Remembering Kenneth Kaunda

Zambia’s former president Kenneth Kaunda has died. He led the southern African nation from 1964 until 1991. A teacher, activist, and anti-colonial leader, Kaunda assumed the presidency of Zambia at the age of forty as the country transitioned from British colonial rule as Northern Rhodesia to a nation that Kaunda sought to define through his philosophy of Zambian humanism and the slogan “One Zambia, One Nation.”





I started my academic career as an environmental historian of the British Empire in eastern Africa, but find myself currently working on political history of eastern and southern Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, meaning that Kaunda looms over much of what I think about on a daily basis.

Across Africa, Kaunda, who headed the United National Independence Party (UNIP) is understandably best remembered for his opposition to apartheid South Africa and settler Rhodesia. While most of Africa experienced decolonization between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, the political terrain looked very different in southern Africa. Apartheid South Africa was joined by white settlers’ rogue decolonization in Rhodesia. Two recalcitrant Portuguese colonies in what became Mozambique and Angola, along with a South African colony in present-day Namibia rounded out the region. Most African states were critical of these violently segregated societies, but Zambia shared a border with Rhodesia, lay within easy reach of South Africa’s powerful military, and was bound by economic orientation and transit infrastructure to both states. This meant that Kaunda’s rejection of their models as a threat to African decolonization writ large, and the material actions that his government took, carried real weight.

Kaunda declared his country willing to bear any sacrifice so that international sanctions could force Rhodesia toward a democratic decolonization. He hosted South African and Rhodesian liberation movements in Zambia, despite the dangers that large, well-armed communities of fighters posed, despite the commando and bombing raids these invited from the South African Defence Force, and in spite of the way this committed Zambia to intensive and costly diplomatic entanglements. Lusaka became the headquarters of the ANC’s External Mission which, by the 1980s, was treated by most of the world’s nations as a government in waiting.

What Kaunda’s hospitality did for the ANC--led in exile by Oliver Tambo, and dependent on the symbolic power of imprisoned figures like Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu--is hard to quantify. A daughter of ANC exiles recalls how in Kaunda’s Lusaka, ANC and other exile figures became “a new breed of Africans...determined that they would shine and shine and shine. They were possessed of the secret of freedom, a sort of inner spirit that propelled them forward and made them look--to my wide eyes at least--as though they were soaring” (Msimang, Always Another Country, 35). Kaunda, that daughter of exiles recalled, “was a dreamer...who said that independent Africa had a responsibility towards the parts of Africa that were still in chains.” The significance of Kaunda’s stance became clear when exiles travelled elsewhere in Africa. In Zambia, they were privileged refugees in a country “whose entire foreign policy was built around our protection and emancipation.” Elsewhere, they were mere sojourners (Msimang, Always Another Country, 35, 80).

Life in exile for some became corroded by rivalries, insecurities, and fatigue. But South Africans were grateful, and among Mandela’s first acts on release from prison was to travel to Lusaka to pay homage to Kaunda.

In British archives documenting this period, Kaunda comes across as a figure who deeply frustrated his British interlocutors in the government, diplomatic service, and intelligence world. Kaunda embraced a kind of dependency on Britain that his government believed would ultimately yield more benefits than costs. But Kaunda also positioned Zambia more broadly in the world through his outsized presence in the Commonwealth and roles in the Non-Aligned Movement. The RAF and British trucking firms supported the Zambian economy during the early months of Rhodesia’s rogue independence, British military training teams entered the country to build its British-commanded armed forces, and Kaunda sent young Zambian soldiers to British military academies for military education. He also committed the country to purchasing British-manufactured weapons that young officers believed locked the country into indefensible dependence on the former colonial power.

But through these actions, and the way in which they temporarily ceded Zambian freedom of movement on the Rhodesian issue, Kaunda secured substantial British security guarantees at a moment when the Zambian government lived in real fear of being drawn into an unwinnable war with the Rhodesian military that had armed itself during the colonial era in part through acquiring the wealth of Zambia’s copper mines through an aborted British experiment in imperial federation that temporarily bound Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

By the early 1970s Kaunda sent British training teams packing, replacing them with Italians. He cut off arms contracts with Britain, signing new ones with Yugoslavia. Zambian soldiers still went to train at Mons and Sandhurst, but still more went to India’s military academies. And Tanzania’s defence forces provided political education to Zambia’s military. Just a few years earlier the British government was convinced that it could continue to dominate Zambia’s military, intelligence, and national security apparatus for years to come, but suddenly found themselves powerless. And Zambia gained a rail outlet to the Indian Ocean due to its cooperation with Tanzania and China.

Kaunda’s commitment to liberation in southern Africa translated into a series of lasting images: Kaunda meeting with South African Prime Minister John Vorster in a railway carriage on the Victoria Falls Bridge; Kaunda squiring Olof Palme to the Rhodesian frontier, which the Swedish prime minister described as “the border of human decency” before unleashing massive funds for the ANC and other liberation movements; Kaunda dancing with Margaret Thatcher as part of a Commonwealth diplomatic offensive to bring down the rogue Rhodesians.

The British were intensely frustrated by what they saw as the two faces of Kaunda: his willingness to publicly flay them for their inability and unwillingness to successfully confront Rhodesia and South Africa; and his private willingness to compromise. The former saw him threaten by turns to leave the Commonwealth or to move to evict Britain from the organization that it regarded as an extension of its empire. The latter saw him broker deals in Angola with the South African government and its clients there that put him opposite more radical African liberation movements and their Cuban supporters.

Kaunda’s constant moralizing, however much it infuriated the British and others, was successful both in shifting global opinion, and in constructing a lasting image of Kaunda as a flawed but upright statesman. When he condemned South Africa in a widely distributed Commonwealth pamphlet on the regional costs of apartheid, he wrote that he wore several hats: “as president of one of the victim states; as the Chairman of the six Frontline States for which this report is about; as a member of the Commonwealth or simply as an ordinary mortal appalled” by what apartheid had wrought. “The ideology of apartheid,” he declared, was “hitting its neigbhours back into the stone age” (Apartheid Terrorism: the Destabilization Report, 1989, xi-xii). In a comparison designed to stir the global conscience, Kaunda compared the physical and structural violence of apartheid, and its relentless plundering of its neighbors, to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Best known for his stance against Rhodesia and South Africa, Kaunda also admitted South Asian refugees from eastern Africa at a time when other African nations were closing their doors to these stateless families. Kaunda cast a wide net with his diplomacy, and used the spectacular national parks his government helped to create as a backdrop for diplomacy, one day hosting Indira Gandhi, another brokering South African diplomatic deals, at a government lodge in the South Luangwa National Park.

On the home front, Kaunda sought to construct a developmental state that conveyed benefits to Zambians long denied by the uneven structures of colonial rule. Building a national economy to replace the extractive one that preceded it required dealing with a white-dominated mining sector, the managers of which resisted Africanization. Nationalization and planning were key tools of Kaunda’s early governments, and as the “One Zambia, One Nation” slogan demonstrated, Kaunda was deeply concerned with bridging the gaps that separated Zambians.

Some of these gaps were racial or tribal--legacies of colonial rule, competing nationalisms, and the diversity of the vast territory that Zambia contained. In western Zambia, the Lozi kingdom chafed when promised autonomy failed to materialize. Europeans on the Copperbelt--the powerhouse of the Zambian economy--not only dragged their feet when it came to training and promoting African employees, but publicly impugned Africans’ abilities, indicting not just their employees, but Kaunda and his cabinet. At least as much as these divisions, the ones between urban and rural Zambians preoccupied Kaunda, who worried that Zambians inhabited two worlds.

His squishy philosophy of Zambian humanism--and the symbols of industry and agriculture, tradition and modernity, on the national seal where it resided--sought to bridge these worlds. Like Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa, humanism sought to rehabilitate an African past and to graft it onto the promise of socialism. Less ideological than Nyerere, Kaunda’s humanism was more malleable. But far from this fact rendering it inconsequential, it gave it a different, potentially demotic kind of power. Letters from Zambians to their government officials on a host of policy issues during the 1960s and 1970s invoked Kaunda’s humanism--subtly or otherwise. The power they recognized these invocations as giving their claims is a testament to the multiple, unpredictable lives of Kaunda’s political thought.

Kaunda’s Zambia, it should be said, was not all brotherly love. A new generation of historians has moved beyond the uncritically sympathetic portrayals of earlier generations, and is exploring more complex dynamics of Kaunda’s legacy. Kaunda and his government were distinctly intolerant of rival forms and sources of authority in Zambia, or of challenges to their rule and governing prerogatives.

UNIP had joined the rival ANC liberation party in encouraging Africans to poach in late colonial Northern Rhodesia as an expression of their discontent with the injustices of colonial rule, which extended to restricting Africans’ access to wildlife resources. But when UNIP assumed power, Kaunda was unforgiving in his persecution of poachers, and baffled by the chiefs who sought to protect them. Members of Alice Lenshina’s Lumpa Church were killed in their scores for challenging state authority, and dissenting members of Kaunda’s government were dealt with harshly, some of them experiencing a kind of permanent internal exile. Kaunda ultimately engineered the creation of a one-party state. He argued, in common with figures like Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, that multi-party democracy left young African nations vulnerable to predatory superpowers and their clients in the context of the Cold War, and that partisan divisions could too neatly map onto the ethno-linguistic divisions produced by the country’s diversity. This was true, but also self-serving.

In government, Kaunda was a micromanager. His nation confronted by massive economic and social challenges, and enormous foreign policy conundrums, Kaunda nonetheless found time to send dozens of missives to central and local government officials on the distinctly tangential topic of wildlife conservation. Did lechwe--a species of antelope--need a special preserve, Kaunda wondered? Could fertilizer be deployed in the game-rich Luangwa Valley without harming the fauna there? Could ideas he scratched out on the back of an envelope for translocating dangerous animals be successfully implemented by the wildlife department?

Zambia’s robust economy and growth, powered by development plans’ harnessing of wealth from the mining sector, plummeted during the 1970s as sudden global trends echoed through the country’s political economy. The strengths and pitfalls of Zambia’s economic management since the 1960s is receiving far more serious scholarly attention the past decade, but its dependence on the mining sector, and that sector’s dependence on the global economy, exposed its vulnerabilities during the 1970s and created a cycle of debt that frustrated the long-term goals of its development plans.

In the early 1990s, Kaunda’s lustre was gone. His compromises in Angola and with South Africa more broadly seemed out of step with more aggressive diplomacy and armed struggle. Facing considerable popular pressure in Zambia, Kaunda altered Zambia’s constitution to allow for multi-party elections. Voters gave Kaunda and his party a comprehensive thumping at the polls, and in the years that followed his departure, the new Zambian government introduced constitutional changes designed to bar his return to office.

Kaunda’s years as elder statesman saw his rehabilitation. And his moving speech at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in 2013 provided amusement and nostalgia--the sight of Kaunda taking frail steps from his seat, and then sprinting to the podium to the roar of the audience, and his typically staccato rebuke of “young man” in his fifties or sixties who sought to end his praise of Madiba and condemnation of the “Boers”, made him a figure who commanded respect without demanding absurd adoration.

But Kaunda became more than a figure of nostalgia and fun. For people uncomfortable with Nelson Mandela’s dance with De Klerk at the end of apartheid in South Africa, Kaunda could be celebrated for his publicly-uncompromising stance against that regime. For Zambians concerned about the destruction that ethnic divisions seemed to threaten in the nation, Kaunda could be admired for his Zambian humanism. For those frustrated with Robert Mugabe’s brutal suppression of his political opponents, Kaunda could be admired for taking his cues from Zambian voters in 1991--although that required a certain amount of forgetting. For those frustrated by the neoliberalism underpinning the structural adjustment regimes and the damage they wrought on Africa, Kaunda’s national development plans and aspiration to build Zambia anew after colonialism could provide inspiration.

Historians and Zambians writ large will continue to debate Kenneth Kaunda’s presidency and political legacy--in some regards this process has only seriously begun recently--but his passing is more than an occasion for mourning in Zambia. It is an occasion for revising debates about how to fashion a good, just political economy. It is a moment for considering solidarity across borders in the face of profound racism. It is a reminder of the vitality of debates about how countries should make their way in the world. And it will hopefully spark new frameworks for thinking about the contributions and legacies of a figure who jovially and impatiently loomed over Zambia and Africa.