It was ostensibly about obscenity, but it was really about corruption and censorship and in the end, justice prevailed.
On Monday a Zambian court found journalist Chansa Kabwela not guilty of distributing obscene material with intent to corrupt public morals. What obscene material?
She had sent photographs of a woman giving birth in a hospital parking lot during a nurses' strike to government officials.
President Rupiah Banda declared the photographs pornographic. Kabwela faced a five-year jail sentence if she were found guilty; Banda's motive was probably that her paper, the Post, constantly accuses him of corruption.
The Post is probably right. Banda succeeded Levy Mwanawasa, a president of unquestioned integrity, after he died of a stroke last year. But unlike Mwanawasa, he has failed to pursue the previous president, Frederick Chiluba, a monumentally corrupt man who has been ordered by a British court to repay Zambia $59 million that he had stolen.
Banda has not tried to collect the money from Chiluba, and has stopped any further action against him in Zambia's courts.
An unsympathetic observer might wonder if some of Chiluba's stolen millions have bought Banda's complicity. The Post wonders that out loud, so Banda went after its news editor, Chansa Kabwela.
The pictures Kabwela sent out were not pornographic. Rather, they were horrific: images of a woman in the midst of a breech birth, the baby's legs dangling out between her own while its head was inside her.
She had already been turned away from two clinics; nobody would help her because of the strike, and the baby suffocated.
Kabwela sent copies of the photos to senior officials, with a letter urging them to settle the strike. That's when Banda had her arrested.
The courts are still independent in Zambia, and in the end Kabwela was found not guilty, but many of the witnesses were genuinely more shocked by photographs of a woman naked from the waist down than by the horror of what was actually happening.
As one said: "We are all Zambians. We all know this is not allowed in our culture."
The word you're looking for is prudish, and it applies to a lot of African popular culture. Never mind what's actually happening. We don't want to hear about it, and we certainly don't want to see it.
The Zambian elite has been devastated by HIV/AIDS: the higher the social class, the worse the death rate and yet nobody wants to talk about sex, let alone the links between sex, power and violence.
Go 1000km south to South Africa, and the gulf between appearances and reality is even wider. Last June the country's Medical Research Council published a study about rape and HIV which reported that 28 per cent of South African men admitted to having raped a woman or a girl. (A further 3 per cent had raped a man or boy.)
Almost half the rapists said they had raped more than one person, and three-quarters of them said they had carried out their first assault before the age of 20.
They didn't use condoms, and they were twice as likely to be HIV-positive than non-rapists.
This is a national calamity that is killing more people than a middle-sized war, and causing a huge amount of pain and grief. Yet few South Africans are even willing to talk about it.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist whose work is published in more than 45 countries.
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