In Memory of Dr. Kenneth Kaunda
Dr. Kenneth Kaunda the Founding president of Zambia and giant of African nationalism transitioned from this world on 17 June 2021. He was 97 years old. He was widely known by turns for his humility and total dedication to the liberation of Southern African countries namely, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
Zambia was born on 24 October 1964, Africa’s thirty-fifth independence state. Like most of its sister nations in Africa, Zambia’s transition to independence had been rapid and dramatic. For the ten years preceding independence Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, a federation created and governed by white men, but resisted and ultimately destroyed by black men.
As late as 1958 only eleven Africans were registered as voters in Northern Rhodesia; within five years that number exceeded a million. Three times between 1958 and 1964 Northern Rhodesia went to the polls, twice under Colonial Office constitutions imposed against the active and sometimes violent opposition of Africans. These were the years of militant resistance, the years during which Northern Rhodesia’s African leaders organized the nationalist party which was destined to govern the new Zambia.
In his annual report for 1954, Kaunda conceded that ‘the masses thought ANC had come to an end. Most people evidently believed he wrote, that ANC had been formed only to fight the Federation. The party’s performance since mid-1953 hardly suggested any other conclusion. ANC’s national executive and its working committee had met only once during the past year. Financial troubles, Kaunda claimed, had virtually immobilized the party, and prevented even head office officials from touring in the rural areas. Part of the decline Kaunda blamed on Native Authority bans that had been imposed.
At ANC’s annual conference in 1954, which drew only a handful of delegates and was the last conference to be held for two years, it was decided that senior officials should assess ANC’s present difficulties and prepare a five-year plan for the party. The accent of our endeavor must always be on administration and organization. Kaunda observed, otherwise ‘all our planning is moonshine’.
In January 1955 Nkumbula and Kaunda served their first prison sentences, an exercise which appeared to have a marked effect on both men. Kaunda resumed his organizing work more vigorously than ever after his release in March 1955. He published a series of monthly circulars which provided progress reports on branch formation and commentary on political developments in Northern Rhodesia and the Federation. In nearly every issue Kaunda stressed the need for dedicated leadership, personal sacrifice, improved party organization, and financial responsibility. Nkumbula’s prison experience appeared to weaken his resolve. His support for ANC’s boycott actions was unenthusiastic on several occasions.
At the party’s 1956 annual conference, held shortly after the 1956emergencyon the Copperbelt, Nkumbula’s presidential address was notably moderate. He denied any connection between ANC and the trade union movement, pleaded for improved race relations, and defended a pledge which he had recently made to show a more cooperative spirit towards the Northern Rhodesia Government. By comparison, Kaunda’s speech was far more militant., Kaunda warned of the years ahead and the Federal Government’s increasingly open campaign for dominion status by 1960.
The shift in African nationalist thinking which emerged full-blown in 1957 had clearly begun in 1956. At first, it was restricted to a mere handful of ANC leaders. Gradually they built up branch organizations and began consolidating the party’s more militant elements. For the next eighteen months, the build-up continued, slowly but steadily, until in October 1958 the split occurred which produced Kunda’s Zambia African National Congress (ZANC).
Kaunda was released from prison on 9 January 1960. On 31 January he was elected to the presidency of UNIP, Mainza Chona stepping down to the post of Deputy President. Kaunda’s first public statement reflected UNIP’s determination to force the pace of political advance, setting the stage for a dramatic struggle for power lasting well over two years.
Freedom! All I am asking of Africans of Northern Rhodesia is that they should remain calm and patient, and should prepare themselves for the real non-violent struggle that lies ahead.
The Zambia African Congress was banned, but there is no power to ban our desire to be free, to shape our own destiny. In this struggle for freedom, we will tell the present rulers to realize that the color of a man should not count; what should count is behavior…
I am determined more than ever before to achieve self-government for Africans in this country. Detentions, imprisonments, and rural area restrictions will only delay, but will not stop us from reaching that goal, which should be reached this year,1960.
The preliminary session of the Federal Review, which opened in London on 5 December 1960, marked the beginning of a new phase in the struggle over the future of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. On 4 December at a meeting between the Colonial Secretary, the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, and the three nationalist leaders, Kaunda, Nkomo, and Banda, the African leaders agreed to attend the Federal Review.
Kaunda and several colleagues attended a conference of nationalist leaders from dependent African territories in Accra early in July. On 6 July Kaunda returned to London to see Macleod before traveling to Northern Rhodesia for UNIP’S historic Mulungushi Conference. Speaking to the Conference’s 4000 delegates amid shouts of ‘Action Now ‘and ‘Kwacha’, Kaunda launched into an impassioned attack on the British and Federal Governments.
They (British Government) have sold us down the cold river of white supremacy… They are treating us like pieces of dirt…. We are being sacrificed on the altar of foreign politics. They gave into Welensky to save Whitehead’s referendum which means saving Welensky himself and, therefore, saving the Federation at the expense of our political advancement; the very thing successive colonial secretaries have assured us would not happen.
The battle remains the same. It is not anti-white, but anti-wrong. We have many friends among men of all races. We shall not fight against white racialists and at the same time be racialistic ourselves.
I have repeatedly asked the people of Northern Rhodesia to be patient and non-violent in thought, word, and deed. But I have recently had to remove one of these words from my vocabulary. It is ‘patience’. Welensky refused to be patient and he got what he wanted. We who were patient have been neglected.
When Zambia achieved independence in October 1964, Kaunda became President of all the people, white and black alike, leader, of one of Africa’s great political parties and hope of the new nation of Zambia.
On 1 February 2001, the Commonwealth Secretariat released into the public domain 117 formerly classified files for the year 1970. Some of the documents are records of important events and situations that have helped shape the Commonwealth. Some are issues that threatened the very survival of the Commonwealth as revealed by 1970 records.
When Arnold Smith, the first Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, sent presidents and prime ministers a proposed agenda for the Commonwealth summit to be held in Singapore in January 1971, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania replied: “I am in some embarrassment about replying, for it is by no means certain that Tanzania will at that time be a member of the Commonwealth! I hope we are, but I am afraid the decision is no longer one for me to make.”
The Commonwealth was in a crisis of survival. The reason: the United Kingdom’s newly elected Conservative government led by Edward Heath has said it intended to resume arms sales to South Africa. African Commonwealth countries were furious. South Africa has ceased to be a member of the Commonwealth in 1961. For the UK now to help the apartheid state militarily seemed to make nonsense of the Commonwealth relationship.
Arnold Smith had long been wrestling to keep the Commonwealth together in face of the Ian Smith rebellion in Rhodesia. Now he confronted another threat to its survival.
President Kaunda had dinner with Heath at Number 10 and left in a huff. Mr. Heath complained he had been lectured. President Kaunda said it had not been a happy occasion, but the reality was that “members of a family quarrel.
In one of the seminal books The Riddle of Violence, Dr. Kenneth Kaunda boldly confronts the dangers of both pacifism and militarism. It is an angry and passionate record of a personal tragedy; it is an insider’s reading of one of the most crucial freedom struggles of our day and a trenchant guideline for all involved in the fight for human rights.
History and posterity must decide. Customarily they reserve the mantle of greatness for those who win great wars, not those who prevent them. It will be difficult to measure Dr. Kenneth Kaunda by an ordinary historical yardstick. For he was an extraordinary man, an extraordinary politician, and an extraordinary President.
In my view, the man was greater than the legend. His life, not his death, created his greatness.
When the storms break for him
May the trees shake for him?
Their blossoms down.
And in the night that he is troubled
May a friend wake him?
So that his time is doubled.
And at the end of all loving and love
May the Man above
Give him a crown.