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Dr. Mwizenge S. Tembo is Professor of Sociology who has taught at Bridgewater College in Virginia in the United States for twenty years. He was born in 1954 in Chipata in the Eastern Province of Zambia in Southern Africa. He grew up at Chipewa Village in Lundazi where he did his Sub A (Grade 1) at Boyole Primary School. He went to school at Tamanda Dutch Reformed Church Missionary Boarding Boy’s Upper School in Chipata District from 1964 to 1966. He was at Chizongwe Secondary School from 1967 to 1971. He qualified to go to the University of Zambia from 1972 to 1976. Mwizenge obtained his B.A degree in Sociology and Psychology at University of Zambia in 1976, M.A and Ph. D. degrees at Michigan State University in Sociology in 1987 in the USA. He was a Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies of the University of Zambia from 1977 to 1990. During this period he conducted extensive cultural research and fieldwork in rural Zambia particularly in the Eastern and Southern Provinces of the country.

Dr. Tembo has authored 5 books: Titbits for the Curious (1989), Legends of Africa (1996), The Bridge (Novel) (2005), Zambian Traditional Names (2006) and Satisfying Zambian Hunger for Culture: Social Change In The Global World (2012). He is a weekly columnist for the Daily Newsleader Newspaper of Staunton in Virginia. He is a frequent column contributor to the Daily News-Record of Harrisonburg in Virginia. He was also a frequent contributor to the Sunday Times of Zambia in the 1980s. He has published at least 100 newspaper columns. He is a freelance photographer. For more details: www.bridgewater.edu/~mtembo, www.bridgewater.edu/zanoba

Dr. Tembo has also published at least 15 scholarly articles, 21 book reviews, and 10 journalistic articles.

He is co-founder and President of the Zambia Knowledge Bank (ZANOBA). The organization’s main objective is to encourage people in his native country of Zambia to document their culture and technology. He is spearheading the building of a Zambia Knowledge Bank Libraries: Nkhanga Branch Village Library in Lundazi District in his native country of Zambia in Southern Africa.

While growing up as a child in the village in the Lundazi district among the Tumbuka people of Eastern Zambia in the Africa of the 1950s and 1960s, he developed a keen interest in reading, academic curiosity, storytelling, African traditional dances and drumming. He has shared significant aspects of African culture with American audiences through writing, lectures and public performances in college classes, schools, banquets, churches, and public libraries in the Shenandoah Valley, Richmond, and Charlottesville in Virginia in the United States. His wide range of cultural experiences and firsthand knowledge of African culture make him an effective cross-cultural communicator and articulate teacher in the classroom, and entertaining story teller. Dr. Tembo has a passionate interest in preserving traditional African culture such that in his book Legends of Africa, he states: “I would like to express my strongest heartfelt wish that Zambians and Africans of all persuasions document in the many media (audio, video, and print) available today our rich traditions, knowledge, and culture that are, as you read this, unfortunately rapidly going to waste in both urban and rural areas.”