By Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology

Introduction

A few years after Zambia’s independence from 70 years of British colonialism in 1964, the veteran hard-hitting journalist and TV Sunday Interview host Charles Mando had the opportunity for the first time in his life to travel to the Western world to Canada. When he flew back to Zambia a few days later, one of his first comments was memorable. I remember him saying with shock or surprise something to the effect that (this is not a quote) …”I saw Bazungu that were very poor. Many bazungu were poorer than me; they were street sweepers, beggars, and toilet cleaners. I never realized bazungu are so poor too in the Western countries they come from.”

The vast majority of the ordinary 15.7 million Zambians and over a billion Africans on the continent have been made to believe that all white Europeans are rich. This muzungu superiority racial myth was  inculcated in all of us Zambians since European explorers first came to Africa going back to the 1600s. I would have believed the same myth of all white Europeans being rich or wealthy had I not travelled to the Western world about 6 years after Charles Mando had made his memorable comments.

This article addresses the issue of us Zambians who have lived in the country all our lives without ever going outside the country, “Do You Know What You Don’t Know?” Do you know sometimes that you don’t know what you don’t know? Why is it important to know, not just what you know or have learned through formal education text books and the news, but to know what you don’t know about foreigners from the outside world who come to live in Zambia? After all, knowledge is power. After all, people who know that you don’t know will have power over you. On the other hand, if you know what you don’t know and come to know what you previously did not know, you become a strong person who will be liberated from mental slavery as Bob Marley the great Raggae  singer would say.

Do You Know What You Don’t Know?

Why am I writing this article? Is it to cause Zambians to hate all foreigners or stoke xenophobia as is the case in some countries that I won’t mention? Is it to needlessly criticize and humiliate even Zambians who are very educated? Is it to create suspicion, dividedness and animosity between the various groups, tribes, ethnic groups, as some would still say to use the bogus term “races”,  that live peacefully in non-racial Zambia motherland? Since the 1600s we have had people of various ethnicities live in and explore Zambia; the Soli and Lenje people were some of the earliest to settle in Central Zambia. White Europeans including the British, the Scottish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and Indians from India lived in Zambia. To day we have the Chinese that economically dominate not just us but the world, the Filipinos, Somalis, Greeks, Italians, the Japanese and many others.   Why is it important for us to know what we don’t know about the histories, origins, and the home country back grounds of these people including our own history as Zambians and Africans?

Times have Changed

Before 1964, the 3.5 million Zambians generally lived in rural villages with members of the large extended family who included numerous grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, nieces, and cousins. Vital knowledge and history were transmitted through the older kinship or family members teaching younger members. But today after 55 years and so many drastic population, cultural changes and movements including globalization, we Zambians are in grave danger of completely losing the transmission of this knowledge.

The population of Zambia is 15.7 million. The proportion of the country that is under 14 years old is 46.0%, those between 15 and 24 years old are 20%, those between 25 to 54 years old are 27.9% and but those between 55 and 64 years old are only 3.0% and those above 65 years old are even smaller at 2.9%. The age statistics that are the most important for the crucial possible important role in understanding what we Zambians don’t know that we don’t know are that Zambians that are younger than 30 years old may be about 73.9% of the population which is about 11.6 million young girls, boys, women and men. And yet those who are over 55 years old are only 5.9% which is only 926,300. Therefore, there are fewer elders to day in Zambia to teach younger people about our 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 and other diseases since the 1980s. Urbanization also takes its toll as the 39.4% of the urban population is rising.

What does all this mean? This means increasing numbers of Zambians lose their connection to rural areas where the source, strength and origin of our traditions and some of our indigenous knowledge are the strongest. The total number of Zambians who have migrated in search of better opportunities and live in the Zambia Diaspora abroad is 1.4% of the population or 219,800. This population of Zambians increasingly has children who may have limited knowledge or no direct connection to the Zambian society they love.  They would also need to know what they don’t know besides the often only very negative stories that they might read about Zambia their father or mother homeland.

Zambia Best Country in the World

Zambia is the best country to live in because of the people and the geography. If you don’t know what you don’t know you will be stunned or not believe me. Compared to some other people and other societies we are very friendly to each other and love each other. We have our own disagreements, but we generally love each other. Ignorance is a very strong term just as primitive is also a very strong term. But if you don’t know the details of the lives of other societies, you will think Zambia is very bad or the worst. But it is often because you don’t know what you don’t know. I myself did not know what I didn’t know until I travelled and especially read about other societies. Zambia is one of the most peaceful and ethnically integrated societies in spite having 72 tribes. The praise and tremendous credit must be given to President Kaunda and all the numerous founders of our country who chose the motto One Zambia One Nation and the policy of  a non-racial and non-tribal society. All of us Zambians have lived through this peaceful era over the last 55 years.

The geography and climate of Zambia is  one of the best. It is not too cold, or too hot and humid. It is dry, sunny and warm for about 6 months of the year. Most of the foreigners who came in the past and even now love the weather and climate. All of these countries such as Japan, China, United States, European countries, Russia, and even some countries in Africa and South America may not have the best climates. In some of these countries some tribes, races, and peoples hate and still kill each and their women and girls have fewer rights. Some of them may even be richer than Zambians. In fact, it was the late great scholar Ali Mazrui who said that may Europeans in the 1700s and 1800ss migrated to Africa including Zambia because the weather and climate here was so much better than in Europe. This is true even today. But if you are a Zambian and you don’t know what you don’t know, you will not believe all that has been said.

If you want to become a better Zambian citizen, please you should answer these questions for yourself: Do you know what you know? Do you know what you don’t know? Are you in a condition in which you don’t know what you don’t know? Do foreigners know that you as a Zambian you know what they don’t know? Some foreigners know what you don’t know which makes you very vulnerable to manipulation. You as a Zambian you should also know what you don’t know about foreigners and other foreign societies. When you have found answers to all the knowns, the unknowns, the known knowns and unknowns, then you will be a truly educated Zambian.

References

1. Zambia and Urban populations

2.Exploring the Zambia Diaspora

By Henry Kanyanta Sosala

PART I

Preamble.

I would in the first remiss if I do not tell a little bit about myself. I am a free-thinker and a free-thinker is supposed to be audacious i.e., to be extremely bold, daring, recklessly brave and fearless. I believe that conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. To conform means thinking as the crowd thinks. It is a system of misdirection that makes one exhibit a behaviour called ‘’herd mentality.’’ And I am therefore totally liberated because one of the tenets of being a free-thinker is the ability to tell people what they need to know, rather than what they want to hear.

I personally believe that we as a nation have lost the moral compass. And this therefore makes my article the most controversial because I have singlehandedly gone against the accepted ‘’normal’’ Zambian principles on sex morality since I can never subscribe to the current scenario of ’’liberated sex.’’

The greatest problem is the ‘’Bantu’’ type of education which was especially designed for Africa that teaches ‘’what to think,’’ and not ‘’how to think.’’ And therefore the majority of our African intellectuals are victims of this strait-jacketing. The image of the human mind is infinitely malleable, capable of being reformed, transformed and rectified without limit. And this is the area where ‘’Bantu’’ education system actively plays its role since character and thought patterns can be directed to desired ends and whoever controls the mind, controls the man. And so the type of education you receive will direct the way you approach the whole spectrum of life. King Solomon wrote: ‘’Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts.’’

The Genius of the Imperialist.

Who is an imperialist or a capitalist-exploiter? Irvin Babbitt in his book Democracy and Leadership wrote: “…..the man who stands for nothing higher than the law of cunning and the law of force, and so is, in the sense I have sought to define imperialistic.” The imperialist has an instinct or genius for colonizing. The imperialist or capitalist-exploiter has sharpened his exploiting techniques to the edge of a razor. The capitalist-exploiter is a great strategist and he is as well blessed with the gift of wit and he leads with truth but never to truth. He cannot exploit the continent without first demoralizing the inhabitants

And therefore one of the strategies to achieve the total domination of the African has been to instill self-despise into our minds. Dr. Kaunda in ’’A Humanist in Africa’’ wrote: ‘’The colonialists set out to destroy an African’s self-confidence. They dinned into his mind the idea that we were primitive, backward and degraded, and but for their presence amongst us, we would be living like animals. The result is that even today in an independent African state, you will find a certain sector of the population suffering from a Bwana complex. They cannot stand on their own feet as free men but must look over their shoulder all the time for the approval of the white man.’’

And to the contrary, Professor Rene Dumont in his book, ‘’False Start in Africa’’ wrote: ‘’ African civilizations reached a kind of apogee in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, earlier around Benin. African blacksmiths knew how to work gold, copper, bronze and even iron, the latter as early as the time of our Lord Jesus Christ. They thus surpassed the oceanic civilizations, like those of pre-Columbus America, in technique development. The system of cultivation practiced at the time, working the earth with hoes after clearing it with fires and rotation of fallow lands is still used today with rare modifications.…. However, no one knows where agrarian African civilization would be today if it had been able to follow a normal development, in peaceful contact with European techniques. But, alas, this development was brusquely arrested, and we are still paying for the crimes of our white ancestors, who believed that they were free to do anything, endowed as they were with ‘innate superiority’.’’

The answer lies in what Lord Macaulay told the British Parliament on 2^nd February, 1835: ‘’I have travelled across the length and breadth of Africa and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage and therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, if the Africans think that all that is foreign is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want, a truly dominated nation.’’

And it is unfortunate that because of mis-education, today many educated Zambians wrongly believe that their cultural heritage is derived from their education and conscious approximation to the western living standards. None can overlook the fact that the western man has brought a lot of civilization to Africa, but it comes with a sly danger, because while celebrating the generous donor aid and such privileges as learning and enlightenment, it can easily blind us to who we really are and come to the fatal conclusion that the white man is the measure of all things. This perverted mentality has subverted the African personality like no other ideology.

For example, in an article African Culture and Development, Simeo Siame wrote: ‘’Culture for what?….it is futile to mobilize thousands of manpower to paddle a big boat or spend days and nights dancing round a bonfire, when such manpower should have been at points of economic production….this culture can no longer be a tool for modernization and economic development..’’

And what actually lies under this blinding type of education? in his book ‘’The Sociology of Black Africa’’ Professor Georges Balandier talks of ‘’the psychology of colonization,’’ which sets the Europeanized African into a transformation of the whole mentality as he enters the heart of western logic and the role of imitation which occurs in a variety of manifestations and the apparent duplicity leads to mental conflict of being ‘’like an actor playing two parts.’’ And other sociologists say, ‘’the conflict produces doubt and fogginess of mind, resulting in lack of balance and reasoning.’’ In fact anthropological research have revealed ‘’mental conflicts’’ resulting from ‘’the too rapid development of individualism.’’ R. Firth, carried out a research in West African countries under British influence on neuroses and psychoses and variety of mental disturbances that affect so many of the peasants when they start to work in industrial enterprises. This simply means that many of those half-clever town-dwellers who think that they are ‘’jacked-up’’ (ukucampuka kwa bu mbuli nangu ukusambilila kwa mungulu weka weka) are mere mental patients.

You can see how after 180 years (i.e. 1832-2012), we have become prey to Lord Macaulay’s strategy and endorsed cultural genocide in the useless foreign-drafted Constitution which I had strongly opposed and I was only supported by Professor Muna Ndulo, a US-based constitution lawyer. And according to the Report of the Technical Committee on Drafting the Zambian Constitution: ‘’Part V on Bill of Rights, Article 63: Language and Culture states in 63 (3): A person shall not be compelled to- (a) perform, observe, participate in, or be subjected to, any cultural practice or rite; or (b) form, join, contribute, maintain or pay allegiance to any cultural, traditional or linguistic association, organization, institution or entity.’’

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight without vision. And It is general knowledge that no one forces anybody to do what have been stated above i.e., who goes overseas to force the tourists who flock to watch the highly celebrated and magnificent Kuomboka ceremony? The question is the motive behind the inclusion of such in the Constitution which is actually in line with Lord Macaulay’s proposal and traditional rulers should carefully note: ‘’….NOT to maintain or pay allegiance to any cultural, traditional or linguistic institution..’’ The big question is: Was not the useless Constitution advocating the abolition of chieftainship?

The useless Constitution was the product of NGOs. In fact it has been alleged that the Members of the National Assembly have surrendered their powers of decisions to the civil society groups. The former Germany envoy, His Excellency, Erich Kristof said that the National Assembly was his major disappointment since his arrival in the country. It was strange to observe that the National Assembly didn’t play a major role in many national matters despite of being elected representatives of the people. ”I wish the National Assembly being elected representatives of  the people can be proactive when dealing with national matters instead of the civil society. The civil society is not elected….the chiefs should also play a major role in areas where government is not present.” (Sunday Post 10^th July 2005)

The truth is that the civil society groups are given programmes by their sponsors on strategies _____ they are boxed in a coffin-like narrowness of vision and thereby suffocate their creative imaginations. Admittedly, some of the individuals in the civil society groups have the best brains, but they have to follow instructions. And hence there is loss of sovereignty over self; loss of power, dignity, morality and debility

. Let me now take you back in order to clearly understand what I am talking about. In 2003, President Mwanawasa initiated the national indaba in order to try and gauge the general consensus on national issues from the supposed top cream in our society. And according to Gazette No. 587 of 2003, the majority of the participants were drawn from the NGO groups. However, a lawyer in attendance summed it up in these frightening words: ‘’What we saw in the indaba was that decisions were made through mob psychology. Those who shouted the loudest carried the day.’

On the other hand, the ‘’clever’’ who had lamentably failed to come up with an ‘’economic road map’’ at the national indaba, eventually received the ‘’constitution road map,’’ with well-coached blinding slogans like, ‘’people driven constitution’’; ‘’Zambia’s back-bone’’ and these were backed up by well-calculated mob psychological propaganda materials like, ‘’Mwanawasa must respect the will of the people’’; ‘’the people have spoken.’’

And according to the then finance minister, Ng’andu Magande, the money given to NGOs was not properly accounted for and the donors don’t ask how and where it had been taken. (Zambia Daily Mail 21^st June 2007). The then South African President, P.W. Botha once said: ‘’……. the white man would use the African’s love of money to destroy himself……..here is a creature who lacks foresight.’’ (TO BE CONTINUED)