President Jimmy Carter Legacy

The late President Jimmy Carter was awarded the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize because of the humanitarian work that he had performed tirelessly for over four decades. But I have always been deeply grateful for what he did for my boyhood friend Charlie forty-six years ago in 1978. I had known my friend and classmate from when we were freshmen at Chizongwe Secondary School in Chipata in the Eastern Province of Zambia in 1967 up to our junior year at the University of Zambia 49 years ago in 1975. He was gifted with incredible wit. He was funny in class without being mean, cruel, or reckless. He easily disarmed bullies with his sharp wit. Everyone who has been to school and is lucky remembers a sweet but vibrant childhood friend and classmate like Charlie. He created great and lasting memories for the entire Chizongwe Secondary School class of Form Five A in 1971.

One time in eleventh grade or Form Four, he announced loudly in his characteristic lazy playful tone of voice that Mr. Brown’s dog (Mr. Brown not his real name was our British English teacher) had clocked more miles or Kms riding in his master’s automobile that I had ever done in my whole life. The whole class broke into laughter rolling in the isles. I joined in the laughter too. I was only seventeen and it was true that virtually all Zambian kids, including Charlie himself, were lucky to ride a couple of hundred miles or Kms in a car in an average year. Nobody owned cars.

But Mr. Brown drove into town virtually every day, a ten-mile or 16Kms round trip, with his German Shepard always sticking its head and long tongue out of the open back seat window of his station wagon. From an African cultural perspective, we thought that riding with your dog everywhere in your car was one of many peculiar muzungu European cultural habits.

When we were at the University of Zambia, Charlie, Mike and I spent many evenings in our dorm rooms in Presidents Hall sharing our dreams about the future while listening to Jimmy Hendrix and Santana music on the small inexpensive portable record player I owned. We wanted to hitchhike through the Southern African countries of Botswana, swing through Zimbabwe up to Mozambique. What about flying to and taking a hitch-hiking trip across Australia to see those Kangaroos? We talked about girls and wanting to be writers. Charlie wanted to be an actor in Hollywood and write movie scripts. We wanted to live in America. Charlie admired actor Steve McQueen. We shared some sentimental tidbits about our families. We never talked about politics because Charlie thought the whole subject was boring.

Charlie had such a keen sense of observation and a tremendous insight into human nature such that he would turn the most mundane human social actions into something to smile about, interesting, and funny. That’s why he was such a great guy to hang out with. He was an unassuming social genius if ever there was such a thing.

One sunny Saturday afternoon during the University summer vacation of 1975, I was with Charlie downtown on Cairo Road in the Capital City of Lusaka in a local popular joint known as the Dog Box. I remember laughing so hard with him and another classmate Ruskin Jere that my ribs hurt and tears couldn’t stop rolling down my cheeks. I kept wiping them off. Later that evening we ate dinner and hitched a ride to the Woodpecker Inn in Woodlands. We went home to my uncle Mr. JJ Mayovu’s house in Northmead and crashed for the night. The following morning, my aunt Amama a NyaZghovu prepared some delicious eggs, bacon, toast, and hot tea for breakfast. After lunch, I escorted Charlie to the bus station as he was traveling to visit his older brother in Ndola. That was the last time I was to see Charlie.

The story that I was told five years later by another classmate, mutual friend Thomas Nyirenda, was shocking, incredible, as it was heart wrenching. Although Charlie was a Zambian citizen by birth, his parents had decided to go back to their original neighboring country of birth of Malawi. That country was ruled by a ruthless dictator Kamuzu Banda who had scuttled his cabinet just after his country gained political independence from Britain 59 years ago in 1965. He decreed the country a one-party state, and eliminated any opposition leaders who did not escape into exile. One of the exiled cabinet members was Masauko Chipembere who later taught for a short while at California State University in the late 1960s.

The story was that Charlie had crossed the international border on a bike through a bush path without a passport to visit his parents. That sounded like the adventurous but still naïve Charlie. The village agents of the paranoid secret security police known as young pioneers of the neighboring country, immediately arrested poor Charlie as a possible saboteur or political dissident from Zambia. Charlie was immediately whisked hundreds of miles or Kms to the notorious Nzaleka (I will not do it again) prison where political prisoners and dissidents were detained without charges.

From the time of his arrest in 1976 for most of eighteen months, apparently Charlie endured horrendous and sickening torture. What saved him was when the newly elected American President Carter assumed power and put Human Rights on the front burner. President Carter announced that no country was going to receive American aid unless all political prisoners were released and Human Rights were upheld. My dear friend was released from detention in 1977 with hordes of other political detainees in that African neighboring country. But Charlie was never the same according to the friends who had seen him.

He married and had a family. Rumors came out in the mid-1980s that Charlie had died. I could never visit, write, or telephone him or confirm his death. Communication was difficult in those days. Over the years, I had painful but bittersweet recurring dreams that I had reunited with Charlie. It was always so euphoric to see, talk and be with him again in the dreams. Charlie’s life was saved and he enjoyed a little of it thanks to President Carter. He sure deserved the Nobel Peace Prize because President Carter saved my dear friend’s life. The only regret I have is that Charlie never made it to America.

I have no doubt he would have had some witty and funny things to say about the goings on among Americans as we go about in our everyday mundane things of carrying on with our lives. I have no doubt that had he made it to America, he could have been another Seinfeld with a smaller “s”. My dream is to one day meet his wife and kids. I am convinced that he was a wonderful and maybe even funny dad and husband in his last short years. The ruthless dictator of that neighboring country finally died in the early 1990s. I learned in 1995 that Charles Kateketa had tragically died in a plane crash.

By Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology