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Kenneth Kaunda, Patriarch of African Independence, Is Dead at 97 - The New York Times

Kenneth Kaunda, Patriarch of African Independence, Is Dead at 97 - The New York Times

Kenneth Kaunda, Patriarch of African Independence, Is Dead at 97 - The New York Times
Jun 17, 2021 4 mins, 21 secs

As Zambia’s first president, he dominated his country, outliving many of the other frontline leaders who had sponsored southern Africa’s guerrilla wars.

Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s first president and a founding patriarch of African independence who kept his grip on power for 27 years before enduring electoral defeat, an attempted assassination, house arrest and efforts to deport him from the country he had established, died on Thursday in Lusaka, the nation’s capital.

His death, at a military hospital where he was being treated for pneumonia, was announced by the president of Zambia, Edgar Lungu.

Kaunda dominated the politics of his Southern African country for a generation, beginning in the mid-1960s.

Kaunda outlived many of his peers among the so-called frontline leaders who had sponsored Southern Africa’s guerrilla wars, becoming a kind of elder statesman.

Kaunda espoused what he called African humanism, a vague political philosophy of his own devising that extolled private initiative while promoting welfare-state programs and a spirit of community.

He was steadfast in challenging white-minority governments in South Africa, Rhodesia and Namibia, as well as Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique and Angola.

In a bipolar Cold War world, he kept Zambia resolutely nonaligned: He criticized the United States for its war in Vietnam, and he upbraided the Soviet Union for its interventions in Africa.

For Zambia, the rail line was a needed outlet providing relief from the chokeholds on trade applied by the country’s white-ruled neighbors to the south.

At various times he threatened to call for Britain’s suspension from the 49-member British Commonwealth — or even to withdraw his own country— unless London dealt more sternly with its errant colony Rhodesia, which was fighting Black nationalist forces, some of them based in Zambia, that were seeking to overthrow its white rulers and rename the country Zimbabwe.

Kaunda rallied international opinion in support of censuring and imposing economic boycotts on racist regimes close by, and he permitted Black nationalist movements from these countries to set up guerrilla bases in Zambia.

Zambian soil was bombed and raided by Rhodesian and South African forces on missions to root out guerrillas, including many from South Africa’s banned African National Congress.

And no country was more economically harmed by Africa’s white-minority regimes than Zambia in the 1970s and ’80s, when Zambians formed long lines to acquire scarce staples.

In what was then Rhodesia, the government of Ian Smith, backed by South Africa, cut off the rail links that had historically carried Zambian copper ore to ocean ports and world markets.

In one attempt at conciliation, in 1975, after years of guerrilla war in Rhodesia, Mr.

Kaunda and leading Zimbabwean nationalists sat across a table from John Vorster, the South African prime minister, and Mr.

Smith, who had led Rhodesia to break its ties with Britain rather than accept multiracial politics.

Smith’s insistence, had been positioned at the midpoint of the Victoria Falls railroad bridge on the border between Zambia and Rhodesia, high above the Zambezi River.

Kaunda and the nationalists remained technically in Zambia.

In April 1982, at a meeting in a trailer near South Africa’s border with Botswana, Mr.

Kaunda pressed the South African prime minister, P.W.

Mandela, the African National Congress leader, from his long imprisonment.

He repeated the plea seven years later while hosting a meeting with South Africa’s new president, F.W.

The success of the struggles for one-person, one-vote elections in Southern Africa proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for Mr.

With the price of oil rising and that of copper falling, Zambia borrowed so much from the International Monetary Fund that by 1987 it owed more than any other country south of the Sahara.

Kaunda was the onset of multiparty elections in South Africa, which made it difficult for him to continue to proclaim the superiority of a one-party system.

Chiluba began depicting his predecessor as a dictator who had ruined the country, blaming him for Zambia’s economic troubles.

Kaunda from contesting further presidential elections, which were limited to citizens whose parents had been born within Zambia’s frontiers.

Kaunda, a retired army major, had been a rising figure in his father’s opposition United National Independence Party.

Kenneth David Kaunda was born on April 28, 1924, at a Church of Scotland mission in the northern part of what was then Northern Rhodesia.

His mother, Helen (Nyirenda) Kaunda, had been one of the first African teachers in the region.

He often traveled around the country on his bicycle with his guitar strapped to his back, stopping to sing hymns and discuss politics with tribal chiefs and others, and establishing branches of a Black organization called the Northern Rhodesia African National Congress.

After the white-run Federation of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland held an election in 1958, he was arrested and jailed for leading a boycott against it, and his organization, the Zambia African National Congress, was banned.

8, 1960; three weeks later he was elected president of an organization he had formed, the United National Independence Party, which quickly became the largest party in Northern Rhodesia.

24, 1964, following an agreement with Britain that had been struck in May, the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia became the Republic of Zambia, with Mr.

Kaunda as president.

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