the trial, focusing on Ntashé. Standing at her father’s grave, Ntashé speaks to him about Sali, who, a convicted felon, is about to be released. “They say she’ll receive a presidential pardon at the next Independence Day celebration.” But there is still so much that is unresolved.
Are any of the marriages in The Shipikisha Club appealing? Forget about “happy.” Nobody – no woman – seems to enjoy being married. It’s all compromise, cover-up, and damage control at best. Indeed, welcome to the Shipikisha Club.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press, See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books, The Trapeze of Your Flesh from Blazevox Books, and most recently, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, published by Kelsay Books.