Africa
Zambia’s first President Kenneth Kaunda dies at 97
Zambia’s former president, Kenneth Kaunda, the father of the country’s independence who ruled for 27 years has died.
He died at the age of 97 on Thursday. Kaunda had been admitted to the Maina Soko Medical Center, a military hospital in Lusaka, on Monday where authorities disclosed he was being treated for Pneumonia. But a Facebook post by his son Kambarage Kaunda, announced the Zambian founding president’s passage.
Kambarage asked for prayers for his father whom he called Mzee.
Rumors of COVID
“He is being treated for pneumonia but he does not have Covid,” his aide Rodrick Ngolo told AFP, denying rumors to that effect
“The problem of pneumonia comes up regularly (in the ex-president) and every time you hear that he is in hospital, it is because of pneumonia,” said Ngolo, adding that the health of the ex-president had “improved” since Monday.
Nicknamed the “African Gandhi” for his non-violent activism, Kaunda led the former British protectorate Northern Rhodesia to bloodless independence in October 1964.
A socialist, he ruled the country for 27 years, largely under a one-party regime, whose mismanagement led to a severe economic and social crisis. After violent riots, he accepted free elections in 1991 and was defeated.
While in power, it hosted many movements fighting for independence or black equality in other countries in the region, including the African National Congress (ANC) party of South Africa.
Also known as “KK,” he was the leader of the main nationalist party, the center-left UNIP. He also became an AIDS activist when he publicly announced that one of his sons had died of the disease.
Zambia’s independence hero
Kenneth Kaunda was one of the pioneer leaders of a new Africa, as countries threw off colonialism in favour of independent statehood.
A man of great personal charm, he was hailed as a modernising force in the continent despite his initial rejection of the concept of multiparty democracy.
As a committed pan-Africanist, he began the task of building a new Zambia, free to determine its own way in international affairs.
But poor economic management caused his popularity to plummet, and he was voted out of office when free elections were held in 1991.
Kenneth David Kaunda was born on 28 April 1924 at a mission station near the border between what was then Northern Rhodesia and the Congo.
Kaunda was strongly influenced by the policies of Martin Luther King
His father, an ordained Church of Scotland minister, died while he was still a child, leaving the family in straitened circumstances.
But the young Kaunda’s academic ability won him a place in the first secondary school to be formed in Northern Rhodesia, and he later became a teacher.
His work took him to the country’s Copperbelt region and to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where for the first time he experienced, and deeply resented, the full impact of white domination.
One of his first political acts was to become a vegetarian in protest at a policy that forced Africans to go to a separate window at butchers’ to buy meat.
In 1953 he became the general secretary of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress but the organisation failed to mobilise black Africans against the white-ruled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
Kaunda appearing on the BBC’s Brains Trust in 1960
Two years later he was imprisoned, with hard labour, for distributing leaflets that the authorities deemed subversive.
Disillusioned with what he saw as the failure of his party to take a stronger line on the rights of indigenous Africans, Kaunda set up his own party, the Zambian African National Congress.
Within a year it was banned and Kaunda was back in prison. His incarceration turned him into a radical.
By 1960 he had become the leader of the new United National Independence Party (Unip) and, fired with enthusiasm following a visit to Martin Luther King in the US, he began his own programme of civil disobedience which involved blocking roads and burning buildings.
Kaunda stood as a Unip candidate in the 1962 elections which saw an uneasy coalition with the African National Congress (ANC) take power in the legislature.
He became the first Prime Minister of the newly created Northern Rhodesia
The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was dissolved at the end of 1963 and, a month later, Kaunda was elected prime minister of Northern Rhodesia. The country, renamed as Zambia, gained full independence in Oct 1964 with Kaunda as its first president.
Kaunda started with the great advantage of leading an African state with a stronger economic base than any of its neighbours but there was a shortage of native Zambians who had the skills and training to run the country.
His position was also gravely imperilled by Ian Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence in Southern Rhodesia.