The loss is all mine, but novels set in Africa written by African writers rarely come my way. Iris Mwanza, judging from her bio, is now right at the heart of the global human tights, gender equality and wildlife protection industry, so I wonder if her heroine in The Lions’ Den, newly qualified Zambian lawyer Grace Zulu, is autobiographical? We are in the country’s capital Lusaka in 1990, and Grace, a junior with a law firm, has taken on a pro bono case. It is to represent a young homosexual, Willbess Mulenga, a dancer at a gay bar. He has been arrested for lewd behaviour, and has been incarcerated in an insanitary cell in the Central Police Station, denied parental visits and legal help. Grace is as surprised as anyone when the courts issue a nolle prosequi decree on the case of Bess Mulenga, but when she  returns to the police station to collect him, she is told that he has already been released. At this point she realises that something is very, very wrong.

Grace’s journey to the  firm of DB & Associates has been a struggle. She fled her village after the threat of being made the fourth wife of a local chief, and is estranged from what remains of her family. Thanks to the generosity of a friendly Asian shopkeeper, she completed both school and university, and now has her foot on the first rung of the legal career ladder.

The contrast between Grace the aspiring lawyer and Grace the awkward village girl pounding the maize to produce the rough flour her family subsists on couldn’t be starker. She still bears the visible cicatrises inflicted on her by the village ‘wise man’, meant to keep away evil spirits. She still flinches from the thought of a life as fourth wife of a village chief, presumably bearing children for as long as the old man’s virility held up. A key memory for Grace and the older people she mixes with is the rise to power of Kenneth Kaunda. Initially seen as as the great liberator Kaunda, at the time this book begins, was only weeks away from being ousted and his party trounced in the polls.

As Grace beats her head against the brick wall of incompetence and corruption that surrounds the Zambian government and its legal system, she is faced with an even greater challenge, and that is how to reconcile her own folk memories of tribal customs from her childhood with an urban Lusaka that seems to be advancing too fast for its own good. She bitterly resents her mothers’ willingness to sell her off in a loveless marriage, but still sends her an envelope full of kwacha (still the Zambian currency) each month.

This is not solely a political novel, but we are reminded of the revolutionaries who spearheaded the independence of African states, but then became corrupted by their own power. Alongside Kaunda was Mugabe, Nyerere, Amin, Nkrumah, and Taylor. Perhaps Mandela was the only one to die with his legacy intact. Grace is brave, intelligent, perceptive and persistent. If she has a flaw, it is that she isn’t cynical enough to recognise her own vulnerability as a young woman from a tribal village, trying to make her way in a capital city falling over itself to mimic the trappings of Western society.

I cannot speak with any authority about 1990s Zambian attitudes towards homosexuality and AIDS, but I am sure Iris Mwanza (left) knows the score. In the end, there is to be no salvation for Willbess Mulenga, but Grace survives the ordeal with her integrity intact. Beautifully written, touching, and a winning combination of legal thriller and detective story, The Lions’ Den is published by Cannongate and will be available from 19th June.