Zambia Is Not in My Blood, But in My Soul

He arrived in Africa young, eager, and certain he understood the world. Twenty-five years later, Zambia had quietly remade him.

Adrian Scarlett is English by birth, Irish by heritage, and African by choice. He came to the continent as a teacher. He stayed as a husband, a father, a mulamu — brother-in-law — and a man slowly learning what it means to belong somewhere you were not born.

This is a book about that belonging. About paying lobola and raising mixed-race children. About white privilege in Black spaces, the quiet democracies of southern Africa, the gospel of greed, and the philosophy of Ubuntu. About the barber shops, the minibuses, the market traders, and the grandmother who handed him dried fish wrapped in newspaper and nodded — as if to say: yes, you will do.

Honest, warm, and unafraid of difficult truths, Zambia Is Not in My Blood, But in My Soul is the story of a life transformed by a place — and of the responsibility that comes with being welcomed somewhere you did not expect to call home.