Kenneth Kaunda
Kenneth Kaunda ruled Zambia for twenty-seven years, wrecked its economy supporting liberation movements next door, and then lost an election and left. He was a teacher's son and a teacher, and he led the nationalist movement that broke up the Central African Federation - the arrangement joining Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which Africans in the north read as a device to extend white settler rule over them. Zambia became independent in 1964 with the world's largest copper reserves and one of its highest growth rates. What he did with that position was spend it. Zambia was a front-line state: it hosted the ANC, SWAPO, ZAPU and the Zimbabwean guerrilla armies, and was bombed and raided by Rhodesia and South Africa for doing it. Closing the border with Rhodesia in 1973 cut off its own export route, and the railway built to the sea through Tanzania with Chinese money never fully replaced it. The arithmetic of that choice is stark. Zambia was among the twenty-five richest countries in the world per head at independence and among the twenty-five poorest by the time he left, and while the copper price and the oil shocks did most of it, the closed borders and the wars did the rest. Copper collapsed in the mid-1970s and never recovered. He nationalised the mines, ran a philosophy he called Zambian humanism, declared a one-party state in 1972, and by the late 1980s was presiding over shortages, IMF conditions and food riots. He legalised opposition parties in 1990 under pressure, lost the election of 1991 heavily, and handed over power - which few of his contemporaries did. He was later arrested by his successor, acquitted, and spent his last decades campaigning on HIV after losing a son to it.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 2021 CE
- Nationality: Zambian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
