Personal trauma and healing woven throughout A Chitenge Story

Calgary actor Makambe K. Simamba has been working on her solo show, A Chitenge Story, for the past four years, but it is a story that has unfolded over her lifetime.

Simamba and her family emigrated to the Caribbean from Zambia when she was seven years old. When she was 17, Simamba went to Prince Edward Island to study journalism, only to have a fellow student stalk her.

“At first he just sent me emails, but then he started turning up at my door. He never touched me physically, but he frightened me because I thought it was only a matter of time,” says Simamba, who says the incident triggered a childhood memory that was long since buried. She remembered that, as a five-year-old child in Zambia, she had been abused by a man.

(Louis B. Hobson, CalgaryHerald.com)