Kenneth Kaunda

Kenneth Kaunda (28 April 1924 – 17 June 2021), often called KK, was a Zambian politician and the country’s first president, holding office from 1964 to 1991. He led the push for independence from British rule, but after achieving it, he became a dictator and presided over Zambia’s economic decline. Unhappy with Harry Nkumbula’s direction of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress, Kaunda split off to form the Zambian African National Congress and later took over the socialist United National Independence Party (UNIP).

Kaunda became president when Zambia gained independence. In 1973, after tribal conflicts and violence between political groups, he banned all parties except UNIP through a constitutional change following the Choma Declaration. Around the same time, he pushed for the state to take majority stakes in key foreign-owned companies. The 1973 oil crisis and falling export earnings plunged Zambia into economic trouble. Growing unrest forced Kaunda to alter the rules that kept him in power, leading to multi-party elections in 1991, where Frederick Chiluba of the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy defeated him. In 1998, Kaunda was briefly stripped of his Zambian citizenship, but this was reversed in 2000.

Kaunda was born on 28 April 1924 at Lubwa Mission in Chinsali, then part of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), the youngest of eight children. His father, Reverend David Kaunda, was a Church of Scotland missionary and teacher from Nyasaland (modern Malawi) who 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 belonged to the Bemba ethnic group in northern Zambia. Kenneth’s father died when he was young. He was educated at Lubwa until the early 1940s, then followed his parents into teaching, first in Northern Rhodesia, then in the mid-1940s in Tanganyika Territory (now part of Tanzania), and also in Southern Rhodesia. He attended Munali Training Centre in Lusaka from 1941 to 1943. Early on, he read Mahatma Gandhi’s writings, which he said “went straight to my heart.”

Kaunda taught at Upper Primary School and served as Boarding Master at Lubwa, then became Headmaster there from 1943 to 1945. He later worked at the Salisbury and Bindura Mine. In early 1948, he taught in Mufulira for the United Missions to the Copperbelt. He then became an assistant at an African Welfare Centre and Boarding Master at a Mine School in Mufulira. During this time, he led a Pathfinder Scout Group and was Choirmaster at a Church of Central Africa congregation. He also served as Vice-Secretary of the Nchanga Branch of Congress.

In 1949, Kaunda entered politics as a founding member of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress. On 11 November 1953, he moved to Lusaka to become Secretary General of the Africa National Congress under Harry Nkumbula. Together, they failed to rally native Africans against the European-led Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. In 1955, Kaunda and Nkumbula were jailed for two months with hard labour for distributing subversive literature. The two grew apart as Nkumbula came under the influence of white liberals and failed to defend indigenous Africans. Kaunda led a dissident group that broke from the ANC in October 1958, founding the Zambian African National Congress (ZANC). ZANC was banned in March 1959, and Kaunda was sentenced to nine months in prison, first in Lusaka, then in Salisbury.

While Kaunda was in jail, Mainza Chona and other nationalists left the ANC, and in October 1959, Chona became the first president of the United National Independence Party (UNIP), which replaced ZANC. Chona did not consider himself the party’s main founder. When Kaunda was released in January 1960, he was elected UNIP president. In 1960, he visited Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta. In July 1961, he organized a civil disobedience campaign in Northern Province called the Cha-cha-cha campaign, which involved arson and blocking major roads. Kaunda ran as a UNIP candidate in the 1962 elections, leading to a UNIP–ANC coalition government where he became Minister of Local Government and Social Welfare. In January 1964, UNIP won the next major elections, defeating the ANC, and Kaunda became prime minister. On 24 October 1964, he was sworn in as the first president of independent Zambia, with Reuben Kamanga as his vice-president.

At independence, Zambia’s education system was one of the least developed among Britain’s former colonies, with only about a hundred university graduates and fewer than 6,000 locals with two or more years of secondary education. Kaunda responded by investing heavily in education at all levels. He introduced a policy providing all children with free exercise books, pens, and pencils, regardless of their parents’ ability to pay. Parents were mainly responsible for buying uniforms, paying a small “school fee,” and ensuring their children attended school. This approach ensured that the best pupils could continue their education.