The Riddle of Violence by Kenneth D. Kaunda

ZANC was banned in 1959 and he was jailed for nine months for his nationalistic activities.

This led Kaunda to founding the Zambian African National Congress (ZANC) in 1958. The two leaders fell out as Nkumbula became influenced by Caucasian liberals and wasn’t militant in his approach in the demand for total emancipation of Zambia from the British. In 1955, he was incarcerated for the first time when he and Nkumbula spent two months behind bars for distributing subversive literature to the people. In 1953, he moved to Lusaka where he became the Secretary-General of the African National Congress under the Presidency of Harry Nkumbula.

While a teacher he read the works of the Indian Nationalist, Mahatma Ghandi which he said in a later interview had a profound influence on him.Īt barely 25 in 1949, he joined partisan politics when he became a founding member of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress. Kaunda taught not only in his native Zambia but also in Tanzania and the then Southern Rhodesia now Zimbabwe. Ghana’s Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah and Zimbabwe’s Robert Gabriel Mugabe were trained by the Roman-Catholic Church. Like many African nationalists, he was trained by the missionaries – in his case the Scottish missionaries. The last born of the family, he must have been influenced to become a teacher by his parents. His parents from the Bemba ethnic group were both teachers with his mother being the first female to teach in the then colonial Zambia.

The Riddle of Violence by Kenneth D. Kaunda