Category Archives: General

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

We are only fourteen days from the terrible Paris attacks in which 130 people were killed and scores wounded. Before that, suicide bombings in Beirut had killed 43 and wounded 239. Two days before the Paris attacks, Boko Haram in Nigeria had killed an estimated 60 people and wounded hundreds in suicide bombings. There is heightened anxiety and vigilance about whether these terror campaign bombings and shootings will hit the American streets. One can ask the question: “What should we have Thanksgiving for when we are living with so much terror, death and war?” Where is God?

This is what we should characterize not as the fog of war but the fog of life. The most troubling memories from those who survived the immediate aftermath of the total destruction after nuclear bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan to end WW II, was not just the utter devastation itself the likes of which no one had seen before. But it was the aimless wandering of survivors as there were no other human beings in sight to help the wounded survivors and the destitute in cities of more than 300,000 thousand.

This Thanksgiving we should be thankful that the survivors of the Paris massacres, the Beirut bombings, and the Boka Haram killings have police, the military, emergency workers, hospitals, doctors, nurses, families, neighbors and all of us who offered them love and consoled them. We should be thankful that those killed can be laid to rest is safe peaceful cemeteries. We have been there with candle lights at make shift memorials.

These tragic events this Thanksgiving may be the best moments for us to acknowledge what we have lost, appreciate what we have, and the best we can truly hope for tomorrow. We have lost so many people and military members in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. We have lost so many lives to guns due to gun violence in cities, neighborhoods, streets, families, schools and colleges. Many of us may have an empty seat at the Thanksgiving table because a member of the family passed away this year who might have been a patriarch or matriarch in so many ways we might never have truly realized until they were gone. Others are grown children who have moved away to distant places for work and marriage. All we have is their empty seat and place mat. Pets that used to hover under the table may also have passed away.

The brightest part of Thanksgiving is if the family has the newest member who was born or was adopted this past year. The new exciting addition of the baby may sooth some of the emptiness we may feel as families. That empty seat will have a baby booster on it with a young person who is wondering what this spectacle is all about with all the chatter, cheer, laughter, smells and taste of food, and clanking silverware. Next year the new member of the family will forever know what Thanksgiving dinner is and will happily anticipate and participate in it for many years to come. We should all be thankful that we have each other and can still feel good, have hope and be optimistic about tomorrow. If anything happened we still have other people who love us and can depend on whether we are in America, Nigeria, Syria, France, or Beirut this Thanksgiving. May be God is still present after all.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

Since the British colonized the then Northern Rhodesia now independent Zambia in late 1800s, we have been made to believe that English is the only, best, and superior language to express thought. We have English as the official language which we use in education from the first grade all the way to secondary school and university. Since Zambia’s independence about 50 years ago, with Zambia now having over 17 universities, we have never really seriously questioned or even explored whether English is the only and best way to express sophisticated thought. What about our 17 major Zambian languages which include Nyanja, Bemba, Tonga, Lozi, Kaonde, and dozens of others? Can they be used to convey sophisticated thought?

Communicating in a Zambian Language Video Clip

I have always known that our indigenous Zambian languages may be best for communicating, exploring, and even for research and development, technical inventions and innovations which we have been erroneously made to believe are only possible using English only. There is a 2.12 minute video clip that has been viewed more than 56,000 times that clearly confirms that we can use our Zambian languages to explain basic principles of electricity as one example. The language the boy used to explain his ideas is Lusaka Nyanja which is the lingua franca of the Capital City of Lusaka. In the video clip, a poor boy from Misisi compound in Lusaka holds a model he had built from discarded material himself to explain basic principles of electricity. https://www.facebook.com/samson.phiri.7/videos/1050732518280060/?pnref=story

He does this in such a surprisingly articulate way, that even I, as a grown man who has a Ph. D but not in electrical engineering, could instantly grasp the principles of electricity from the Kariba Hydroelectric Dam to my own domestic use may be in Lusaka or Kitwe, or Luanshya. Some have suggested that Zesco should have used this boy to explain power shading to the public.

Recommendations

The vast majority of viewers of the video clip comment that Zesco should sponsor the boy, government should sponsor the boy, and some even have said they could individually volunteer to sponsor the boy to get an education. He is clearly a boy who lives in poverty right now. My own reaction is that large institutions like Zesco and especially the Zambian government may already be preoccupied. Samson Phiri who made the video can track down the boy. He can start a fund drive that will first and foremost educate the boy. I would start by donating a hundred dollars myself toward the fund. If there is more money, he can start a program that will educate all the boys and girls who have been found to be as intellectually creative as that boy. There are thousands of talented boys and girls in Zambia who are like the boy in the video. But because of poverty and lack of opportunity, the boys and girls cannot use their creative talents for themselves as well as for the whole nation.

First and foremost, we have to make sure that corruption is completely removed. If the 56,000 viewers of the video clip each donate just 5 dollars or K65.00, a total of 280,000 dollars or K3.6 million would be raised. If we can keep all the corruption out of this, this would be enough money to educate the boy, but may be hundreds of other boys and girls who have similar creative talent but live in poverty. If we harness this boy’s creative talents, there are also other benefits for you and me and the whole country. There are many possible benefits but I identify the possible two.

Teaching Pedagogy

What the boy is illustrating in the video clip is what is called teaching pedagogy in sophisticated lingo. The boy clearly illustrates teaching methods or how we should teach from the first grade, all through secondary school, up to higher education in colleges and universities. His methodology and simplicity should be incorporated into teaching which may involve bilingualism. This means teaching both in indigenous Zambian languages and English language in order to maximize clarity when explaining a complex subject to anyone especially students in a classroom and even the public. All my fellow teachers from grade one to college lecturers should take note of the basic fundamental principles of this video clip.

Construction of Models

The simple hand held but quite sophisticated model illustrating basic principles of electricity and the power grid can be manufactured on a large scale by Zesco and other manufacturers in Zambia. These models can be of so many different types of sciences which could be sold to thousands of schools. The models could be in biology, physics, chemistry, geography, astronomy, botany, medicine, anatomy, physiology, computers, engineering, and many others. The simple but cheap models could be exported to neighboring and other countries in the world which could also use them in schools, colleges and university. That could create both jobs in the country and exports. Instead of waiting for hard to convince foreign investors, Zambian entrepreneurs, companies, educators, individuals and others could easily join in this very exciting possible profitable venture that could help enhance education.

Creative Talents in Zambia

There are thousands of young boys and girls in Zambia who have creative talents but live in poverty. One such boy is my own nephew Abiuldi Banda who lives in poverty with his parents, his brothers and sisters in Lundazi. But the boy had incredible creative talents, curiosity and was always experimenting building and testing different models of science from when he was a small boy. Once he completed Grade 12 in 2012, he was admitted to UNZA. But his parents did not have money and the government bursary was not available to him. He is now languishing with wasted talent that he and the nation could benefit from. There are thousands such boys and girls in Zambia. As a nation we just need to harness these talents for the benefit of both the individual boys and girls but also for the entire nation of 13 million people. Mr. Samson Phiri could start the ball rolling without waiting for the government, Zesco, or someone else to start what would be the best project for the nation ever.

Zambian Languages and Sophisticated Idea

If you are still skeptical that Zambian languages can be used to express sophisticated ideas that can only be expressed in English, I believe in practice. I wrote an academic article in

English a few years ago. I translated the abstract into Tumbuka and Nyanja languages. You can try also to translate the abstract into Lozi, Kaonde, Tonga or Bemba Zambian languages. There is a link to the complete academic article in English. The title of the article is: “Eurocentric Destruction of Indigenous Conceptions: the Secret Rediscovery of the Beautiful Woman in African Societies.”

1. http://people.bridgewater.edu/~mtembo/menu/articles/BanthuBakaziKukongolaAbstractDec92009.pdf (Nyanja)
2. http://people.bridgewater.edu/~mtembo/menu/articles/BanthuBanakaziKutowaAbstractDec92009.pdf (Tumbuka)
3. http://people.bridgewater.edu/~mtembo/menu/articles/AfricanBeautyRevisedMarch162010.pdf (Abstract and Full Article in English)

 

 

 

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

Introduction

My 22 year old niece was about to complete her studies at Evelyn Hone College in Lusaka so she could graduate with a Diploma in Gender Studies. But she was left with one more last hurdle; she had to do an internship. She was attached for a month to one of the 8 Gender Based Violence (GBV) One-Stop Coordinated Response Centers located in hospitals. These centers are in Livingstone, Mazabuka, Kabwe, Chipata, Kitwe, Ndola, and Lusaka has 2 centers. What she told me in our casual conversation after she completed her internship is that she had personally attended to 24 cases of gender based violence. She said 12 cases were very severe and 12 were average to mild. The examples of 2 severe cases was a 2 year old girl who was brutally defiled by her uncle. The other case was a woman who had been brutally raped and dumped. My niece said she was emotionally drained but learned a lot. I was stunned that such Gender Based Violence is very wide spread to epidemic proportions in my otherwise beautiful country of Zambia. What has happened? Why are so many Zambian men beating up women, raping, and some even defiling very young girls?

Incidence of GBV in Zambia

According to a GBV survey conducted in 6 countries, the highest incidence of GBV was in Zambia with 89% of those women surveyed in Kasama, Kitwe, Mansa, and Mazabuka reported having experienced or been victims of Gender Based Violence. In the same survey, “86 percent of women in Lesotho, 68 percent of women in Zimbabwe, 67 percent of women in Botswana, 50 percent of women in the some provinces of South Africa studied and 24 percent of women in Mauritius have experienced GBV.” (Chanda, 2014) According to another “2007 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey, 47% of women in Zambia have experienced physical violence since age 15 – 77% by a current/former husband/partner – and one in five have experienced sexual violence in their lives, 64% of which is perpetrated by an intimate partner.” (CARE, 2013, p.2)

Why are these incidents of Gender Based Violence very high in spite Zambia’s enactment of a landmark Anti-Gender Based Violence Act of 2011? Since then there has been a public campaign to stop GBV through concerted efforts to treat victims, and for communities, organizations, police, health workers and judiciary to be involved in the fight.(Chanda, 2014)

The Zambian papers have frequent reports of such Gender Based Violent incidents. This article will explore the definition of gender based violence, possible causes of GBV in Zambia, and the author will recommend solutions that both include and go beyond those proposed by many institutions, organizations and government.

Definition of Gender Based Violence

Gender Based Violence is not only a serious public health social problem in Zambia but all over the world. The vast majority of victims are overwhelmingly girls and women. Although some men are victims of GBV, they constitute a much smaller number. The public may have the mistaken assumption that GBV, also called Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), only happens when extremely unstable drunk men or husbands beat up or rape their wives after a drunken night out. Gender Based Violence has wide a definition that includes many abusive behaviors that men direct at women and girls. Sexual and Gender Based Violence is “physical, mental, or social abuse that is directed against a person because of his or her gender role in a society or culture.” (ASAZA SGBV Training Manual, n.d., p.9).

The GBV includes sexual violence, Femicide (female killing) is quite common in Asian countries like in India and the Middle East; Battery is common in Zambia and worldwide; property grabbing after the death of a spouse; rape in and outside marriage. Marriage is not a license to force an intimate partner or wife to have sex when they don’t want to. Sexual harassment is a form of GBV; beating of women perceived to be improperly dressed especially at bus stations of urban areas; forced prostitution, engagement in pornography, sexual cleansing, trafficking in women and children for immoral activities, and finally forced abortion.

Causes of Gender Based Violence

The causes of Gender Based Violence are so many that they are multifaceted. The dozens of factors that cause GBV are both intertwined and may overlap. These may include poverty, unemployment, changing gender norms in which men’s dominance in marriage and relationships is being challenged, history of family dysfunction and violence in the GBV perpetrator and victim’s family background, male personality disorders, and lack of or poor legal or police action against GBV perpetrators. This is what may make finding one or two effective explanations and solutions that can solve the entire problem  very difficult to identify. The causes of GBV can be categorized into those that are Societal, Community, Relationship, and Individual. (ASAZA SGBV Training Manual, n.d, p.27).

Proposed Solutions to Gender Based Violence (SokoRelaNdi)

Gender Based Violence in Zambia both the physical and the verbal type or psychological intimidation especially of girls and women cause horrific harm to thousands of children and women, imposing havoc in families and communities creating untold life of suffering. All forms of campaigns, policies, and strategies to combat and eliminate this serious problem should be supported. But since most of the overwhelming evidence including surveys suggest GBV is  deeply embedded in the Zambian society, I propose a comprehensive national approach. This approach is most likely to eliminate or reduce the problem to a greater degree after many years as it will more likely result into transforming the entire Zambian culture from children in the home, marriages and families all the way to the national institutions. A problem of the GBV magnitude that is apparently deeply embedded in the Zambian society cannot be easily solved using piece meal approaches  much as the existing policies and strategies may be implementing very helpful programs.  The new comprehensive program should go by the very Zambian sounding acronym: SokoRelaNdi. This stands for Society, Kommunity, Relationships, Individual. “Community” is spelled with a “K” instead of the English “C” as this makes it very Zambian. “Ndividual” as a Zambianized word sounds very close to the English “Individual”.

The use of this new acronym, the programs and policies will draw attention to the reality that Gender Based Violence is both wide spread and needing comprehensive action by all 13 million Zambians at all levels. For example in SoKoRelaNdi, “Societal” or “Society” would mean GBV can be eliminated by creating more jobs lowering unemployment on the level of Zambian government. “Kommunity” means communities should create more shelters for victims of GBV.  The same would apply for “Relationships” and “Individual” components of solving the serious problem of GBV. The program would start with ministry of Gender Development, The President, Schools, Churches, towns, compounds, villages, and the way to families in rural and urban compounds. The media would lead the publicity. Everyone and all organizations would find a way of acting to reduced and eliminate Gender Based Violence (GBV) under one or some of what is represented in SokoRelaNdi. Zambia had at least 4 national Development Plans since independence in 1964. Gender Based Violence needs similar serious comprehensive national policies if we are going to eliminate Gender Based Violence as a nation.

References

1. ASAZA, (undated), Care Givers Handbook, A Comprehensive Household Model. (The author derived the acronym from from the 4 components of causes of GBV ASAZA had identified in its manual: Societal, Community, Relationship, and Individual.)

http://preventgbvafrica.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ASAZA_GBV_Training_Manual_Zambia.pdf

2. Chanda, Mwazipeza., “End GBV: Prosecute perpetrators”, in the Zambia Daily Mail, November 27, 2014. https://www.daily-mail.co.zm/?p=12375
3. CARE, Lessons from CARE Zambia: One Stop Model of Support for Survivors of Gender-Based Violence.

http://www.care.org/sites/default/files/documents/GBV-2013-ZMB-CARE-ASAZA-OSC-Case-Study.pdf

4. Kamanda, Mwelwa, A Hidden Truth: Gender Based Violence in Zambia,Video for Change.

https://blog.witness.org/2011/11/a-hidden-truth-gender-based-violence-in-zambia/

5. Klomegah, Roger Y., “Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in Zambia: An Examination of Risk Factors and Gender Perceptions”, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Vol. 39, No. 4, (Autumn) 2008), pp. 557-569.

 

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

The Africans, by David Lamb, New York, Random House, 1982, 363 pp. $17.95, Hardcover.

********************

David Lamb, author and journalist, opens the book with a bang whose reverberations might remind the reader of the typical modern “Hollywood” plots or reminiscences of the diaries of early European colonial explorers in Africa.  There is only one exception; the modern technology – alas, the little that still works in Africa – enables him to travel virtually the whole of Africa in four years during the late 1970s.

In the introduction, Lam places the proverbial carrot in front of the reader’s eyes.  What book about Africa can be “good” without droughts, death, wars, ignorance, massacres, superstition, coup d’états, political turmoil, contradictions and other juicy alleged excesses that can tantalize any reader?  Lamb though, claims he is only trying to answer the question; “What is Africa and who are the Africans?”  Lamb further summarizes what he found or discovered in Africa and how he did it.  From his base in Nairobi, Kenya, he travelled 300,000 miles by air, road and rail through 48 Sub-Saharan African countries including South Africa.  He talked to presidents, villagers, university professors, guerilla leaders and many others.

From the opening chapter, the details about Africa begin to unfold and in some cases spill out.  For example, in the first chapter, Lamb describes the “portrait of a continent”.  In it the reader learns about impoverishment in Guinea-Bissau, the growing Sahara desert, poor farming, lack of population control because of ignorance and superstition.  “Only Gabon, in West Africa, has managed to achieve population stability – largely because 30 percent of the women have venereal disease.”(p. 18)  Over Two Hundred thousand Hutus were massacred in 1972 by the Watusi because of tribal conflict.  According to Lamb, there are only four black African countries where there has been political stability and meaningful economic development; Kenya, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and Malawi.  The book has a total of 18 brief chapters that address issues such as “Collision of Past and Present”, “The Ghost of Idi Amin”, “The Colonial Heritage”, and “Culture Shock.”

A politically astute reader all along is anxious to lean about the political hot potato; the racist South African society.  He rightly devotes an entire chapter to this matter.  He describes the high level of economic development and at the same time the racial polarization.  He predicts the blood shed that will occur unless South Africa eliminates its racist policies.

This book contains mountains of information which, if carefully sifted, should be useful particularly for the African, the Africanist and those in the black diaspora who wish to search for positive changes in the progress, knowledge and understanding of the African continent as a part of humanity.  There are myriad useful facts about African economies, politics, social characteristics, tragic problems and contradictions that seem unique to the continent and its individuals.

But unfortunately, this useful information is shrouded in tints of outrageous anecdotes that should be dismissed as largely garbage by most intelligent readers.  For example, sex is perhaps the most emotion laden and sensational issue in the human contemporary civilization.  When David Lamb states that population control in Gabon has been achieved because 30 percent of the women have venereal disease is to deliberately open a can of worms whether his statement is “objective” or not.  In this and other curious sexual and other innuendo and unwarranted generalizations, one cannot fail to see the grim cultural ethnocentric implications of the anecdotes.

The author in numerous instances projects serious contradictions which he erroneously attributes to the African inhabitants but which clearly reside in the author’s own intellect.  For example, Lamb claims that the more he stayed in Africa the less he understood the African character. (p.234)  “But the African often becomes a deepening mystery.” (p. 235)  But in many volumes of words, he tells the reader in very clear and strong words devoid of any tinge of hesitancy what the African is all about.

Also, Lamb claims that Africans have resilience which “extends beyond any logical human limits”; crops fail, children die, “his government can treat him grievously and still carries on, uttering no protest, sharing no complaints”. (p. 235)  At the same time Lamb devotes a whole chapter to political “Coups and Countercoups” in Africa.  He also ignores that there were bloody liberation wars in Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya.  All this and much more is obvious evidence that Africans “protest”.  Has David Lamb ever “experienced” with an African family whose child has died and what type of anguish and subsequent searching personal actions and behavior modification that emanate from such tragic incidents?

I recommend this book particularly for mature, well informed and seasoned Africanists.  For only they can be trusted to possess the ability to sift through the subtle Western European or more specifically the American propaganda coating that is hidden in the book.  For it is one thing to say that an economic statistic of a certain African country has declined by 60 percent but quite another to say African children are “deprived” or “unstimulated” because they do not have toys of the Western European stock to play with when they are growing up.

Those who are being introduced to Africa for the first time are advised to either steer clear of this book or trust themselves to read it with extraordinary caution.  Otherwise instead of gaining useful knowledge, they will end up unwittingly consolidating their prejudices and racial stereotypes about Africans as constituting “pygmies, jungle, heat and lions” ironically the stereotypes that Lamb detests.

Post Script: This review was rejected for publication by over at least half a dozen African and Black Studies journals. The tone of the polite but hostile rejections by the editors was that of consternation and being stunned at the criticism of the book. I found the unpublished review in my old papers. I have not edited it. Have my views changed from when I was a young Ph. D. student 30 years ago in 1985 compared to now? Absolutely not to my surprise. My views or perspectives on this book have remained the same. One journal asked me to revise the review. Since as a young scholar “publish or perish” is such an urgent matter if you wish to climb the ladder of success and be accepted in the academic community, I reluctantly agreed to revise the review. This is how a heavily edited, shorter, less critical version of the review was published in the “African Social Research” a publication of the Institute of the African Studies of the University of Zambia at the time.

**************

TITLE:  Book Review     The Africans, by David Lamb, New York,

Random House, 1982.

AUTHOR:  Mwizenge S. Tembo

Affiliation:  Research Fellow at the Institute for African

Studies, University of Zambia,

Lusaka, Zambia.  Currently on

Study leave at Michigan State

University.

ADDRESS:  Michigan State University,

1575 I Spartan Village,

East Lansing,

MICHIGAN  48823

DATE:  18^th January, 1985.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

I caught the radio news story in the middle during the second week of August in 2008.  “….he grew up poor working in the fields in the American South. His rise to fame in his music career came when……he produced the album …..Hot Buttered Soul …….Isaac Hayes dead at the age of 65.” My reaction was “Oh! My God. I didn’t know he was so young.” Another one of my music heroes was gone. What might have appeared as an insignificant revelation about him in the story confirmed something very fundamental that drew me to his music like a butterfly to sweet nectar.  How did an American, Isaac Hayes, influence a teenager who was growing up ten thousand miles away from America deep in Africa in Zambia in the late late 1960s? It happened in the most unlikely way.

I was a poor village kid who was excited to complete Chizongwe Secondary or High School in 1971 in the remote provincial town of Chipata. I got a job in town at a small local volunteer organization Dzithandizeni: Chipata Nutrion Group where an American had just arrived as a volunteer worker. We became good friends. After my first small pay check, I was so proud to buy a small portable record player; about the length of two 2 small lap tops and 4 inches wide. It looked just like a briefcase. I could also only afford to buy my only 45 single of Crosby Stills and Nash “Suite Jude Blue Eyes” for seventy-five cents or forty-five ngwee. I played the record over and over.

As a Christmas gift,  Bob the American friend gave me a couple of Long Play Albums. One of the covers had a huge close up photo of the top of a black guy’s shinny shaved bald head; that was Isaac Hayes’ album “Hot Buttered Soul.” By this time I was an undergraduate at University of Zambia and listened to the album so much in my dormitory room in Africa Hall. The music, the story line of the lyrics of the song “By the Time I get to Phoenix”, and everything about it invoked a certain bitter sweet painful melancholy. I did not understand why his music appealed to me so deeply at the time.

The answer came as I listened to subsequent radio news stories of earlier interviews Isaac Hayes had conducted. He said as he was growing up poor and working in the fields in the American Deep South, he was a “hopeless romantic”. That’s it. That’s what drew me to his music. Looking back I have always been a “hopeless romantic” while growing up all the way to my adulthood. What is a hopeless romantic? Some readers may get the mistaken impression that this is a human being who sits passively, frustrated because girls reject his advances, doing nothing but wait while day dreaming about romantic escapades. Nothing could be further from the truth. A hopeless romantic is a person who is always totally consumed by the deep feelings of passion, awareness, perpetual feelings of romance and desire while involved in some of the most seemingly mundane activities to the ordinary soul.

A hopeless romantic sees infinite possibilities of vivid and intense human experiences in such normal activities as eating food, taking a walk in a botanical garden, riding a bicycle in a remote Savannah bush path, listening to music, walking in the park, fishing, having sex, reading, living in poverty, driving to the store, working on the farm, seeing the sunrise and the sunset, hearing birds singing, crashing waves on a beach, mourning loved ones, and conversation. When some of these activities are combined with the passion of romantic love, it is like pouring petrol or gasoline on ambers of fire. The elevated emotions flood the senses and create a symbiosis of taste, smell, sight, hearing, painful longing mixed with heavy doses of nostalgic memories. The hopeless romantic suddenly becomes engulfed in deep and overwhelming experiences with intense tearful emotional drama and anguish sometimes reminiscent of the Shakespearean Romeo and Juliet.

When Isaac Hayes said he was a hopeless romantic the remark invoked in me those deep memories of the pain and sweet anguish in his music which is the stuff of the soul. The remark validated my lifelong inclination to be drawn to deeply intense soulful music from any genre; from the traditional Mbira music of the Shona people of Zimbabwe in Southern Africa, to the thundering Nigerian Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s 1970s hit “Gentlemani”, to Jim Reeve’s Country intensely romantic love ballads like “A hundred miles to Mariam”, to the American Blue Grass music of  “Seldom Scene”, Alison Kraus and Union Station’s “Every Time You Say Goodbye”, and to the heavy metal Quiet Riot’s “Mama Mama let’s not get crazy now”.

The hopeless romantic is not just confined to music but also to readings such as novels. I still remember the most intense romantic experiences of the characters in my few favorite novels down to the page number even though I read these novels decades ago. These are such novels as Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield”, Mongo Beti’s “Mission to Kala”, and Peter Abraham’s “Mine Boy”. I am hardly surprised that twenty years later I published a sizzling romance novel called “The Bridge” that only a hopeless romantic could write. We should all be thankful and appreciate music heroes such as Isaac Hayes and many others in many genres who especially help validate the intense feelings of all hopeless romantics in us in this wonderful world.

 

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

“And Chama said the UPND in Southern Province were polygamous by nature and “may be by having so many children, one day after 100 years, they may lead the country, but not under Hichilema.

If at all they will ever be in power, may be a hundred years from now, they are polygamous by nature so may be as they have more children they can be in power. But under the leadership of Hichilema. I don’t think it will happen,” he said. (The Post, June 9, 2015, p.8)

These are the incendiary offending remarks that have apparently stirred passions of tribalism so much among some Zambians today that there are even reports of a small group of  the Tonga in Southern Province defiantly talking about secession. The purpose of this article is to provide some advice and perspective in the form of the Zambian tradition of mphala, insaka, or indaba on the bigger picture about our beloved Zambian nation. First, I will briefly discuss the offending remarks by the PF Secretary General Davies Chama. Second, I will discuss why Zambian politics may be reaching a dangerous stage. Third, I will discuss the bad news or even potentially tragic news for those all over Zambia who have contemplated secession in the past, the present and in the future. Fourth, I will discuss the great news about our beloved country of Zambia and how anyone can be elected the President of Zambia from whatever tribe they belong. Last, I will mention a few Kaundaisms that all political leaders including the current and future Presidents of Zambia will find very useful in leading the great nation of Zambia.

Mr. Davies Chama’s Tribal Remarks.

Mr. Chama’s remarks were offensive not just to Tongas but may be to Zambians all over the country and the world. The best thing would have been for Mr. Chama to issue an apology but he has vehemently refused. What I found surprising was that the offending remarks were buried deep into his long statement about the PF swallowing MMD and the UPND. This suggests to me that he may not have fully meant the remarks to be harmful. His remarks were actually a form of taunting after someone has won a contest. He may have been carried away in the moment of exuberance and PF party chauvinism after electoral triumphs. This does not excuse Mr. Chama’s remarks. Taunting is unprofessional and is poor sportsmanship. In recent Zambian elections, whenever a particular party has won, the cadres of the winning party afterwards taunt the ones from the losing party sometimes resulting in violence. Taunting after winning elections has to stop. May be one of the reasons we are having so many problems with cadres, some political violence, and talk of secession is that we have too many young people in Zambia and too few elders like veteran politician like Mr. Vernon Mwaanga.

Zambian Population

The population of Zambia is 13 million. The proportion of the country that is under 14 years old is 46.7%, those between 15 and 24 years old are 20%, those between 25 to 54 years old are 28.4% and but those between 55 and 64 years old are only 2.9% and those above 65 years old are even smaller at 2.4%. The age statistics that are the most important in explaining both Mr. Chama’s remarks and how Zambian politics may be in danger of becoming dangerous is that Zambians that are younger than 30 years old may be about 70% of the population which is about 9 million young girls, boys, women and men. And yet those who are over 55 years old are only 2.9% which is only 377,000. Therefore, there are fewer elders to day in Zambia to teach younger people about our political history, customs, and our culture perhaps due to the high death rate of older Zambians who are over 55 years old because of the HIV/AIDS epidemic since the 1980s. Urbanization also takes its toll as the 36% of the urban population is rising. This means increasing numbers of Zambians lose their connection to elders,  rural areas where the source, strength and origin of our Zambian traditions are the strongest.

The Bad News about Political Future

When there is political frustration in a young population, certain people in Zambia who might feel they are not getting a fair share of the resources might contemplate revolution and violence as the sure and quickest way to getting what they want. This will not work in Zambia and may not be working very well in many countries where people have tried revolutionary violence. Peaceful secession is very rare. The vast majority of Zambians today have access to the internet through cell phones. There is Facebook, email, twitter, web pages, blogs, and Instagram. We read and see exciting images of the Arab Spring revolution in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and many other places.

It is tempting for many younger Zambian leaders to assume we will just import whatever is abroad to solve our problems. While some of the information is good, some or much of it may be unrealistic and just plain dangerous and destructive for the nation. This author is advocating peaceful solutions for the Zambian nation not because he is a coward, scared and deathly afraid of revolutions but because I know we have a very peaceful country. We do not need revolutionary violence. I just love and cherish the peace that we enjoy and I am sure many Zambians would like to maintain it too. Many younger Zambians may have no idea how badly people are suffering with violence and chaos in the Eastern Congo, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Iraq, Central African Republic, and many other places. I will discuss more of this later about Kaundaisms.

The Great News about Our Country

The greatest news about our country is that we are probably the most integrated in the world. Our founders were intelligent enough to create the foundation. This is our greatest strength that very few countries in Africa and the world have. Even some of the most powerful countries such as the United States, the oldest European and other countries are not as integrated as Zambians. We Zambians do not have the deeply entrenched deadly hatred and segregation of one tribe against another of  the 72 tribes. Our founders made sure that we loved each other. This does not mean we have no problems or internal political differences. I had to laugh when there was news about Tonga secession. I was thinking if Southern Province seceded, I would need a passport to go to Mwanamayinda on the Kafue Road on the Mazabuka road. I am a Tumbuka from the Eastern Province. I have a sister who is married to a Tonga man who is my mulamu (brother-in-law) and I have more than 8 nieces and nephews and grand nieces and nephews in Southern Province. Would they suddenly be in another country? All of us Zambians have close friends, blood and marriage relatives in regions and provinces all over Zambia in the 72 tribes.

Any Zambian Can be Elected President

Because we are so integrated, that’s why anyone in Zambia from any tribe can be elected President. The talk that a Tonga, Lozi, Kaonde, Namwanga, Chokwe and any member of the 72 tribes cannot be elected President is just not true. Who would have thought President Obama, a black American, would become the President of the United States which has deeply entrenched racism against African-Americans? This is the advice that every political party and individuals who aspire to be elected President of Zambia should know. If you are a Presidential candidate who is Bemba, Lozi, Ngoni, Chokwe, Nkoya. Lozi, Tonga, Soli, Lenje, Lamba, and many others, don’t waste your time campaigning in your province or region. You already have that vote in your pocket. You need to have a good manifesto, organization on the ground, and then travel to all the other provinces to personally appeal for their votes. If you are genuine, Zambians can see you are  serious, fair, determined, you have a vision for all Zambians and you are genuinely non-tribal, Zambians will vote for you irrespective of your race, ethnicity, tribe, man or woman. This is why any Zambian man or woman can be elected President of Zambia.

Kaundaisms and One Zambia One Nation.

The younger generation of political leaders today in Zambia might take the peace, tranquility, the One Zambia One Nation we enjoy for granted. That is the most dangerous attitude. There are two of the many Kaundaisms that might help all of us Zambians which we should always remember.  First, if you advocate revolutionary violence, when the country of Zambia is up in flames, you won’t enjoy whatever you thought you will achieve. President Kaunda addressing a rally in the 1970s even said that once the whole country is engulfed in violence, thieves, saboteurs, those who are holding dark corner meetings, political opportunists, tribalists, racists, and even those engaging in corruption will not be able to enjoy their spoils. Second, if you as a President unjustly politically verbally or physically attack or imprison a particular opposition group leader(s) or political party leaders, the supporters of that party or group will hold a grudge against you and you will be creating more martyrs and enemies as a political leader or President. His advice was that it was best as a political leader to be fair minded, make just decisions, follow the law, be reconciliatory, be kind, and respect others including the opposition because you yourself as a leader might be out of power one day.

 

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

In August 1969, my father was teaching at Kasonjola Primary school which is 30 miles north of Chipata along the Lundazi Road. I was in Form Three or Grade 9 on school holidays from Chizongwe Secondary Boarding School. My father went to Chipata on a Friday on a shopping trip. When he didn’t return by Sunday, my mother was very worried and concerned. When she did not see him on Monday, she was alarmed and frantic. Being the oldest boy at 15 years old, my mother dispatched me to look for him in Chipata and check with all the familiar relatives. When I returned from Chipata a day later, my father was nowhere to be seen. My mother dispatched me to the village 80 miles away in Lundazi carrying a bicycle on top of the bus. I went to the village to look for my father and inform my grandparents and the whole village that he was missing.

Grieving

When I returned to Kasonjola, my mother was beginning to grieve and reminisce about what a great time she had spent with my dad and now she was going to the village to suffer and raise us all 9 children alone as a widow through the hard work of farming using the hoe. My mother is the strongest woman I know. She said she was confident my dad was alive though because if he had been killed and thrown in a ditch in Chipata, this fifth day, the police would have known because people would report a decaying body. She was also a woman of deep faith. She had to be. She had been through so much in life.

On the sixth day, a rare vehicle appeared at our rural school and slowly meandered through the school ground toward our house. We kids screamed and jumped up and down with excitement. My mother smiled. Out of the vehicle came my dad and another man his age also about 45 years old, a suitcase and my dad’s famous leather briefcase. The two men had traveled by bus from Kitwe to Chipata. Instead of looking for a ride, they booked a vehicle from Chipata to Kasonjola so they could get home fastest.

The Kuchona or Long Gone Brother

What unfolded later was this: that Saturday when my father had traveled to Chipata, he had met an acquaintance who had told my father that my father’s brother who had gone to Johannesburg in South Africa in the late 1940s had returned and was in the town of Kitwe on the Copper belt. My father had neither seen nor heard from his brother for about 20 years. The Tumbuka call this kuchona. As my father was about to board a lift  to return home to Kasonjola via Mgubudu Stores that Saturday, a close friend of his who owned a Land Rover said he was heading to Kitwe right there and then for some business. He jokingly asked my father if he needed a free ride to Kitwe? The coincidence and the temptation was irresistible. My father could see his long lost brother. My father was never impulsive. He was a stable responsible family man. He didn’t need to think about it. My father sent a message to someone going to Mgubudu Stores to pass a word or message to my mother that my father had suddenly gone to Kitwe to meet his brother. That verbal message never reached my mother.

Laughter

My father and his brother Sajeni Tembo brought such laughter to the whole family as we kids excitedly sat around to hear about life in the great City of Johannesburg in South Africa. We kids chased the chicken and my beaming mother cooked the most delicious meal. I have an image of the two men strolling near our house in the evening, quietly chatting, strolling, and they would stop, face each other, and talk and gesture to each other. Then they would both laugh throwing their heads back. My father was so happy. My mother was so joyful.

Return of Sajeni Tembo

Sajeni Tembo had married a woman in Johannesburg during the 20 years he was there and had 8 children with her. He wanted to come home to Zambia with them. He could not afford it. He couldn’t travel though Zimbabwe which was still Rhodesia at the time. He found his way through Botswana, catching rides through either Kazungula or Caprivi Strip. He had to use disguises, false stories and forged travel papers at the time because of the tensions were very high between apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia and the whole Southern region. My father’s brother died in the early 1980s in Kitwe. He could never raise money and get travel papers to go and get his wife and children from Johannesburg in South Africa. There are probably grown Tembos, children, and great grandchildren of Sajeni Tembo in Johannesburg who wonder about their Zambian father who disappeared and never cared to come back for them.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo

Author of “The Bridge- A Romance Adventure Novel”.

Professor of Sociology

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) sexual orientations are openly advocated today from President Obama of the United States and the First Lady Michelle, in American schools, institutions of higher learning, the military, some churches, in work places and families. Same sex marriages are now legal in 36 of the 48 states in the United States. Ireland just voted to legalize same sex marriages by 62%. Bruce Jenner, the most celebrated and decorated Olympic male athlete in the United States now calls herself “Caitlyn” as a woman at the age of 65. She is transgender and her photo is on the front page of the famous Vogue magazine.

The change in attitude is happening so fast that if anyone today appears to sit on the fence, question, or equivocate about supporting LGBT or homosexuality and same-sex marriages, the individual will have an avalanche of vicious criticism fall on them like a ton of bricks. They will instantly be called homophobe, gay basher, anti-gay, uneducated, uninformed, a reactionary, oppressor, close minded, supporter of human rights abuses, religious conservative fanatic, and Hitler. And these are just the name calling that can be printed.

There is something about the issue that ignites our most primal passions today whether you are for or against the issue. How did we get to a point where most Americans and Westerners are about to accept homosexuality and same sex marriages? Why do individuals still spend so much emotional energy to oppose same sex marriages? Since this author cares deeply about children, how will children turn out during all these tsunami of social changes? What should Zambians think about this because social changes that start in the Western society very quickly often sweep to Zambia through media followed by Western inspired NGO human rights campaigns?

History of Human Sexuality and Gender

Over two hundred thousand years ago when as the first human beings we lived in small bands in Savannah Africa including in Zambia or when God created us, all types of sexual orientations might have existed. Heterosexuality was sexual attraction between people of the opposite sex or between males and females. Homosexuality, gay or being a lesbian was sexual attraction to someone of the same sex. Intersexuality was people whose bodies (including genitals) have both female and male characteristics. Hermaphrodite was an original Greek term which referred to intersexual people who have both female ovary and male testis. Transsexuals are people who feel emotionally they are one sex (male for example) even though biologically they are the other sex (female for example) or vice versa. Bisexuality is sexual attraction to people of both sexes. Asexuality is a biological lack of sexual attraction to people of either sex. Sexual pathologies existed such as pedophilia which is being sexually attracted to children, bestiality having sex with animals, sexual addictions including pornography, peeping toms, nymphomania, sexual phobias, and fetishes all existed. What is the relevance of all this to today’s conflicts about homosexuality and same sex marriages?

 

Human Survival

Two hundred thousand years ago it was a matter of survival for a man to have genital sex with a woman because that was the only way babies could be created. Because human babies are the most vulnerable and unable to fend for themselves until they are probably about 18 years old, (today it might be as old as 30 years old in some families and countries) marriage between a man and the woman and the extended family were very crucial for human survival. So the very strong culture of monogamous heterosexual sex, marriage, family and kinship were developed. All the cultural rituals and customs including groups such as hunter and gatherer bands, villages, clans, communities, Chiefdoms, and Kingdoms were built on the foundation of the biological productive unity of the monogamous union between the man and the woman. Without highly emphasizing that original heterosexual sex between a man and a woman, we would likely have gone into extinction. I emphasize this point among our earliest first human African ancestors in Chapter 17 in my book: “Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture”.  Our human population grew from an estimated18,000 people1.2 million years ago to 7.2 billion in 2015.

Brilliance and Wisdom

The monogamous heterosexual family centered on a man and a woman was found to be the best and most intelligent and wisest way to produce and raise children for survival. Our African ancestors created sufficient strong networks of kinships relationships so that no baby or child was ever an orphan, abandoned and had the best chances of being raised to adulthood. The author was raised in the last days of those historic African village community in the 1950s which he regards today as heaven on earth because as a child he could never have had a more enriching social environment to live and be raised in. It takes a village to raise a child to day is just for the most part a cliché that we are no longer able to live by especially in large cities.

LGBT, Same Sex Marriages, and Homosexuality

Since our reproductive ability, personal physical security and technology have improved so much that there are 7.2 billion of us, there are virtually no threats from nature to humans anymore. Humans should be able to and are going to more freely express their sexual orientations. But the only universal criteria that should be enforced is that everyone should abide by same strong moral code of wholesome sexual conduct that heterosexuals or married men and women have followed and insisted on through customs and reinforced by religious codes for thousands of years. It is when we have all these uniform moral sexual codes that children will be raised in very stable marriages, families and social environments. If people in all kinds of marriages refuse to abide by these strict moral codes, it should not matter what sexual orientation they have, they should not choose to have children. Because it is always the case that when there are so many social changes and upheavals, it is always children that suffer.

Sexual Orientation Changes in Zambia

Since independence in 1964 and the openning of the University of Zambia in 1966, we have never even through formal research paid attention to how our society indigenously and traditionally regarded all these forms of sexual orientation. Because I am sure these forms of sexual orientation have always existed and do exist today. My own interpretation from growing up in the village and informal observations in Zambia over a period of 50 years is that we never took seriously, regarded with hate and disdain informal sexual relationships outside heterosexual relationships between a man and a woman. I am sure going back to two hundred thousand years ago, women had sex with women and even held each other’s hands during the day. Some boys and men had sex or were homosexuals. But all of this may have been ignored and deemed insignificant or unimportant. All the human and collective community effort and energy were sorely focused and invested in heterosexuality. Puberty rituals for girls called Chinamwali (Chewa), Chisungu (Bemba), and Mwalanjo (Lozi) were all preparing the girl for marriage for sex with a future husband who was a man. All boys and men underwent initiation rituals including use of herbs in preparation for marriage and sex with a future wife who was a woman. Although sex itself is enjoyable but its purpose was mainly to produce children that would ensure community survival.

First Night of Heterosexual Marriage

After months of preparation and a wedding ceremony, the first night the newlyweds spent the night together was very crucial. Today we might even laugh about some of the first night rituals. The one I find most fascinating is when Yizenge Chondoka describes in his book: “Traditional Marriages in Zambia”.  Chondoka says among the Valley Tonga, after the first night the groom and the bride had spent together:

“To find out how strong the man is, the girl is asked to break a number of short pieces of sticks from along stick according to the number of times they made love the previous night. If, according to the elders’ judgment, the number of broken sticks is less, then they start looking for medicine to help the young man.” (Chondoka, 1988:129)

I make similar descriptions about the first night of the newlyweds:

“If the groom has successfully had sex with her, he tossed hot embers outside the door. This was a symbol of success that brought cheers and ululations to the people gathered outside. The following morning the bride was asked how many times they had made love during the night. Four times was the yardstick. If the man failed to perform, the bride rushed out with the bad news and that could be the end of the marriage.” (Tembo, 2012: 111)

References

1. Chondoka, Yizenge., Traditional Marriages in Zambia: A Study in Cultural History, Ndola: Mission Press, 1988.
2. Tembo, Mwizenge S., Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture: Social Change in The Global World, Xlibris, 2012.
3. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/science/19human.html?_r=0

 

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

Author of “The Bridge” – the  transatlantic romance adventure novel.

On a Sunday blue sky afternoon in May 1972, I finally stood on the balcony of the fourth floor of Africa Hall 5 Room 26 as a freshman at the University of Zambia appreciating and surveying the beautiful scenery around and below. The lawn was green with gorgeous flowers and short bushes. Different types of music were booming from record players from many students’ rooms. I breathed a huge sigh of relief and excitement about the better times to come of gaining a University education which my family and I had not even ever dreamed of even just months before in January 1972 when I got an acceptance letter from the University of Zambia.

My room was furnished with brand new wardrobes, book shelf, desk, reading lamp, chair, blankets, clean bed sheets, blankets, and pillows. The bathrooms had good new hot showers, a line of clean wash sinks with shinning mirrors. The hall floor toilets were clean with toilet paper which was replaced virtually every day. These clean toilet facilities were also all over campus classrooms and the library with toilet papers. Hall sweepers cleaned the rooms every day. This was the case in the 5 residences of Africa Hall, Kwacha Hall, Presidents Hall, and International Hall. The women’s was October Hall. Thefts of property on campus were unknown. Supper that evening in the main dining hall was a five course meal of soup or a salad, rice with chicken or beef, custard with cake, fruit, coffee, tea and bread with butter. We had pocket money of K25.00 and an allowance for purchasing text books at the bookstore for our classes.

It was very exciting to sit for the first time  in Lecture Theater One and Two for lectures by may lecturers at the time including Professor Robert Serpell and Professor  Muyunda Mwanalushi in Psychology and many other courses. We had some of the best professors and lecturers from around the world since we did not have too many indigenous Zambian lecturers yet. The University of Zambia had an enrollment of fifteen hundred. The cost of room, board, and tuition was four hundred Kwacha per year. My father earned K19.00 per month as a primary school teacher with 9 children some of whom he had to pay school fees for. My family could never afford for me to attend the University of Zambia.

The vast majority of Zambians could not afford the cost of sending their sons and daughters to the University of Zambia. The government provided bursaries for everyone because the country needed educated highly skilled labor.

Thousands of Zambians who graduated from University of Zambia will forever love the University of Zambia and will always want the institution to remain alive. All of us graduates are  dedicated to do whatever we can to help support the University. This is why the problems that have continued to beset the University of Zambia are always deeply troubling for all graduates, former students or alumni of the University Zambia as well as for all concerned citizens.

University of Zambia Problems

Since the great days of the early 1970s during the last 43 years, the determined men and women of UNZA have proudly continued to graduate students who excel both in Zambia and the  international diaspora although the university has faced major challenges that would have made other institutions buckle and disappear. The list of problems is so endless that this article cannot know nor address all of them. These discussions and proposed solutions are not meant to imply that the author has all the solutions  but rather to make some very pragmatic suggestions according to this author’s view.

UNZA Alumni-Diaspora and Lecturers

There are 5 possible serious problem areas and proposed possible immediate and long term solutions to some of the deeply embedded problems of the University of Zambia. The first and probably the most serious problem is lack of a culture and an organization that can both coordinate and mediate mutual cooperation and trust between UNZA lecturers and older graduates some of whom are retired and some may be in the diaspora. All the thousands of UNZA graduates all the way back to its inception in 1966  who are in Zambia and especially those in the diaspora are deeply devoted to the institution.  Day and night they are proud and would like to help the University of Zambia. But there appears  to be lack of a culture and  prominent organization to channel this desire to help.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that there may be mutual suspicion about the intentions of the graduates who are in the diaspora and those at UNZA. The same mutual suspicion also applies to national leadership where Zambians who are in the diaspora are regarded with suspicion if they express a desire to participate in the electoral process or seek political electoral office. Although many of the lecturers at UNZA may have been also trained abroad, there is an underlying suspicion that any diaspora graduate coming to UNZA may be looking for a job to displace the indigenous younger faculty or looking to unfairly dominate the institution. Some of the diaspora UNZA graduates may harbor a superiority complex. Both of these attitudes would have to be resolved before any long term plans and actions can be mutually executed to help University of Zambia. We all deeply love the institution and badly want to help it survive and prosper. This potentially may be the most serious problem that may hinder or impede any potential progress initiated by the two wings of the UNZA graduates or alumni.

Capital Expenditure

Since the early 1970s, the University of Zambia has increased its enrollment from 1500 to about 30,000 in 2015 which is an overwhelming increase of 1900%. Has student housing or residence halls, teaching and classroom facilities increased by 1900%? That is probably not the case.  According to The Post of 8 May 2015 Page 2, UNZA  has deplorable conditions with lecturers having 250, 298, 500 to 1,000 students in a class with some sitting on the floor.

A few years ago during a Presidential election campaign one candidate promised that if elected they would improve the conditions at UNZA such that 19 students would not be sharing one residential hall room. I was stunned but was never able to verify that my room like Africa 5 Room 26 could be occupied by 19 students. During most of the early years at UNZA, there were only 2 students per room.

This is a troubling reality that affects not only UNZA but all public institutions that offer services in Zambia; the demand increases as the population grows but there are never enough resources to accommodate the increasing demand. How can we get the resources to increase capital expenditure? Although government might be the solution, there is much more that alumni or graduates of UNZA can do to build the new, necessary and needed infrastructure to expand the institution.

Lecturers and Workers Conditions

The lecturers should be the best paid since donations and endowed Chairs could account for some of the pay. Some of the best conditions could be arranging for lecturers to take sabbatical leave to institutions where UNZA graduates are teaching and researching in foreign institutions. All UNZA lecturers could have a designated counterpart  UNZA graduate lecturer at other institutions abroad to work together for research and exchanging some of the new cutting edge teaching pedagogy. May be we could have  lecturers abroad who are UNZA graduates to give live lectures by skype as guest lecturers in one of the current UNZA lecturers’ courses as a donation. The other way round is that current UNZA lecturers can provide guest lectures to University classes abroad where lecturers who are UNZA graduates are teaching at colleges and universities in the diaspora.

Since I began teaching here in America 25 years ago, I tried to use appropriate supplementary textbooks by some of my Zambian colleagues and authors in the courses I taught in the early 1990s. There is a possibility that a live lecture from an UNZA lecturer would provide a valuable source of course material for my students who often cannot afford to fly to Africa or Zambia to attend a lecture at  a Zambian or African institution. Many times I took my American students to the University of West Indies Mona Campus in Jamaica where my students attended many lectures by Jamaican lecturers for a fee that was paid to both the lecturers and the University. University of Zambia could to the same today via skype or closed circuit television.

Refurbishing of Residence Hall Rooms

Some of the most passionate desires among all UNZA graduates in Zambia and abroad are to refurbish and paint their dilapidated old rooms in the Halls of residence. The word is that the late President Mwanawasa did refurbish his old room in President Hall. This is one of the easiest tasks that a new organization can arrange. When University of Zambia students are on a break between terms,  teams of UNZA graduates with their families, friends, and children would come to campus and paint rooms every year. The best way would be to install plaques in each room listing all the graduates who resided in those rooms since the University opened. This could be a continuing tradition in which every UNZA student upon graduating would be expected to help take care of his or her former room later in their lives.

Library, Classrooms, Equipment, and Landscaping

UNZA needs library resources, adequate classrooms, equipment for teaching and research and landscaping to maintain the beautiful grounds, very modest donations by all former graduates could take care of some of the expenses. For example, if we assume that UNZA had graduated a conservative total of 8600 students over the last 43 years, how could they make donations? If each one of the alumni or the graduates donates K500.00 ($71.00) each, that would yield K4.3 million. If they donated K721.00 ($100) each that would yield K6.2 million. There should be a new approach in which all donors’ names should be recognized on campus by engraving names of each donor in relevant places, buildings, and rooms. Their names should also be put on the UNZA web page.

Vison for the Future

University of Zambia can be stronger even produce better graduates for the future. In order to achieve this, we ought to have a better vision for the future for the institution. Simply doing the same things we have done since 1966 may not be enough. Professor Lameck Goma, the first Zambian Vice-Chancellor of the University game a famous graduation speech in the early 1970s titled: “The Usefulness of the Useless Disciplines”. University of Zambia focused intensely on training students to occupy skilled jobs in the Zambian economy that were under tremendous demand. Disciplines such engineering, medicine, law, computer science, business, education, economics, biology, agriculture, and mathematics were regarded as “useful” disciplines. But disciplines such as the arts, music, philosophy, poetry, anthropology, literature, theater, and dance were regarded as “useless” disciplines because they could not help Zambia provide the technological skills we urgently needed for developing the nation at that time.

Prof. Goma was arguing that we needed knowledge of the arts to lead fuller both personal and intellectual lives as a nation. I agree with Prof. Goma. University of Zambia needs to introduce the arts. How this can be done is subject to proper planning and discussion. For example, University of Zambia should build a state of the art Performing Arts Theater and center. This could be a source of employment, income from the community as all audience attending events would pay for all national and international performances.  A performing arts center would also be a training ground for future artists, film makers, creative writers, play wrights, dancers, musicians, ethnomusicologists, opera writers, opera performers, stage and film actors. Virtually all UNZA graduates are good technocrats but very few of us are capable of infusing the arts into our work.

 

 

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

It was Malcolm Gladwell in his book: “The Tipping Point” who said at the beginning of the internet era in the early 1990s, emails were not only very few, but they were very useful for only quickly communicating very important meaningful information. The tipping point when email turned from being valuable to a new sense and even a menace is when its volume increased. Today one individual can generate millions if not billions of spam email at a click of a button clogging up our inboxes with meaningless rubbish or trash. It is for this reason that among thousands of emails I receive, besides work and other formal official email correspondence, I can count may be up to five the number of emails that have had a profound impact on my thinking and world view during the last ten years. These emails constitute a major “event” because I become very sharply aware of my own thinking before and after reading that particular mail.

An Email from Zambia

So it was that on 3 October 2014 at 10.00 hours Eastern American time, I risked clicking open an email from a stranger. I read it for the first few seconds with my clicker hovering above the delete button. The excerpt from the email said:

“…….The first time I came across your information was a few months ago when I was looking up some Tumbuka expressions and I found your “Hunger for Culture” web page.  Your Adada Nati Niwele and Amama Nati Niwele poems were very inspirational to me. I was impressed, at first I thought you were Malawian, but as I read more I discovered you are Zambian, I was delighted and very proud. I hold you in very high esteem and I’m humbled to be able to communicate with you.

I am aspiring to write in Tumbuka. My parents hail from Lundazi, it’s a long time since I have been there. I barely speak Tumbuka, but I understand, and can read and write fluently……..”

Releasing the Delete Button

I instantly released my delete button. I had written 2 Tumbuka mother tongue poems on my web page with no translation into English. I can write, do, and publish material in an innovative way and responsibly on my web page without anyone breathing down my neck telling me what I can and can’t think and express. So many furious thoughts began steaming in my mind. Who is this Marita Banda? I wrote the 2 poems many years back when I was experiencing my own normal ups and downs of marriage problems. The 2 poems reflect what married Tumbuka men and women traditionally contemplate and wrestle with during normal marital conflagrations, problems, and sometimes upheavals.

One very short portion of the long Tumbuka poem I wrote that Marita had read is reproduced with English translation for the first time. The poem is from the married woman’s perspective.

 

 

Adada nati niwele

(Father I want to come home)
Mwanalume wanisuzgha

(The man is troubling me)
Ndeke zinai baliwiska

(Four planes were taken down)
Ndine mwanakazi yayi

(I am not a woman)
Ine bana nkhulela

(I am raising children)
Ndine mwanakazi yayi

(I am not a woman)
Nabapa bana bankhondi

(I have given him five children)
Ndine mwanakazi yayi

(I am not a woman)
Mutima bukubin’gha nkhanira

(My heart aches very much)
Adada nati niwele

(Father I want to come home)
Niza mlima kukaya

(I will come home and farm)

Am I a Malawian?

Marita Banda at first thought I was Malawian? That’s the legacy of Africans and Zambians being victims of British and European colonialism in 1884 during which the continent was divided into 54 artificial countries on a map. The result of which is that of the one million Tumbuka people, half of them are in Eastern Zambia in Lundazi and the other half are in Northern Malawi. Some of the Lozi people in Western Province in Zambia are in Zambia, some in Botswana and others are in Namibia. Some of the Bemba are in Northern Province and others in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some of the Chewa people are in Eastern Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique.

Marita Banda was aspiring to write in Tumbuka and did not know her native language very well? All of this intrigued me so much that some of my long held negative assumptions about contemporary Zambian writers were beginning to be challenged. Her Tumbuka poem was forty lines long but only the first 7 lines are reproduced here with English translation for the first time. The full poem is at the bottom of the article.

Gombeza

 (Blanket)

Gombeza ilo mukuona na nika pa nthambo, ndane

(That blanket I have hung on the cothes line is mine)

Lene lila liswesi na babulaula bati bii mu mphepete makora ghene, ndane

(The red one with butterflies along the edge, is mine)

Ndipo, lu saba kuomila cha

(In fact it does not take long to dry)

Mungaleka kulisezga apo nkhulibika namweneco, ku chipinda

(Do not move it, I the owner store it in the bedroom)

Kwambula ku nimanyiska

(Without telling me)

 

Gombeza lane nkhudikha para kwiza ka mphepo

(My blanket I cover myself with when it gets cold)

Para nadikha mbwenu kati fuu… Makora ghene

(When I am under it, I feel so warm and so good)

New Zambian Poetry Genre

This is an excerpt of my response to Marita’s email:

“Your e-mail was sweet music to my ears. Your poem made me laugh especially about “gombeza na viskuli”. This brought vivid memories to my soul about my childhood. That’s why I find Tumbuka so profound because it brings out the deepest philosophical thoughts and memories from kukaya when I was growing up; my grandparents, my father and mother, cousins, uncles, aunts, food including nchunga ziswesi or eating red delicious kidney beans with nshima. “Gombeza liswesi” I can see the vivid colors of the blanket and images of “kwanika pa nthambo”. i.e to hang on the clothes line.

…….I think sometimes English is very restricting and narrow. I think what you have written is not just a poem in the English Western sense, but I think is more a poem of “Kuteketela” in the Tumbuka language sense”.

The expression “a poem of Kuteketela” was the moment of eureka for me in the email when a sudden flash of a new idea, perhaps a new fresh genre of Tumbuka and therefore Zambian poetry in the 72 Zambian dialects and languages, was born. We could also have another genre of Tumbuka poems we could call “Kutoza” directed at someone of something that had annoyed you.  Another genre could be poems of  “Kuzingiziwa” describing intense and profound suffering. Another one could be poems of  “Kugexgha” where you challenge someone or something that is confronting you. I also just thought of “Love, Romance, and Marriage” which would be “poems of Chitemwano” in Tumbuka for young romantic lovers.

You could also have “poems of Kusungana” for couples who have had long deeply loving relationships especially in marriage. For example, we could have poems and prose about “Mwanakazi wa garuka” or “Mwakazi wa Punthuka” both involving a woman’s intense feelings of alienation in marriage. Poems of “Mwanalume tondo” would reflect a man’s reflections, reactions and expression of frustration in a marriage or any relationship in which a man’s devotion, tenacity and courage are being doubted by family members. Poems of “Kulobombolela” would reflect feelings of pessimism, gloom and predicting a negative future which is very common in our politics. Perhaps the most fascinating and full of deep philosophical thought are poems of “Malonje” when two Zambians greet each other in a traditional customary way.

Important Message to Zambians

Remember where and when you read this article. The most important message you should get especially in this preceding paragraph is that all of these new possible genres of poetry probably already exist in virtually all Zambian languages including in Bemba, Tonga, Lozi, Ngoni, Chewa, Tumbuka, Lunda, Luvale, Kaonde, Soli, Lenje and many other Zambian languages. People just need to express them in those languages originally and commit them to the written page. I am very excited that in the weeks and months to come I will be writing some poetry in these new genres both for purposes of expressing myself but also to serve as a practical expression of what Zambian poems written in native, indigenous or mother tongues read like while invoking our deepest experiences and feelings which we are denied when we are compelled to use English when it is not our mother tongue.

References

Gladwell, Malcolm., The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2002.

P’Bitek, Okot, Song of Lawino, Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1966.

Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi., Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary, London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1981.

Tembo, Mwizenge., the Tumbuka Poems “Adada nati Niwele” and “Amama nati Niwele” can be found at this link:

https://hungerforculture.com/?cat=19

Tembo, Mwizenge., “Hunger for Culture: Kusungana as a Zambian Expression of Deepest Love between Couples”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIzt5PwafJY

The Untranslated Tumbuka Language Poem

Gombeza

by Marita Banda

Gombeza ilo mukuona na nika pa nthambo, ndane

Lene lila liswesi na babulaula bati bii mu mphepete makora ghene, ndane

Ndipo, lu saba kuomila cha

Mungaleka kulisezga apo nkhulibika namweneco, ku chipinda

Kwambula ku nimanyiska

Gombeza lane nkhudikha para kwiza ka mphepo

Para nadikha mbwenu kati fuu… Makora ghene

Gombeza ili nanga inunkhe folo, ndane

Panji mukunuska matuzi, ngane

Nanga ni nyelemo visyuli vya nchunga za msuzi uswesi, ndane

Asi lu chapiwa? Ilo lili pa nthambo likuomila makora ghene

Ningafika patali yayi kwambula gombeza lane liswesi

Na babulaula bati bii mu mphepete makora ghene

Nyengo zinyanke lusebeza nge ni nkhata

Nkhuthwikilapo maji pa kufuma ku dambo

Ndipo, pa kufuma ku thengele nkhutwikilapo nkhuni

La dazilo nkhayeghelamo mboholi wuwo makora ghene

Nkhumanya banyake pa imwe banyithu

Kumasinda uku muka nenanga kuti ‘ati ukazuzi bati!’

Kweni mboholi muli kulya

Nati nane lino nkhubetcha

Gombeza ndilo lane!

Ukazuzi nawo, ngwane!

Ntheura, mukhale waka chete!

Gombeza likunilela na mweneco,

Likunisunga

Ndipo ndiwemi nkhanira

Chinyakeso, nkhumanya pali banyake pano

Nyifwa yindanunkhe imwe  muli yamba kale

Kuibendelela gombeza ili

Kuti muzalitole para nyifwa yanifikila

Agho maghanoghano mulekeletu

Chifukwa ili gombeza nkhunjira nalo dindi

Olo nyifwa yinitole,

Ndine wonozgeka kale

Imwe mbwenu chitanda muza mubika mu gombeza ili

Mungasuzgikanga kuti mu gule linyake chara

Muzamusebezeska lene lili gombeza lane

Liswesi na babulaula bati bii mu mphepete makora ghene

 

 

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Author of  “The Bridge: Romance-Adventure Novel”.

Professor of Sociology

I opened my e-mail in my office. As usual there were hundreds of messages from work, friends, and organizations, companies, including the useless and annoying spam that I quickly delete. As I scrolled down, the subject said: “Congratulations!” and it was from someone I knew from Zambia. I quickly clicked it open: “It is with great delight that I extend my heartiest congratulations to you for your book, The Bridge, being accepted by the CDC in Zambia as a supplementary reader for grades 10 – 12 in the Zambian Secondary School Literature syllabus”.

I was stunned. My emotions were frozen for a few moments. My mouth was open in disbelief. I was alone in my office. I heard myself say: “Oh My God!! Dreams can come true.” I had been learning, struggling, reading, writing, and fighting for this moment for the last 50 years since I was 11 years old in Grade 6 in Zambia in 1965. I wanted to scream with joy. But I didn’t want my American workmates to think I was a Chainama case. I paced up and down my office with pent up excitement and stood by the window and stared at the American Spring sunny blue sky day. I sent an email to my wife and children to tell them of the great news. I thought about my parents in the village and all the sacrifices they had made to give me an education; my father is 91 years old and my mother is 89 years old.

Curriculum Development Centre

I would like to thank the Zambian people for having paid for my education from Chizongwe Secondary School all the way to finishing my Ph.D. This novel is my thank you for all you have done for me in my life. This is my gift to you and a thank you. I hope this novel  will help many young Zambians and non-Zambians today and in the future. The Ministry of Education, Science, Vocational Training and Early Education Curriculum Development Centre of the Republic of Zambia has just approved my novel “The Bridge”. The novel will be used for teaching English and English Literature in all Secondary Schools for Grades 10 -12 students.  Teachers should be very excited.

I would like to thank Mr. Elisa Phiri, who was the Headmaster, who taught me English in Grade Seven at Tamanda Upper Primary School in 1966. I would like to thank Mr. Lyson Chikunduzi Mtonga who was my English teacher when I was in Grade 6 at Tamanda Upper Primary School in 1965. Mr. Benson, who was British,  was my English Literature teacher at Chizongwe Secondary School from Form 3 to 5 from 1969 to 1971. My late cousin, Smart Nyoni, told me so many traditional folktales when I was growing up as a child in the village that I was enchanted, inspired, and fascinated by the power of telling a good story. The writing of “ The Bridge” benefited from all these people.

What is “The Bridge”?

It is a powerful romantic story between two characters: Kamthibi the Zambian man and Trish the Irish woman. The saying that the proof of the pudding is in the eating is true in this case because just describing the novel may not be enough to appreciate its power. When I was in Grade 6 in rural Zambia, we read an English textbook which had photos of a red double decker in London in England. The Nkhwazi Nyanja textbooks had our traditional Zambian village culture in it. Of course later, I read Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, Dominic Mulaisho’s “Tingue of the Dumb” and Gideon Phiri’s “Ticklish Sensation”. I have also read dozens of other books. But I was never satisfied. I have always wanted to write books in which anyone can read but I have wanted Zambians to be right in the thick of the book. There were other reasons. But when I was writing this novel, I always had Zambians and the Zambian reader at heart.

Dispelling Myths

There are some common myths that should be dispelled right away. Everyone will enjoy this novel. Don’t categorize it as “Zambian or African novel; then I shouldn’t read it because I am not Zambian or African”. People who have read it from different walks of life have had only praise and sometimes anger because they could not get enough of it. This novel has been around for 10 years. It has been circulating underground. Let me give you just a few of numerous examples why it is a good novel.

Jenny

In October 2012 I was visiting Mpika.  The host was a Bemba woman I will call “Jenny”. She loves novels. One day after work, she locked herself in her bedroom at 16:00 hours to read “The Bridge”. She burst out of her bedroom at 2100 hour insulting me the author just after she had just finished reading the novel. “Iwe Tembo! Nala kuuma (I will beat you up). This novel is so gudu iwe but how can you end it like this!! I am not satisfied. I kudinti stop reading it!!” I almost run out of the house because I thought she was going to beat me up.

White American Student

When I wrote the novel 11 years ago, I asked a 19 year old white American college student to read and edit the novel. After handing the thick manuscript to me in my office, I asked her what she thought about the novel. Tears dropped from her eyes. I was surprised and worried because I thought something terribly wrong had happened to her. When I asked her why she was tearing up, she said: “I didn’t know what was going to happen to the characters.” Although this was very early, I knew I had something good.

The Zambian students will not be the first ones to use “The Bridge” in the classroom.  Over 200 of my American college students have read “The Bridge” in my classes and they have all enjoyed it over the last 9 years.

Others

James Mwape and Mbumwae Suba-Smith are two of the many Zambians who read “The Bridge” in the United States. They both thought it was so good that it could be made into a great movie. A lecturer at the University of Zambia who has a Ph. D. in Mathematics said after reading “The Bridge” in 2006: “Tembo, reading your novel is like watching a video”. This is some of the best complements I could get as a writer as it meant the descriptions in the novel are very vivid so that you feel like you are right in the middle of the action. Lengani Kabinda read “The Bridge” and wrote a review in which he expressed glowing comments.

In December 2014, a Zambian woman in Lusaka who is also a writer read “The Bridge” between her work and family responsibilities at home. She said she could not put it down and called “The Bridge”  “a page turner”. She complained that as a result some of her domestic responsibilities were somewhat neglected that week.

Recommendations

I would like to thank the Curriculum Development Board for approving the novel. Both men and women adults, secondary, college, and University students from all walks of life will enjoy “The Bridge”. Teachers will enjoy their teaching and their students will enjoy learning just as my students have the last 9 years.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

Introduction

My wife carefully laid down in his crib in our bedroom our napping three week old first born baby boy. She slowly tipped toed out of the bedroom carefully leaving the bedroom door half way open so she could hear the baby if he began crying. As a young new mother and housewife, she had so much to do that morning while the baby was napping. She wanted to wash the pile of soiled cloth nappies or diapers and hang them on the clothes line outside to dry. She was going to do more laundry, cook relish for lunch, sweep the house, and cook nshima before I got home for lunch. She was hardly ten steps tiptoeing out of the bedroom, when our baby son cried. My wife went back in, briefly breast fed him to sleep again. When this happened the 5^th time, she was frustrated as she could not have any chores done without the well-breast fed baby waking up and crying.

Although she was American and very Western, my wife did what she had seen the millions  of Zambian mothers so; she got a chitenje cloth and tied our son on her back. The baby blissfully slept for next few hours as she did all her chores. I had driven my wife and our baby son from University Teaching Hospital (UTH) maternity ward three weeks before. We were living in Lusaka at the time in the early 1980s at the institute of Africa Studies.

What is the best way to raise a baby in 2015? Do you bottle feed only during certain controlled times? When do you introduce solid food? Is it a sign of being primitive and backward for  Zambian mothers to carry their  babies on their backs as some  animals in the wild do? Can you be a strong liberated educated woman, and Managing Director of a top company, a professional, and still carry your baby on your back using a chitenje cloth? Should women openly breast feed their babies in public? Should you let babies cry before they go to sleep in a separate crib in another room away from the parents? Should mothers sleep with their babies? How does this affect marriage?  What is the role of the father?  How much sex and attention should the husband and the father expect from his wife as she is mothering the baby? An article: “Why African Babies Don’t Cry” by……. a friend had sent to me on facebook instigated me to write this article. http://www.drmomma.org/2010/09/why-african-babies-dont-cry.html

 

Credentials and Experience

Since I am going to say and suggest things about how to raise babies that some may regard as controversial,  offensive, uninformed, sexist since I am a male, and perhaps unscientific, I want to disclose my life experience as well as my formal academic credentials. I will also explain why I have been motivated to write this article.

I was born and grew up in the village in Zambia in Africa. I saw perhaps how hundreds of babies were raised. I saw how my mother and father raised 5 of my younger siblings from the first day they were born and up to when they became adults. I was heavily involved in raising my own three boys from when they were a few minutes old as babies up to now when they are adults. I have also observed how babies are raised for the last 30 years in the Western or American society.

I worked with the Dzithandizeni Nutrition Group in Chipata in 1971and also taught nutrition classes in the villages in rural Chipata from 1969 and 1971 in the Eastern Province of Zambia when I was a student at Chizongwe Secondary School. I also worked with the National Food and Nutrition Commission in Lusaka from 1972 to 1975. I majored in Psychology and Sociology at the University of Zambia from 1972 to 1976. While studying for my Ph. D at Michigan State University from 1982 to 1987, I was heavily trained in Cross-Cultural or Comparative Studies.

I have been compelled to write this article for a very simple reason: I deeply care about babies and children and their welfare. It deeply pains me personally when babies and children are subjected to some of the most distressful or harmful child rearing practices which appear to have been introduced to serve the interests of adults and not the babies. I hope this article will help all young mothers and fathers who want to do the very best for their babies. The Zambian baby does not cry. Their babies may gain so much from this good experience that ultimately the good practices will make raising children a joyful experience for both the baby and parents. It is gratifying to raise babies who don’t cry. How you raise your baby may ultimately influence what she or he is like as an adult.

What is the best way to raise a baby?

The best way to raise a baby is to give them that total mother’s attention everyday as soon as they are born. This means holding them as they breast feed on demand even if they are just fussing. Carrying them on the back is the most natural as they can feel the comfort of the warm of the mother’s human body. A mother’s back may be too wide for a small baby who may be only a few weeks old. In the villages and large extended family households in Zambia, there are always young boys and girls who are 8 or ten years old who have narrower backs who will more easily carry the small baby on the back using the chitenje cloth. The father and other family members can also help provide and maintain the social warmth the baby naturally craves by holding and talking and interacting with the baby.

Should you bottle feed only during certain controlled times?

Exclusively bottle feeding the baby after being born for no good reason deprives the baby of the basic immunological advantages that have biologically been passed to the baby through the mother’s milk during the first 6 months. If you have to bottle feed perhaps for medical reasons, you should be aware at least of the nutritional and health advantages of breast feeding. When I taught nutrition from 1969 to 1975 in Zambia, we taught all mothers to breast feed their babies as the best way to prevent malnutrition in babies. Bottle feeding may have become common in Europe after the Industrial Revolution among wealthy upper class elite families. The idea of feeding the baby on demand  becomes very difficult with bottle feeding. My wife and I were so grateful that she was able to stay home for the most part to breast feed all our three boys with abundant supply of her breast milk.

When do you introduce solid food?

There is no need to rush. There is no set time. If there is enough breast milk that they are able to frequently feed even during the night, the baby will be very content. When they have outgrown the breast milk, they will let you know. Traditionally, mothers used to chew or masticate the solid probably hard food and feed it to the growing still toothless baby. Today we say how disgusting and primitive, exchanging mother’s saliva with the  baby! Think about this; wild animals still do it and this is how we survived as human beings from 150,000 years ago. After all, Zambians and Africans are the origins of all the 7 billion people to day starting way back about 150,000 years ago. We discovered the best way to raise babies from trial and error. But of course to day we grind foods easily and can make all kinds of porridges and smooth processed foods. So there is no need to first chew the food for the baby.

Carrying Baby on Back and Primitiveness

One of the most powerful and destructive words which Europeans have used is the term “primitive”. If you live in a flat in a city, have Western education, can read and write, use sophisticated technology, then you as a mother cannot carry a baby on the back with a chitenje cloth; because that would be like those primitive native Zambian or African women carrying their babies on their back like monkeys or other wild creatures do. Westerners associate carrying the baby on the back with primitiveness. What this has done is to introduce a wedge between a mother and one of the most nurturing actions or instincts anywhere in the world: to physically be with her baby on her back or front if she needs to with a convenient chitenje cloth.  This is not just a matter of convenience for the mother or guardians of the baby, but the physical closeness the carrying of the baby on the back introduces may be a biological necessity for the safety and health of the baby and later perhaps the emotional health of the child as an  adult.

The Liberated Educated Woman

Should the liberated Zambian educated woman carry her baby to the office and breast feed the baby on demand while she is working? This question is provocative but it is the wrong question that really puts the cart in front of the horse. I think liberated men and women should be asking, “Since when were women banned from raising their babies and working at the same time to earn an income?” When I was growing up in the village, my mother worked in the field with us. The baby was often on her back. She would stop and sit down and breastfeed the baby and resume her work. She took the necessary breaks as needed. Sometimes after breast feeding while sitting on a ridge (mzele), she would spend a few minutes while the baby sat on her lap and briefly played. Then my mother would get up to resume working. My mother took particular pride in being able to work hard in the field to contribute to the family food while taking time to attend to the baby. Why should this be impossible to do this for today’s Zambian educated women? Why should this not be possible for women everywhere?

Should women openly breast feed their babies in public?

I was travelling in a 20 passenger minibus from Serenje to Lusaka in Zambia. The bus stopped to pick a woman passenger with a 6 months old baby on her back. As she soon as she boarded the bus, men and women moved so they would offer her a better seat. She shifted her baby in the chitenje cloth up to her front. Within minutes she was breast feeding the baby and no one was freaking out, staring, squinting at her, or looking stunned. It was normal.  We live in a beautiful society that cherishes the bond between the baby and the mother.

One of the most striking and unfortunate differences between Western and Zambian women is that  Zambian women can breastfeed their babies anywhere anytime 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Western women can be arrested in some cases if they breastfeed openly. If they are in public, restaurant, bus or shopping mall, they have to go to the public toilet or rest room to breast feed. The very isolated defiant Western women who try to breast feed in public will try to cover themselves and the baby in some obscure corner. They are made to feel embarrassed, ashamed and fearful. The public also act alarmed and will call the police and act very hostile if a woman is breast feeding openly.

I took for granted and was never aware of the abundant freedom that the Zambian woman enjoys to breast feed her baby openly until I came to America in the 1970s. I had not seen women breast feed in public in the United States for so many years, that the first time I returned home to the Capital City of Lusaka, I was aware of women breast feeding everywhere; on buses, on streets, in shops, and walking. After a few hours later, I didn’t notice it anymore. This is the power of culture. I am very thankful for the sake of the Zambian mother and the well-being of the babies that Zambian men and women have given women this freedom by not sexualizing and turning into  sexual pornography the natural act of openly breast feeding the baby. Every Zambian woman and man should be vigilant though because the educated Zambian elite men and women can easily introduce these hostile cultural values to Zambia through internet pornography.

 

By

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Author of “Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Cutlure”.

Professor of Sociology

During the night for about 12 hours on 7 February in 1968,  Zambia did not have a President. I was sleeping in my Aggrey House dormitory bed with my school mates as a young Form Two student at Chizongwe Secondary School in Chipata. Over 3 million of my fellow Zambians had no idea what potential danger and catastrophe was brewing in the Capital City of  Lusaka. Political conflict,  vicious tribal divisions and fights had become so bad at the UNIP’s National Council conference hall in Chilenje in Lusaka that President Kaunda had stormed out of the conference in disgust and disappointment and had resigned as President of Zambia. He had driven to State House to pack his bags to leave. The tribal conflicts all over Zambian had been building up for months. The top leadership at the conference knew what bloody chaos would fall on the entire nation if President Kaunda resigned. Zambia was only 4 years young and  a very fragile nation.

Tribalism Ugly Head

The top leadership of Vice President Simon Kapwepwe and Grey Zulu told all the leaders not to leave and  to stay in the Conference Hall in Chilenje. They knew the whole nation was tittering on the brink of an unimaginable disaster. The 2 leaders followed President  Kaunda to State House to persuade him to reverse his resignation. Church leaders, representatives of the army, police, and friends went to State House all night. President Kaunda by morning had reversed his decision. Zambia had dodged the ugly scourge and divisive evil that is tribalism.

During the recent Presidential elections, vicious tribalism has reared its ugly head again. There have been charges, counter charges about tribalism, and finger pointing among the two leading political parties; UNDP and the PF. The intellectuals have been in the middle of these verbal tribal fights, dousing the political flames, taking sides and apparently using some of the most hateful language. Why all of a sudden is this tribalism becoming so bad after 50 years of relative peace and harmony? One possible explanation is that we have generations of Zambian leaders and citizens who may be too young to remember how, who, what struggles, what it takes, the leadership, and the sacrifices that brought  Zambians together to be a peaceful nation.

Solutions to Tribalism

The solution to tribalism today is to deeply understand the sacrifices and revisit our national history and how our founding fathers and mothers built a stable Zambian nation to begin with. May be we could learn from our own history. There are those of us who are educated and see other countries that appear to be more democratic. We want our constitution to have articles from the constitutions of those countries and insert them into Zambia’s constitution. This alone cannot solve our apparent national problem of crisis of tribalism. We have to change people’s minds and hearts. That is not easy and hardly happens overnight. The constitution alone, however well written with well-meaning appropriate clauses, cannot solve some of the apparent tribalism problems and the animosity that emerged during this recent election.

Incidentally, the time to implement solutions is now and not when various tribes, stakeholders, and groups are at war and cannot talk to each other any longer. Political leaders ought to visit Rwanda, go to Kenya and see the terrible impact of the recent political violence, visit Somalia, Southern Sudan, understand the history of apartheid South Africa and NAZI Germany periods. Even developed democratic countries are not immune to this racial, ethnic, or tribal hatred. There are plenty of examples of what hate can bring to an otherwise peaceful nation like Zambia. No Zambian from the top leadership to the ordinary citizen, or even the cadres should  take the peace and tranquility for granted.

One Zambia One Nation

At the very beginning of the nation in 1964, the founding Fathers and Mothers of the nation and President Kaunda had decided that Zambia would be a non-racial and non-tribal society. These were not just empty slogans. They put these guiding principles into practice

through offering opportunities for leadership, education,  and the economy to every Zambian without taking into consideration race, tribe, region of origin, sex, and other differences. Secondly, they taught and preached those ideologies and  policies of love, unity, Humanism, One Zambia One Nation, tolerance, non-violence,  in every aspect of  life for all Zambians every single moment every day.  I know because I lived through that whole period. I did not have to read about it or listen to rumors or some second hand twisted historical revisionism today. The best life style the leadership encouraged was social intermixing, integration, and the intermarriage that happened among the young generation  as a result. We Zambians may be ethnically the most socially integrated not just in Africa but the entire world. We ought to regard this with pride as a strength although societies which  still practice racial, ethnic, and religious segregation, may regard this as a national weakness.

Tribalism and Presidential Elections

What is the solution to the tribal politics and voting that happened during the recent elections? All Zambian leaders and citizens must go back to history and understand what our founding fathers did to create unity, a non-violent, non-racial and non-tribal society. All the Chiefs who encouraged their subjects recently only to vote for people from their own tribes were wrong. All political parties and their leaders who encouraged people to vote just for the candidate of their tribe were wrong. To say that it is the other tribe or political party who started it or made tribal statements first is not a good excuse. This was not Zambian political behavior. We cannot change or improve something unless first we know and acknowledge what was wrong.

Denounce Tribalism and Violence

During the next 18 months before the next election, all political leaders must make a clear effort to first denounce violence and tribal politics among all Zambians and especially their political supporters and cadres. The Zambian voters must also become better educated about our own political history. Every Zambian reading this should realize that once that peaceful tranquility is perhaps accidentally lost due to careless, irresponsible, and inflammatory tribal statements and actions among leaders, it will be impossible to get back the stable and peaceful Zambia we enjoy and cherish for ourselves and our children in the future. I have a first grandchild who is barely three weeks old. I would like her when she grows up to live in a peaceful Zambia that I as her grandfather has lived in for more than 50 years.

If you would like to know more about how the founders and Zambians fought tribalism in Zambian politics and struggled and sacrificed from 1964 to 1991, you can read Chapter 16: “Evolution of government and multiparty democracy in Zambia from 1964 to 1991” in my book: Satisfying Zambia Hunger for Culture. If you would like to know why and what caused President Kaunda to resign that night 47 years ago, read the book: Night Without a President  by Sikota Wina.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

It has always occurred to me that parents create lasting warm memories through the wonderful things they do for their families and especially children during the Christmas season. When these children grow to be adults, they will often return home during the holidays to re-experience that magic. I do not know whether I can ever re-experience my special childhood Christmas magic.

We were a family of nine in a rural village in Zambia in Africa. My father was a primary school teacher who earned a modest twenty kwacha or dollars per month in the early 1960s. How did he and my mother make us all happy at Christmas? Of course some of the food like maize for nshima, beans, and peanuts we grew on land just behind our house. How did my father manage to buy one small gift for each one of us at Christmas? He saved and planned ingenious layaways for the whole year with the local Indian (from India) shopkeeper at Mgubudu Stores. Each of the six girls and mother got an inexpensive dress sewn by local tailor. Designer clothes were out of the question. The boys usually got either a pair of shorts or a shirt.

One Christmas at the old age of eight, my father bought me my first pair of shoes. When I saw them, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I put them to my nose to smell them. They smelt new. Everybody had a big laugh because I did not know which shoe went on the right or left foot. Like a good mom, my mother teased me about my scrubbing my feet really good so that my razor sharp calluses did not put holes in the new shoes. She had a point because there were no socks with the shoes. A pair of socks would have been too expensive.

The most exciting and memorable part of Christmas day in our family was the food. The day before Christmas, my father would buy a loaf of bread, rice, onion, Tiger Oates and a special spice called chikasu. Early in the morning on Christmas day, a chicken was slaughtered. My mother diced the onions and sautéed them in oil with the chikasu spice. The aroma wafted from the kitchen. The smell was so good that it could have killed several starving and emaciated men. We kids would all hang around the kitchen our nostrils sniffing the air around us.  Mother would tease us asking what we were hanging around the kitchen for. Why didn’t we go and play outside, say about a  mile away? She needed elbow room in the kitchen, she would say. She would have this special beam and smirk on her face that said a thousand words that she was happy on this special day.

After church at noon, we would have a large family feast; rice and chicken both cooked with the special chikasu spice, cake my sisters baked using recipes from their domestic science classes at Kanyanga Girls boarding  school. In the afternoon, dressed in whatever best new piece of clothing each of us had, we went to Christmas festivities including a variety of African traditional dances like vinyau, chitelele, and cimtali in the villages.

One memorable Christmas incident surrounds the African village tradition of not wasting any food. When a chicken is slaughtered, for example, everything is used except for the feathers. Children clean and roast the intestines and the head and eat them as a snack ahead of the main meal. This was often seen as a preliminary reward for the children for performing the hard and exhausting task of chasing the chicken through the village before it was apprehended. We boys always looked forward to amusing ourselves by using the chicken’s stomach as a soccer ball. We would clean the inside, inflate it and tie it.  We would usually get a good game of chifyawo football going. One Christmas day, my  brother and I had just inflated the chicken stomach and kicked the “ball” about a hundred meters ahead  of us in the village square. We sprinted after it. Six to ten chickens began to also chase the thing. This was not unusual. But from nowhere, our family dog furiously charged the “ball” amidst our screams to “stop!!!”. The village dog knows a good meal when he sees one. He disappeared into the bush with the  “ball”. He reappeared later licking his chops.

 

By

Mwizenge S. Tembo

Professor  of Sociology

I was hardly surprised recently to read that John and Lisa Henderson decided to cancel Christmas in their home. Apparently they had had enough of their children acting up and taking everything including Christmas presents for granted. When they broke the news to their three sons; 5, 8, and 11 year old, there was crying. The parents were going to donate to those in need whatever they were going to spend on Christmas presents.

In a highly prosperous society with material excesses, there is no longer a debate that simplicity in Christmas celebration was tossed out of the window decades ago. To remind myself that Christmas can be simple and happy I go back to memories of my first Christmas which I always remember with nostalgia.

It was during the late 1950s in a village in rural Zambia in Africa. This is the earliest Christmas I can remember.  I was one of more than 15 grandchildren in the Tembo clan. My grandparents were great farmers who provided us with abundant food, including delicious red kidney beans, corn, pumpkins, cassava, sweet potatoes, peanuts, chicken, and an occasional goat meat. But this year there was an air of excitement. Christmas was coming and word got around that we were going to eat something special on that day.

My grandmother had saved One shilling or 12 cents during the year. My aunt walked all afternoon to the Hoya store and came back in the rain that evening. Whatever she had bought was dry and had been obviously carefully concealed all through advance contingency planning. I could barely sleep with anticipation about Christmas and whatever my grandmother was keeping secret.

Early the following morning, as the grand children  jostled for position around the open fireplace, two gallons of water were boiled in a clay pot. From a small brightly colored aluminum foil packet, my aunt sprinkled half of some black dry floating substances never seen before. She then poured a whole three pennies or  three cents worth packet of sugar into the pot. She stirred it. The children sat near the pot as adults – uncles, aunts, older cousins – sat a little distance waiting and making a running commentary among them on how excited we kids were.

My grandmother handed each a small rusty metal cup. Adults had larger metal mugs. She carefully and slowly poured a little bit of the dark steaming liquid into the cups enough so that the liquid could go around the many cups. My grandmother unwrapped pieces of golden brown, white and soft edibles which were known locally as scones; pronounced as sikono. She split each piece among four children while adults split halves.

I proceeded to slowly take a sip of the sweet dark liquid followed by a small deliberate bite of the sikono. The whole experience was known as drinking tea with a small piece of a bun and it sent all us kid bonkers with profound sheer joy, pleasure, and wonder. As children this experience could not simply be bottled away.

Soon after most of this brief exhilarating event was over, I clutched by now a rather small piece of bun I had saved in my hand and ran outside the house to brag to other admiring friends in the village. “We drank tea and ate scones for Christmas!” I yelled at the top of my lungs as I pranced around. The other kids in the village begged for a piece of the Christmas. I gave each of them a smitten of the bun just enough to wet their mouths. But the kids were thrilled all the same.

That was my happiest Christmas ever. Later that morning we went to church and in the afternoon watched traditional dances.

More than forty years  – thousands of cups of tea and loaves of bread, pizzas, hamburgers – later, I have never really forgotten that Christmas. The majority of people in rural parts of the Third World still celebrate this Christmas by eating something special in the whole large family; it may be something as simple as a cup of sweetened black tea and slice of bread with sweet jam.

I have never forgotten that if I do not get any Christmas presents at all, the best way to celebrate Christmas is to share a meal however small.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo

Author of “Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture”.

Professor of Sociology

Huge peaceful public demonstrations have gone on for many days from coast to coast in protest of white Police officers killing unarmed black men. Three of the numerous cases are so outrageously tragic. A twelve year old African American boy Tamir Rice was playing alone with a toy gun in a public park. The video shows the Police Cruiser driving up to him within feet and the boy was shot dead in less than two seconds. Eric Garner in New York gasped for his breath as he said 11 times “I can’t breathe” as one of the more than 5 police officers  chocked him to death because of he was allegedly selling loose cigarettes or mishanga; loose cigarettes in my native country of Zambia.

John Crawford was a 22 year old African American  man playing with a harmless bb gun in a Walmart store. The victim had no chance. The video shows he was on his cell phone talking to his girlfriend and not even paying attention. He wasn’t threatening any one. The police shot him dead within less than 10 seconds. In both of these cases all it took was for a white person to call the police saying there was a black man with a gun. These cases are now just an endless epidemic. What has gone wrong? Are the police racist, out of control, and trigger happy?

We cannot arrive at useful solutions unless we understand what is going on beyond these tragic incidents. If you are looking for one quick simple answer such as because of the “racist white police” or “the black victims resisted arrest and were thugs and deserved to die”,  you may need to rethink.

The first thing that should be clear is that the vast majority of Police Officers in almost all communities perform their jobs very well in keeping the public safe. They follow the rules. But just as in every organization you will get a few rogue officers whose idea of policing may be distorted by racism or the Hollywood movie images of the thrill of shooting bad guys. Otherwise how does one understand the most recent case in which a rookie police officer was reportedly patrolling a public housing stairway with a drawn gun which accidentally fired and shot dead a completely innocent black man? It is common knowledge that we tell children not to run in the house holding a knife, folk, pencil, sharp stick or object? Why would a police officer be running around in a staircase with a drawn gun?

Some of the major reasons why the police are shooting black men are that there are too many guns in America an estimated 270 to 310 million guns or 101 guns per 100 citizens including babies. Forty years ago, many of the poorest neighborhood small time gangs in American ghettoes did not have guns. There may also be an estimated 3 million people today who may have mental illness in America who may need to be institutionalized but they may not be getting medical treatment. Families are managing these people and some are on the streets and are among the homeless population. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) says that blacks accounted for 39.4% of the total prison and jail population in 2009; 841,000 black males and 64,800 black females out of a total of 2,096,300 males and 201,200 females in the jail population. These same statistics are used as a justification for police racial profiling of  black men. Lastly, the recent proliferation of digital social media may have weakened both the citizens and the police’s social skills and ability to socially interact with each other in an amicable manner.

So when the police attend to calls, they may be dealing with very highly volatile situations. Many of these black victims in these police encounters are either innocent or deserve a day in court and not to be killed. We may need to think of all these factors before we find a solution to white police officers shooting unarmed black Americans.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

Author: “Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture”.

It is nearly over a month since President Sata died. Zambians are in a state of political hysteria both at home and abroad. I have been following news from Zambia every day. It seems there is minute to the minute political drama and jostling as political parties, potential candidates,  the nation, and the Patriotic Front (PF) ruling party are focused

on who will be elected the successor as President.

Dr. Christine Kaseba was in mourning for her deceased husband President Sata,  and planned to be in seclusion as required in our Zambian culture. But within a matter of a day or two  she had filed papers and had declared herself Presidential candidate. She said she had been urged to stand to save the party which was dominated by open squabbling. There is nothing wrong and everything right with her wanting to stand as President. After all, spouses work together, support each other, often share strengths, insights,  and determination needed to become effective in most positions and careers each one may hold in society. Carazan Aquiono of the Phillipines became the 11the President of the Philipines after her husband was assassinated in 1986. Asif Ali Zardari became Prime Minsiter of Pakistan after his wife Benazir Bhutto who was the former Prime Minister of Pakistan. Hilary Clinton may become the first woman to be President of the United States if she decides  to run in 2016. She is the wife to former American President Bill Clinton.

Concern as Zambians

What should concern all Zambians is that we do not have well established ways yet and sources of guidance as to how to conduct ourselves in these circumstances of important funeral customs and other major social events. It has generally been

observed that hardly was the late President’s  body cold and put in a coffin before people declared their candidacy and began campaigning. There was a story in the press that an educated woman attended a women only mourning session at President Sata’s numerous informal funeral gatherings wearing a short skirt when  all the other women were wearing chitenjes as Zambian traditional symbols of modesty and proper  mourning decorum. It is no secret that we educated Zambians are the worst at flouting these traditional rituals and customs  as we regard them with contempt as archaic, anachronistic, old, backward and primitive. This superiority complex attitude toward our own culture may be misguided as  an unfortunate remnant of our European colonial heritage.

Answers from “Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture”.

The questions we should be asking as Zambians are: “Do we know what our customs are?” “Should  we follow all the traditional rituals and customs and why?” “How much of our traditional customs should we change and what should we adopt from other modern cultures?” Sometimes we can’t find good answers because either we don’t know our own traditional customs  and knowledge enough  in the first place, and are therefore  torn and confused about how to behave in particular social situations.  If you have questions, lack confidence, you have an inferiority complex, and feel an emptiness of meaning about our Zambian culture and indigenous technology; you may

be reading this article at the right time.

The book: “Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture” had contributions from four Zambians: Claire Miti is a Zambian who lives in UK. Ruth Mugala is a Zambian who lived in Canada and now is in Zambia. They wrote the long Chapter on how girls and women are raised in Zambia. James Mwape with Mwizenge Tembo contributed to the Chapter on Zambian traditional dances especially Kalela. The book describes so many significant aspects of Zambian culture that President Kaunda wrote the foreword to the book saying:

“Many books have been written about Africa covering many aspects of human development. To my knowledge, no man has described in greater detail various aspects of African culture as this book by Prof. Mwizenge S. Tembo. In my humble view, this book, Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture, fulfills the desire for understanding and appreciating our Zambian  and African culture among my fellow citizens and non-Zambians whether they live here in Zambia or abroad in the diaspora.” (p.12)

Honey and Bee Stings

I will never forget what my fifty year old  younger brother told me a few years ago while I was visiting at our village. He said: “Para mupenja uci, njuci zimulumaninge”

translated: “ If you want to get honey be prepared to be stung by the bees”. The metaphor says that if you want anything  that is very important in life, be prepared to suffer some pain and sacrifice before you achieve or get it.  The book: “Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture” is probably the most important book for 15 million Zambians today. But it is difficult to get or buy the book in Zambia since it was published in the United States in September 2012. http://www.amazon.com/Satisfying-Zambian-Hunger-Culture-Social/dp/1479702080/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417041864&sr=8-1&keywords=Satisfying+Hunger+for+Culture

In the whole of Zambia, there may be about 20 copies of the book. When those who are in the diaspora buy and read it, these are the e-mails I have been receiving like this one recently from Inonge Mulako:

“I am a biochemist/molecular biologist based in Germany.  I recently purchased your book titled ‘Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture’.  I am still reading the book and I do not normally write to authors of books that I find interesting, however, the subject of this book is very dear to my heart.  I would personally like to thank you for this great book, it has stimulated many discussions among myself and my siblings .  I have ordered books for a few other family members and I am  looking forward to the discussions when we all meet for Christmas in December”. 

You may have to make an effort to get the book. I would strongly recommend that all the Presidential candidates and top political leader from the eleven  political parties should read the book with the idea of developing meaningful better manifestos on how the Zambian nation should go forward; Patriotic Front (PF), Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD), United Party for National Development (UPND), Alliance for Democracy and Development (FDD), Agenda for Change (AfC) Party, National  Restoration Party (NRP), Heritage Party (HP), United National Independence Party (UNIP), Forum for Democracy and Development (FDD), ULP, and National Democracy Focus (NDF).

Zambian Cabinet

All members of the Zambian cabinet should read this book. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs through Embassies abroad should gladly provide this book as a gift for those foreigners who truly want to understand Zambian people in the past, present, and the future. The book addresses Zambian political history, traditional dance, the detailed Zambian food customs especially our nshima staple food and various relishes or ndiyo, umunani, dende, or ndiwo. What about the role of religion, Christinaity and witchcraft among Zambians, traditional and modern diseases and treatments? What about the future? etc. etc. The book has 17 Chapters. This is the book to have not tomorrow but now.

Is Acting President Guy Scott a Muzungu?

Chapter Three addresses the very delicate subject of our Zambian identity. How do we identify ourselves as Zambians with 72 tribes and a very tiny minority of whites and non-Africans? The word muzungu has been used now for over a century, often in a negative way, as describing anyone who is white. Mwenye similarly is used in a very unique non-racist Zambian way. But we Zambians describe muzungu in such a way that  we don’t regard Guy Scott as a Muzungu but at the same time we sometimes refer to some particular  black Zambians as ba muzungu including African Americans. How is this possible? You may ask. After you read this chapter in the book you may for the first time as a Zambian realize that we have a very different complex but forgiving conception of race such that we feel comfortable with all our fellow white Zambians as citizens because the majority of them don’t behave like a muzungu but  behave like munthu or a Zambian or African.

Most important Book.

This may be the most important book for all 15 million Zambians. I was born and lived in the village totally immersed in Zambian and African language and culture in the late 1950s among the Tumbuka in Lundazi. I witnessed Zambia growing as a young nation and went to school at Tamanda Misison Upper School and Chizongwe Secondary School. I went to the University of Zambia from 1972 to 1976 majoring in Psychology and Sociology. I taught Social Development Studies, was a Research Fellow at the then Institute of African Studies of the University of Zambia, from 1977 to 1989. I have taught at colleges and read so much material on African culture here in the United States for the last 20 years. The book: “Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture” is so good that I gave a copy to President Kaunda. I called Cabinet Office to arrange to give a copy personally to President Sata around December 16 in 2012. I now regret that I never made it to State House to personally hand him a copy of the book. My three months sabbatical leave had come to an end.  I run out of time as I had to fly out of the country back to my college here in the USA where I am a lecturer or Professor.

by

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

Author: “Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture”.

Even when we were expecting it, when a relative or someone we dearly love who has been sick for a long time finally departs, we are shocked and still filled with infinite grief as we grapple with the finality of the passing of President Sata; our great country’s fifth President.  His immediate family members begin to reminisce about when they last saw and heard his voice, shared a meal, a joke, laugh, or played with the grandchildren. As a nation we begin to think of when we last saw him in public or heard him in the media. I remember his sharp memorable cobraisque comments a few months ago before parliament. As a nation that passionately loves our Presidents, we will all share those happy moments as we continue to khuza or mourn our beloved leader. The passing of President Sata at this moment turns everything that he did suddenly into the past. Never will he pass through Zambia’s great beautiful Savannah soil again in flesh. But his memories  will continue to nurture us as we look to tomorrow’s sunrise as a nation for another thousand years and beyond.

Every individual, family or marriage, every institution finds out its strength in a crisis. So it is true with nations. The passing of President Sata has created a crisis that tests us all as a nation. How do we mourn following our traditional Zambian values and customs while balancing this obligation with concerns about succession? Those of us who are abroad and cannot attend the funeral are the hardest hit as we wish we were there to be with our fellow citizens in this moment of grief.

After just celebrating 50 years of independence and having gone through the death of  President Mwanawasa and Chiluba, as a nation we should now be developing certain strong and clear customs, rituals, decision making procedures that guide us on how to mourn and choose the new leader. We should by now be able to tell each other: “This is how we mourn as Zambians” or if one of our fellow citizens is doing something which is munthondwe or unthinkable, we should be able to tell the individual: “That’s not not how we mourn as Zambians”.

Was it just an interesting coincidence that President Sata was not to be at the 50^th Independence Anniversary celebrations in Lusaka? Was it a coincidence that President Kaunda’s remarks at the celebrations reiterated his message urging of love, unity, and harmony among Zambians as the founder of the nation of Zambia? He had been doing and saying these messages since 1964.

As we grieve and mourn the passing of President Sata, especially after just celebrating 50 years of relatively peaceful independence, it may be appropriate for our whole nation to take a moment to count our blessings as we contemplate where we go from here and who we will choose  next as our beloved leader.

There are those Zambians, the young, and especially the very educated non-Zambians who believe that democracy in Zambia was born in 1991 when the nation had the first multiparty elections since 1968. I beg to differ. The building of democracy started in Zambia soon after independence in 1964 because that’s when the founding fathers started to build institutions and values, through the One-Party State, and the ideology of Humanism that eventually led to the multiparty democracy we enjoy today. Democracy and democratic values are never brought or imported on a clean silver platter to a nation from somewhere. Each nation has to work hard, struggle,  believe in God, and have to go through difficult times. Some nations go through deadly conflicts and genocidal wars before they finally establish democracy.  The scars of those deadly conflicts haunt the souls of those countries forever.

We Zambians as  a nation should feel very blessed and lucky that as we mourn the passing of President Sata  everyone including leaders are preaching love and unity. These values did not magically happen because one leader waved a magic wand and shouted: “Democracy”. They had to be developed especially by our founding leaders, fathers and mothers fifty years ago.

Some of the fundamental values that we share among Zambians as a nation can only be characterized as a few of the many Kaundaisms. These are the values our founding fathers and mothers preached and implemented in all policies to the nation every day and night as we built this great nation. First are love for each other, unity, and treating each other with dignity. Second, Zambia is a non-racial and non-tribal society. Third, that Zambians even during the heat of the struggle for independence chose a non-violent approach which is satyagraha in Gandhi non-violence philosophy. Fourth, that every Zambian should guard our peace, love and tranquility as a nation just as a  wife and husband will jealously protect their marriage and the love they have for each other. If as a citizen you see a fellow Zambian and especially a foreigner who wants to introduce seeds of division, exploitation, racism, tribalism, a hatred and violence, you should take appropriate peaceful precautionary measures to let other citizens and authorities know.

We Zambians are  a strong, compassionate, resilient, and a good people. I am sure Zambians have perhaps millions of stories like this one. I was on a 20 passenger minibus travelling from Serenje to Kapiri Mposhi. The minibus stopped to pick up a woman passenger. She sat down. After driving for 20 minutes she suddenly yelled that she had forgotten her cell phone at the station at which she had boarded the minibus. The young driver immediately slowed down contemplating what to do. The driver asked us if we could go back so the woman passenger could retrieve her cell phone. We agreed. We made a U-turn and drove back. When we arrived at the station, a woman run out of a house nearby  holding a cell phone saying she had been keeping it safely. We were back on the road when one of the men passengers said to the lady who was so grateful to have retrieved her cell phone: “Madam, you should buy the driver a drink once we arrive in Kapiri Mposhi”. All the passengers broke into hearty laughter.

So as we bury President Sata, the political parties that are jostling for power and choosing leaders  that might be elected to continue to lead the country,  should take the task very seriously. The potential leaders should be men and women who have demonstrated that they believe and will  practice the Zambian democratic principles and values embedded in the foundation of Kaundaisms that we have peacefully  lived by over the last 50 years.

The video clip by of Mvela by Rachel Botha  could easily be our mourning anthem at this time, should have the lyrics also apply to the reality that if you lose not just personal life but  peace in a nation, it is very difficult to get it again as you cannot buy it from anywhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm4aJjOs3i4. I could not stop the tears as I watched the video clip.

 

By

Mwizenge s. Tembo

Professor of Sociology

On Saturday afternoon May 24 2014, I had just finished mowing the grass around my yard. It was a warm spring day. I sat by the small table under the pine tree in my back yard to rest before I could remove my coveralls or overalls. The dogs were suddenly barking in the house which was usually the sign that someone was at the front door. There was no one in the house at the time. Sometimes the dogs barked if they saw the cat through the front door. After a while a man was on the back yard fence gate. He was an older man I had never seen before.

 

He sat down after I greeted him and I apologized for not running to

the front door.

He told me he had this idea of wanting to provide clean drinking water to people in rural Africa. He said he had his own money. Would I be willing to help him?

I was surprised. I told him that he might be taking a huge risk because there is so much corruption in Africa. What if I got his money, drunk it, bought a brand new car, and flew to Las Vegas to go and gamble?

The elderly man laughed. He shook his head and said he had heard about me. He thought I was a good trusted man. I told him I was flattered.

He explained  that he and his wife would provide the money for drilling the water boreholes, the cost of the hand driven water pumps, and the labor for the installation of the water pump. The village residents would contribute labor in carrying sand, crushing stones, and providing the water for the construction of the borehole water pump cement deck.

I finally told him he might be in luck and the people who will receive this gift of clean water will also be lucky. My brother and I had just gone through 6 years building the Village Library at NKhanga. The library was opened on December 8, 2012 and has now been operational serving hundreds of people in the community and many schools. We had gone through six difficult years from 2006 to 2012 of organizing people in the villages to execute the project. We had learnt some lessons about how to carry out the project. It had been very challenging but gratifying work.

I told the man I would propose the idea to my brother in the village and I would get back with him.

The man is Mr. Harry Showalter who is 90 years and is a member of the Mennonites. His house is on a farm  about 5 minutes’ drive from my house across the North River in Ottobine.

The great news is that after 5 months of hard work including consultations, dozens of phone calls, text messages, and my brother conducting extensive research, organizing, and travelling 400 miles to Zambia’s capital city twice to buys pumps, the great news: the first 3 villages now have clean drinking water using the hand driven borehole pumps that have just been installed this week October 21 2014. Mission accomplished. The villages that now have clean water are Zibalwe, Chitamba and Kamzati. The next three villages have already asked to have the pumps installed as the news has spread like wild fire.

 

By

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

This column suggests that we Zambians and Africans are taught and continue to teach ourselves the wrong and distorted Zambian history. The column explains the Eurocentric context of the current history. The column proposes the Distracted Dog Syndrome (DDS) as the reason we continue to teach ourselves, sustain, fiercely continue to support our wrong history. The column appeals to both educated Zambians and Ministry of Education to revise the current education to teach ourselves the accurate Zambian/African history.

 

*In Memory of the Great Africanist and Thinker Ali Mazrui.

 

Introduction

In our African history in 1968 in Form II (Grade 9) at the prestigious Chizongwe Secondary School, we learned that some of the earliest humans 125,000 years ago included the Broken Hill man (Kabwe) whose skull was found in the mine. There was also Zinjanthropus whose bones were located in East Africa in the Olduvai Gorge from 1.75 million years ago. The history also included the numerous names of Zambian and African tribes that I could not easily remember during exams and too many people that constantly fought each other; the Sebetwane of the Kololo fought their neighbors, Mzilikazi of the Ngoni fought the Chewa, the Ndebele fought the Matebele and so on. Zambia has 72 names of tribes.

The big part of the African history was European explorers’ arrival in Zambia such as missionary David Livingstone, Mungo Park, Henry Morton Stanley and others spreading Christianity, European colonialism and stopping the brutal Arab Slave trade in East Africa. My classmates and I did not have to be geniuses to realize that our place in this narrative of history was that we Zambians and Africans lacked religion, were ignorant, uneducated, passive, fighting tribal wars, lacked modern schools, democratic institutions, we were uncivilized, superstitious until the more advanced, enlightened, and powerful Europeans arrived.

This narrative of history clashed with my personal experiences when I grew up among the Tumbuka people. I experienced my grandparents, aunts, father and mother and everyone in the village as the most confident, intelligent, confident use of indigenous technological knowledge, articulate in Tumbuka language people I have known in my life. My paternal grandfather Zibalwe Tembo was smelting and forging iron in the late 1800s. The founding fathers and mothers of the Zambian nation led by President Kaunda did not look lost in 1964. They were a confident lot.  Indeed, looking back my grandfathers and mothers behaved more like people who have been around for numerous generations going back perhaps thousands of years. There was a confidence, knowledge and dignity about their persona and life that I can’t describe that suggested to me that they are people who had been around for thousands of years. They didn’t behave and look like people who were waiting for Europeans to tell them what to do. But why was their legitimate and accurate history not in the textbook official Zambian history I was being taught? For forty-six years these questions and contradictions were always in the back of my mind as I continued to gain Western education and lifestyle.

Why does the history  we learn always have this undeserved underlying background and undertone of Zambian inferiority? Why do we continue to teach the history in this manner so that future Zambians will believe they have been always passive, colonized,  slaves or somewhat inferior and will be perpetually behind while trying to catch up especially to the West and the rest of the world?

This column will address four major ideas. First, I will discuss the more broad accurate history. Second, I will discuss why our Zambian history is so distorted. Third I will discuss the Distracted Dog Syndrome (DDS) as the major obstacle to we Zambians as  individuals and a nation discovering and teaching our 13 million citizens the accurate and appropriate history. Fourth, I will discuss in what ways as Zambians through the Ministry of Education can teach,  reclaim for our future generations, and learn our accurate Zambian history.

The More Accurate History

The more accurate history is that many groups of Africans called homo sapiens evolved from Savannah East Africa about two hundred thousand years ago. They migrated through present day Saudi Arabia through India, Andaman Islands, to the Far East including Islands in the South Pacific, Australia,  and New Guinea. The same Africans may have lived in North Africa, Southern Europe, the Middle East and some may have migrated by canoe from West Africa and settled in North and Southern America. This may have been thousands of years before what are known as the Dark Ages in European History

(500-1500 AD), Spanish exploration(1492 – 1892), Portuguese exploration (1500-1600), and European voyages of exploration and colonialism around the world. I discuss some of this information which is at the center of human evolution in Chapter 17 of my book: Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture. In other words all the 7 billion people today all over the world may be biologically descendants of Zambians and Africans starting  from about two hundred thousand years ago. If this is the broad accurate history, why is it today that the history of Zambians and Africans is so distorted that nearly everyone generally denies that Africans had any significant influence in history? That somehow Zambians and Africans are a black race that have always been colonized, inferior or were slaves?

Why Our History is Distorted

We cannot understand why our Zambian history is distorted until we are aware and conscious of how we as humans have a major weakness: we try to impose the present day conditions on past history. We wrongly impose what we know and the language and terminology we use now on the past and are wrongly convinced that what exists today or now was there and is going to be there forever.  Also once as human beings we have declared one group of people as inferior, the dominating group or nations work hard at suppressing and successfully removing and distorting the history of that targeted inferior group. Europeans have been very successful in all three in suppressing and distorting the history of Zambians and Africans. Today we have language and divisions according to races; Caucasian, (white or European), Mongloid, (yellow skinned), Negroid (black or dark skinned). All of these skin colors are false. A “black person” or “human” never existed among the Africans or Zambians from two hundred thousand years ago. In fact, munthu wakuda (Nyanja or Chewa) or munthu mubinkha (Tumbuka) referring to the physical race of person never existed among our people or Zambian ancestors. These terms are recent inventions and adoptions from probably the 1950s as a response to European racism and the superficial racial constructions. The term “Bantu” in our Zambian lexicon means “human” with zero reference to skin color. In this sense, all 7 billion people today are actually banthu or bantu.

Europeans have used three principle motivations and forces to successfully suppress the accurate history of Zambians. The clash between Zambians and Africans in the ancient Egyptian civilization and the Greek Civilization, the Atlantic Slave Trade of Africans to North and South America, and European Colonization of the entire African continent.

Ancient Egyptian and Greek Civilizations

The ancient civilization of Egyptian Kingdoms headed by powerful Pharaohs dominated North Africa and the Middle East for almost two thousand years ago from  c 3100 to 1090 B.C. E. This was before Assyrians, Persians, the Babylonian Empire, Greeks, and Romans occupied Egypt. This was also before Christ. The African Egyptian civilization was the first to create a large empire, establish writing using hieroglyphs,  large scale political economy, the bureaucracy and built the sophisticated massive pyramids.  In 330 B. C. E: Alexander the Great of Greece had gained control of  Lower Egypt and established the city of Alexandria. Greeks ruled Alexandria for 3 centuries or 300 years until the Roman conquest.

 

In 30 B. C. E: Rome imperial rule was established. Queen Cleopatra committed suicide to avoid being humiliated in Rome. Roman law and religion were imposed on Egyptians until the 4^th century. From 7-2 B.C. E. to 30 -33 AD was the period of Jesus also referred to as Jesus of Nazareth the central figure of Christianity. From 640 -1600 was when  the historical Age of Islam took root.

Zambian Direct Descendant of Egyptians

Europeans, their scholars, and other supporters for a long time have denied that any Africans were involved in the Egyptian Civilization. Their argument was that if they built the Egyptian Civilization, where are those same Africans and their descendants to day?

We Zambians are direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians. The journal article that  Dr. Chisanga Siame had published was titled: “Katunkumene and Ancient Egypt in Africa” from the Journal of Black Studies of 20 March, 2013. It clearly shows that all of us Zambians might be descendants of the ancient Egyptians. Dr. Siame had cracked the secret code which was hiding right under our noses; our clan names and our Bantu languages which have left our imprints all over North and West Africa, the Middle East and all over Africa up to Cape Town on the Southern tip of the African continent.  The secret code might be buried all over rural Zambia in our 72 tribes and our languages and clan names which include Lozi, Tonga, Bemba, Nyanja, Chewa, Kaonde, Luchazi, Tumbuka, Namwanga,Luvale  and dozens of Zambian languages. Dr. Siame found out that the Bemba term uku tunkumana may have descended from the name Tunka Men (Tutankhamun: c. 1346-1328 bc) the name of the ancient kingdom of Sudan suggesting a connection between the Bemba and Namwanga people and ancient Egypt.

Towards the end of the fall of the great Egyptian Civilization, the Greeks are believed to have taken some of the technical knowledge and philosophy from an Egyptian library in Alexandria. Some of the key technical knowledge for building the

great Egyptian pyramids is believed to have been later adopted in the construction of sophisticated building structures in Greece, Mesopotamia and the Biblical great tower of Babel. As Europeans advanced during the enlightenment period in the 17^th century, they sought to expunge or remove completely African Egyptian influence in the Greek Civilization. They wanted to make Greece suddenly a white, Caucasian, or exclusively European.The reinforcing and hanging on to this myth still goes on to day in form of conflict between Eurocentrists and Afrocentrists in American academia. The European suppression, denial and distortion of Zambian and African history may have started in earnest about ten thousand years ago.

The Atlantic Slave Trade

In the early 1600s Europeans began to buy and ship Africans as slaves to North America, the Caribbean Islands and South America. In 1619, the first 20 Africans arrived in Jamestown in Virginia in America as free indentured servants. By the 1660s all the British colonies had passed laws making all Africans outside the continent of Africa slaves for life. The Portuguese bought Africans from Angola and shipped them to Brazil. Other European countries bought slaves from West Africa. It is estimated that 11 million Africans were enslaved in the transatlantic slave trade. The significance of the trade is that it helped create and reinforce the image and ideological belief of Africans as an inferior people and therefore it was probably morally and ideologically appropriate not only to enslave them but to distort and deny their significant contribution and participation in human civilization but instead always portray them as just slaves and passive inferior observers in history of the rise and fall of civilizations.

European Colonization of Africa

There were dozens of large Empires in Africa and movement of Zambians and Africans on the continent and beyond for thousands of years.  In 1885, 14 European countries met at the Berlin Conference and divided the continent into 54 countries that they colonized. Zambians and African were suddenly not only dominated and exploited, but were divided into 54 small countries. Often many tribes were divided between 3 or 4 different countries. For example, half a million Tumbukas are in Eastern Zambia and half a million are in Northern Malawi. A large population of the Lozi people are in the Western Province of Zambia. But some of the Lozi people are found in Namibia and Botswana. Some of the Luchazi people are in NorthWestern Province but others are found over the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Chewa people are in the Eastern Province but many of the same Chewas are in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. All of these people are Bantu or just Africans and belong together in terms of their origins, language and culture.

The most destructive aspect of the Atlantic Slave Trade and European Colonialism in Africa is the ideology of racial inferiority of Africans  that Europeans generated, spread, and maintained all over the world. What made it possible to maintain this distorted and often racist knowledge about Africans was especially after the invention of the Guttenberg Printing technology in Germany in 1450. This made it possible to print newpapers, journals,  text books that could easily  spread false information and propaganda all over the world and into Africa about the inferiority of Africans. Why and how do you think the inferiority of Africans and anyone with dark skin was spread all over the world?

Distracted Dog Syndrome (DDS)

Why is it that 13 million Zambians cannot teach ourselves a more accurate history 50 years after gaining independence from European colonialism? Why do even the most educated Zambians at Universities and Africans in the 54 countries still learn and believe in the distorted history that is Eurocentric and continues to project and have the undercurrent of the inferiority of Zambians and Africans? The answer is the Distracted Dog Syndrome (DDS).

The “Distracted Dog Syndrome” (DDS) is a useful metaphor. Supposing you are walking along and out of the blue a big menacing vicious dog is charging at you and closing in. If you have a bone or a piece of very rotten meat in your pocket, you can throw it away from you. The dog will immediately change course and go where you threw the bone or meat. You distract the dog. You will escape safely.

The same analogy can be applied to how we Zambians and Africans have failed to uncover our own ancient history, because each time we may try to ferociously and tenaciously uncover our own history like that vicious charging dog, Europeans and others who have joined them who want to continue to bury that history throw us a bone or a piece of rotten meat and we charge into the wrong direction chasing the bone instead of pursuing our own ancient history going back to antiquity. How does this happen?

Whenever you mention an interest in finding out if Zambians, Africans, or we the Bantu created the ancient Egyptian civilization for example, you will be told: “Black Africans were in Sub-Saharan Africa and were always enslaved to America and sold by their fellow Africans”.  “There were so many people crisscrossing Africa, there is no definitive evidence who built ancient pyramids in Egypt”. “Do you have a degree or qualification in Egyptology or Greek? If not, how can you tell?”  “Aliens must have built the pyramids because Africans today are so backward. How could they have built the sophisticated pyramids that even present day European engineers do not understand?” These sources of distraction are not only by Europeans but also our very educated Zambians and Africans who have been coopted to the Eurocentric thought or perspective in the process of acquiring Western education including Secondary School Certificates, B.As, Masters, and Ph. D degrees. If you are an educated Zambian like this author, if you criticize your fellow Zambians and Africans harshly, you are said to be “rational” “objective” and the most well “educated”. The conversations and arguments will turn to who enslaved Africans, why Africans have failed, what were the other groups that crisscrossed North Africa and Egypt hundreds if not thousands of years after the fall of the Egyptian civilizations instead of the main topic. All the distracting tactics constitute the Distracted Dog Syndrome or what the Bemba would call “ukufulunganya ifintu”, “mifulungenye”  or  what the Chewa would call “musokonezo”(causing confusion), what the Tumbuka call “ku tangwaniska munthu” or causing “mfundukutu” or confusion and doubt.

Ministry of Education and Zambian History

Both the very educated and ordinary Zambians will be bewildered and will ask questions like: “What will learning our accurate ancient history do for us?” “Will this knowledge provide us food, create democracy, employment, get rid of HIV, now Ebola, or help us compete in the modern world, will this be racism in reverse?” “Will all the teachers have to be retrained and the Ministry of Education write and print new text books?” “Will all our Eurocentric educational certificates, degrees and credentials that we have be revoked or become useless?”  “All of this will be wasting money and time that can be used for true development.”  Insisting that we learn our own accurate history is not racism in reverse or retrogressive as those who practice DDS will claim or charge to create confusion and doubt like they have done during the last perhaps one thousand years. To the contrary, the answer to all these questions is “yes”  in the long run we will develop better. Our accurate history is so important that it will truly liberate us from “mental slavery” as Bob Marley would say. If all the 13 million Zambians learn our accurate Zambian and African history, the thousands and millions of teachers who will also have this knowledge will play a very special role. This new knowledge will truly improve our lives and we will be truly educated, liberated, strengthen our sense of dignity and we will make better strives in development.

References

Anta Diop, Cheik., The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, Edited and translated by Mercer Cook, Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, 1974.

Anta Diop, Cheikh., Civilization or  Barbarism: an Authentic Anthropology, Brooklyn, New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991.

Bernal, Martin., Black Anthena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Bernal, Martin., Black Anthena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. II, The Archeological and Documentary Evidence, New Bruswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Bernal, Martin., Black Anthena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. III, The Linguistic Evidence, New Bruswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2006.

Chondoka, Yizenge., and Bota, Frackson F., A History of the Tumbuka from 1400 to 1900, The Tumbuka under the M’nyanjagha, Chewa, Balowoka, Senga and Ngoni Chiefs,  Lusaka: Academic Press, 2007.

Heine, Johan., and Tellinger, Michael., Adam’s Calendar: Discovering the Oldest Man-made Structure on Earth 75,000 years ago, Johannesburg, South Africa: Zulu Planet Publishers, 2008.

James, George G. Stolen Legacy: How the Wisdom of Ancient Egypt was Transformed into Greek Philosophy,  San Diego, California: The Book Tree, First Published 1954, New York: Philosophical Library.

Khapoya, Vincent B., The African Experience: An Introduction, New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2013.

King, Richard D., African Origin of Biological Psychiatry, Baltimore, MD: Afrikan World Books, Inc., 1990.

Lefkowitz, Mary., Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to teach Myth as History, New York: Basic Books, 1996, 1997.

Ladner, Joyce. (ed.) The Death of White Sociology: Essays on Race and Culture, Baltiomore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1973.

Mainga, Mutumba., Bulozi under the Luyana Kings. Political Evolution and State Formation in Pre-Colonial Zambia, London: Longman, 1973.

Muller, Gert., Black Origins of Ancient Rome and Black Roman Emperors, London: Pomegranate Publishing, 2013.

Penda, Chanda (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Zambian Names: Reconciling Zambian and Global Worldviews, Lusaka: Pensulo Publishers Limited, 2013

Rotberg, Robert I., The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: The Making of Malawi and Zambia, 1873-1964, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard  University Press, 1965.

Siame, Chisanga N. “Katunkumene and Ancient Egypt in Africa”, Journal of Black Studies,  20 March, 2013.

Tembo, Mwizenge S., Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture,  Indiana: Xlibris Corporation, 2012

“The Difference Between Us” Episode 1: in the video series Race the Power of an Illusion, California Newsreel, 2003.

Sharman, Fergus., Linguistic Ties between Ancient Egyptian and Bantu: Uncovering Symbiotic Affinities and Relationships in Vocabulary, Boca Raton, Florida: Universal Publishers, 2014.

Sertima, Ivan Van., They Came before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003.

Wele, Patrick., Likumbi Lya Mize and other Luvale Traditional Ceremonies, Lusaka: Zambia Educational Publishing House, 1993.

Williams, Chancellor., The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of Race from 4500 B. C. to 2000 AD., Chicago, Illinois: Third World Press, 1987.

 

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw3kuhVkk-M

First Migration of Africans The five foot black skinned Andaman Island Isolated Tribe Evolution.

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_rhodesiensis
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mungo_Park_(explorer)
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_Gorge
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebetwane
10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade

 

 

 

 

By

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

Author of “The Bridge” a Trans-Atlantic Romance Adventure Novel

Introduction

A man was admitted to Livingstone Central Hospital after having one liter of blood drained from his manhood to relieve him of a three-day erection. The attending UTH urologist Dr Michael Silumbe had advised men who have sexual problems to seek medical attention instead of resorting to taking aphrodisiac substances. Dr. Silumbe had further said the lengthy erection suffered by the Livingstone man was due to priapism and could lead to erectile dysfunction.

“Priapism is a condition where an erection lasts more than four hours. A normal erection should not last that long. This leads to the reduction of oxygen floor to the tissues and also leads to acidosis, meaning more acid gets to the tissues and could damage the muscles if not corrected in time,” Dr. Silumbe said. (The Post, Sunday July 21, 2013)

The man in this story was 36 years old and was apparently on separation from his wife and had gone to see a girlfriend. Fortunately, the story ended well for the man as he was given medical treatment and he apparently recovered.

The purpose of this article is to provide some informal advice to Zambian men on how they can have the best sex without necessarily resorting to taking modern or traditional aphrodisiacs. I do not claim to be an expert sexologist but I have lived long and gained enough knowledge to offer advice to younger and even older Zambian men.

But before we proceed, a few ground rules. This article intends to be respectful. Therefore, it will avoid use of explicit anatomical language which often reduces a man sharing one of the most special fulfilling private social actions with a woman, into a cheap short meaningless physical activity. If you want to know the various biological parts of a female and a male to gain some basic sexual education, this is not the purpose of this article. If you would like to know those clinical details read a textbook in reproductive biology, human anatomy and physiology or some of the numerous manuals on how to have sex.

Nomenclature

In this article we will use metaphors; a man’s private part will be called “Nthonga”. Sex between the two partners will be called: “making love”. When the two make love and reach the point of such pleasure that the man feels like he will die, that will be called “crossing the bridge of no return”. When the man successfully crosses the bridge with his partner, he will then have “delivered the goods through his Nthonga”. The discussions are divided into three parts: boys and young men between 14 and 17 years old, men between the age of 18 to 40 years old, and men between the age of 40 to 90 years plus. Lastly the article will describe the most ideal way to make love with a woman.

Foundations of the Best Love Making

The best and most ideal circumstance for very satisfactory love making for all men is to have one partner you are married to or with whom you have a long term committed relationship. Any other arrangement however glamorous or convenient such as one night stands, having sex with numerous women, quickies, visiting prostitutes, and affairs tend to be unsatisfactory and filled with stress and anxiety. The reason is that if you want to truly experience love making and ecstasy at its best, you need the physical, emotional, and the soul to be all involved. This is not possible with temporary partners. If you are married or have a permanent relationship, when you and your partner during love making cross that bridge of no return, you will both experience incredible total complete physical and emotional pleasure or ecstasy.

Boys between 14 and 17 years old

Boys between 14 and 17 years old may be still too young to engage in sex. Although testosterone, and other sexual hormones of puberty may be screaming “sex! sex! sex!”, their bodies and emotions are not yet mature enough to engage in and handle love making. Modern life sexualizes children too early. As a result every boy and girl feels the pressure to have sex when they are not even old enough. During this age boys should avoid looking at pornography. Instead boys should be focusing on school, participating in church activities, sports, games, school clubs, and learning from fathers and older responsible men. If they have a girlfriend, they can go to movies, adult supervised birthday parties with no alcohol, do home work together, talk on the phone, and take walks to parks with other groups of friends. If the boys between this age group rush to have sex, they risk impregnating a girl, contracting sexually transmitted diseases including HIV and 25 other possible sexually transmitted diseases, and developing poor sexual habits that later in life might create problems and make the boy unhappy during marriage as an older man. Good things always happen later in life for boys who wait. The process of waiting is not easy.

Men Between 18 and 40 years old.

If you are a man in this age group, and have any problems getting your Nthoga to rise to that special love making occasion, you should consult a medical doctor to see if there is anything medically wrong. Some of the problems that cause failure of your Nthonga to rise to the occasion are watching or addiction to pornography, anger and resentment of your partner, prescription medications, serious marriage problems and tensions, psychological stress relating to work and family, lack of physical exercise, smoking, excessive drinking of alcohol, and a poor diet that is high in fat.  Eating nshima with relish which had little fat may be one of the possible ways to help your Nthonga to rise and also maintain less weight or to fight obesity.

http://www.infobarrel.com/Nshima_Diet_Maintains_Slim_Bodies

Even our wise ancestors knew that a diet excessive in fat can block a man’s blood flow to the veins such that his Nthonga fails to rise during love making in marriage. Naboth Ngulube (1989) in “Some Aspects of Growing Up in Zambia” mentions many traditional taboos including: “Fatty Mice – to boys, girls, and pregnant women – Too much fat would close the way in the Nthonga  and render one impotent”. (p. 54) (Nthonga added)

The “New Mulemena Boys” have a song in which a wife is complaining that her husband’s Nthonga does not rise so that they could make love. The wife consulted a traditional healer. After investigation the problem was found to be that the husband always came home late at night drunk from the bar. Alcohol abuse was causing the problem.

Men Between 40 to 90 years plus

If you are a man in this age group, the first thing that will happen is that there might be a noticeable decline in sexual drive or desire. First the production of the men’s sexual hormone testosterone declines the older a man gets. Second, this is often also because most men do not lead perfect lives. All those bad habits such as drinking, divorce, smoking, stresses of work and career, raising children, parental responsibilities,  poor diet of eating fatty food, disease including high blood pressure and possible strokes, all begin to have an impact during this period. This is the bad news. The good news is that you now have the wisdom, patience, and capability to change and improve your life. As a result, you will have a better perspective on sex and love making and so does your wife. The two crucial things to keep in mind in order to continue to have a good or improved sexual life are; maintaining physical exercise and a good balanced diet. The Zambian nshima diet may be the best. This brings us to the best and most ideal way for a man to make love.

Ideal Way to Make Love with a Woman

The best or ideal love making needs to have the physical, emotional, and the soul aspects all involved. What does this mean? Love making for men requires first and foremost for his Nthonga to rise in a sustained way. All the physically gratifying vigorous activity demands quite remarkable physical effort equivalent to perhaps running a marathon, 400 meters or running 100 meters dash. All readers would agree that to perform all these quite demanding activities you need to be physically fit and exercise often. Of course you can experience some pleasure in love making if you are not quite physically fit. But it might not completely satisfy you or your wife. Exercising regularly and a good diet are a must.

The emotional aspect may be the force that may be what binds the man and the woman. Loving the woman means you think and care for her all the time every day. You talk to her, hug and hold her, remember special occasions, buy her flowers, tell her what of her perfumes you like on her, you do some cooking of good food, you call her when you are out with your guy friends, you take care of your children, listen to her, laugh with her, and argue and fight with her without physically beating or emotionally intimidating or abusing her.

The Role of the Soul

The crucial role of the soul is probably what most of us may not even be familiar with in love making. This includes erotic feelings and thoughts involving all the senses such as smell, what we see, taste, hear, and touch. It involves the mysterious role of the mind and the spirit. Good love making invokes some of the godliest deepest feelings about our partner and the mystery of the goodness and meaning of life.

Ideal love making may start in the morning as the couple hug or kiss or bid each other goodbye as they embark on the day. During the day, she calls him and says in a secret cryptic message that only both of them know: “kaja kanthu nakonza” (I have prepared that thing). They both are so excited all day. They can’t wait to see each other at home. As the children do homework and dinner is being prepared; the couple exchange tense smiles. They eat a hearty meal. The anticipation is just killing them both. When finally the children are asleep and the bedroom door closes, all hell breaks loose.

They wildly kiss hastily and can’t tear off each other’s clothes quickly enough. They breathe heavily like desperate wounded animals. They switch on the TV to mask loud sounds to come that may wake up the children frightening them. After vigorous love making and crossing the bridge of no return, their bodies shake and tremble from head to toe. The man experiences pleasure not only in his robust Nthonga but an orgasm too in the whole of his body. The couple collapses in each other’s arms with lots of sweat mingled with the engulfing scents of natural aromas. There is a calm serenity over the couple that momentarily takes care of the world’s troubles in their lives. Some couples will have a special snack both of them like to quietly share afterwards.

References

Berkowitz, Bob., What Men Won’t Tell You But Women Need to Know, New York: Avon Books, 1990.

Burton, Sir Richard and Arbuthnot, F. F,. (Transl) The Kamasutra of Vatsyayama, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1963.

Burton, Sir Richard F., (Transl) The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi, New York: Kessinger Publishing, Castle Books, n.d

Gilder, George., Men and Marriage, Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 1986.

Joe McIlhaney, Jr., Sexuality and Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker House, 1990.

Moore, Thomas., The Soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an Act of Love, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998.

Helmering, Doris Wild., Husbands Wives and Sex: How One Partner Alone Can Change the Dynamics to renew sex, romance, and intimacy, Holbrook, Massachusetts: Bob Adams, Inc., 1990.

Ngulube, Naboth., Some Asepcts of Growing up in Zambia, Lusaka: Nalinga Consultancy/Sol-Consult A/S Limited, 1989.

Nioche, Brigitte., What Turns Men On,  New York: New American Library, 1989.

Tembo, Mwizenge S., Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture, Xlibris Corporation, 2012

Tembo, Mwizenge S. The Bridge: a Trans-Atlantic Romance and Adventure Novel, New York: Linus Publications, 2013

Witkin-Lanoil, Georgia., The Male Stress Syndrome: How to Recognize and Live With It,  New York: Berkley Books, 1986.