Upcoming book details his story
Gilroy – Kaluba Kapapula found Jesus in Zambia, in the Copperbelt province where he grew up. In four short months, he lost first his mother, then his father, both to crippling depression. He was 16 years old and an orphan, a lackadaisical student and a playboy.
“I was just beginning to test my independence,” he says softly, “and all of a sudden, they were gone.”
Before she died, his mother Casalwa chided him, “If you think you’ll inherit your father’s things, think again. You are too many.” His father Felix, a businessman and member of the Zambian parliament, had two wives and mistresses to spare. With nine brothers and sisters, and more than 20 half-siblings, family life was survival of the fittest. Not for material things, which were never denied to him: Felix provided Casalwa with an ample house. But sometimes, amid the hubbub, he felt lost.
His name means ‘small flower,’ the same name given to his uncle and grandfather.
Every Sunday, his mother took him to church. His father did not go, banned by pastors who decried his polygamy, called it unforgivable. Yet he, too, was a man of conviction. In an era when people feared affronting the one-party state, a party that ruled for 27 years, Felix rallied for a multi-party system. When guests arrived, he and his son gave up their beds, and slept in the living room.
“People are more important than anything you are doing in life,” Felix told him.
Kapapula was a 9-year-old boy when he learned of Adam’s fall from grace, and knew he was a sinner. They were a child’s sins – stealing sugar, and sassing his mother – but that day, at Vacation Bible School, he says he accepted Christ into his heart.
But after that, no one taught him how to live, he said.
As a teenager, he drank. He shunned his schoolwork. Every year, he was last, or almost last, in his class. He drifted away from school for a year, and came home. His father told him to get his act together. His mother welcomed him home, but advised him to change.
Meanwhile, his father’s business had declined. Felix left politics. He squabbled with and threatened to divorce Casalwa, who could not understand why.
“She was my everything,” Kapapula says quietly. “When she died, I felt like my world had collapsed.”
His father’s did, too. Kapapula said his father, like his mother, died of depression. His death did not rattle him the way his mother’s had; he felt prepared, somehow.
Kapapula says, “I knew it was time to step out into the real world.”
He hit the school books, and graduated at the top of his class. Kapapula was among the select 2,000 students, only a fifth of his graduating class, picked to attend university, but he declined, choosing Bible college instead. The Zambian state pays for university; it does not pay for Bible college.
Kapapula says his father’s relatives, who inherited his estate, never volunteered his fees. Instead, he scraped by. Once, his fees unpaid, he was about to be dismissed. Terrified, he prayed with a friend for provision, then returned to his room. When he rose the next morning, toothbrush in hand, to wash up before classes, a man stopped him in the hallway, an envelope packed with money in his hand. His name was Pastor Everisto Kutontonkanya, and to this day, Kapapula has no idea how he learned of his plight.
He graduated, and ever since, he has bounced between Zambia and the U.S., doing missionary work.
“When people in America think of Africa, they think of the uncivilized jungle,” he said. “When people in Africa think of America, they think of Hollywood. The violence. The immorality. Believe me, I had no intention of coming to the U.S.”
His first visit was in 1997, when he coached American teens in a Bible-study boot camp, a two-week training session before the teens were dispatched across the globe. Later, with the same organization, he criss-crossed the country, spreading Christian gospel in 28 U.S. states. He was stunned to see rivers freeze over in New York, to see the ocean’s width in Miami. When kids asked him if people wore clothes in Africa, he’d tease them, saying, “No, and we ride on lions to school.”
Ordained again in the U.S. in 2000, he opened a church in Zambia, then returned to the U.S. to work for International Students Incorporated, a Christian organization that assists foreign students in the U.S.
Today, he lives in Gilroy, working for ISI and for Sunrise Christian Church, where he serves as assistant pastor. His wife, Precious, and daughters Jemimah, 4, and Jedidah, 2, have joined him.
The U.S. is thick with opportunity, he said. In September, Tate Publishing agreed to print Kapapula’s book, Purpose Restoration, a self-help tome that tells his story. To write it, he took classes at Gavilan College, refining his American English alongside U.S. students. Sometimes, he says, he grew flustered at other students’ laziness, their carelessness with their work.
“In Zambia, if you have an opportunity to go to school, you take it seriously,” he said. “This is a prosperous nation, but slackened, in certain areas.
“Hillary Clinton says, ‘In Africa, it takes a village to raise a child,'” he added, “and it’s true. You know your neighbors. You can knock on their doors. I miss that. People here are very independent.”
Someday, he says, his family will return to Zambia. Copper prices have declined, but new promise rises there: the discovery of oil and natural gas, the cancellation of colonial debt. He longs to be a part of that change, and sometimes thinks of running for office – perhaps even the presidency, he says.
Kapapula smiles bashfully, then hastens to add, “Should the Lord allow.”
