Lessons of blame

They never called her by her name when they were angry.They called her a lesson.A lesson in what happens when things fall apart.A lesson in what a family becomes when a man dies and leaves something behind—land, a house, unfinished promises.A lesson delivered not with kindness, but with blame.She was twenty-two years old and lived about ten miles from Lusaka, where the road toward home thinned into dust and noise gave way to long silences. In that place, electricity was never guaranteed. Some evenings the bulbs glowed faithfully, and some nights darkness arrived early, without apology. When the power went, the radio fell silent, phones ran out of charge, and the world shrank to the size of thought.Her father’s death had done the same thing to her life.He had not died suddenly. His illness lingered, slow and demanding. She remembered the smell of medicine, the careful way she cleaned his wounds, the concentration it took to do it properly because she was afraid of making mistakes. Her mother gave instructions. She followed them. She stayed. She endured the quiet panic of watching someone weaken day by day.Later, they would forget that.Later, they would say she should have done more.Grief, she learned, is not always about loss. Sometimes it is about accusation.When her father was buried, the mourning period did not end the way elders said it should. Instead of peace, arguments followed. Conversations about “responsibility” and “tradition” slowly transformed into disputes over ownership. Property lines appeared where love used to be. Voices grew sharper. Everyone seemed certain of what they deserved.No one asked her what she needed.Her education became fragile during that time. She was enrolled at Evelyn Hone College, a place she had once believed would be her doorway into independence. She loved learning. She loved the idea that knowledge could not be taken away the way houses and land could.But knowledge needs time and stability to grow.There were mornings she missed lectures not because she was lazy or careless, but because arguments at home swallowed the hours. Sometimes she was sent away deliberately, told not to attend class because adults were fighting and she was expected to be present—as proof, as leverage, as silence.On one painful day, she was taken to college not to be supported, but to “prove a point” to someone who was already dead. Her father could not hear the argument. He could not defend her. She stood there feeling exposed, reduced to evidence in a conflict she never asked to join.When results did not reflect her effort, the judgment was immediate.“Be quiet,” they told her.“You failed because you wanted to fail.”They did not see the nights she studied by torchlight when electricity disappeared. They did not see her borrowing notes, retracing missed lessons, teaching herself material that had already been explained while she was absent. Failure, to them, was simple. To her, it had been manufactured.Her mother told her to cut ties with some relatives. The advice came heavy, complicated by the knowledge that blame was shared. Her mother, too, had been part of decisions that left scars. Still, daughters are raised to obey, even when obedience hurts.So she pulled back. Quietly. Carefully.Isolation has a strange effect. At first, it hurts like hunger. Then, slowly, it sharpens awareness.Without constant electricity, she could not disappear into social media the way others did. Without distraction, her thoughts deepened. She noticed patterns—how adults justified cruelty when money was involved, how women were expected to absorb conflict silently, how grief was used as a tool instead of honored as pain.She began to write.At first it was only fragments—sentences scribbled when the power was out, ideas shaped by candlelight. Writing did not fix her circumstances, but it gave them shape. It allowed her to speak when she had been told to remain quiet. It reminded her that her perspective mattered, even if no one around her acknowledged it.She stopped seeing herself as a mistake.They had called her a lesson, yes—but not in the way they intended. She was learning things they never planned to teach her: resilience without applause, clarity born from hardship, the difference between guilt and responsibility.She was learning that surviving does not require permission.Evelyn Hone College still stood in her mind as both a struggle and a promise. Even when circumstances interrupted her path, the idea of education had already changed her. She had learned how systems fail people, how power dynamics shape outcomes, how silence can be enforced and how voice can be reclaimed.She did not romanticize her suffering. Pain was pain. Loss was loss. Being despised by relatives left marks that did not..................... To be continued