MWAPE MWENYA and BAMBE CHINYEMBA, Lusaka
DESPITE the devastating health and economic effects of Covid-19, its business as usual for commercial sex workers in Lusaka’s brothels and popular night pick-up points.
On a Monday morning, a check at a brothel disguised as a lodge in Chawama, found sex workers cleaning their rooms and others beautifying themselves in readiness to entertain their clients.
At this particular lodge, sex workers have booked rooms for as long as a month. Clients who know the arrangement, troop in at any time of the day.
One of the authors, pretending to be a potential client, enters the premises of a lodge which community members very well know as a brothel that hosts Zambian and Zimbabwean prostitutes.
The women get excited and jostle for his attention, with some telling him how much it would cost him for different services categorised according to “duration” and “risk factors”.
Maureen*, one of the sex workers, says a man with flu-like symptoms is labelled a “high-risk client” and CLICK TO READ MORE