I first met Kenneth Kaunda in the 1940s, when we were in our early 20s. This was at the Kabulonga Club in Lusaka, the only place where black and white people could meet with ease in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). It was also the one place where Africans could legally consume European-style beer.
Kaunda, however, drank no alcohol. He was an intensely religious young man.
One day he told us: “I think the white missionaries found me a difficult youngster. Each Sunday they sat in the front row of our church in padded armchairs. The black congregation – and that included my father – had to sit behind them on wooden benches. And yet he’d been a preacher longer than most of those whites. I got up in class one day and asked whether it would be the same in their heaven – blacks on wooden benches at the back?”
Almost everyone laughed, but not Kaunda. I hope that I didn’t.
Peter Fraenkel
In 1985, I shot part of an environmental film with Kenneth Kaunda and his good friend the artist David Shepherd. We had arranged for a short session in the grounds of the presidential palace in Lusaka one morning – an interview followed by a group of around a dozen schoolchildren who sang an environmental song.
His love of the environment was not well known, but he had taken great care to help protect Zambia’s elephants.
Despite underfunding – anti-poaching patrols often went out with just three bullets between them against well-funded poachers armed with the latest weapons – the elephant population was growing again.
After our interview, to my surprise, Kaunda insisted on both film crew and schoolchildren staying to lunch in the state house. He personally handed plates to each of the children. This was no publicity stunt – the camera had been packed away and he talked happily about environmental issues until we finally left at three in the afternoon.
Only when we turned on the TV that night did we discover that just 30 minutes later he was chairing a meeting of Commonwealth foreign ministers to discuss the burning issue of Rhodesia.
Charles Harris
