Kenneth Kaunda led Zambia to freedom, then banned every other party
At independence in 1964, Zambia had roughly a hundred university graduates. Its first president, a former mission-school headmaster, poured money into classrooms and a national university built partly on citizens' donations. The same man later outlawed rival parties, ran the economy into crisis and was voted out after 27 years.
Kaunda was born in 1924 at Lubwa Mission in Northern Rhodesia, the youngest of eight children of two teachers. His father was a Church of Scotland minister from Nyasaland; his mother was the first African woman to teach in the colony. He followed them into teaching, rising to headmaster at Lubwa, then worked in mine schools on the Copperbelt, leading a scout troop and a church choir.
He entered politics in 1949 and became secretary general of the African National Congress under Harry Nkumbula. The two served two months' hard labour in 1955 for spreading subversive literature, then split; Kaunda's breakaway party was banned in 1959 and he spent nine months in prison. Released in 1960 as leader of the new United National Independence Party, he visited Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta, then launched the Cha-cha-cha civil disobedience campaign of arson and road blockades in 1961. Elections followed, and on 24 October 1964 he became president of independent Zambia.
The new state was mineral-rich but short of skills: beyond those few graduates, only about 6,000 Africans had two or more years of secondary schooling. Kaunda's government handed pupils free exercise books and pencils, opened the University of Zambia in Lusaka in 1966 and added technical colleges. By threatening expropriation he wrung concessions from the British South Africa Company, and from 1968 his Mulungushi Reforms pushed foreign-owned firms toward state control.
Economics was his weakness. Borrowing Tanzania's socialist farm policies on some of Africa's best land went badly, and the 1973 oil shock and falling export earnings tipped Zambia into crisis. Meanwhile he grew steadily more authoritarian; after 1973 only his party was legal, and he built a personality cult around a doctrine he called Zambian Humanism. Unrest eventually forced multiparty elections in 1991, which he lost to Frederick Chiluba. He was briefly stripped of citizenship in 1998 and died in 2021.
Source: Kenneth Kaunda
