All my friend Christopher and I wanted was a new BMX bicycle. I never had a new one, and I really wanted to be the first to ride one. I always admired the older boys who rode their bicycles through our neighborhood.
The neighborhood’s community ground was a multi-purpose ground that regularly hosted matches for the local soccer teams. It was also used for gatherings like church crusades, civic and political assemblies. To us kids, it was one of the most exciting places we could think of. It was where Christopher and I and so many others learned to ride bicycles.
There was a certain man there who owned a lot of bicycles. Every weekday he parked them by the basketball court. Kids my age and the older boys from other neighborhoods paid him to ride his bicycles. I remember he had sizes twelve, sixteen, twenty and twenty-four.
My mother gave me money every day to buy snacks at school, but I used the money to get a ride for Christopher and me. We always prayed for the schoolday to go by fast. We did not have bicycles of our own, so we took each opportunity to ride one. At school, waiting for the afternoon to arrive, we discussed the types of bicycles we wanted to have. We even compared the different bicycles parked at the community ground.
Before the Zambian kwacha rebased, a twenty-minute ride around the area demarcated by four big stones cost us 300. The man checked the time on his watch and instructed one of the men working with him to monitor us. We rode from one end to another, between the stones, until the twenty minutes were up.
Most weeklday afternoons we spent at the community ground with the other kids from our neighborhood, admiring bicycles, paying rides, watching the local soccer players training, buying fried popcorn, ice blocks, and sweets called mbalala which were made by melting sugar and mixing it with dry-fried groundnuts,
Opposite the community ground were drugstores, bottle stores and restaurants that filled the air with delicious smells.
After paying for the bicycles for several years, I finally decided to start saving the money my mother and siblings gave. I kept it in a small, locally made wooden savings box. Kids and adults in our neighborhood used to buy the wooden banks from local carpenters. The carpenters left a small slot on top. We dropped the money inside it through the slot, and we would break it open with a hammer once the target amount was reached. Every coin I saved went straight into the box.
Every time I dropped a coin in the slot, I thought of the day I’d finally own a bicycle. The wooden-made bank was safe in the house; it felt like progress to me. Each day I put money in it brought that goal a little closer.
Thank God I found work at our neighbors, One Touch General Dealers, a bicycle repair shop. I assisted the owner every afternoon after school, repairing broken bicycles. I learned so much: how to mend punctured tubes, fix broken chains, dismantle and assemble spokes on rims, and how to repair spoiled drillers. The work was not easy, but I felt good being around bicycles and discovering how they worked.
After three months at One Touch I had raised enough money and bought my first second-hand size sixteen BMX bicycle. It was black with yellow stripes and had a large frame. Finally, I could now ride when I wanted, where I wanted, and how I wanted.
Christopher and I felt like the kings of the neighborhood. Just like the other kids who had the bicycles before us, we took turns riding it. After a month, I added a carrier on the back, so I could carry my friends and luggage more easily. We rode to the nearby surrounding neighborhoods together, exchanging sitting on the carrier while the other rode.
I used to ride my bicycle to Twashukwa Primary School. It took me an one hour to get there. Unfortunately, while I was studying for my grade seven final examination, my bicycle broke down. At the time, my eldest brother and the firstborn, Andrew, was living abroad. He promised to buy me a new bicycle if I passed the examination and made it to grade eight.
We waited from October to December for the results. Then, in January, they were finally released. I had passed! I was more than happy. I was officially promoted to grade eight, the first class of the junior secondary school. Moreover, I had proven that Andrew’s sacrifices paying my tuition fees for years were not in vain. He fulfilled his promise. He sent money via my older brother Alex so I could buy a new mountain-sized twenty-six bicycle and a Dell Laptop.
The following day, Saturday, Alex and I boarded a Hiace minibus to the Kamwala market in town. I sat by the window in the back and glanced at familiar neighborhoods passing by as we made way into town. Alex led me through the computer shop at downtown Kamwala. Different computers and laptops were displayed behind glass: Dell, Acer, Toshiba, HP, Mac, and Lenovo. We bought the Dell laptop and continued our journey.
We crossed the railway line and entered a large shop owned by an Indian. It was overcrowded with customers and different types of bicycles were displayed outside: heavy-duty utility bicycles, mountain bicycles, electric bicycles, and children’s bicycles.
I walked around admiring the different kinds of bicycles. I took my time. Some frames were larger than others. Some had features of the road racers’ bicycles I had seen on television. Then I noticed a blue mountain bicycle.
I slowly walked toward it. It had a small pipe frame, big tires with small aluminum rims, and a gear shifter on the handlebars. This was the type of bicycle I had wanted to have for years. I held the handlebars for a while. After spending much time envying other people’s bicycles, it was hard to imagine one of them would soon be mine.
Alex paid the Indian man with long beard. I could barely contain my excitement. I kept looking at the bicycle as the workers prepared it. The Indian man handed the receipt to Alex. Then they brought it to us. I still found myself looking at it over and over just to make sure it really was mine.
Alex pushed the bicycle out of the shop. We flagged down a taxi and put the bicycle inside the boot. When we finally arrived home, we removed the bicycle from the taxi’s bonnet, and I stood there, just looking at it, before walking into the house. I finally had my own brand-new mountain bike.
The bike became part of my everyday life. I rode it to school as often as I could, sometimes giving Henry my new schoolmate a ride on the carrier when going to school and coming back.
