by
Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.
Emeritus Professor of Sociology
When I enrolled as a freshman at University of Zambia in 1972, it was the best of times. The University of Zambia was the only new prestigious university in Zambia, a country of 4.5 million. The country had just obtained independence from British colonialism in 1964. Thousands of students from 113 high schools in the entire country sat for highly competitive exams in order to qualify to get spots into my small freshman class of 350 students. The academic competition was brutal. We exclusive enrolled students were the crème de la crème of the entire country. Although the entire small student body of 1500 had worked hard to get a university education, we felt a certain humility because the whole nation had paid for our free education. We were to be the future leaders of our country.
Although virtually all of us during the four years never lost focus on the hard work of obtaining a college degree, we created plenty of time for social life of being young, playful and sometimes engaged in fierce campus student politics. Toward the end of the academic year, something happened that changed my life. There was a concert on the campus graduation forum or mall during which students were milling around. This one guy was standing a few feet from me. He was wearing brown pants, a red shirt, and a black jacket vest. He had coke glasses. We walked toward each other and shook hands. We said we had seen each other during classes and in the large Lecture Theatre One lecture hall but never talked. We had small talk. We did not know at the time. That was the beginning of our deepest friendship to last our lifetimes.
The coincidence was that James Lutuli (not his real name) and I double majored in Psychology and Sociology. We took exactly the same classes every day for four long years. We walked to the campus dining room together after class. My room on the 5th floor of Africa Hall was just down from his room on the ground floor of Kwacha Hall. We admired and unsuccessfully chased the same girls. We did not have any malice toward those girls because being rejected among us guys was very common. We talked and laughed so much most of the time we were together. We went to some of the best parties in the capital city of Lusaka on weekends. We both came from good but poor families whose parents were together. Since we students did not own cars, we often walked many miles at night back to campus after some of the parties because we could not get a ride. God must have created our deep friendship so that both our lives were like living in heaven on earth. Of course, we both had larger circles of many friends on campus.
When the Epstein files scandal broke out this year, President Trump admitted that he and Epstein had been very close friends for 15 years. But he says he did not know that Epstein was a pedophile or was sexually molesting 14- or 15-year-old girls. Who among the 330 million Americans believes his denials that Trump did not know what Epstein was doing? Do the 37% of Trump supporters still believe Trump’s denials?
If there are still Americans who believe Trump’s denials that he did not know that Epstein was a pedophile, I am here to tell you that if my best friend James Lutuli had been a pedophile, did drugs, robbed banks, was stealing, used vulgar language, assaulted women, I would have known about it. That is what happens when two people are best friends; they intimately know each other’s character. In addition, because you are best friends you are also likely to participate in whatever your friend is doing, good or bad. That’s what close friends do. If James Lutuli had been a bad or vile character, he would not have been admitted to University of Zambia. Neither would I have been friends or let alone best friends had he had such moral turpitude.
The Epstein Trump scandal only confirms what most of us have been aware of during the last 9 years since 2016; the Trump presidencies have forced Americans to live in a moral sewage. Besides the rapturing Epstein file scandal that appears to be the cherry on top of the moral sewage pie, there are some recent nuggets that really infuriate me. No one had lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits since the earliest government shutdowns in the 1990s. Because it never occurred to those past Presidents to starve people. But not with Trump. Trump decided they would cut SNAP benefits for 42 million people for no other reason than to maximize cruelty and human pain and suffering.