In Search Of My Missing Pieces Christina Hoag   © Copyright 2025 by Christina Hoag

The English-style bungalows in Mufulira, Zambia.  Photo courtesy of the author.

The unfolding drama has drawn a crowd. The onlookers seem more curious than hostile, but I’m not about to get out and test my theory. Embarrassed by their stares, I gaze at the road throttled with semi-trailers waiting to enter the Lagos Port Complex.

 I was taking random pictures of the roadside, a boil of trucks, motorcycles and three-wheeled taxis, peddlers of everything from corncobs to car parts, and women walking with beanpole backs to balance massive baskets of goods on their heads, but the cop seems to think I have a sinister motive. “I want to know who you are, who is behind you,’ she said.

I’d arrived in Nigeria the previous night from Sweden. Lagos is the second stop on a pilgrimage to retrace the earliest years of my childhood, the ones that predate my memory, but I’ve heard about from my mother and father my whole life. It’s a zigzag of a journey, thanks to my adventurous parents who moved me and my siblings among seven countries by the time I was thirteen.

Mum and Dad met in Zambia in the early sixties when it was still Northern Rhodesia. My mother was an English nurse and my father a mining engineer from New Zealand. They came to work for Zambia’s huge copper mine in Mufulira. When Mum was eight months pregnant with me, they left Africa for New Zealand where I was born. Three weeks later, we moved to a gold mining town in Fiji. Following Dad’s rising career, we then lived in Sweden, England, Nigeria, New Zealand, Australia and the United States, where I now live.

Most of the countries we lived in, I have revisited over the years, or I lived there as an older child, so I remember them well. But there are gaps: Stockholm, where we lived in 1964, and Lagos, from late 1964 to 1966.

The trip is both a geographical and emotional checkerboard. Travel allowed my parents to escape working-class backgrounds so they thought it would be glamorous to raise their children as citizens of the world. But for me, it has meant a lifetime of living in the limbo of paradox. I am from everywhere and thus nowhere. I have passports from three countries but belong to none. I can relate to almost anybody, but few can relate to me. I experienced an extraordinarily rich, stimulating childhood, yet it has brought me deep loneliness in its singularity. I have felt conflicted about my upbringing my entire life. Perhaps this journey will bring me resolution.

The paved road gives way to a lunar-landscape of earth then the asphalt again. We turn into Rycroft Road. We drive slowly, then I spot a three-story building, white with grey trim. It’s surrounded by a high wall and metal gate, but I make out distinctive concrete ledges that jut out over the windows, as in the photo.

“I think that’s it!”

We get out. A security guard ambles over. This time, Joseph explains my story and asks if I can take a photo. The guard opens the gate, and we enter. The place is tidy, the paint fresh.

I place my palm against the wall of the ground-floor flat that we may have lived in. In that moment, I claim my exotic childhood that has often seemed the stuff of story more than reality. Growing up among far-flung cultures, my childhood seems to lack physicality. It has become Brigadoon-like, existing solely in misty memory. It’s inevitable, I think. When we moved, I had to focus on adapting to a new setting. I had to molt my past self and mold my current self to fit the present. I had to change shape so many times, I never really knew who I was. I had to belong so, I had to be the same as everyone else, discard the things that made me different. Finding this building is a touchpoint to how my upbringing shaped my true self, where it doesn’t matter what clothes I wear, how I pronounce words, what passport I use.

Joseph snaps a picture of me, triumphant at locating this scrap of my history that I’ve come halfway around the globe to find.

After Lagos, I fly to Zambia, where I was conceived and almost born. As the prop plane descends over Zambia’s Copperbelt Province, I press my forehead to the windowpane. The sky is a cerulean vault and the earth below a rich ochre color from its mineral wealth, daubed with scrubby trees.

My destination, the provincial capital of Ndola, appears. It’s small, gridded with only a few macadam streets. Most roads are ruts of red dust, bordered by shoe-box cement houses, their corrugated metal roofs glinting in the harsh sun. I suddenly feel myself expanding like a desiccated sponge sopping up water. I am again reaching my true self, the self I have had to retract for so much of my life as I tried to belong. Tears simmer in my eyes from the gush of elation at reaching this remote, wild and beautiful outpost of the planet – and of myself.

​We clank down the metal staircase onto the tarmac. A rush of hot wind greets me, lifting my spirit higher. Estelle, from my guesthouse, picks me up in an SUV. As we drive, I tell her I want to visit Mufulira. “Is there a bus?”

 “You can go by bus, but it is cumbersome. It is better I arrange a driver for you.”

Estelle pulls into ​the guesthouse, which is surrounded by a high wall topped with electric wires. We walk by a pavilion decorated for a “kitchen party,” she tells me. ​I assume it must be a bridal shower. The DJ starts up later. I lie on the bed as upbeat percussive notes twinge my memory.

In 1977, a South African hit musical called Ipi Tombi arrived in New York. My parents, delighted at the rare appearance of African culture, took me and my siblings to see it and bought the soundtrack album. Four years later when I was sharing an apartment at college, I played the Ipi Tombi soundtrack. One of my roommates marched into the living room and angrily turned off the stereo. I felt embarrassed. I’d put my different background on display and was rejected. I never played the record again. It was a petty incident, but it stung with the pain of not being accepted.

There in Ndola, I realize the music was never turned off inside me. Tears sliding down my cheeks, I dance to the music. With every step I shed all the criticism, the invalidation, the dismissal and loneliness I have felt due to being the different kid. I dance for the experiences that gave me my uniqueness. I dance to celebrate me. 

The air conditioner cuts out in the wee hours. Awakened by the stuffiness, I get up to open the windows. They’re hinged at the side, like the windows at my grandmother’s house in England. I push them open with the attached metal rod and fasten them by placing a hole in the rod over a peg in the sill. Then I unfurl the mosquito net over the bed, tuck it under the mattress to make a tent and crawl under it.

I feel an odd happiness. So often my past has felt like an appendix, originally there for a reason but now devoid of meaning. If I were to excise all the bits of my knowledge from where I’ve lived and travelled, it would make no difference to my present. But lying in my netted cocoon, listening to the croaks and chirps from frogs and crickets, I realize these things are meaningful because they form part of me.         

​The next morning, I meet Isaac, the driver Estelle has arranged. He’s bony with grizzled grey hair and wearing a sweater. It’s in the mid-eighties, but I suppose this is cool for Zambia. We head out in the SUV. Isaac tells me he used to work at the Mufulira mine. Again, I feel the comforting touchstone of familiarity. I grew up with rock samples around the house and hearing about things like tunnel-boring machines. Mining is foreign to most people, but here it’s daily life.

Along the roadside, women sell onions and tomatoes. Boys kick a football. Men loll on crates in scraps of shade and drink beer. Every so often there’s a church and clutches of girls wearing knee-length Sunday school uniforms with white ankle socks and buckled shoes. We pass sandy villages of mud-brick huts and herds of goats.

​Driving through Kitwe, I spot the blue cursive script of the Atlas Copco logo on a building, the company my father worked for. I tell Isaac and he nods. “You know it?” I ask. “Oh yes,” he says. I smile. Another stamp of validation.

​We zoom along a lonely swath of road. I wave at the few pedestrians. Their faces light up and they wave back. A boy races us in bare feet that scarcely touch the ground, his chest pushed forward and legs striding like he’s hurdling the air. Then concrete buildings and signposts emerge. Mufulira. I suddenly feel like I’ve been dropped into an English town in the African bush. Bungalows with chimneys and gabled roofs line the streets. Hedges rim expansive lawns.

“This is where the whites lived,” Isaac says. “Their houses are made of brick. We don’t have brick anymore in Zambia.”

Decades ago, the mine, then owned by the Rhodesian Selection Trust, a British company, built the houses for its expat employees. After the mines were nationalized following independence in 1964, the foreigners left, and the houses were sold to locals.

Isaac pulls into the gated driveway of a sweep of verdant lawn studded with white, low slung buildings, like a tidy tranquil oasis. A sign identifies it as the Mopani Copper Mine Hospital. This must be where Mum worked. I get out to take a picture, but a security guard pops up like a Jack-in-the-box and says photos are not allowed so I absorb it, imprint it on my brain.

I remember my mother’s stories about the place, such as the arrival of a Belgian doctor and two nurses who were fleeing the violence of the independence movement in Congo, just twelve miles to the north. “The Congo was breaking out, and the Belgians were coming over,” Mum was fond of saying. “The Belgian doctor was very good. He was a little man with glasses, and very good with the patients, but the nurses were lazy. We thought them inefficient.” She also told me about the patients with a strange fatal wasting illness, which decades later she thought could’ve been early cases of HIV.

Mum told me the hospital was down the road from the mine and sure enough, the street ends in an entrance to the site. As if on cue, a truck lumbers out of great puffs of dust on the dirt road.

Mum said the mine ran most everything in the town and that still seems true. The mine logo is on a school, fences and the sports complex. ​We drive through the shabby shopping district of just one main street, similar to what my parents had described, then along the perimeter of the mine. The mine itself is underground, but a massive labyrinth of steel pipes pierces into the sky. Smokestacks belch clouds of soot. Mountains of black tailings, the waste from the refining process, form a new landscape.

Beside the tailings lies a neighborhood of small concrete houses shaded by banana trees. This is where the African mine workers lived. The difference between their homes and those reserved for whites back in the day couldn’t be starker. ​

We head back to Ndola in late afternoon. Meshing what I’ve just seen with my parents’ stories, I imagine their life in Mufulira. My father often held court in his flat’s front garden where miners would drink beer in the evenings to the rhythm of log drums from the African side of town. ​My mother, crisp in her nursing uniform, flitted among wards and operating theaters, delivering babies and setting bone breaks from drunken brawls. I imagine her getting dressed up for a night out at the Flying Club, an expat hangout.

 I also see how it would have been an insular world, where gossip was probably even more popular a past-time than drinking, the reason why Mum, after discovering she was pregnant with me, arranged a quick wedding in Nairobi. My parents had fond memories of Mufulira. Their stories became woven into my childhood along with the Ashanti stools and Kente cloths we lugged from country to country.

The following day, I continue my journey. I fly south to Victoria Falls, on the Zambia-Zimbabwe border (locally known as Zim-Zam), where my parents honeymooned. Since it’s dry season, only a fraction of the normal volume of the magnificent Zambezi River plummets over the cliff, leaving large sections of the gorge exposed as dry rock. Still, there’s enough water hitting the river below to send up a roar and a cooling mist that coats my skin, but it lasts only moments. It evaporates almost instantly in the baking heat.

I take a selfie in front of the oversized statue of explorer David Livingstone in the same pose as an old picture of my mother. ​In the Livingstone Museum, I find a display case detailing a story Mum often told: an Englishwoman whose car was set on fire by Zambians protesting colonial rule in 1960 as she drove on the Ndola-Mufulira Road. She later died. It happened just before Mum’s arrival in Mufulira, and the incident had rattled the expats. Again, I feel a jigsaw piece of my history click into place.

The lights in the museum suddenly cut out. Electricity is being rationed during the dry season. Some visitors leave, but I need to study that display. Using the light from my cell phone screen, I pore over every word in that glass case.

I take a break from my personal history to do some crafts shopping at the local market and go whitewater rafting on the Zambezi. I also take a day trip to neighboring Botswana’s Chobe National Park. It’s elating to see giraffe, lion, zebra, elephants and other wild animals wandering freely. Sadly, I also see the handiwork of poachers. Dead elephants lying on the banks of a river, bloody holes where their tusks had been ripped out. Several people complain to the guide about having to witness that. I feel sick to my stomach, but I don’t complain. Poaching is a reality of African life.

It’s time to leave my past and return to my present. I fly to Doha to catch a nonstop back to Los Angeles. It’s Sunday, a work day in Qatar, so the place bustles with the start of the week. I pass a tall bearded man dressed in the traditional thobe, a long white tunic, with the sides of his white headdress tucked into a black headband. A hooded falcon perches on a leather gauntlet on his forearm. I pass women cloaked in black abayas, their eyes strips of mystery above their face veils. I pass Westerners bowed under the weight of backpacks and looking lost. I pass giggling Asian girls snapping selfies in front of a huge teddy bear. I hear snatches of English and Arabic, French and German, Russian and Japanese, and languages I can’t identify. I feel that expanded feeling again. As a little girl, I loved international airports and still do. They are the modern crossroads of the world. I realize that as discomfiting as my childhood often was, it made me, me.

​I stare out the window at the aircraft on the tarmac and do what I have done since I was little: Guess which countries the planes are from. Then boarding for my flight is announced and I join the queue.