Border town, Zambia, 2005
Ten years ago, there were few jobs in rural Zambia, apart from in busy border towns. Many unemployed women were drawn to them, and from there into sex work, selling their bodies and companionship to the hundreds of truck drivers who passed through every week. Some even became “take aways”, a term for girls and women who agreed to be a driver’s temporary travelling companion. Often they were dumped half way across the country, or occasionally in another country, with no means of returning home other than by offering sex again.
Cristabel the Queen Mother, 31, and a sex worker, Zambia, 2005
Chirundi is a dust-blown border post on the Harare-Lusaka highway. At any time, as many as 300 articulated lorries are parked along its “truck corridor”, their drivers waiting for customs clearance, hungry for sex. Day and night slender girls as young as 11 saunter along the roadside together with older women; all are ready for business. In 2005, most sex workers rented clothes and makeup from Cristabel, the town’s “Queen Mother”. At the end of the evening they paid her about half their earnings. The young woman in the photograph has since died of Aids.
Irene, 16, Zambia, 2005
Irene first sold herself at the age of 12. “I went into sex work so I could remain in school,” she said. “When my father left and my mother couldn’t afford my books, uniform or fees, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I first slept with a man to buy exercise books. Then I worked the truck stops to sell sex to truckers.” Irene considered herself lucky as she hadn’t fallen pregnant, even though none of her clients agreed to wear a condom.
Irene, 21, Zambia, 2010
Five years on, Irene had lost her first born to malnutrition and given birth to a second child. She had also become HIV-positive. When Nick Danziger refound her, she told him: “I didn’t think I would ever see you again. In another five years’ time I will be dead.” Her antiretroviral treatment was free, but she hadn’t enough money to buy the food needed to take them with. “I just wanted to support my family. I nearly realised my goal of returning to school, but my first daughter got sick and all the money I’d saved went to pay for the medical expenses and her funeral.”
Border town, Zambia, 2010
In five years, little changed for most women in this border town. Gender equality remained a distant dream. Boys were still favoured when it came to education. Many girls were left without skills or the chance to better themselves. Thanks to NGOs, a few young women received vocational training, but that funding dried up with the global economic downturn. To make matters worse, local sex workers had to compete with refugees who sold themselves for half local prices.
Cristabel, 36, Zambia, 2010
By 2010, trade was booming in Chirundi. The Queen Mother’s modest rental venture had grown into the town’s most successful business. Cristabel owned two bars, a motel and several vehicles, including a minibus to run “her” girls to the Oasis truck stop. But for others, life hadn’t changed. Sex workers often saw three or four men a night; their clients refused to use condoms. The women were in no position to refuse any demand, such were their families’ financial needs.
Cristabel, 41, Zambia, 2015
“So many of the girls who I first knew are dead now,” said Cristabel in 2015. “But I can’t allow myself to feel sad for them. I am in business, like them. We all are just trying to make a living.” Cristabel no longer rents out dresses and makeup. Her motel now has 13 rooms and she wants to expand the business on to neighbouring land, buying out some of Chirundi’s poorest squatters. Meanwhile, along the truck corridor, desperate girls still sell themselves for as little as $1, the price of a bottle of local Mosi beer.
Border town, Zambia, 2015
In Zambia, as elsewhere in the world, most women are drawn into sex work by desperate financial need. But there are exceptions. Mavis, on the right, owns a restaurant in a nearby city. She came to the border town for the weekend with the intention of raising enough money to buy a new oven.
Sex work remains dangerous and demoralising. Often drivers shout abuse at the women, calling down from the cab “Bitch” and “Coffin” as they bury them in a choking swirl of exhaust fumes and road dust.
Irene, 26, Zambia, 2015
“I pray and cry to God to let me earn enough money to keep my girls at school,” said Irene. By 2015 she had two daughters, Grace, aged eight, and Sara, three. “I’ll go without food to pay for their education. I’ll even sell our land. But I will never, never go back on the street.” All she owned in the world was a small plot of land on which she had built three mud huts to rent out. But they went unoccupied and then filled up with penniless relations who Irene also began to support.
