Kenneth Kaunda

Kenneth David Kaunda was born on 28 April 1924 at Lubwa Mission in Chinsali, in the far north of what was then Northern Rhodesia, the youngest of eight children among the Bemba people. His father was a Church of Scotland minister and teacher; his mother was the first African woman to teach in the colony. Kenneth followed them into the classroom — but the injustice of colonial rule pulled him out of it and into politics, where he founded the United National Independence Party (UNIP) and led a patient campaign of civil disobedience modelled on Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

On 24 October 1964 the Union Jack came down and Kaunda became the first president of Zambia. He preached a philosophy he called Zambian Humanism — that a nation should put its people first and care for them like family — and he nationalised the great copper mines that were the country's lifeblood. Beyond his borders he turned Zambia into a frontline sanctuary: the ANC, ZAPU, ZANU and SWAPO all worked from Zambian soil, and the ANC's Radio Freedom broadcast from Lusaka while Zambia absorbed the cross-border raids that this courage invited.

The story is not all light, and an honest record says so. In 1972–1973 Kaunda banned every party but his own and ruled a one-party state for nearly two decades, while a copper-dependent economy slid into debt as world prices fell. Yet his decency kept showing through. He sang his song of unity, 'Tiyende Pamodzi' ('let us go together'); in 1987 he told his shocked nation that his own son had died of AIDS — the first African head of state to speak so openly — and campaigned ever after against the disease and its stigma.

And when the people finally voted him out in 1991, he did the rarest thing of all in the Africa of his time: he accepted defeat and handed over power peacefully. He lived on as a beloved elder, 'KK', until his death in Lusaka in 2021 at the age of 97, mourned across a continent with a forest of raised white handkerchiefs.