There were no cinemas where I grew up. Not the kind you see now with big screens, good sound, and popcorn that costs more than lunch. Where I lived we had video shows in small dark rooms full of wooden benches, and the smell of sweat and cheap snacks. The walls were stained, the paint flaking off, old movie posters barely hanging on or displayed on a wooden board. Arnold Schwarzenegger holding a bazooka, Jean-Claude Van Damme frozen mid-kick. But to us? That place was everything.
I remember it very well. It was located between a barbershop and a chakanga bottle store. Above the door, a sign simply said Video Show. Outside, posters were nailed to a wooden board: Commando, Bloodsport, Cyborg, Double Impact, No Retreat No Surrender, Deadly Prey. These weren’t just movies to us. They were escapes. Adventures. Dreams you didn’t want to wake up from.
Entry cost one kwacha, Zambian currency. That little note got you ninety minutes of action. If you wanted to stay for another movie, the man at the door with huge muscles like a bodybuilder would ask for another. We never knew his name, but in our heads, he was the final boss. No one dared cross him. If he threw you out, you were finished. Most times we didn’t even have enough for one show, but we found ways to go without snacks, lying to our parents, and sneaking in.
We weren’t allowed there. None of us were. Our parents said it was a place for thieves and drunkards. “Only useless boys go there,” my uncle once said while fixing his mountain bike. But when you’re young, rules are just obstacles to jump over. One Monday afternoon, we went for it. Christopher, Abraham, Mathews, Justin, and I had planned it during break-time at school. We’d meet behind Kuku Market after lunch. Everyone was to bring their own one kwacha. I had mine, I’d skipped buying bread for two days and lied that I wasn’t hungry.
All of them showed up. From his sock, Christopher pulled out one kwacha. “Too many thieves around,” he said. Abraham produced his from beneath his footwear. Mathews carefully opened a matchbox. As if it contained diamonds inside. One by one, they showcased their valuables. Little, but enough.
Then we turned to Justin. He had his head bent down, staring and kicking soil with his Bata shoes. “I don’t have it,” he said.
We all fell silent. He was certainly going to make a ruckus, everyone understood that. But being excluded from the group was not an option, in his opinion. There was no way we could address it. Each of us had just a single kwacha. Losing it meant losing our only opportunity. What was more, I had my own one kwacha for the entrance fee and, hidden in my sock, one extra kwacha I saved for a boiled maize. Giving up my savings for boiled maize money was hard, but leaving a friend out or being caught in our little scheme was worse.
I pulled out my hidden extra kwacha and paid the man at the entrance, who gave Justin his token. All the other participants had already paid. “Now the deal is closed,” Justin said with a smile.
I could tell something was off with the way he smiled. It was more soothing, as if he had won a battle. I could tell the story was not finished for him.
Justin was different from other kids. He had an older brother who was a deacon in a church, a man who was well regarded in the community. There were other options available to Justin should he decide to pursue them. But for the time being, the deal was finished.
Inside, the room was hot and dark. An old fan wobbled overhead, turning slowly and uselessly, barely stirring the thick air. We squeezed onto the third bench, next to a man smoking something strong and a group of teens whispering about stealing cassettes from the market.
The moment Justin settled beside us, I saw him smiling, and I heard him say, “If you didn’t pay, I would’ve gone home and told your uncle where you were, and told Christopher’s father. And told every single one of them.” We all knew he was serious, he was Justin. Half a friend, and half a blackmailer. It was a strange mix, but that was who he was.
Then the movie started, Terminator 2. Gunshots. Motorbikes. Explosions. For those ninety minutes, we were gone. Not in Zambia. Not in a sweat-smelly hall. We were in the United States, running from a robot, jumping over fire, riding into the night. Sometimes the power would go off in the middle of a scene, and the screen would turn black. Everyone groaned. Someone would shout, “Let him finish punching first!” and then, just like that, the power would come back. We’d cheer. That moment the lights flickered back, the whole room erupting into laughter and claps, stayed with me.
It wasn’t just the movie that made the memory. It was the way strangers became a team, united in hoping the power stayed enough for Arnold to finish the fight. I realized later that those rooms weren’t just business. They were gathering places, where kids like us sat side by side with adults we’d normally fear, and for one and a half hour, we were all the same, dreamers chasing stories on a shaky TV screen.
After the movie, the man at the door stood up. “Next movie, one kwacha!” he shouted. Sometimes I wondered if he knew most of us were schoolboys spending stolen lunch money. If he did, he never showed it. He just wanted the coins, nothing else.
None of us had money left. Justin turned to me. “You got more?” I shook my head.
Mathews stretched. “Let’s go.”
We walked out into the sunlight. Our eyes squinted, our heads ringing from the noise. Nobody said it, but we all felt it, this had been one of the best days of our lives.
On the way home, the world felt different, almost brighter. The roads we’d walked on every day now felt like they led somewhere new, as if the explosions and chases had shaken something awake inside us. Even the market stalls looked alive with possibility. I remember thinking that maybe one day I could be like those heroes, strong, fearless, ready to face anything. It was a childish thought, but it gave me courage I carried long after.
As we walked, we joked about Van Damme’s kicks, and Schwarzenegger’s lines. Christopher tried a slow-motion flip and landed flat on his chest. We couldn’t stop laughing. Even Justin still had that edge of restraint that he had earlier. Then he laughed too. But as we got closer to home, the fear came back. That sinking feeling. What if someone saw us? What if an adult asked where we were? Would we be able to lie well enough?
At the roadside, we all stopped. “No one tells,” Abraham said.
“No one,” we repeated.
After him, nodding, came Justin, who only a minute earlier had been lost in deep concentration. We laughed again, but deep down, I didn’t trust him. Maybe he liked holding it over us more than actually snitching. We knew if Justin went to his brother, or Christopher’s father found out, it was over for us. That fear never really left, even when we laughed.
That night, I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling above me. I could still see the robot melting in lava, the final thumb-ups. Worth every kwacha. Worth every risk.
I think that was the first time I understood sacrifice in a real way. I had given up my maize money, gone hungry just to sit in a dark room and dream. Looking back, it sounds foolish, but at that age, the hunger in the stomach was smaller than the hunger in the heart. Movies filled a space food couldn’t, imagination. Escape. Belief. Maybe that’s why it mattered so much.
Days passed. While in class at school, our head teacher came in. “Some of you have been watching video shows and lying to your parents,” he said, eyes scanning the room. “That’s bad behavior.”
Our stomachs dropped. Did Justin snitch? He didn’t. Turns out, Mathews’s older sister had seen us, and she was also a teacher at our school. Mathews got some lashes at home and a long talk at school. The rest of us got lucky. At my house, I pretended to go to sleep early. My uncle didn’t suspect a thing. Still, my stomach was in knots all night, waiting for a hand to pull the blanket off me.
After that, we got smarter. We waited between visits. Used back paths. Hide our money in our shoes. We took turns, a couple of us would sneak in while the others stayed back, pretending to be somewhere else. It became a game of timing and lies. The risk became part of the thrill. It wasn’t just the movies, it was outsmarting adults, crossing lines we weren’t supposed to cross.
We found ourselves a week later doing the same thing, except we weren’t watching a movie. Just beyond our compound, there was an orange grove. It was owned by a man known to everyone as Shanzi. They said he had once chased off four robbers with a machete. Never mind whether it was true or not. To us at least, he was a legend, and not the good kind. This was at the edge of compound where the footpaths grew dusty and the air smelled like dry grass. We passed by it most days, and we’d see the trees laden with fruits, but never quite dare to stop.
That afternoon, Christopher grinned and exclaimed, “If we can survive Arnold and the final boss, we can survive Shanzi.”
Abraham let out a chuckle, but nobody else did. The orchard was a fenced square of wire, with trees that were lit up with fruits inside. To five boys that had been mostly raised on boiled maize, those oranges looked like something worth robbing. The skins were bright, a vivid orange against the dull green leaves. We could see the juice running down our chins, sweet, sticky, something we hadn’t had for weeks.
We worked it out the same way we had at the cinema, who would crawl in, who would climb, and who would catch. My heart raced as Mathews went flat on his belly and slipped underneath the fence. Christopher boosted Justin up into the branches. Abraham was there to catch the oranges as they dropped from the tree to his belly, hugging the stolen oranges against his chest, and I remember feeling like we were inside a movie scene, only this we were the actors for real.
Then came the scream. A voice so low it shook me to my core. “Who is there?” Shanzi. We all froze. Justin almost fell off the tree.
Mathews hissed, “Run!” and in the next second we were off.
Abraham stumbled, his shirt dumping oranges everywhere. I grabbed his arm and pulled him along as Shanzi’s shadow caught up with us. I thought I heard the clang of the machete on the fence. Or maybe it was just the pounding of blood in my ears. But I was sure I heard his footsteps closing in.
Somehow we made it through the fence, skinning ourselves on the wire, lungs on fire. We didn’t stop running until we landed on the football field, coated in dirt. The goalposts were crooked from sticks, and the place smelled of sunbaked dirt. It felt like the only safe place in the universe.
Christopher dug in his pocket and yanked out an orange. Just one. That’s all that survived. We looked at it for a second, then busted out laughing. Five kids running wild, risking our necks for a single orange—it was dumb, and it felt like winning the World Cup. We didn’t eat it right away. We passed it around, holding it like treasure. When we finally ripped it open, juice ran everywhere. Sticky hands, big grins. I swear nothing’s ever tasted that sweet.
Looting the orchard wasn’t so different from sneaking into the cinema. In the same way, there was the orchard. We devised a plan, kept to it, and in the end had nothing to show but a good time. The movie wasn’t the prize. The orange wasn’t either. It was a thrill. The chase. The guts. And mostly the laughter, echoing louder than anything else.
Truth is, we didn’t need much. Just each other, a bit of nerve, and a story we’d still be laughing about years later. There was a kind of education in it too, though none of us admitted it then. We learned planning, team work, even negotiation skills, that would later help us in many different parts of our lives. It sounds strange, but sneaking into those shows taught us courage, how to face consequences, and how to protect each other. That brotherhood was worth more than the one kwacha we scraped together.
Years passed. The video shows closed. Those halls became phones and television repair shops, salons, and churches. Big cinemas came with clean seats and popcorn machines, but they didn’t feel the same. No power cuts. No shouting. No smell of old wood and childhood dreams.
Now and then, when I’m home, I walk past that spot and smile. I see Christopher fumbling with his socks, Abraham flirting with the fritter-seller girl, Mathews stuffing his token into his socks, Justin grinning like he saved the world.
We didn’t know it then, but that was the real cinema. Not the hall. Not the screen. Us. Sitting in the dark. Heart racing. Dreaming of worlds bigger than our own. We’ve all gone different ways now, some moved to different countries, some stayed, some I don’t even know about anymore. But when I pass that spot, I still hear our laughter, still feel that fear and joy. That’s what stuck, not the movies. Those were the good old days.
