Kenneth Kaunda

Kenneth Kaunda (28 April 1924 – 17 June 2021), also known as KK, was a Zambian politician who served as the first president of Zambia from 1964 to 1991.

He was at the forefront of the struggle for independence from British rule.

Dissatisfied with Harry Nkumbula's leadership of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress, he broke away and founded the Zambian African National Congress, later becoming the head of the socialist United National Independence Party (UNIP).

Kaunda was the first president of independent Zambia.

Kenneth Kaunda was born on 28 April 1924 at Lubwa Mission in Chinsali, then part of Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, and was the youngest of eight children.

His father, the Reverend David Kaunda, was an ordained Church of Scotland missionary and teacher, who had been born in Nyasaland (now Malawi) and had moved to Chinsali, to work at Lubwa Mission.

His mother was also a teacher and was the first African woman to teach in colonial Northern Rhodesia.

They were both teachers among the Bemba ethnic group which is located in northern Zambia.

His father died when Kenneth was a child.

This is where Kenneth Kaunda received his education until the early 1940s.

He later on followed in his parents' footsteps and became a teacher; first in Northern Rhodesia but then in the middle of the 1940s he moved to Tanganyika Territory (now part of Tanzania).

He also worked in Southern Rhodesia.

He attended Munali Training Centre in Lusaka between 1941 and 1943.

Early in his career, he read the writings of Mahatma Gandhi that he said: "went straight to my heart."

Kaunda was a teacher at the Upper Primary School and Boarding Master at Lubwa and then Headmaster at Lubwa from 1943 to 1945.

For a time, he worked at the Salisbury and Bindura Mine.

In early 1948, he became a teacher in Mufulira for the United Missions to the Copperbelt (UMCB).

He was then assistant at an African Welfare Centre and Boarding Master of a Mine School in Mufulira.

In this period, he was leading a Pathfinder Scout Group and was Choirmaster at a Church of Central Africa congregation.

He was also Vice-Secretary of the Nchanga Branch of Congress.

In 1949 Kaunda entered politics and became the founding member of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress.

On 11 November 1953 he moved to Lusaka to take up the post of Secretary General of the Africa National Congress (ANC), under the presidency of Harry Nkumbula.

The combined efforts of Kaunda and Nkumbula failed to mobilise native African peoples against the European-dominated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

In 1955 Kaunda and Nkumbula were imprisoned for two months with hard labour for distributing subversive literature.

The two leaders drifted apart as Nkumbula became increasingly influenced by white liberals and failing to defend indigenous Africans, Kaunda led a dissident group to Nkumbula that eventually broke with the ANC and founded his own party, the Zambian African National Congress (ZANC) in October 1958.

ZANC was banned in March 1959 and in Kaunda was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment, which he spent first in Lusaka, then in Salisbury.

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.

On 24 October 1964 he became the first president of an independent Zambia, appointing Reuben Kamanga as his vice-president.

In 1973, following tribal and inter-party violence, all political parties except UNIP were banned through an amendment of the constitution after the signing of the Choma Declaration.

At the same time, Kaunda oversaw the acquisition of majority stakes in key foreign-owned companies.

The 1973 oil crisis and a slump in export revenues put Zambia in a state of economic crisis.

International pressure forced Kaunda to change the rules that had kept him in power.

Multi-party elections took place in 1991, in which Frederick Chiluba, the leader of the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy, ousted Kaunda.

He was briefly stripped of Zambian citizenship in 1999, but the decision was overturned the following year.