Kenneth Kaunda, also known as KK, was a Zambian politician and teacher who played a pivotal role in the country's struggle for independence. He served as the first President of Zambia from 1964 to 1991. Kenneth David Kaunda was born on April 28, 1924, at Lubwa Mission in Chinsali, which was then part of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), and passed away on June 17, 2021, in Lusaka, Zambia.
Kenneth Kaunda in 1978
Early Life and Education
Kaunda was the youngest of eight children. His father, the Reverend David Kaunda, a Church of Scotland missionary and teacher, was born in Nyasaland (now Malawi) and had moved to Chinsali to work at Lubwa Mission. His mother, Helen Nyirenda Kaunda, was also a teacher and the first African woman to teach in colonial Northern Rhodesia. Both parents taught among the Bemba ethnic group in northern Zambia. Kaunda received his early education in Lubwa, completing secondary school in the early 1940s. Following in his parents' footsteps, he became a teacher, first in Northern Rhodesia and later in Tanganyika Territory (now part of Tanzania) in the mid-1940s.
Kaunda's early career included various roles such as a teacher at the Upper Primary School, Boarding Master at Lubwa, and Headmaster at Lubwa from 1943 to 1945. He also worked at the Salisbury and Bindura Mine for a time. In early 1948, he became a teacher in Mufulira for the United Missions to the Copperbelt (UMCB), where he also served as an assistant at an African Welfare Centre and Boarding Master of a Mine School. During this period, he led a Pathfinder Scout Group and was Choirmaster at a Church of Central Africa congregation.
Struggle Against Colonial Rule
Kaunda returned to Zambia in 1949 and became interpreter and adviser on African affairs to Sir Stewart Gore-Browne, a liberal white settler and a member of the Northern Rhodesian Legislative Council. Kaunda acquired knowledge of the colonial government as well as political skills, both of which served him well when later that year he joined the African National Congress (ANC), the first major anticolonial organization in Northern Rhodesia. In the early 1950s Kaunda became the ANC’s secretary-general, functioning as its chief organizing officer, a role that brought him into close contact with the movement’s rank and file. Thus, when the leadership of the ANC clashed over strategy in 1958-59, Kaunda carried a major part of the ANC operating structure into a new organization, the Zambia African National Congress.
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Kaunda became president of the new organization and skillfully used it to forge a militant policy against the British plan for a federation of the three central African colonies-Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. African leaders opposed and feared any such federation because it would tend to place ultimate power in the hands of a white minority of settlers. Kaunda employed the Zambia congress as an instrument for executing what he called “positive nonviolent action,” a form of civil disobedience against the federation policy. His campaign had two major results: first, the British government modified the federation policy and eventually agreed to discard it; second, the imprisonment of Kaunda and other militant leaders elevated them to the status of national heroes in the eyes of the people.
While Kaunda was in prison, Mainza Chona and other nationalists broke away from the ANC and, in October 1959, Chona became the first president of the United National Independence Party (UNIP), the successor to ZANC. However, Chona did not see himself as the party's main founder. When Kaunda was released from prison in January 1960 he was elected president of UNIP.
In 1960 he visited Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta and afterwards, in July 1961, Kaunda organised a civil disobedience campaign in Northern Province, the so-called Cha-cha-cha campaign, which consisted largely of arson and obstructing significant roads. Kaunda subsequently ran as a UNIP candidate during the 1962 elections. This resulted in a UNIP-ANC Coalition government, with Kaunda as Minister of Local Government and Social Welfare. In January 1964, UNIP won the next major elections, defeating their ANC rivals and securing Kaunda's position as prime minister. Thus, from 1960 on, the nationwide support of Zambia’s independence movement was secured, as was too the dominant status of Kenneth Kaunda in that movement.
In December 1960 the British colonial authorities invited Kaunda and several other UNIP leaders to participate in discussions on the status of the three colonies at a conference in London. Early in the following year the British government announced that formal decolonization of Zambia would commence. The first major elections leading to final decolonization were held in October 1962. The constitutional proposals upon which the election was based provided the European settlers in Northern Rhodesia with a disproportionate share of the votes. Yet the two major African parties-the UNIP and ANC-gained a majority of the votes. The UNIP was the winner, gaining 15 of the 37 seats in the new Legislative Council. The UNIP’s success was attributed overwhelmingly to the leadership of Kaunda. He had been astute both in allaying the European settlers’ fears that an African regime would unfairly disregard their interests and in quelling the factionalism prevalent in large sections of the country’s African population. It was this same skill that enabled Kaunda to negotiate further constitutional advances, and in 1964 Zambia was granted independence with Kaunda as its president.
President of Zambia
Like other African leaders, Kaunda faced many complex postindependence problems, especially the issue of tribalism. He succeeded in continuing to negotiate on this issue, saving Zambia the trauma of tribal civil war. Nevertheless, interparty political violence occurred during the elections of 1968, in which Kaunda and his party were returned to power. In response, Kaunda in 1972 imposed one-party rule on Zambia, and in 1973 he introduced a new constitution that ensured his party’s uncontested rule. As president of UNIP, and under the country's one-party state system, Kaunda was the only candidate for president of the republic in the general elections of 1978, 1983, and 1988, each time with official results showing over 80 per cent of voters approving his candidacy. Parliamentary elections were also controlled by Kaunda.
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At the time of its independence, Zambia's modernisation process was far from complete. The nation's educational system was one of the most poorly developed in all of Britain's former colonies, and it had just a hundred university graduates and no more than 6,000 indigenous inhabitants with two years or more of secondary education. Because of this, Zambia had to invest heavily in education at all levels. Kaunda instituted a policy where all children, irrespective of their parents' ability to pay, were given free exercise books, pens, and pencils. The parents' main responsibility was to buy uniforms, pay a token "school fee" and ensure that the children attended school.
The University of Zambia was opened in Lusaka in 1966, after Zambians all over the country had been encouraged to donate whatever they could afford towards its construction. Kaunda was appointed Chancellor and officiated at the first graduation ceremony in 1969. The main campus was situated on the Great East Road, while the medical campus was located at Ridgeway near the University Teaching Hospital. In 1979 another campus was established at the Zambia Institute of Technology in Kitwe.
Zambia's First President: The Legacy of Kenneth Kaunda
For example, the British South Africa Company (BSAC, founded by Cecil Rhodes) still retained commercial assets and mineral rights that it had acquired from a concession signed with the Litunga of Bulozi in 1890. Deciding on a planned economy, Zambia instituted a programme of national development, under the direction of the National Commission for Development Planning, which instituted a "Transitional Development Plan" and the "First National Development Plan". The two operations brought major investment in the infrastructure and manufacturing sectors.
In April 1968, Kaunda initiated the Mulungushi Reforms, which sought to bring Zambia's foreign-owned corporations under national control under the Industrial Development Corporation. Over the subsequent years, a number of mining corporations were nationalised, although the country's banks, such as Barclays and Standard Chartered, remained foreign-owned. The Zambian economy suffered a setback from 1973, when rising oil prices and falling copper prices combined to reduce the state's income from the nationalised mines. The country fell into debt with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Third National Development Plan had to be abandoned as crisis management replaced long-term planning. His weak attempts at economic reforms in the 1980s hastened Zambia's decline. A number of negotiations with the IMF followed, and by 1990 Kaunda was forced into partial privatisation of the state-owned corporations.
From 1964 onwards, Kaunda's government developed authoritarian characteristics. Becoming increasingly intolerant of opposition, Kaunda banned all parties except UNIP following violence during the 1968 elections. However, in early 1972, he faced a new threat in the form of Simon Kapwepwe's decision to leave UNIP and found a rival party, the United Progressive Party, which Kaunda immediately attempted to suppress. Next, he appointed the Chona Commission, which was set up under the chairmanship of Mainza Chona in February 1972. Chona's task was to make recommendations for a new Zambian constitution which would effectively reduce the nation to a one-party state. Finally, Kaunda neutralised Nkumbula by getting him to join UNIP and accept the Choma Declaration on 27 June 1973.
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After eliminating political opposition, Kenneth Kaunda established a personality cult and promoted a left nationalist-socialist ideology called Zambian Humanism. It combined mid-20th-century concepts of central planning and state control with values Kaunda described as traditional African principles, including mutual aid, trust, and community loyalty.
Kaunda with Nicolae Ceaușescu
Foreign Policy
During his early presidency Kaunda was an outspoken supporter of the anti-apartheid movement and opposed white minority rule in Southern Rhodesia. Kaunda supported the succession of Biafra when he recognized it as an independent nation on May 20, 1968. Although his nationalisation of the copper mining industry in the late 1960s and the volatility of international copper prices contributed to increased economic problems, matters were aggravated by his logistical support for the black nationalist movements in Ian Smith's Rhodesia, South West Africa, Angola, and Mozambique.
Kaunda's administration later attempted to serve the role of a mediator between the entrenched white minority and colonial governments and the various guerrilla movements which were aimed at overthrowing these respective administrations. Beginning in the early 1970s, he began permitting the most prominent guerrilla organisations, such as the Rhodesian ZANU and the African National Congress, to use Zambia as a base for their operations. Former ANC president Oliver Tambo even spent a significant proportion of his 30-year exile living and working in Zambia. Joshua Nkomo, leader of ZAPU, also erected military encampments there, as did SWAPO and its military wing, the People's Liberation Army of Namibia.
In the first twenty years of Kaunda's presidency, he and his advisors sought numerous times to acquire modern weapons from the United States. In a letter written to US president Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, Kaunda inquired if the United States would provide him with long-range missile systems. All of his requests for modern weapons were refused by the United States. In 1980, Kaunda purchased sixteen MiG-21 jets from the Soviet Union, which ultimately provoked a reaction from the United States. Kaunda responded to the United States, stating that after numerous failed attempts to purchase weapons, buying from the Soviets was justified in his duty to protect his citizens and Zambian national security.
From April 1975, when he visited US president Gerald Ford at the White House in Washington, D.C., and delivered a powerful speech calling for the United States to play a more active and constructive role in southern Africa. Until approximately 1984, Kaunda was arguably the key African leader involved in international diplomacy regarding the conflicts in Angola, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and Namibia. He hosted Henry Kissinger's 1976 trip to Zambia, got along very well with Jimmy Carter, and worked closely with President Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester Crocker.
On 26 August 1975, Kaunda acted as mediator along with the Prime Minister of South Africa, B. J. Vorster, at the Victoria Falls Conference to discuss possibilities for an internal settlement in Southern Rhodesia with Ian Smith and the black nationalists. After the Lancaster House Agreement, Kaunda attempted to seek similar majority rule in South West Africa. He met with P. W. Meanwhile, the anti-white minority insurgency conflicts of southern Africa continued to place a huge economic burden on Zambia as white minority governments were the country's main trading partners.
In response, Kaunda negotiated the TAZARA Railway (Tanzam) linking Kapiri Mposhi in the Zambian Copperbelt with Tanzania's port of Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean. Completed in 1975, this was the only route for bulk trade which did not have to transit white-dominated territories. For much of the Cold War, Kaunda was a strong supporter of the Non-Aligned Movement. He hosted a NAM summit in Lusaka in 1970 and served as the movement's chairman from 1970 to 1973. He maintained a close friendship with Yugoslavia's long-time leader Josip Broz Tito; he was remembered by many Yugoslav officials for weeping openly over Tito's casket in 1980. He also visited and welcomed Romania's president, Nicolae Ceaușescu, in the 1970s.
Transition to Multiparty Democracy
In August 1989, Farzad Bazoft was detained in Iraq for alleged espionage. He was accompanied by a British nurse, Daphne Parish, who was also arrested. Matters quickly came to a head in 1990. In July, amid three days of rioting in the capital, Kaunda announced a referendum on whether to legalise other parties would be held that October. However, he argued for maintaining UNIP's monopoly, claiming that a multiparty system would lead to chaos. While expressing willingness to have the Zambian people vote on a multiparty system, Kaunda maintained that only a one-party state could prevent tribalism and violence from engulfing the country.
By September, however, opposition demands forced Kaunda to reverse course. He cancelled the referendum, and instead recommended constitutional amendments that would dismantle UNIP's monopoly on power. At these elections, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), helmed by trade union leader Frederick Chiluba, swept UNIP from power in a landslide. In the presidential election, Kaunda was roundly defeated, taking only 24 per cent of the vote to Chiluba's 75 per cent. UNIP was cut down to only 25 seats in the National Assembly.
When Kaunda handed power to Chiluba on 2 November 1991, he became the second mainland African head of state to allow free multiparty elections and to relinquish power peacefully after he had lost.
After the Presidency
After leaving office, Kaunda clashed frequently with Chiluba's government and the MMD. Chiluba later attempted to deport Kaunda on the grounds that he was a Malawian. The MMD-dominated government under the leadership of Chiluba had the constitution amended, barring citizens with foreign parentage from standing for the presidency, to prevent Kaunda from contesting the next elections in 1996, in which he planned to participate.
After the 1997 coup attempt, on Boxing Day in 1997 he was arrested by paramilitary policemen. However, many officials in the region appealed against this; on New Year's Eve of the same year, he was placed under house arrest. In March 1999 a judge ruled that Kaunda should be stripped of his Zambian citizenship because his parents were from Malawi and, furthermore, because of that fact, Kaunda had held office illegally for most of his period in government. Kaunda mounted a challenge, and his citizenship was restored the next year when the petition that generated the court ruling was withdrawn.
In 2002 Kaunda was appointed the Balfour African President-in-Residence at Boston University in the United States, a position he held until 2004. In 2003 he was awarded the Grand Order of the Eagle in Zambia by Chiluba’s successor, Pres. Levy Mwanawasa.
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