Author Archives: Mwizenge Tembo

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Since the Paramount Chief Mpezeni IV of the Ngoni people of Zambia passed away on May 30, 2026, at the age of 75, the incidents of public powdering are exploding. The powderings are taken as endearing symbols of the strong chiMbuyaship between the Ngoni and Bemba people among the mourners at the funeral. Some of the powderings seem to have gotten out of hand. I have seen images on social media of powderings of a dog, babies, children, powderings that appear to be ambushing incidents in vehicles, and offices. There is a social media video of mourners panicking, scrambling in a mass commotion as there was a huge white thick  plume of powdering clouds among the mourners at the Chief Mpezeni funeral. What I found even more shocking was a social media image of a white muzungu woman at the British High Commission in Lusaka powdering a young Zambian woman. This appears to have been not even at the funeral of Chief Mpezeni. This is absolute mayhem. What is happening?

This article will define mbuyaship, mbuyaship between the Ngoni and Bemba, mbuyaship among other Zambia tribes, answer some important questions about mbuyaship, and why mbuyaship powdrings are exploding and spreading both at the Chief Mpezeni funeral and the Zambian society in general. Should something be done about curbing mbuyaship powderings?

The Ngoni and the Bemba were involved in numerous battles and wars in the 1800s. Neither one could defeat the other. So, the two tribes decided to defuse their fighting, frequent conflict and hostility by establishing chimbuya. This is the relationship of joking with and teasing each other which is also very central between cousins or in cousinship among kinship relationships in Zambian traditional society. The powderings are a playful and relatively harmless expression of this mbuyaship.

There are mbuyaships that exist between other tribes, for example between the Lozi and Tonga. I have recently learned that there are mbuyaship relationships among some tribes in the Northwestern province that may include the Luvale, Lunda, Ndembo, Kaonda, Luchazi and Chokwe. Some Zambians are asking questions. Besides the Ngoni there are other tribes in the Eastern Province who are not Ngoni. These include the Nsenga, the Senga, the Tumbuka, the Chewa, and the Kunda. Should these tribes also take part in the Ngoni Bemba mbuyaship? Similarly, beside the Bemba in the Northern Province, other tribes include the Lala, Aushi, Bisa, Shila, Lungu, Mambwe, Namwanga and Tabwa. Should these tribes who are not directly Bemba also participate in the Ngoni Bemba Mbuyaship?

Can anyone who is not your peer, not the same age, gender, or same status powder you? Can an individual who doesn’t know you or with whom you do not socialize powder you? For how long should the powdering take place before the burial at the funeral before it has to stop? Is the aim of chimbuya powdering  to raise money to help the grieving family? 

My understanding is that powdering is only between people who know each other very well and are close friends. For example, I have a Bemba friend’s sister with whom I am very close. We have known each other for the last 49 years. If she powdered me at a funeral or I powdered her, both of us would probably giggle and laugh even though we would be grieving and mourning the loss of a loved one. This is one of the main purposes of mbuyaship; to express love and solidarity, and at the same time lighten the moment a little even though we might be very sad and grieving.

The members of the Ngoni Bemba mbuyaship have other ways of expressing their mbuyaship which includes teasing through talking during what the Tumbuka call kukhuziska at a funeral. The mbuyaship does not have to focus on powdering although powdering is perhaps the most dramatic, and visible to everyone and garners immediate visual attention. 

Every important cultural activity in all societies including in Zambia has rules, takes place at an appropriate place, surrounding, and time. Marriage ceremonies and weddings take place in the church where couples exchange marriage vows. This takes place in decorated hall, room or in front of a beautifully decorated hut, home, or house. School takes place in a classroom during the days of the week and not on weekends. Mbuyaship powdering should strictly happen at the house or location of mourning and before burial at the cemetery or graveyard. The rules of mbuyaship should be followed. Powdering should never happen at any other arbitrary random public places or in offices far away from the place for mourning and funeral, cemetery, or graveyard prior to burial of the deceased person.

Threats of powdering should not be used to raise funds for the grieving family. I have attended many Ngoni Bemba funerals during which a plate is passed around and many mourners including myself have made donations.

There are two major reasons why powdering as an expression of mbuyaship is exploding and spreading to the general Zambian public. First, the rules and strict customs that elders may have enforced in the village in the 1800s among the Ngoni and Bemba are no longer being passed to the younger urbanized Zambians. Most of the tribal elders have died. Many Zambians do not live in Villages anymore. The youth spend many hours on cell phones watching videos including ones of powedring. Short videos do not show the cultural context of powdering. The youth lack clear guidance in how to behave and conduct mbuyaship especially at funerals.

Second, Zambians who are outsiders to the mbuyaship see very humiliating excessive powdering which degrades the person’s dignity. They see both actors often smiling and joking during the powdering. No one is being punished or arrested by the police for what looks to outsiders as physical assault and public humiliation that should be annoying.  Men do not exchange blows. This looks like something very exciting that many outside observers are envious of and want to participate in the exciting action. 

Last week, I saw a smiling Ngoni member of parliament who had been severely powdered on his head, face and shoulders standing up and addressing parliament in the Parliament of Zambia. The woman speaker of parliament looked nervous and amused. This is why the widespread out of control powdering must be reined in.

The population of Zambia is 22.4 million. An estimated 75% to 80% of Zambia’s population is under the age of 30 which is about 17 to 18 million youths. Zambia has an estimated urban population of 47% or over 10 million people. The most important point is that  in terms of the customs and rules of mbuyaship and the spreading of powdering, there are very few or no surviving adult elders to teach the youth the customs. Most of the youth may not live in rural area villages where most of the traditional customs were passed on to the young or youth. Because of the lack of guidance regarding the strict rules, I have seen reports that Bemba young people at the Chief Mpezeni funeral were so disruptive that they wanted to powder the Catholic Clergy who were about to preside over the funeral and burial. The Ngoni or Nyanja speakers would say the Bemba youth were acting with mawala, mphuvya, and with vingazi. All this means is the Bemba young people in question were acting  recklessly and were misguided.

The traditional leadership of the Ngoni and the Bemba must publicly spell out and enforce the rules and the customs. All traditional rulers must follow suit in spelling out and enforcing the mbuyaship rules particularly powdering. The government should never be involved in regulating these mbuyaship traditions.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Since the Paramount Chief Mpezeni IV of the Ngoni people of Zambia passed away on May 30, 2026, at the age of 75, there have been many public and personal reactions among my fellow Zambians. While the 22.5 million Zambians learned the sad news through the media, what has garnered a lot of attention are what appear to be offensive images on social media. These images appear to be videos of one or two Zambian men apprehending another Zambian man who is smart looking, wearing clean clothes with a tie being smeared with white stuff all over the face, the head and hair, the neck, and chest. The victim appears embarrassing, funny, degraded, and humiliated. This is called powdering among Zambians, and it is not new. This article will discuss what Mbuyaship is, what powdering is, what its purpose is, who is doing the powdering now and who is the target, why are individuals powdering others, and who can participate in the powdering and who should not participate in the powdering. Last, the article will discuss cautions about powdering.

Mbuya is a noun which means grandfather or grandmother in languages particularly from the Eastern and Northern Provinces of Zambia. Another term for mbuya among the Tumbuka, Chewa, Ngoni in the Eastern Province and Malawi is agogo. The traditional deep kinship customs of mbuya or agogo going back hundreds of years is that the two individuals involved in the relationship joke, tease each other, and may sometimes playfully lightly wrestle with each other. That light playful physical contact is called kumphatana between cousins among the Tumbuka. This relationship of joking with and teasing each other is also very central between cousins or in cousinship. This mbuyaship is what exists today among the Bemba of Northern Province and the Ngoni of Eastern Province. How did this mbuyaship happen between the people from the 2 tribes? 

The reader might not appreciate the deep history of the Ngoni-Bemba mbuyaship  just by a 5-minute read in social media. The reader should read the book by the great Zambian Historiographer the late Yizenge Chondoka who dedicated most of his life to researching indigenous Zambian history. In Chapter 8 titled: “The Bemba-Nthuto Ngoni War and the Beginning of the Cousinship” in his book “The Zwangendaba Mpezeni Ngoni”, Chondoka says in the 1800s the Ngoni and Bemba fought numerous wars and battles.

“It is important to note that up to this day, the Bemba claim that they defeated the Nthuto-Ngoni, and that, that is why they left Bembaland. On the other hand, the Ngoni also claim that they defeated the Bemba but left their territory because the Bemba did not have enough cattle to fight for.” (Chandoka, 2017, p.71)

It was after these wars in the 1800s that the mbuyaship between the Ngoni and the Bemba started that exists up to this day in 2026 expressed during the funeral period after the death of Paramount Chief Mpezeni. But why are the Bemba powdering, and what the reader may regard as humiliating the Ngoni during this funeral?

What Zambians call powdering today is a very common practice deeply embedded in traditional Zambian culture. The white painting of the face and the whole body was very common among most of the 72 Zambian tribes. The painting was done when individuals were experiencing significant life events such as during marriage and wedding ceremonies, during funerals, and especially during initiation ceremonies (Chinamwali among the Ngoni and Chewa and Chisungu among the Bemba for girls) when boys and girls were transitioning from being boys to young men and girls to young women. Sometimes in some traditional dances among the 72 Zambian tribes, dancers may powder their faces and bodies. The anthropology scholar Victor Turner discusses rites of passage.  In his book “The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual” Turner called the period of psychological transition the process and state of liminality.

Modern Zambian urban Bemba and Ngoni people may use modern white commercial powder. But traditionally, very fine white mealie-meal and cassava meal  used for cooking nshima were used for painting the head, face, and the body. There may also have been some white substances from trees in the bush that may have been used for powdering or painting the faces and bodies white.

The powdering that is happening from the Bemba of the Ngoni is to express and cement their mbuyaship during the mourning, funeral, and burial process. Next time there is a major death among the Bemba, the process of powdering will be reversed during which the Ngoni will powder the Bemba. The mbuyaship expresses love and solidarity between the individuals from the Ngoni and Bemba tribes that goes back to the 1800s. Whenever I have attended burials between we, the Ngoni and our cousins the Bemba in Lusaka during the last 50 years, the mbuyaship activities especially at the cemetery lighten the burden, the mourning and the burial process. The powdering injects some humor and lightens what is a deeply grieving occasion of mourning, loss of a loved one, and deep sadness. For those Zambians who may express concern that the powdering is ruining their clean clothes, face, and destroying their dignity, you should be aware that when Zambians attend funerals, the traditional custom is that they wear old used clothes for both men and women. To familiarize yourself with Zambian funeral customs, read Chapter 15 in my book “Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture (2012)” that describe funeral customs in Zambia.

Who can powder who during the Paramount Chief Mpezeni mourning and funeral? Only individuals who belong to the Bemba tribe can powder the Ngoni mourners. It is a serious taboo for anyone who is not a Ngoni or Bemba to powder a mourner or to participate in the mbuyaship. The powdering is never meant for random people to run around aggressively powdering, harassing, and physically assaulting others during mourning and the funeral process. You can see in the photo that Mr. Dickson Jere who is being powdered by a Bemba is smiling.

As I was scrolling through social media, someone raised the issue that powdering the face, the eyes and nose may cause harm from talc in the commercial store-bought powder. The powder may cause painful eye irritation. What if someone is asthmatic and has other bronchial allergies to commercial powder? I would strongly recommend people use the traditional breakfast or other maize mealie-meal, cassava meal, or traditionally pounded white mealie meal.

There should be some reasonable logical places where powdering should be done. It might not be appropriate to do it at the office at work during working hours unless there is prior acceptance, agreement, or arrangement. Afterall, the Ngoni Bemba mbuyaship often happens between individuals who know each other very well. In case of the coming funeral and any other funerals, powdering is often best done in the physical environment of the premises of the mourning house and the cemetery.

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, New York: Penguin Press, An Imprint of Pnguin Random House LLC, 385 pages, Hardcover, $30.00, Canada $39.99 (ZK577.48)

BOOK REVIEW

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Introduction

Since our evolution and migration from the African vast Savannahs a hundred thousand years ago, we humans or homo sapiens have been exceptionally good at not just survival but we have thrived.  Our young are born small, fragile, very dependent and vulnerable with an outsize big head. As we grow, we walk, learn speech, culture, and often do not reach full maturity and become fully grown responsible humans in all societies until the age of 25 when our frontal cortex of our brain is believed to be fully mature and functional.

Through all the ecological, environmental, and technological changes, we humans made sure teaching, raising them, and learning by our children was best done in the real world in groups with others. In fact not only communities and parents over thousands of years have identified best ways to raise our children, many psychologists like Jean Piaget for example, identified 4 stages of sequential human development; sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational which are driven by growth, maturation and experience. It was taken for granted that all this cognitive development happened in the real world. Something however happened two decades ago.

This reviewer is over 70 years old whose childhood goes back to 1959 growing up in the village in Zambia Africa.  He and perhaps billions of other people were enjoying growing up developing their 4 stages of cognitive development.

Fast forward to 2026. This reviewer just finished reading both the fascinating and alarming Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt argues in the book that since the evolution of human beings or homo sapiens over 100 thousand years ago in the plains of Africa, we survived because we raised our children outside in the natural real world and lived in very specific ways as communities. Children played together outside in the real world. Peers, parents, teachers, schools, and communities taught them social skills that eventually helped the children to become adults and become happy successful well-adjusted members of the communities. This pattern of childhood never changed much even during all the technological changes, especially after the Industrial Revolution in Europe that spread all over the world.

According to Haidt, the widespread introduction of smartphone cell phone technology changed drastically the experiences of childhood. There has been a serious rewiring of childhood. Perhaps millions of children have had exclusively phone-based childhood. “The most intense period of this rewiring was 2010 to 2015”. (p.4)

Haidt describes the four “foundations harms of the new phone-based childhood that damage boys and girls of all ages: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.” (p.114)

Haidt explains and devotes 385 pages of the substantial portions of the book articulating alarming details of the four  harms of the phone-based childhood. Towards the end, he recommends four urgent solutions: “First, No smartphones before high school. Second, No social media before 16, Third, Phone free schools Fourth, Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.” (p.290)

My reading of “The Anxious generation” happened at the worst or best time depending on your perspective. I flew ten thousand miles or 16 thousand kms to Zambia in Southern Africa. I lived in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia for a few weeks. I travelled by bus to the most remote villages of rural Africa in the Eastern province of Zambia. My observations, experiences. the verdict was the same: the cell phone is changing the lives of not only the young generation but even the normal everyday lives of adults seem to be severely disrupted. The reader probably thinks this reviewer is engaging in hyperbole or fear mongering, worst he is old and conservative. The reader may argue “Social media after all has never been so good and popular especially with the coming AI. Isn’t all this technology great?”

“The Anxious generation” suddenly provided me with answers to what I experienced in 2018 after I had been teaching undergraduate students for 41 years. When I walked into the class of 30 students, the class was quiet with everybody’s head down staring and swiping at their smartphones. Previously students would talk to each other and there was always noise before I started the class. I used to say: “Class can you stop talking! The lecture starts now!” This time I was saying: “Class put your cell phones away!” Students no longer talked or argued with each other during class when I raised an obviously provocative question. There was complete silence. I did not know how to explain the silence at the time.

One particular small class of 14 students surprised and disturbed me in 2018. During that semester, the students were always very tense, nervous, and anxious about nearly everything in class; tests, assignments, aspects of my lectures that I had successfully given for the previous 28 years. During the last day in this one particular class, 2 students actually were exhibiting signs of an emotional meltdown. I had not changed. I could not understand why all of this was happening to my students. Other faculty members at the time said the same things. They said the students were very anxious, depressed, and incurious.

According to Hardt, these are the serious symptoms of children who have been raised on cell phones while totally cut off from significant learning and socializing experiences of the real world. This reality ought to alarm everyone. But I am not sure if this alarm has happened or will happen at all in this environment in which nearly everybody seems seriously distracted by the cell phone technology.

I would recommend this book to everyone, even those who have extremely short attention spans, preferring 2-minute reads from social media. If we do not pay attention to and solve this existential threat or problem, most of the 8 billion people may seriously be in danger of extinction. We, the entire humanity, have never experienced or been confronted with this existential threat to the core of our very lives both as individuals and especially as societal groups.

January 23, 2026

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

When I enrolled as a freshman at University of Zambia in 1972, it was the best of times. The University of Zambia was the only new prestigious university in Zambia, a country of 4.5 million. The country had just obtained independence from British colonialism in 1964. Thousands of students from 113 high schools in the entire country sat for highly competitive exams in order to qualify to get spots into my small freshman class of 350 students. The academic competition was brutal. We exclusive enrolled students were the crème de la crème of the entire country. Although the entire small student body of 1500 had worked hard to get a university education, we felt a certain humility because the whole nation had paid for our free education. We were to be the future leaders of our country.

Although virtually all of us during the four years never lost focus on the hard work of obtaining a college degree, we created plenty of time for  social life of being young, playful and  sometimes engaged in fierce campus student politics. Toward the end of the academic year, something happened that changed my life. There was a concert on the campus graduation forum or mall during which students were milling around. This one guy was standing a few feet from me. He was wearing brown pants, a red shirt, and a black jacket vest. He had coke glasses. We walked toward each other and shook hands. We said we had seen each other during classes and in the large Lecture Theatre One lecture hall but never talked. We had small talk. We did not know at the time. That was the beginning of our deepest friendship to last our lifetimes.

The coincidence was that James Lutuli (not his real name) and I double majored in Psychology and Sociology. We took exactly the same classes every day for four long years. We walked to the campus dining room together after class. My room on the 5^th floor of Africa Hall was just down from his room on the ground floor of Kwacha Hall. We admired and unsuccessfully chased the same girls. We did not have any malice toward those girls because being rejected among us guys was very common. We talked and laughed so much most of the time we were together. We went to some of the best parties in the capital city of Lusaka on weekends. We both came from good but poor families whose parents were together. Since we students did not own cars, we often walked many miles at night back to campus after some of the parties because we could not get a ride. God must have created our deep friendship so that both our lives were like living in heaven on earth. Of course, we both had larger circles of many friends on campus.

When the Epstein files scandal broke out this year, President Trump admitted that he and Epstein had been very close friends for 15 years. But he says he did not know that Epstein was a pedophile or was sexually molesting 14- or 15-year-old girls. Who among the 330 million Americans believes his denials that Trump did not know what Epstein was doing? Do the 37% of Trump supporters still believe Trump’s denials?

If there are still Americans who believe Trump’s denials that he did not know that Epstein was a pedophile, I am here to tell you that if my best friend James Lutuli had been a pedophile, did drugs, robbed banks, was stealing, used vulgar language, assaulted women, I would have known about it. That is what happens when two people are best friends; they intimately know each other’s character. In addition, because you are best friends you are also likely to participate in whatever your friend is doing, good or bad. That’s what close friends do. If James Lutuli had been a bad or vile character, he would not have been admitted to University of Zambia. Neither would I have been friends or let alone best friends had he had such moral turpitude.

The Epstein Trump scandal only confirms what most of us have been aware of during the last 9 years since 2016; the Trump presidencies have forced Americans to live in a moral sewage. Besides the rapturing Epstein file scandal that appears to be the cherry on top of the moral sewage pie, there are some recent nuggets that really infuriate me. No one had lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits since the earliest government shutdowns in the 1990s. Because it never occurred to those past Presidents to starve people. But not with Trump. Trump decided they would cut SNAP benefits for 42 million people for no other reason than to maximize cruelty and human pain and suffering.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist Jane Goodall was known for her 60 years of studying chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park in East Africa, died on October 1, 2025. Her groundbreaking lifelong work debunked the myth that only human beings were capable of making tools. She died at 91 years old doing what she loved; giving speeches and talks about nature and advocated for wildlife conservation. But what impresses me the most is that her work helped burst the bubble that because we live in apartments and huge houses in cities, drive cars, and even have Ph. Ds and believe in our superior religions, that we are not animals. On the contrary, we humans are animals.

When I was five years old 66 years ago in the late 1950s, I lived at Chipewa Village in Lundazi district and also later in the Luangwa Valley in Eastern Zambia deep in the wilderness among wild animals night and day. We human beings even to this day behave just exactly like other fellow wild animals. This has become very apparent to me looking at dozens of videos of the horrible Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and abductions that are happening in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland.

The intimidating (ICE) agents wear masks to hide their identity, carry long guns, wear military fatigue, they are big muscular males just as lions look like in the wild. We ordinary Americans going around our everyday lives are the impalas, deer, wildebeests, buffaloes, antelopes, birds. Since the inauguration of the new President in January, word has rippled that ICE human lions were going to hunt, abduct, deport us to unknown countries, and some of us were going to die in the process. All of this was going to happen to our suspected fellow undocumented animal neighbors we have come to love.

What is happening is the classic predator and prey threatening and often deadly drama that happens in the wild. The Lion King in the White House Den has dispatched ICE human lions to hunt in Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles for undocumented human wildebeests, impalas, deer. American human animal citizens have been warned that ICE lions are roaming in the neighborhoods. We the animals have to go to the grocery store to buy food. We have to go to our animal church, to the doctor, animal parents take their children to school, they go to the courthouse to report to animal immigration. Some of the ICE lions are lurking around churches so they can pounce on the unsuspecting victims once prayers are over. Some human animals in these neighborhood are in hiding, living in hell, and in fear everyday as the ICE lions can stalk and pounce at one of us at any time night and day. The ICE lions are the kings of the jungle just when we Americans believed and thought we were civilized, above animals, and live by rule of law.  

One video clip from the South Side of Chicago validates that we are animals after all.  Two ICE lions had been stalking this rather large wildebeest human along the neighborhood street. The lions leaped out of their SUV and pounced on the lone unsuspecting human wildebeest. Cars were driving by. The wildebeest yelled for help in Spanish. There was a struggle and the wildebeest human fought for its life. The ICE lions grabbed him and dragged him toward their SUV. He was yelling for help and resisting. The ICE lions threw him to the ground and pinned him down trying to grab his hands and cuff him. He fought and resisted. A crowd of human animals gathered and were screaming epithets. “Let him, go!!!!” Cars were honking. The struggle continued as the hollering and screaming human male and female animals gathered around. The screaming, hollering, yelling got so loud, and the struggle was taking so long that the two ICE lions were spooked and run to their SUVs and sped off. The human wildebeest was bruised but was saved and would go home to his family to live another day.

The ICE human lions will never stalk or even attempt to attack the elephant rich who live in suburbs and red states cities. The ICE human lions look for the weakest and most vulnerable in poor black and Latino neighborhoods and cities. Once they slum to the ground and cuff these American human animal citizens, they can feast on the 143-billion-dollar ICE budget that ensures each ICE lion can earn thousands of dollars per day abducting American human animal suspected undocumented victims even though they have lived here for decades and have committed no crimes at all.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Souls of Teachers

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

I was 6 years old herding goats at noon on the edge of  Chipewa village 65 years ago in 1960 in the Eastern Province of Zambia in Southern Africa.

“Mwizenge!” Uncle Mzimphu called. “Take a bath and wear the school uniform your grandmother bought you. I am taking you to school.” Schools had been introduced in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in the 1920s.

I was very excited and nervous. My grandparents had been telling me for a while that I would go to school soon. The day had finally arrived. My uncle and I walked one and half miles or two and a half kms to Boyole primary school. When we reached about 50 feet or 15meters to the Sub A (Grade 1) classroom door, my uncle held my small hand. I could hear the students singing. My uncle knocked on the door. The teacher opened and my uncle let my hand go as I entered the classroom. The teacher Mr. Mbuzi directed me to squeeze between 5 students on one of the desks. The class had 40 students. It was a religious education class. The teacher resumed drawing a long, big snake on the blackboard as the students were singing.

 Teacher Mr. Mbuzi: Adam Adam

Class Response: Adam na Eva (Twice)

                           (Adam and Eve)

Class Response: Chinjoka cikulu cikamnyenga Adam,

                           Adam na Eva

                           (A big snake tempted Adam,

                             Adam and Eve)     (Twice)

Since that first memorable day in the village, I went to school for 20 years from first grade to secondary school, undergraduate, and up to completion of my Ph. D. in 1987. I taught college or university students for 41 years.

As millions of  the19 million Zambians and others in the whole world go to school everyday starting from nursery or kindergarten, primary, secondary schools, to colleges to universities, I ask myself: What has been best about my school learning experience? Who are the best teachers in my humble opinion? What are the best classes to take?

My learning experience in school debunked one of the most common myths; the belief that in order for students to learn best, boys have to have male teachers, girls must have women teachers, Zambians must have Zambian teachers, black students must have black teachers, white students must especially have white teachers. I must have been one of the luckiest students because I had teachers from many identities of the world. During the 20 years of my education, I had some of the best indigenous Zambian/African male and female teachers. I had teachers from Britain, United States, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Canada, France, Holland, Norway or Scandinavian countries, white and black, men and women teachers of numerous nationalities. The different English language accents of the wide variety of the teachers are what echo in my warm memories of them.

I found that learning in school was very exciting because the teachers and the new knowledge stoked my curiosity. During one cold but sunny morning at 9 hours, I was in my Standard 3 (5^th Grade) class. I was at Tamanda Upper School in June 1964. My geography Zambian teacher Mr. Phiri, who was as tall and slender as a giraffe entered the class. Students had nicknamed him “Interior” because when he taught European influence on African history he would always repeat: “Europeans could not penetrate the Interior of Africa!” His other nickname students gave him was njolinjo as he was so tall.

“Class!” he said as he adjusted his small glasses as a giraffe would on his nose on his small head. “Do you know that right now on this bright sunny early morning here at Tamanda, in another part of the world far away in Japan it is dark and midnight and people are asleep?”

My village classmates and I glanced at each other with bemused astonishment. I was instantly fired up and wanted to learn more and more.

I was able to build on the knowledge from my family and my Tumbuka tribe culture. Often, I kept some of the new school western knowledge separate and parallel from the knowledge from my indigenous Tumbuka tribe culture.

All teachers do their trained best to teach students skills and provide knowledge. This could be writing, science, technology, math, geography, history, reading, English literature, social studies, chemistry, and physics. Virtually all the best teachers share their souls with their students as they teach. This sharing of the soul, which is never in every teacher syllabus, is what philosopher Michal Polanyi would call the tacit dimension of teaching and learning. The soul is embedded in the personalities of the teachers.

I have numerous personal examples. This is why I am not too excited about replacing teachers with Artificial Intelligence (AI) or teaching Avatars because the souls the teachers share with students are very crucial and invaluable. The souls of the teachers perhaps provide the most significant essential part of creating our human lifelong important social bonds and connections that school and learning provide for both the students and teachers.

The classes you take as a student tend to be generic until later in high school and college when you take electives and choose majors. The electives you take in high school can change the trajectory of your entire future education and career. Never choose easy electives. 

When I was in ninth grade or Form III at the prestigious Chizongwe Secondary School in Zambia 56 years ago, I talked to Mr. Newton who was my white British teacher. I did not have much confidence yet although I was a smart or intelligent student. I told him I did not know whether I could do well if I took physics and chemistry electives because they were very hard.  “Mwizenge, yes take the two electives,” he said. “I know you can do well. You are a good student.” I would never have taken the crucial electives and made it to the highly competitive University of Zambia in 1972 and went on to get my Ph. D. That teacher, Mr. Newton, made such a difference in the trajectory of my education and my life.

Not just lukewarm interest, but passion in the discipline as much as possible must determine the choice of your major in college. Otherwise, it will be difficult for you to go to class for 4 years in a major in which you have no or minimal interest. Passion is what is going to drive you through the best and worst or most challenging times in the long four years you will be pursuing your undergraduate degree and perhaps beyond.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Numerous incidents happened in June during which mask wearing United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons were conducting raids apprehending suspected undocumented people in Los Angeles. Many of the people ICE targeted were not violent criminal suspects but day laborers at Home Depot, farm workers, children, street vendors and car wash workers. Some public protests happened against ICE raids with some limited violence in one city block near a Federal Building in the large city of Los Angeles of 500 square miles and 3.8 million people.

President Trump seized the opportunity to swiftly deploy 700 marines and 2,000 National Gurd troops. Two months later, a former young Dodge employee in his 20s was apparently assaulted at 3.00am in Washington, D.C. President Trump seized the event to deploy 800 National Guards to fight crime in D.C and to assist the mask wearing ICE agent goons to apprehend any suspected undocumented citizens walking the streets of D.C. who tend to be brown people.

One incident documenting the patrols in the fight against violent crime in DC caught my attention. A resident of Washington DC is shown on the pavement of the city block approaching two National Guards shouting at and berating them. The resident is seen wagging his finger at them when he suddenly hurled an object at the one National Guard troop that landed on the left side of his chest. The 2 guards gave chase as the suspect turned around, crossed the street and sprinted away as fast as he could as the two guards furiously gave chase down the block until they apprehended the suspect and cuffed him. When the report said the hurled object was a Subway sandwich, I could not stop my loud laughter with my chest rocking up and down. I felt awful that I could not stop laughing with tears in my eyes over the serious incident.

However, my laughter suddenly turned into utter dread and fear after watching the former Judge Jeanine Pirro of Fox News video clip. Jeanine Ferris Pirro is now President Trump’s Department of Justice Attorney for the District of Columbia who was bragging in the video clip that throwing a sandwich at law enforcement officers had earned the suspect going to jail. She further emphatically said the suspect was going to be charged with a felony which, if convicted, would earn him many years in prison.

This tragic news sobered me so much that I secretly schemed to save some money by earning some free food since I am a retired poor senior surviving on a limited social security income. I hatched a plan. The suspect was now nicknamed the Sandwich Slinger. The Trump DOJ hauled him to court and as expected charged the suspect with a felony. But the Judge released the suspect on bail under his own recognizance. The trial might be next month.

Since the suspect Sandwich Slinger was out on bail, I intended to travel to Washington DC and scout the Subway fast food places he likes to patronize. My friends and relatives who live in DC were in on the scheme. They texted and updated me on the suspect’s every move up to the last minute. The Sandwich Slinger would be purchasing a sandwich from the Subway fast food restaurant on 14^th Street downtown DC at 4:00pm Eastern Standard Time.

I quickly hopped on the Metro underground train, briskly walked 20 minutes and stood waiting fifty feet or 15.00m on the sidewalk next to the Subway Restaurant exit door. I could see through the glass doors that the suspect had just bought the sandwich and was coming out. He walked out about ten feet or 3meters when I suddenly jumped in front of him 20 feet or 6ms away.

“Hey!! Sandwich Slinger!!!” I growled at him. He froze.

“Hear you hurled a Subway Sandwich and hurt a National Guard!! You sun of a gun!! F bomb you F bomb your girlfriend and your mom!!! Explicative you!!” I wanted to really rile and piss him off. He uncorked the Subway Sandwich and seemed unsure whether to hurl it at me.

“Go!! Ahead!!!” I growled with my ugliest Clint Eastwood scowl with intense eyes, twitching nose, and quivering lips.

 “Make my day!!!” I growled angrily, jabbing my forefinger on my forehead. “I bet you can’t hit me with a man’s hundred mile per hour deadly major league fastball!! I bet you can’t  hit me with a  deadly strike right here on my forehead!!!” I angrily jabbed my forefinger on my forehead several times.

The suspect unwinded and angrily threw the 6inch or 152mm sandwich at my forehead. I snatched the sandwich out of the air with my quick reflexes before it could slam into my forehead and I took a swift bite at it.

“You just made my day!!!” I growled as I chewed, squinting with my Clint Eastwood scowl. “Make my day again!!!”

To my surprise, the Sandwich Slinger dashed into the Subway again and this time bought a 12inch or 304mm sandwich which he hurled at me again. I snatched it in midair again.

“Call the police!!!” the gathered crowd was now shouting.

Holding on to my 2 free subway sandwiches, I sprinted escaping to the Metro that took me to Manassas.  I jumped into my car and drove for 2 hours back home to Virginia  Shenandoah Valley. I learned on the evening news that the National Guard and FBI could not apprehend the suspects in the DC 14^th street Sandwich Slinger duel despite numerous 911 calls to the police from the public. The law enforcement officials were too distracted looking at the Epstein Files in the White House.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

I woke up at 3 am facing a star-studded sky under an open tent sleeping in my clothes surrounded by maize fields at a remote rural village farm in Africa. Dozens of other funeral goers around me were still sleeping. This was during a 3-day funeral wake and burial for my 84-year-old brother-in-law who had passed away a few days earlier after a long illness. This was near Muyayi in remote Chief Mwase Mpangwe in the Lundazi district in the Eastern Province of Zambia in Southern Africa.

My challenge that caused me anxiety in the wee hours is that I was supposed to be back in the capital city of Lusaka before sunset that day; a distance of 433 miles or 696kms or 10 hours of bus ride. If I missed my only bus ride, I risked losing my Service Apartment reservation and forfeiting my prepaid deposit. My 30-year-old nephew volunteered to drive me in his small car for 15 miles or 24Kms to the Lundazi-Chipata main road for me to catch the Lusaka bus at 4 am.

The 51 miles or 82kms of this part of the paved road was horrible. There were rough monster potholes all over the road. I had travelled on it by bus since 2012. I ask each time I ride the bus to get a seat near the front of the bus from the capital city of Lusaka. Would I be able to get a seat near the front of the bus this time going back to the city?

When I heard the loud sound from the distance in the pitch darkness and saw the bus headlights emerging, I raised my bright small one double AA battery Redline flashlight to the rapid flickering emergency mode, high above my head to draw the attention of the driver. I made sure the bright flickering flashlight was pointing to the ground because I did not want to blind the bus driver. The bus stopped as I rushed to the door with my backpack and carry-on bag.

“How far, Sir!” the young conductor shouted as he swung the door open.

“Lusaka!!!”

“Hurry Get in!! Go to the very back where the only empty seats are!!!” The Conductor tossed my bag in the bus undercarriage and slammed it shut.  The bus moved on.

“Sir! Can I get a seat near the front?” I asked the conductor again. “I get sick if I sit in the back!!!”

“Unfortunately, sir,” he replied. “There is nothing up front. You have to go to the back!!!”\

I knew then I was in deep trouble or even danger. I awkwardly sat down on seat number 27 as the bus swung and bounced my large stomach around for one minute. I quickly pulled from my 65 years of rural travel experience from 1960 when I was 6 years old and rode on the Central African Bus Services (CARS) when Zambia was Northern Rhodesia during British Colonialism. I travelled on some of the most primitive early dirt or gravel roads. I am now 70 years old.

First, I had to stand in the isle with my feet spread three feet or one meter apart. I leaned the small of my back and tail bone against one of the seats. The bus was wildly swinging side to side of the road and bounced up and down and suddenly braking avoiding deep lethal potholes. I remembered a page from the professional downhill snow skiers, including the famous Lindsey Vaun who often go at speeds of 60 miles per hour skiing on their two legs. When downhill skiers fly at that speed, they use the tendons around their knees as hydraulic springs with shock absorbers. I lowered my upper body by about half a foot and slightly bent my knees. My knees and tendons were now shock absorbers for my body.

I actively used my hands to hold on to the head seat rests in front and behind me. As I bobbed my head up and down, swung back and forth and sideways, I felt like the famous boxer Smoking Joe Frazer trying to avoid the barrage of swift dazzling boxing jabs from the Greatest boxer ever, Mohammed Ali.

The sick looking passenger in the next seat had his head hanging out of the window as he was vomiting. The six passengers being tossed around at the very back of the bus were having it the roughest. The many sudden numerous movements in virtually all directions would require expert explanations from the eminent Astro Physicist Neil de Grasse Tyson. My memories of kinetic, potential energy, and Newtonian Physics from my Grade 12 or Form V Physics class from 54 years ago in 1971 Chizongwe Secondary School, would not do enough justice to understand all the numerous physical traumatic movements and challenges I was experiencing all at once.

After two hours or 51 miles or 82 Kms after Mgubudu Stores, the bus suddenly was quiet and smooth riding. This silence was probably what Astronauts feel once their capsule breaks through the gravity barrier and becomes weightless.

I sat down with a huge sigh of relief. The rest of the bus ride for the next 382miles or 614kms or 8 hours was very smooth all the way to the capital city of Lusaka. The Zambian government needs to repave those 51 miles or 82kms part of the Chipata-Lundazi road which has been horrible since 2012 or during the last 13 years. Warning: Readers are strongly advised not to try to risk travelling like this if you are over 70 years old as it could be dangerous and perhaps even deadly

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Four decades ago, when I was in graduate school, the university assigned us a small two-bedroom married student housing apartment. As students with limited means, my wife and I furnished our small apartment with a small, nice rug, a 13-inch black and white used TV, a small rickety coffee table, and other knick-knacks we obtained from yard sales. My wife’s younger brother gave us a stereo record player with an amplifier, turntable, and two speakers. 

We arranged all these items on a small, short shelf and placed the small coffee table in front of the amplifier with the parental strategy that the small coffee table would block our 18-month-old toddler from messing with our cherished record playing musical system. He was just learning how to walk. Something astounding happened. The front of the amplifier had several knobs, dials, and some buttons.

To our surprise, our son waddled over to the front of the amplifier and leaned his tiny little elbows on the small coffee table. His tiny forefinger reached for a tiny quarter inch long round button that was sticking out of the amplifier and pushed it in. A small red light came on. He pushed it in and out and the red light went off. Before we could say no! no! no! my wife and I froze and realized that if that is all he did, his action was not harming the stereo. We let him do it. That was the start of the biggest obsession in the history of toddlerhood.

All day our son would wander through the small living room and walk back to the coffee table and push that button on and off. Sometimes he would leave the red button on and walk away, only to return thirty seconds later to turn it off. He would go to the corner and play with his toys. He would suddenly get up and walk to the coffee table to push the button. He did this all day for months on end.

This is what President Trump is doing with the tariffs red button. One day the tariffs are on and the next week they are off. Another day he threatens Brazil with 50% tariffs and China 145% tariffs. Then he drops the tariffs on some countries. He announces a deadline for raising tariffs and  when the day is about to come, and the stock market crashes, he drops the particular tariffs. Except the tariffs being pushed on and off are not the harmless toddler pushing of a stereo button. There is actual harm that might be happening to the markets, the American domestic business, and the world economy.

Everyone in America should realize that the way these tariffs are being turned on and off, the consequences of these erratic actions might be similar to the fate of the Titanic. We should be mindful that when the Titanic hit the iceberg, it took two hours and forty minutes to sink. I hope and pray I am wrong. The tariffs that President Trump is messing with daily, will perhaps take months before they hit American domestic businesses and us consumers. 

The country that sells goods to us does not pay tariffs. American companies initially importing consumer goods will try to absolve the higher costs because of the high tariffs in order to stay in business. This is what many companies and even small businesses might be doing right now. The businesses will eventually pass the costs to us consumers. Prices will then rise, and unemployment will rise as companies will lay off workers.

Some among us will argue that to address possible negative consequences of tariffs if applied recklessly to our economy is just fear mongering by democrats and libs until the impact hits everyone here at home. Meanwhile, according to the National Public Radio (NPR) report of July 20, 2025, Trump slapped 50% tariffs on one of the poorest and smallest countries in Africa and  the world. The news headline says: “’We are on our knees’: U.S. tariffs devastate Lesotho’s garment workers.” 

Prior to the tariffs Lesotho was called the denim capital of the world manufacturing garments for American consumers. The country had unemployment of 50% and now in addition up 40,000 workers might have to be laid off because of the Trump tariffs. Lesotho is 30,355 square kms (11,720 sq mi) and has a small poor population of 2.34million.

It seems nothing will deter President Trump from obsessively hitting on and off every day that tariff button, not even the Republican Congress. I have questions for members of (Make America Great Again) MAGA and the nearly 77 million who voted for Trump which was only 49.87% of the population, is this chaos and massive corruption we are living in now what you voted for? What about the 89 million Americans or 36% who did not vote, did your refusing to vote cause some of these terrible consequences?

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Introduction

My father was a teacher at Dzoole Primary School 30 miles or 48Kms along the Chipata-Lundazi road in Chief Chanje’s area in the Eastern Province of Zambia in Southern Africa. This was 60 years ago in 1965. I was 11 years old and in Grade 6 at Tamanda Dutch Mission Boys Upper Boarding School.

One day during the that August school holidays, my young 25-year-old dashing Grade Six English teacher Mr. Lyson Mtonga arrived near our house at Dzoole School riding his sports bicycle. He called and told me to tell my 2 older sisters that he was coming to visit them that evening after dinner. My oldest beautiful first-born sister, Kabuthu Tamara Mary Stella, was 18 years old. Her younger beautiful second born sister, Mwangata Christina Bridget, was 16 years old. Mr. Mtonga proposed marriage to my first-born sister Mary Stella. Both were teachers. They got married a few years later.

Some of the most exciting years of my Chizongwe Secondary School holidays were spent at Mr. and Mrs. Mtonga’s house when they were teachers at Chalumbe Primary School. This was 58 years ago from 1967 to 1970. Chalumbe School was located 25 miles or 40Kms along Chipata-Lundazi road. Mr. Mtonga exposed me to his hobbies which included listening to music because they had a gramophone in their living room with numerous records, bird hunting, photography as he owned so may cameras, and ballroom dancing. Among many features of his happy personality was his laughter, which everyone could hear as his laughter always echoed outside when he was in a house or in a room.

Death of Amulamu Brother-in-law

In February 2025, 55 years later as I am living in the United States, I received a phone call that my brother-in-law had been seriously ill for months. I talked to my sister Mrs. Mtonga. I talked to my brother-in-law who sounded weak. I promised him that when I returned to Zambia, I would play the Jim Reeves ballroom dance songs on my laptop computer. He and my sister could dance ballroom once again. We laughed. I had already planned to travel to Zambia before I received the alarming phone call.

I took the 18-hour flight from the United States to Zambia and arrived by bus in Chipata on Wednesday March 19, 2025. That evening, I went and visited the ailing Mr. Mtonga for about an hour and returned to my hotel. I had not seen him since 23 years ago in 2002. I was planning to return to Lusaka that next day on Friday when I got the fateful call from my nephew Gasion Banda. Mr. Mtonga had passed away that morning at Chipata General Hospital. I immediately changed my plans. I had to travel by bus to Mwase Mphangwe along the Chipata-Lundazi road to attend the funeral.

Next morning I went to the Chipata-Lundazi turn off where I got a lift. I had strict instructions to drop off at Muyayi bus stop which was 71 miles or 115 Kms from Chipata in Chief Mwase Mpangwe’s area. When I dropped at Muyayi at 4:00pm or 1600 hrs. Zambian time, the small bus station had a small shop. I saw a motorcycle with a young man calmly sitting beside it. He agreed to take me to Mr. Mtonga’s farm which was west of the road on a two-track gravel road which was surrounded in many parts with overgrown rain season grass.

Five minutes into the motorcycle ride, the young man was speeding when we flew high in the air and fortunately landed avoiding crashing.

“Hey!!!! Iwe!” I shouted. “Slow down!!!”

“Sorry bamdala (old man),” he responded. “I did not see that big bump”.

“Just take your time!! Be careful. I am in no hurry”.

We finally turned left through a small 2 track grassy road and arrived at the funeral. There were large fields of tall maize around the small brick house. I spotted a small tent shelter which had just been built. Women were drawing water. There were mourners sitting everywhere. I got off the motorcycle with difficulty as my legs felt cramped. I paid the young man.

The Funeral Wake or Nyifwa

I took my small carry-on bag and my backpack to the brick house where my bereaved sister was with women mourners. I joined the men mourners under the tent. Dinner was roller meal nshima with soy pieces as ndiyo or relish. We ate in groups of six men sitting on the ground around the nshima. I was very hungry. The meal was delicious, perfect, and just what I needed. We laid down on the ground tent to sleep. The women mourners were sleeping opposite us men with a huge bone fire roaring between us.

My niece brought me a thick blanket. I folded my night robe or sleeping gown and used it as a pillow. There was a huge roaring fire in front of us. When I laid down and faced the sky, I could see the beautiful moon and the twinkling stars all night. We talked and laughed all night. The mourning wailing or chitengeolo could be heard all night. There were church men and women’s choirs singing funeral songs all night.

An African culture textbook author Khapoya (2013) says: “Marriage is also conceived as a relationship between two extended families rather than just between a man and woman.”(p.24) Therefore, when a man and woman marry in African culture, it is not only the two people who marry but two large extended families marry and get to deeply know each other. For 2 days and three nights I met so many nephews, nieces, in-laws, and numerous relatives from Mr. Mtonga and Mrs. Mtonga’s large extended family members whom I would never have met had I not attended the funeral.

One moment will stand out for the rest of my life. As I was sitting in the tent with the flickering flames of fire when a man walked up to me.

“Mwizenge Tembo! I am Donald Ng’uni!!”

“I cannot believe this!!!” I yelled excitedly as I grabbed and vigorously shook his hand and slapped his back many times.

“Donadi!!!! You even have grey hair now!!” I was so happy to see him 56 years since 1969 when Mr. and Mrs Mtonga were teaching at Chalumbe School. We laughed and talked about the naughty things we did as children.

“You were a little younger,” I told him. “There was a young boy who was 14 years old about my age of 14 at that time. We loved each other so much. We were so happy together. We were always laughing. I was always excited and looking forward to being with him during the school holidays. One school holiday I arrived at the house and asked where the boy was. I was suddenly told he had passed away at his boarding school.”

“That was my older brother Kingswell.” Donald said.

“That was Kingswell Ng’uni your older brother?” I asked. “I must have forgotten. I cried and was so sad and missed him so much that whole school holiday. I miss him even up to this day.”

I was quiet for a while as the memories of his brother Kingswell flashed before my eyes. I was momentarily sad again. Donadi told me about all his troubles and struggles in life. He is married and had 3 grown children.

Mr. Mtonga’s body was driven from Chipata General Hospital to the farm that second night. More than 300 men and women slept around the huge bonfire. A few people slept in the few cars. Choirs sung all night. The next morning at 10 hours, the more than 500 mourners travelled ten miles or 16 Kms to the funeral church service. Burial took place at the village burial site for so many people who lived on many farms and villages in the area.

[I do not feel it is appropriate to put too many photos of the funeral on Facebook. If you belong or are related to these clans, you can ask me to send you the 48 photos I have from the funeral. I would advise you to download the photos and print them for your children to get to know many of their relatives and family members. Keep the history that way. These are not all the clans. Mtonga, Zimba, Tembo, Zerweck, Kabinda, Mayovu, Banda, Nyoni, Mpande]

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Introduction

There was an alarming story in the press two decades ago that many mothers in an east coast town in the United States were expressing frustration. They had had it. They did not know what to do. Their children had to participate in so many extracurricular activities after school. The multiple after-school activities included piano, soccer, football, basketball, ballet dance, violin, piano lessons, swimming, reading tutoring, and martial arts practice and lessons.

 Between rushing around and participating in these activities, the mothers had barely enough time to go through a drive through fast food restaurant window to grab some fast food which the kids quickly ate in the car as the mothers drove on to the next activity.

Once they arrived home late that evening, the kids had to do their homework before they went to bed. The families had no time to sit together to eat dinner. What was the solution? The town council apparently announced that everyone in the town had to pause what they were doing and go to the nearest restaurant and sit together to eat dinner between 6 and 7 pm. What does all this mean?

Most Americans including children live the so-called fast paced life in which they are multitasking; texting, talking on the smartphone, responding to ping notification sounds on their cell phone, anxiously checking email every few minutes,  scrolling through the social media to make sure they are not missing out, watching tik tok videos, driving, attending to five open windows on the lap or desk top computer, listening to music on the cell phone, playing video games, all at the same time 24 hours every day. 

On top of all of this, most citizens run around all day at a hectic pace from one activity to another including maybe 3 jobs and 18-hour days of stressful work either to pay bills or to maintain their rich lifestyle. Reports suggest that most Americans do not get the full eight hours of sleep. Since as recently as the 1980s, nearly everyone has no time to waste. How is this affecting our lives here in the United States?

Alan Lightman, In Praise of Wasting Time 

In a few 9 short pages of his first chapter, Alan Lightman, In Praise of Wasting Time, describes visiting a village in Cambodia in Asia. The women perform all necessary daily chores and tasks in a relaxed manner with no consciousness of time. The author describes how decades ago he used to wander through the woods and play around ponds wasting time as a boy before arriving home after school, while growing up as a child in the United States. He contrasts those bygone early days with his life now hyper connected to the grid in the digital world. Every moment from when he wakes up, he is wired to the loud, addictive, and intrusive world of the internet which does not give his mind and senses time to rest.

“If we are so crushed by our schedules, to-do-lists, and hyper connected media that we no longer have moments to think and reflect on both ourselves and the world, what have we lost? If we cannot sit alone in a quiet room with only our thoughts for ten minutes, what have we lost?” (p.7) He asks the reader so many questions in the first chapter.

Lightman’s main argument is that we need to return to some of the practices from the period before the technology of addictive hyper connectedness when we had time to waste. We need time to rest, play, unplug from the grid because we need that wasting of time for our minds in order to think, rest, and be creative. We need time away from the loud hustle to just rest our brains and minds. The 90-page book has 8 chapters in which he addresses such topics as The Grid, The Rush and the Heave, Play, The Free-Grazing Mind, Downtime and Replenishment, Chronos and Kairos, and Half Mind.

The Book Reviewer

The reviewer grew up in  Zambia or Africa in villages in Southern Africa 65 years ago in 1960. He now lives in America in the western developed world. He looks back and realizes the timeless life in the village that he enjoyed during his childhood was so precious and gratifying for the human soul. That lifestyle is characterized as Kufwasa among the Tumbuka people of the Eastern Province of Zambia. 

The introduction of British colonialism in the then Northern Rhodesia and the school introduced some significant social changes. But the changes were not enough to destroy the primordial lifestyle of living in a traditional village world of timelessness. There was resistance. He lived through rapid urbanization, westernization, and now the internet technological grid. That wasting of time in Zambia and elsewhere is slowly shrinking and disappearing. This applies to the world in general, including the rest of the Third World which used to be a bastion of resistance to the western rebuke and criticism of wasting time because of underdevelopment.

Lightman briefly explores the changing nature of attitudes to time in history and how wasting time is related to the most creative of the human minds, especially inventions. In discussing how the nature of time is different in the Third world, I was perplexed at how the author does not discuss or mention the nature of wasting time in the giant and largest continent, that is Africa. It has such a complexity of cultures and history of time.

Recommendation

I highly recommend this book if you want to explore and understand why our contemporary stressful lifestyle might be responsible for a wide range of social pathologies including psychosomatic illnesses, the lack of creativity among children, college students, and adults. Many people today experience high levels of depression, anxiety, suicide, divorce, dysfunctional families, political conflict, decline of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism, emotional stress, social alienation which causes loneliness, isolation, attention deficit syndromes among children, crime, being victims of war and violence, lack of attention for the poor, low incomes, and unemployment.

Alan Lightman, In Praise of Wasting Time, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, New Delhi: Simon & Schuster Publishers, TED Books, 2018, 90 pages, Hardcover, $16,99 (K403.80)

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

I grew up in a very normal family of a father, mother, 3 brothers and 6 sisters. This was in the social environments of rural villages of the Eastern Province of Zambia and urban areas in Southern Africa since sixty-five years ago in 1960. I played normally with both girls and boys as a child. I attended church and went to school. Although I had known them all those many years, one day something happened that was sudden as it was also stunning that changed my life forever: I discovered girls.

At the time I was living at Chalumbe School north of Chipata where my older sister and brother-in-law were teaching. Suddenly I noticed attractive girls everywhere I went. I began to think, talk with my friends, fantasize, and dream about them. I wanted to talk, hold, kiss, dance, have sex with them, and be in their company. These beautiful girls were 13 or 14 years old. When I sometimes  met them walking along the bush path, I would nervously greet them. They would shyly smile while responding and then they would giggle and run off laughing.

This was in 1968 and I was 14 years old at the beginning of my wonderful, exciting, powerful, and gratifying heterosexual adventure that was to last the rest of my life. After years of searching, meeting my wife at my age of 24, while both of us were in college at Michigan State University, was the most significant event in our lives. We got married at St Ignatius Catholic Church by a gay priest and we had 3 children. Both our families anticipated, celebrated, have enjoyed, and were supportive of our marriage. Do we give the same support to those in same sex marriages?

The biggest impact my parents had on my life is that they  taught us to have empathy toward others. This empathy has compelled me to ask questions during the 57 years in which I have greatly enjoyed the deep and emotional pleasure and privilege of enjoying my heterosexual orientation. I have always wondered about the emotional pain and misery the people who have other forms of sexual orientations endure about being denied the opportunity to enjoy their sexual orientations. Many religions call these orientations sinful.

Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgenders, Queer people (LGBTQ) include homosexuals, gays or lesbians who have the sexual attraction to someone of the same sex. Intersexual are people whose bodies (including genitals) have both female and male characteristics; Hermaphrodites is the original Greek term refers to intersexual people who have both female ovary and male testis; Transsexuals or Transgender are people who feel they are one sex even though biologically they are the other sex; Bisexuality is sexual attraction to people of both sexes. All of these millions of people have the same deep overwhelming sexual desire that heterosexual males who have sexual attraction to someone of the female sex and heterosexual female have the sexual attraction to someone of the male sex.

Why are all these people who are as human as we heterosexuals prevented from experiencing the joy, the sexually gratifying experiences that I and other heterosexuals have and take for granted? Many people believe there is a God who banished LGBTQ human beings, especially those who are homosexual, to this lifelong cruel perpetual misery of being ostracized and hated by society all their lives. Many experience depression, suicide, fear, anger, frustration, and anxiety because society has denied them the opportunity to enjoy their sexual orientation. This might be wrong. Social scientists estimate that nearly 10% of the American population may be either gay or belong to LGBTQ. This means an estimated 33 million Americans may be gay or LGBTQ. Many live quiet but miserable lives. There are those who live in 195 countries of the world that might be outside Western world who might wrongly believe that being gay is an exclusive attribute of western moral decadence. This belief may also be misguided because 10% of the global population of 8.2 billion or 820 million people may be gay or homosexual.

Sexuality is probably the most powerful instinct that influences and dominates our entire lives in a largely positive or sometimes negative manner depending on our social upbringing as human beings. As we enjoy the advantages of social equality, globalization, advocate for democracy, freedom, justice and the championing of human rights, let’s make sure we extend the same empathy to gays, those who are transgender and members of the LGBTQ. Let’s also extend to them the gift of love, respect, the dignity of inclusion, and kindness that we extend to every man, woman, and child who is heterosexual.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

I grew up in a very normal family of a father, mother, 3 brothers and 6 sisters. This was in the social environments of rural villages of the Eastern Province of Zambia and urban areas in Southern Africa since sixty-five years ago in 1960. I played normally with both girls and boys as a child. I attended church and went to school. Although I had known them all those many years, one day something happened that was sudden as it was also stunning that changed my life forever: I discovered girls.

At the time I was living at Chalumbe School north of Chipata where my older sister and brother-in-law were teaching. Suddenly I noticed attractive girls everywhere I went. I began to think, talk with my friends, fantasize, and dream about them. I wanted to talk, hold, kiss, dance, have sex with them, and be in their company. These beautiful girls were 13 or 14 years old. When I sometimes  met them walking along the bush path, I would nervously greet them. They would shyly smile while responding and then they would giggle and run off laughing.

This was in 1968 and I was 14 years old at the beginning of my wonderful, exciting, powerful, and gratifying heterosexual adventure that was to last the rest of my life. After years of searching, meeting my wife at my age of 24, while both of us were in college at Michigan State University, was the most significant event in our lives. We got married at St Ignatius Catholic Church by a gay priest and we had 3 children. Both our families anticipated, celebrated, have enjoyed, and were supportive of our marriage. Do we give the same support to those in same sex marriages?

The biggest impact my parents had on my life is that they  taught us to have empathy toward others. This empathy has compelled me to ask questions during the 57 years in which I have greatly enjoyed the deep and emotional pleasure and privilege of enjoying my heterosexual orientation. I have always wondered about the emotional pain and misery the people who have other forms of sexual orientations endure about being denied the opportunity to enjoy their sexual orientations. Many religions call these orientations sinful.

Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgenders, Queer people (LGBTQ) include homosexuals, gays or lesbians who have the sexual attraction to someone of the same sex. Intersexual are people whose bodies (including genitals) have both female and male characteristics; Hermaphrodites is the original Greek term refers to intersexual people who have both female ovary and male testis; Transsexuals or Transgender are people who feel they are one sex even though biologically they are the other sex; Bisexuality is sexual attraction to people of both sexes. All of these millions of people have the same deep overwhelming sexual desire that heterosexual males who have sexual attraction to someone of the female sex and heterosexual female have the sexual attraction to someone of the male sex.

Why are all these people who are as human as we heterosexuals prevented from experiencing the joy, the sexually gratifying experiences that I and other heterosexuals have and take for granted? Many people believe there is a God who banished LGBTQ human beings, especially those who are homosexual, to this lifelong cruel perpetual misery of being ostracized and hated by society all their lives. Many experience depression, suicide, fear, anger, frustration, and anxiety because society has denied them the opportunity to enjoy their sexual orientation. This might be wrong. Social scientists estimate that nearly 10% of the American population may be either gay or belong to LGBTQ. This means an estimated 33 million Americans may be gay or LGBTQ. Many live quiet but miserable lives. There are those who live in 195 countries of the world that might be outside Western world who might wrongly believe that being gay is an exclusive attribute of western moral decadence. This belief may also be misguided because 10% of the global population of 8.2 billion or 820 million people may be gay or homosexual.

Sexuality is probably the most powerful instinct that influences and dominates our entire lives in a largely positive or sometimes negative manner depending on our social upbringing as human beings. As we enjoy the advantages of social equality, globalization, advocate for democracy, freedom, justice and the championing of human rights, let’s make sure we extend the same empathy to gays, those who are transgender and members of the LGBTQ. Let’s also extend to them the gift of love, respect, the dignity of inclusion, and kindness that we extend to every man, woman, and child who is heterosexual.

White Mulantwishika Phiri, The Conflict Between Alice Lenshina Mulenga and 1964 Government, Lusaka, Zambia Educational Publishing House, 2021, Paperback, K110.00 ($4.00).

BOOK REVIEW

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Introduction

A large, excited ululating crowd had gathered and created a circle in the middle of Seleta village in Chief Magodi’s area in the Lundazi district of the Eastern Province of Zambia. In the middle of the large circle was a famous figure. I was 6 years old, and I was anxiously moving around the outer edges of the standing crowd trying to have a glimpse of the famous figure. Hundreds of adult legs were blocking my view and the view of many of us children as I tried desperately here and there to see. I failed to see the famous figure. The figure was Elesina or Lenshina as us the Tumbuka called her. The figure was Alice Lenshina Mulenga. This was in 1960 when she was touring her congregations, including at my father’s Seleta Village where converts had built a Lumpa Church Temple.

In August 1964 I was 10 years old. My family lived at Dzoole Primary School north of Chipata. My father, mother, brothers, and sisters were worried. There was tension, sadness and anxiety in our Tembo family of 9 children. For days we did not know whether we would see our second oldest 15-year-old sister Christina alive. For days there was news on the radio and many rumors that a religious war had broken out in our home district west of Lundazi including my mother and father’s Chipewa and Seleta villages. Over a total of six hundred people in our two villages alone may have been burned in their grass thatched houses, killed, and massacred. Our sister Christina at the time was attending Kanyanga Catholic Girls Mission Boarding School which was right in the heart of the religious war. That school was about ten miles or 16Kms. from our two villages. The tension was unbearable as we waited every day for what seemed like days on end. My sister came home barefoot, haggard with the only dress she was wearing. The Northern Rhodesia army had fortunately evacuated her school.

Excitement about the book

These are the reasons why since August 1964 61 years ago, I was very excited recently to buy the book: The Conflict Between Alice Lenshina Mulenga and 1964 Government. Even though I have read a book John Husdson, “A Time to Mourn: A Personal Account of the 1964 Lumpa Church Revolt in Zambia”, 1999, and I have gained some information about the Lumpa Church civil war over the years, there are still so many things I do not know or understand about that deadly Zambian civil war.

The book: The Conflict Between Alice Lenshina Mulenga and 1964 Government opens the very first sentence in Chapter One in a simple, plain, but dramatic way. “Alice Esther Mulenga died at 18:00 hours Zambian time on 24^th October 1953 at Kasomo village of chief Nkula, Chinsali District, Northern Province of Zambia”. (p.1) The book goes on to describe how she resurrected from the dead in front of her grieving mourners. She then reported that she had received instructions from God and Jesus Christ. This is Alice Lenshina Mulenga’s dramatic beginning of perhaps the most influential spiritual and religious leader in Zambia in her short 25 years of life.

The book describes how Lenshina from her small modest Kasomo village established very strict moral and religious edicts as she successfully built the Lumpa Church that eventually had thousands if not at least a million followers. She had followers and congregations in the Northern Province around Chinsali, Luapula Province, Lundazi in the Eastern Province. Eventually she had followers in Livingstone, Lusaka, and all the way to the Copperbelt towns. 

Historical Foundation

The historical foundations of the leadership of the Lumpa Church and the politically vital United National Independence Party (UNIP) in Zambia’s fight for independence from British Colonialism was deeply embedded in Chinsali in Chief Nkula. “The former Vice President Simon Kapwepwe and Alice Lenshina Mulenga were grandchildren of the great Chief Nkula, where also the first President of the Republic of Zambia Dr. Kenneth Kaunda was found among them as grandchildren of Chief Nkula”. (p.29)

This is among the many fascinating details of the rise of Alice Lenshina and how she was so closely related to the two influential UNIP and other leaders in the struggle for independence: Kenneth Kaunda and Simon Kapwepwe.  She even blessed them as they moved forward in the struggle against colonialism.

What started the Civil War?

What ignited the worst deadly religious civil war in Zambian history in August 1964? The civil war started with conflicts between competing and clashing demands of the members of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) and members of  the Lumpa Church. What may have started as personal individual disagreements between individual Lumpa church and UNIP

members escalated to beatings, killings, arson, violence, revenge murders and civil war. Alice Lenshina and her top leadership escaped to Angola. Thousands of Lumpa followers fled to seek refuge across the Congo or Zaire border. The new independent UNIP Kaunda government apprehended Alice Lenshina in Angola and put her in detention without trial for many years. She was released in Lusaka with restrictions. She died in 1978.

Book Strength

This book is very useful for Zambians or anyone who already had some knowledge about the tragic religious civil war in Zambia in August 1964 just as Zambia was gaining her political independence. I personally learned from the book as it answered some of the questions I had about Alice Lenshina and the deadly war between local UNIP members and her Lumpa church members. For example, I never knew that Alice Lenshina, President Kaunda, Simon Kapwepwe, and UNIP leadership together tried very hard to stop the fighting and establish peace in the villages in the affected areas. There was tremendous human suffering and death both in the villages and in the bushes many people had escaped to in fear and many died of hunger and illness  in the bush.  The book does describe the disintegration of the Lumpa church after the civil war. I had heard so much in my own villages about “Zione” and “Kamtola” and how some of my relatives had converted and gone to join the church at Kamtola at Zion. Survivors returned to my villages and quietly resettled.

Famous Hymn

There is a famous Lumpa Church hymn that we used to sing that I have always remembered from childhood. The beginning was:

Leader: Natulongane wonse!!!!

Congregation: Natube bana bacine………

But over the last 65 years since 1960 when I was 6 years old, I had forgotten the rest of the lyrics. I was relieved when I was able to sing again and complete the rest of the hymn as the author was able to reproduce all the lyrics of the hymn.

Natulongane bonse tube bana bachine twiba ngabalwani balya balechusha imfumu

Nefwe ngatwalishuka mulwani alipimpa

Aletufumya kuli tata

Translated:

“Let us meet together Faithful children, we should not be like Enemies who made the Lord suffer.

We are lucky Enemies are still following to separate us from God, Amen!”

The regrets I have are many.  I wish I could read the findings of the commission of inquiry into the Lumpa church and the civil war. I wish I could read it as I am sure it is at the National Archives in Lusaka. I wish I had already been trained on how to conduct research in the 1960s and 70s; I would have been able to interview President Kaunda, Simon Kapwepwe, and Alice Lenshina to find out exactly what happened.

Criticisms

This book reviewer is  a highly trained expert who has faced, and continues to face, the difficult challenges and agonizing circumstances for conducting meaningful research in Zambia and publishing books for 45 years ago since 1980. I am reluctant to spend too much energy dwelling on the criticisms of the book. There are many things that could have been done better. Sixty-seven pages is too short. Doing some of those things would challenge and require whoever the critics are to carry the button from the book author to conduct deeper research themselves in 2025 in order to answer more questions that arise from the book.  But I am thankful that I have knowledge that I did not know before I read this book. I am very grateful to the author Mr. White Mulantwishika Phiri and the publishers.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Pa 25 January 2025 nkhaluta ku town ya Richmond kuno ku Virginia ku United States of America. Nkhaluta na kunjira mu Lewis Ginther Botanical Garden. Sono nkhayowoya vyose ivi nkhaona mukati. Kwene ici nkhufumba nchakuti kasi tingapanga botanical garden uko ku kaya ku Lundazi? Nanga mu Lusaka?

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Pa 25 January 2025 nkhaluta ku town ya Richmond kuno ku Virginia ku United States of America. Nkhaluta na kunjira mu Lewis Ginther Botanical Garden. Sono nkhayowoya vyose ivi nkhaona mukati.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Since I came to the United States 48 years ago in 1977 to graduate school at Michigan State University to pursue my master’s degree in Sociology, I have lived away from members of my family in Zambia in Southern Africa. I lived 8,000 miles or 13,000Kms, and 18 hours flight from my family members. The cheapest round trip air ticket ranges from $1,200 to $2,000.00 or  K32,000.00 to K54.000.00 by today’s Zambian Kwacha. Work schedules were very demanding. The painful regret I have had to live with the rest of my life is that it has been impossible for me to visit the sick, attend weddings and funerals of close family members and childhood friends. It was most painful during the era before the cell phone. Because I was lucky to even receive letters 6 weeks later informing me about some significant events. Buying postage stamps was too expensive for many of my relatives.

The funerals over the years that I could not attend were my mother Enelesi Kabinda in 2018, my nephew Victor Mayovu, my uncle JJ Mayovu, my aunt Mrs Rosemary Nya Zghovu, my niece Dora Mayovu, my sister Mwangata, Christina, Bridget, Mrs Zimba, numerous nephews and nieces, and close friends such as Mike Moono and my dearest friend Dr. Vincent Musakanya who passed away in UK in 2019.

I received a phone call in February from one of my adult nieces, Mable, that my 84-year-old brother-in-law Mr. Mtonga was very ill. In fact he had been sick for months and was bedridden. My 78-year-old sister Stella was nursing him at home. I talked to my brother-in-law. He sounded frail as I could barely hear his voice on the phone. To cheer him up I said I would bring him some music so that he and my sister could dance ballroom once again next time I saw him.

He and my sister loved to dance ballroom to Jim Reeves; they danced the twist to the Beatles music when they were a young dating couple in romantic love in the mid-1960s when I was 11 years old. My promise would have been empty promises except that since I retired, I had already planned a prior visit to go home to Zambia to visit relatives especially my father who is 105 years old. I kept praying that my brother-in-law would still be alive when I arrived in Zambia the next month.

Zambian and African marriages are not only a union of a man and woman but a union of two extended families. This is what I loved the most when I was growing up. When Mr Mtonga and my sister married, they created a spectacular home where all the young relatives from both sides of the family  assembled and lived. Since they had a large stereo record player in their small 2-bedroom home, I was introduced to music, ballroom dance, and Rhumba dance. I was introduced to photography as a hobby. I had warm memories as a 14-year-old spending time at their home during school holidays from Chizongwe Boys Secondary Boarding School from 1967 to 1970.

The moment of visiting with Mr. Mtonga finally arrived after my two months of prayer and anxious anticipation. My sister took 6 of us close relatives into his bedroom. I was both relieved and shocked to see his physical state. He was laying down on a mattress with blankets and other covers around him. He was half propped up with pillows and cushions. He was not the vibrant Mr. Mtonga I had last seen 23 years ago in 2002. He was small and emaciated. He smiled with his white sparkling eyes when our eyes met. I shook his hand and clasped it for a while. I talked about my long journey from the United States and my fond memories of him at Chalumbe Primary School where he and my sister had been teachers.

There was no time to waste. I had bought the 3 CDs boxset of his most favorite music to which he and my sister had danced ballroom; country singer Jim Reeves. I had downloaded over a hundred songs to my laptop.

I whipped out my laptop and played the first song: “Distant Drums”, then “Guilty”, “He’ll Have to Go.” “Welcome to my world”. As he heard each song, his lips moved, his face brightened. I could see his mind and brain grinding to warm memories from 58 years ago. This was such a joy to see and witness. I suddenly had an exciting idea. 

As the 6 relatives were chatting with commentaries, I asked my 78-year-old sister to dance ballroom with me as her husband watched. My sister was wearing a bright yellow top and skirt. This is how my 78-year-old sister danced ballroom with me her 70-year-old little brother. We danced to Jim Reeves’s “I can’t stop loving you” for 3 minutes. Mr. Mtonga beamed with excitement and looked like he wanted to stand up and dance. I took photos of Mr. Mtonga and my sister as they sat together as my sister muttered proudly: “This is my husband.” We left as Mr.Mtonga looked tired. He was like a baby who had had too much excitement for a little too long.

The following day at 1400 hrs. or 2:00pm, I got a cell phone message that my brother-in-law Mr. Mtonga had been rushed to the Chipata General Hospital emergency room where he had passed away peacefully at 9:00hrs or 9:00am. I began to cherish my last moments with him. As days passed, I began to think, “Did I contribute to his death when I helped create a moment of so much joy and excitement in him during what turned out to be his last precious hours of life?” What do you think?

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

(Warning: The last part of this column channels the Martin Short character Ed Grimley of Saturday Night Live (SNL) television series in the United States in the 1980s)

After 16 exhausting hours from Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C, the excitement of the final descent to Lusaka Kenneth Kaunda International Airport in Zambia in Southern Africa is overwhelming. It is hot and the rainy season is steaming humid outside the airport terminal. I chat with the taxi driver who is taking me to the Rnbnb or Serviced Apartment across the city. The bill boards have large photos of Zambia’s six deceased Presidents over the last 60 years of Zambia’s independence from British colonialism in 1964. This is reflection of Zambia’s fortune of having a robust peaceful democracy devoid of deep violent and deadly political scandals, coups, and other national political tragedies.

Jet lag is no longer a minor inconvenience that lasts maybe only two days at the author’s age of 70. I needed to recuperate in my apartment for a few days before taking the challenging and grueling 753Kms. or 467-mile bus trip to the village in the remote district of Lundazi in the Eastern Province of Zambia. Each time I visit my 105-year-old father, I rightly have a well-founded fear it might be my last visit to see him alive. It is such a great rare privilege for a few people in Zambia let alone in Africa and the Third World countries.

I arrive at the bus terminal on Freedom Way at 3:30am as the bus was departing at 4:00am. Unfortunately, the bus had only 7 passengers for a 50 passenger capacity bus. So last minute the bus company used a taxi driver to quickly whisk us to board another bus that was going to Lundazi at the main massive Intercity Bus Terminal. Once we arrive there, we were quickly lead through a maze of over 50 buses that were departing and some arriving from all parts, towns and cities of Zambia

After 12 grueling hours, I arrive in Lundazi. After all the passengers had claimed their bags, I could not find mine. My bag was lost. But how? The bus conductor said he had just received a cell phone message. Another disembarking passenger 80 miles or 128kms earlier at Kaulembe bus station had mistakenly offloaded my bag because the size and color were very similar to hers or his. My bag would be brought to me the following day. How could I lose my bag in tiny rural  remote town Lundazi?

How could I explain this to anyone? I had travelled and flown for more than 50 years or may be since I was 10 in 1964 when I first travelled by bus going to boarding school. I had never lost my bag. I now wish my bag had been lost while I was flying between Los Angeles, New York, London, Zurich, and Casablanca or may be between New York and Abudabi; Flying between exotic places except travelling by bus from Lusaka to tiny remote Lundazi. All my bathing stuff and change clothes were in my bag.

During the night at the Lundazi Castle Hotel, I had nightmares about my missing bag. What If I just never got it back? There were so many irreplaceable items in it.

The following day, the young Billie bus officials happily gave me back my bag. I rushed to my hotel room and first placed my bag in the middle of the room and stared at it. It was all intact. This is when the Martin Short character Ed Grimley took over in my excitement. I jumped around my hotel room with joy.

“I am so excited to get all my stuff including my electric shaver and vlogging camera. I am feeling so mental with sheer joy!! But what if I opened the bag and there was nothing but a huge stone in it? I would be so sad. But if I found all my stuff intact, I would be so thrilled!! I would take three baths and change my now stinking underwear. Maybe I should not open the bag until the morning so that I would not be disappointed. But then I would not be able to sleep just thinking about what could be inside the still locked bag. What if the person carefully picked the lock? What if nothing has been stolen? What did the person who got the bag by accident think? Was he or she tempted or not tempted to open it? Were they afraid of witchcraft? Maybe they thought it was a sting operation from the bus company and the Zambia police and American President Trump’s FBI? I would like to meet the person who had my bag for 12 hours? What was in their bag that they left with the bus?”

I was relieved and glad when I opened the bag that everything was there and untouched. Have you ever lost a bag while traveling?

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Once I arrived by bus in Lundazi recently, I faced a special challenge. The bus station was being renovated. So, the entire area was blocked off. No one was allowed to walk through to the shopping center and market. You had to walk all the way around Tigone Motel and Castle Hotel to get to the Shops and Market. After asking around, I was told there was a short cut. I was shocked that it was very narrow. I was nervous and anxious. The local Lundazi people were just walking through it with no thought. I stood there for a few minutes. Would my big fat American body walk through? What if I got stuck and they had to contact the police to use a crane to extract me? I was relieved when I was able to walk through without having to twist my body sideways to walk through like nkhara or a crab. Most if not all Zambians are so slender or slim.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

After flying for 16 exhausting hours from Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C, the excitement of the final descent to Lusaka Kenneth Kaunda International Airport in Zambia in Southern Africa is overwhelming. There is the slight jerk of the plane’s initial thud of spinning tires first kissing Zambian soil and a whiff of twirls of brief blue smoke from the tires’ initial contact with the tarmac. I look at both sides of the runway. It is the rainy season, plush green in contrast to the dead brown bare trees in hibernation in the especially brutal winter in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The thrill of arriving at my childhood home never gets old.

The next week, I travelled for 11 grueling hours by bus to my home village in the remote provincial town of Lundazi in the Eastern Province. I was visiting my 105-year-old father. My mother passed away in 2018 at the age of 88. Arriving by taxi to this village through tall grass with non-existent roads to the end of the world is testimony to the power of family and love. I am 70 and grew up in the village as a 6-year-old 65 years ago in 1960.

My village has over 300 men, women, children, young and old residents. According to our Tumbuka tribe traditional kinship relationships and clans, I am agogo or grandfather to most of the children. A dozen of the children 6- to 8-year-olds gathered curiously to greet and see agogo ba ku America (grandpa from America). I told them to go and get some red clay from the anthill so that we could do something I did when I was a child a long time ago in 1960. We used to mold figurines of people and animals, I told them. The children looked amused.

“I will mold and show you a wheel for the first time!” I said. “Since there are no wheels anywhere here in the village, in Lundazi, in Zambia, and even in America. There are no wheels anywhere in the world!!” Since the children attend Boyole School, one of them raised his hand with a smile as if in a classroom.

“But grandpa from America, you must be blind,” he said. “My uncle just rode his bike to Nkhanga shops. The bike has two wheels!!”

The children laughed. The kinship relationship expects and endorses grandpa and grandchildren to have often brutal teasing and joking banter going back and forth.

“You listen to me!!!” I barked. “I am telling you there is no wheel. I am telling you because I am a professor and a genius from America. I will arrest you now for defying me the genius.”

I proceeded to make small strips of tiny fiber from the chiyombo tree bushes. I was going to use them just as plastic handcuffs, also known as flex cuffs. The children fled into the bush laughing.

This is parallel to the unfortunate fate of Trump’s tariffs. Why reinvent the wheel when the negative impact of tariffs have been well known since Adam Smith’s  “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776 which is 249 years ago?

Every newly elected President has the right to try to implement their own new policies. But they have to be done and planned in a proper way. Signing hundreds of executive orders does not replace carefully crafted good legislation passed through Congress. After a hundred days, we are all waiting like the passengers of the doomed Titanic, for the devastating impact these tariffs will have on the economy and our everyday lives.

Over the last 249 years and even since I took an Econ 100 class as a sophomore 51 years ago at the University of Zambia in 1974, the negative impacts of tariffs have been well known; increased consumer costs, reduced economic competition, long term economic decline, and trade wars in which other countries retaliate. One wonders why Trump and MAGA supporters would describe tariffs as beautiful? Paul Krugman the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, was discussing   the negative impacts of tariffs this morning on National Public radio.

The stubbornness and recklessness with which these tariffs are being implemented guarantees only that Trump will stay in the news every single day during the next four years. There won’t be any meaningful benefits. Congressional Republicans and MAGA faithful will continue to support these policies even though they will hurt even the very Trump political supporters and voters. These are probably the 39% in the opinion polls who still think his performance as President during the first 100 days is excellent. The nation is living in the Twilight Zone.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Fifty-four years ago, in December 1971 barely 7 years after Zambia obtained independence from British colonialism in 1964, 65 students and I graduated from the then Form V and now Grade 12 from the historic prestigious Chizongwe Secondary School in Chipata in the Eastern Province of Zambia. Each member of that graduating class scattered all over Zambia, Africa, lived in Europe and the rest of the world. There were no periodic class reunions during those 54 years so that we could have found out how the members of class’s lives had turned out. Through word of mouth, some occasional phone calls and letters, random encounters, we kept track of some happy uplifting achievements, training, marriages, job advancements, travel, tragic events in lives, and deaths of members.

After my being a lecturer or Professor at Bridgewater College in the United States for 31 years, I retired as Emeritus Professor of Sociology in 2021. Each time I called my classmate Ben, he kept saying: “Just a few of us of the 65 are still alive today in 2025.”  That’s when it hit me: “What would happen if some of the few of us met in Lusaka?” The idea was so thrilling, it kept me awake for weeks.

I had to choose the venue where we could meet. We could have met at one of the restaurants in numerous glamorous shopping malls. But I wanted us to meet at one of the old Lusaka historic venues where some of us had great times during our young days in the 1970s: The Ridgeway Hotel. But I did not know the new name of the hotel until I used my cell phone to book a taxi on the Yango app. Cell phones did not exist in the 1970s. The hotel is now the Southern San Ridgeway. I was so glad they kept part of the old hotel name.

I had so many great but also terrifying fantasies about the meeting. What if the four guys did not show up? What if some of them were ill and in wheelchairs and could barely speak? We were all in our seventies. The moment had finally arrived. It was now Friday March the 7^th 2025, two minutes to 11:00 hours rendezvous time as my taxi pulled up to the Ridgeway Hotel.

I had not bothered to make a reservation. I walked through the lobby towards the old cocktail lounge I remembered so well. I was stunned when no one of the hotel staff stopped me to say: “Sir! You cannot go to this side unless you have a reservation.”

“Tuyuni!!!” I said to myself in my Tumbuka mother tongue language. “The Birds!!!!” I said to myself in English.

The nostalgic memories just gushed in my mind. There is a pond with matete river reeds in it with beautiful yellow and black colored noisy mpheta birds weaving nests. This is the cocktail lounge location where I had great times with my friends in the 1970s. I sat down at a table for four on the edge of the pond. 

My phone rang. Mike said he was just driving around the corner at the Lusaka Civic Center. I was so happy and relieved. They were coming. Michael Ngulube walked in. I hugged him with a big laugh. Then it was Ben Kalinda, Ruskin Jere, and Kennedy Ngoma. The excitement was over the brim and put us all on cloud nine. We could not stop talking and laughing. It was memory after memory and we existed in timeless moment. The waiters asked if we wanted drinks. I was hardly surprised that none of my classmates asked for beer. To think that we used to drink like fish. The last time I had a beer was maybe 25 years ago in two thousand and I did not even enjoy it. We ate a delicious buffet lunch.

After five hours, we had talked and exchanged so much. Effron Lungu had passed away who had once been Minister of Foreign Affairs in President Sata’s administration. Abdul Munshi had passed away. He was our Zambian classmate of Indian parents. Munshi was a Kwacha Hall or resident roommate of the current Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa in the 1970s when some of our classmates were students at University of Zambia. We talked a great deal about our towering figure Headmaster Mr. J. S Mei who was classified as a colored South African. We greatly admired and respected him. We greatly missed our classmate Charles Kateketa, probably one of the most intelligent, humorous, socially gifted, and witty of our class. Many of the 65 have died.

We did have some time to talk briefly about just some of our great career achievements and especially about challenging and overcoming European anti-African or anti-black racism. We had all passed so many tough major formal examinations during our schooling lives. It was not surprising that all of us achieved great heights in our professions.

·       Ben Kalinda was an aircraft maintenance engineer with Zambia Airways in the 1980s. He is currently: “Non-Destructive AirCraft Engineer” who is most qualified in Africa, Asia, and South America.

·       Ruskin Jere was Managing Director of Microfin Africa which is a subsidiary of Africa Banking Corporation in Africa. He retired in 2013 and now does some consulting.

·       Michael Ngulube was first a “Beer Taster at Zambia Breweries” who ensured quality control  of the product.  After working at Zambia Breweries for 20 years, he retired as an assessor of “Brewing Raw Material” using his Chemistry technical knowledge.

·       Kennedy Ngoma retired after being Ancince Maritime Internationale (A.M.I) Projects Manager; CACITEEX Logistics Zambia Limited Operations Manager. He currently owns his own company as Managing Director Trading and Transport Logistics Company: Sodizam Solutions.

·       Mwizenge Tembo is Emeritus Professor of Sociology after teaching or lecturing at Bridgewater College in the United States, at the University of Zambia, being a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies of the University of Zambia. He has worked in academia and universities for 41 years.

If you were a Zambian among a population of 3.5 million people at independence in 1964, we were very excited, optimistic, and euphoric. Because suddenly we had social equality,  freedom of movement, speech, and tremendous economic and educational opportunities became available after we completed From V. Zambia was facing many major problems at independence especially great expectations for development; education, transportation, health, natural resources, agriculture, employment, mining sector, housing, democracy, self-governance, freedom, challenges of tribalism and the country’s political unity, independence for neighboring countries which were still under the oppression of racist white or European colonial rule such as Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Mozambique, Angola, South Africa.

All the five Chizongwe Secondary School graduates were ten to 14 years old at Independence in 1964. There were millions among the 3.5 million who had been born in the 1950s who were 10 to 15 years old. What is the significance of this fact?

The population of Zambia is 19 million. Zambians who were born in 1995 and are younger than 30 years old may be about 70% of the population which is about 13.3 million young girls, boys, women and men. The five Zambian old guards are part of  the small remaining population that worked very hard and benefited from Zambia’s original education policies which aimed at filling  skilled manpower positions during the first 27 years of development after independence in 1964. There was a severe shortage or lack of Zambian skilled manpower immediately after independence.

And yet those who are over 65 years old are only 2.4% which is only 456,000. Therefore, there are fewer elders and old guards today in Zambia who are the Chizongwe group’s age of 70 years or more to teach younger people about what were some of our and the country’s struggles, challenges, successes and triumphs and experiences during the first 27 years of our independence from British colonialism.

by Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

I have been taking photos for 57 years since 1967. My father bought be a cheap plastic camera while we were at Kasonjola Primary School in 1967. To day I found this beautiful lovely photo. This is my niece Alice, the first-born daughter of my first-born oldest sister Mrs. Mtonga. Alice was probably about 3 years old while visiting my mother, Alice’s  grandmother Enelesi Kabinda. My grandmother has just given Alice a bath. My late mother’s other names were a NyaNthula or a Mphikira Nkhondo. My mother is in the back ground cooking. On her back is my 8^th born younger sister Theresa or Anyina Gasion Banda. This was 55 years ago in 1969 or 1970 at Kasonjola Primary School north of Chipata along the Chipata Lundazi Road. The other two are children I have encountered duirng my long Freelance photography as a public service.