Kenneth Kaunda

Kenneth David Kaunda was born in Lubwa, in the Chinsali District of Northern Rhodesia, on the twenty-eighth of April 1924, the youngest of eight children of a missionary teacher father from Nyasaland and a teacher mother. He trained as a teacher at Lubwa Mission School and taught in Northern Rhodesia and Tanganyika through the 1940s and early 1950s.

He entered politics in 1949 through the Northern Rhodesia African National Congress, broke with it in 1958 to found the more radical Zambia African National Congress, and was imprisoned by the British colonial authority in 1959-1960. He founded the United National Independence Party in January 1960.

Zambia became independent on the twenty-fourth of October 1964. Kaunda became the new republic's first President and held the office for the next twenty-seven years until 1991.

His sustained political commitment was the support of southern African liberation movements from Zambian territory. Through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s Lusaka was the principal exile capital of the African National Congress of South Africa, the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) of Namibia, the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), and the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO). The Rhodesian, South African, and Portuguese colonial militaries conducted repeated cross-border raids and air strikes against Zambia in response; over five hundred Zambians were killed in these operations through the period. Kaunda did not withdraw the support.

He accepted defeat in the 1991 multi-party election to Frederick Chiluba — one of the first peaceful transfers of power between elected governments in post-independence Africa.

He died in Lusaka on the seventeenth of June 2021, age ninety-seven.

He is honored here as the frontline statesman who held southern African liberation under Zambian protection.