Mankhokwe...

1915 : a middle-aged man in his mid-forties stands amongst a group of his loyal followers. They are about 200. Perhaps, it is a chilly rainy night with the silence of a graveyard surrounding the church. “The white man has sat on us for so long,” declares the tall man with obviously a mild temper. “We need to do something, we need to act. We must send him packing from our land.” Possibly, the men listening to him shake their heads in unison. Others are yet to comprehend what is driving the man of God in front of them for they have known him as a quiet man for a long time. Thus, the story of John Chilembwe’s rebellion begins, in the January of 1915, years long before the wind of freedom and change begins to sweep in the 1960s. Many years before the bells of freedom begin to ring on the African continent. John Chilembwe, writes Robert I. Rotberg in a 2005 Harvard Magazine article, was not a radical man such that nobody could expect him to stage a rebellion. He appeared...

NELSON Mandela is a great. Not only in South Africa, not only in Africa but in the entire world. His name has always been associated with statesmanship, his face with greatness, his words with maturity, his voice with leadership, and his age with wisdom. Little wonder then that one writer, Ephraim Nyondo, used him as a beacon of some sort in his article ‘Can MCP progress without Tembo?’ in which he argued, convincingly, that MCP can, nay will, progress without Tembo.  He posed Mandela in total contrast to his neighbor and age mate Robert Gabriel Mugabe who, for thirty years plus, has sat at the helm of Zimbabwe; now, a sad story of some sort. A contradiction of her own past, Zimbabwe is. And in contrasting, he likened. It was a likening of two likes: John Zenus Ungapake Tembo and Robert Gabriel Mugabe, Comrade. They were being likened just as their ‘entities’ – Malawi Congress Party (MCP) and Zimbabwe, respectively – were. The two share something, and in sharing so...

All the five children were rich. Their parents were obscenely rich and consequently, them also. They used to live in a posh area and were driven in posh cars. We admired them. We wished, very strongly, to be them. When they came for the holidays in our poverty-stricken township, they used to be our friends. Then, we could laugh together. Feel proud among our peers for having rich friends. Slowly then came the time for tears when their parents came to take them. It was not us who shed the tears but them. They wept for they did not want to leave. They really cried bitterly, wishing to still be playing with us. We, the poor children, just sat watching. We watched them being persuaded. And after some time they would go and ride the car, still weeping. And then we would wave at them. Wave and wave, even after the car had gone out of sight, until our hands ached. Then, we would forget them and resume our games. The rich children admired us than we admired them. That is ...