Fred Owens
Frida Kahlo died in 1954. There is no record of her ever making a journey to Africa, except for the mysterious correspondence found in director John Huston's papers. His movie, the African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, was filmed on location in the Congo..... that was in 1951, and in that year, it was rumored, but never proven, that Huston had an affair with Kahlo, and furthermore, there is a gap in her memoirs covering a month or two in 1951 when she may have traveled to Africa to be with him...... So it is fairly possible that she might have passed through Lusaka in the Zambia in 1951.
At which time I was 5 years old and stationed in a northern suburb of Chicago, making it almost preposterously unlikely that she and I had lunch together, as reported yesterday.
However, knowing Kahlo as well as I do, and John Huston too, for that matter, it is likely that something happened, because I am not the kind of person who just makes things up. I do not have an active imagination, but an astonishingly accurate memory -- and something did happen in Lusaka in 1951...
I visited Zambia briefly in 1997. I noticed that nobody had shoes. It is a very poor country.
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