Zambia pays tribute to “African Gandhi” Kenneth Kaunda, the father of independence

Published on : 07/02/2021 – 20:14

Dozens of people paid national tribute on Friday July 2 to the father of Zambia’s independence, Kenneth Kaunda, who died at 97 on June 19.

Cannons were fired in the National heroes stadium in Lusaka, where the coffin of the first Zambian president, wrapped in a flag, was brought by a military vehicle. A little further on, soldiers in fatigues danced to solemn music and sang funeral songs.

Nicknamed the “African Gandhi”, Kenneth Kaunda had succeeded in defeating the former Northern Rhodesia from British rule in 1964, without bloodshed. He “died peacefully” in the early afternoon of June 17, in the military hospital in the Zambian capital where he had been admitted with pneumonia.

In the streets of the capital, taxi drivers were driving on Friday with their signs lit up. “We have decided to drive with our lights on as a sign of mourning for Dr Kaunda. A huge loss for Zambia but also for the world,” Lazarus Daka, 37, told AFP.

“The end of an era”

Zambia and neighboring countries have declared several days of mourning and lowered the flags.

Welcoming the departure of an “African icon”, the current Zambian President Edgar Lungu declared in his tribute to have learned from Kenneth Kaunda “the importance of patriotism and national unity”, while the next presidential election is scheduled in August.

His disappearance marks “the end of an era”, said at the ceremony the heads of state of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, and South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, the latter recalling that Kenneth Kaunda was the “last surviving leader of the generation which paved the way for the liberation of colonized Africa “.

A “giant among men”, according to Moussa Faki Mahamat, president of the Commission of the African Union who also made the trip, without whom the pan-African organization “would not exist”. The British Minister for Africa, James Duddridge, expressed to him the “sadness” of Queen Elizabeth II, underlining the loss of “a great man”.

Kenneth Kaunda’s funeral, scheduled for Wednesday in Lusaka, will be “the planting of a seed” from which a new Pan-Africanism “free from corruption” will be born, predicted the President of Malawi, Lazarus Chakwera.

The “African Gandhi”

Born on April 28, 1924 in the mission of Lubwa, in the northeast of the country, to Malawian parents, “KK” was considered at the end of his life as a sage on the African continent, even if his opponents saw in him an autocrat having ruined his country.

In power for 27 years, his long reign was largely placed under one-party rule.

Claiming to be socialist and close to Moscow, he collectivized farms and nationalized the rich copper mines and other key sectors, to the chagrin of foreign owners. But mismanagement, debts and falling copper prices ultimately thwarted the “Zambianization” of the small landlocked country in southern Africa and caused a serious economic and social crisis.

Describing himself as “a Christian humanist”, Kenneth Kaunda was one of the staunchest opponents of the racist apartheid regime in South Africa and provided a solid rear base for Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), who organized the armed struggle against white power from Lusaka.

He also provided active support to liberation struggles throughout southern Africa.

In 1990, violent riots, against a background of growing authoritarianism, forced him to resign himself to multiparty politics. He lost the first democratic elections, in 1991, to trade unionist Frederick Chiluba. “This is multipartyism, one day we win elections, one day we lose, it’s not the end of the world,” he said on television, the day after his defeat.

With AFP