"Success is wonderful, but so is failure..."

I recently came across an event taking place in a few weeks that is set to be hosted by Mulenga Kapwepwe. Kapwepwe is the daughter of Zambia’s former vice-president, Simon Kapwepwe, who served from 1967 to 1970, only three years after Zambia declared its independence from the British. From an early age, Mulenga Kapwepwe was surrounded by the very leaders who helped Zambia achieve its independence, and joined their struggle to form a better country. As a six-year-old, she pondered the answers to questions like: "What are we going to call the country? What is the flag going to look like? What is the currency going to be called?"

Kapwepwe went on to become an artist, a writer, and a storyteller. She began writing plays, using her own tribe’s history as the foundation, digging deep into the history of her beloved country. She has built libraries, she co-founded the Zambian Women’s History Museum, and she sought to bring traditional music to new audiences. She started the Lusaka Youth Orchestra, and the Chilenge Girls football team, to work with youth in different capacities.

"Don't abandon your ideas. You can scale them down. You can reshape them. You can do whatever it is, but keep at it. Perseverance. And you learn, keep learning, and ducking and diving until you get what you want. That's been my lesson. Success is wonderful, but so is failure."

-- Mulenga Kapwepwe

Photo Credit: Chalo Chatu, under CC BY 3.0

Success is wonderful, but so is failure. We hear so much from the world’s leaders on following your dreams and succeeding, but what we don’t hear about is the failures that come along the way. At Impact Network, we know that failure is a part of trying something new – we have tried a variety of things over the years. Some of them worked great off the bat! Some of them needed tweaking, fixing, and trying again. And others just didn’t work. But among all of these ideas, we have always learned something – about ourselves, about our capacity to grow, and about our ability to innovate. Over the next few years, Impact Network will be trying more ideas, and while we hope each of them succeeds, we feel no shame in failing sometimes.

For those in the Atlanta area, you may want to check out the event Kapwepwe is hosting: https://www.globalatlanta.com/event/african-women-decolonizing-history-culture-and-the-arts-with-mulenga-kapwepwe/

Onwards!

-Reshma