Kenneth Kaunda – End of an era?

Monday Column By Emmanuel Yawe

royawe@yahoo.com | 08024565402

Kenneth David Kaunda was born April 28, 1924 at Lubwa, near Chinsali, Northern Rhodesia [now Zambia]. Politically however, he was born 15th November 1884. For it was in the afternoon on that Saturday an international conference was opened by the chancellor of the newly-created German Empire at his official residence on Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin.

Including a short break for Christmas and the New Year, the Conference of Berlin would last 104 days, ending on February 26, 1885. In the 135 years since then, the conference has come to represent the late 19th-century European Scramble and Partition of the continent. In the popular imagination, the delegates are hunched over a map, armed with rulers and pencils, sketching out national borders on the continent with no idea of what existed on the ground they were parceling out. Yet this is mistaken. The Berlin Conference did not begin the scramble for Africa.

It did something much worse, though, with consequences that would reverberate Africa, in the process legitimising the ideas of Africa as a playground for outsiders, its mineral wealth as a resource for the outside world not for Africans and its fate as a matter not to be left to Africans.

A week before it closed, the Lagos Observer declared that “the world had, perhaps, never witnessed a robbery on so large a scale.” Six years later, another editor of a Lagos newspaper comparing the legacy conference to the slave trade said: “A forcible possession of our land has taken the place of a forcible possession of our person.” Theodore Holly, the first black Protestant Episcopal Bishop in the US, condemned the delegates as having “come together to enact into law, national rapine, robbery and murder”

Some Africans cooperated with this wholesale injustice against their continent while others, men of courage and conscience stood to be counted in the fight against it.

Kenneth Kaunda was one of them. He returned to Zambia in 1949 and acting as an interpreter to Sir Stewart Gore-Browne, a liberal white settler and a member of the Northern Rhodesian Legislative Council he acquired knowledge of the colonial government as well as political skills, both of which served him well when later that year he joined the African National Congress (ANC), the first major anticolonial organization in Northern Rhodesia.

Kaunda became president of the new organization and skillfully used it to forge a militant policy against the British plan for a federation of the three central African colonies—Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. African leaders opposed and feared any such federation because it would tend to place ultimate power in the hands of a white minority of settlers. Kaunda employed the Zambia congress as an instrument for executing what he called “positive nonviolent action,” a form of civil disobedience against the federation policy.

The reward for African nationalists who had the gumption to criticize such policies was for the colonial government to send them to jail. Kaunda had a fair share of this. On several occasions he was sent to jail for no justifiable reason.

Kaunda was released from prison by the colonial government on January 8, 1960. At the end of that month he was elected president of the United Independent National (UNIP), which had been formed in October 1959 by Mainza Chona, a militant nationalist who was disenchanted with the older ANC. The UNIP enjoyed spectacular growth, claiming 300,000 members by June 1960. In December 1960 the British colonial authorities invited Kaunda and several other UNIP leaders to participate in discussions on the status of the three colonies at a conference in London. Early in the following year the British government announced that formal decolonization of Zambia would commence.

The UNIP’s success was attributed overwhelmingly to the leadership of Kaunda. He had been astute both in allaying the European settlers’ fears that an African regime would unfairly disregard their interests and in quelling the factionalism prevalent in large sections of the country’s African population. It was this same skill that enabled Kaunda to negotiate further constitutional advances, and in 1964 Zambia was granted independence with Kaunda as its president.

Like other African leaders, Kaunda faced many complex post- independence problems, especially the issue of tribalism. He succeeded in continuing to negotiate on this issue, saving Zambia the trauma of tribal civil war.

Zambia under Kauna became a front line state in the fight for the decolonization of the rest of Africa, particularly southern Africa which was still controlled by racial bigots. His foreign policy was focused on this. Kaunda led other countries of southern Africa in confronting the white-minority governments of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. He imposed economic sanctions against Rhodesia in the 1970s at great cost to his country’s focused own economy, and in the late 1970s he allowed Zambia to be used as a base by black nationalist guerrillas.

Kenneth Kaunda and his generation of nationalists were men of courage and vision. They inspired the next generation of Africans to fight for their rights. Regrettably, such nationalist zeal is difficult to find these days. Our university students all over Africa who were always preoccupied with nationalist struggles are today preoccupied with other issues that do not sound deep. The bug has caught even our current leaders in Africa are so short sighted and short on reasoning that they hardly see beyond their noses and reason deeper their pockets. It is indeed sad.  We hope the recent death of Kenneth Kaunda will wake up our leaders to the original dreams of our leaders.