Kenneth Kaunda Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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I wonder if you could give our audience a sense of how you felt, the excitement, because you are one of Africa's founding fathers. You were creating a political party which broke off from the ANC, so you were doing that ground-level work, but you were also leading a national struggle for independence.
Yes, that's true. As it happens, both the party which I formed after leaving the African National Congress, and the African National Congress itself, we were both struggling against colonialism. So, much as we differed in our approaches, I think it is important to relate the fact that from time to time these two came back together, especially when we were nearing the time of our independence. We were still quite close to each other in terms of fighting colonialism in such a way that at the end we still came back together to form a government of national unity, because we were standing for similar things, same principles, although we differed in terms of our priorities. So, yes, we differed from time to time, as I said, but in the end we understood and appreciated the fact that we were fighting for independence together.
At a certain point in this very difficult struggle you were actually a political prisoner. Over the years on my program I've interviewed a number of political prisoners, Wole Soyinka among others, and I'm curious: What was the key to survival when you were in prison? Was it the cause that kept you going, or was it the inner strength that you had learned from your parents and your religion?
Well, the inner struggles were there, it's true, but it was enlistment to fight for what we were to achieve, and therefore the question it raised was very important because from that we managed to sort out what was required to be done. Once we got that -- we had to find ways of how to get it until we found a way of struggling against colonialism, this time British colonialism in Northern Rhodesia. Once we worked out the objective, we began to work out how to get that objective. This is when we began to mobilize and organize the people of Northern Rhodesia. I used to do a lot of cycling because we had no other way of doing it, cycling to villages ...
Bicycling?
Yes, bicycling. One day I met a big lion on the road -- all those things.
Did you get his vote? [laughs]
[laughs] He ran away from voting. So, it was an exciting time, very difficult indeed. Tough, but it had to be done.
It sounds like as part of this communication and reaching people was political education. Was [political education] like education that you done when you were a teacher?
No, different in the sense that when you went out to visit people in villages, in towns, for that matter, you were talking about what was wrong with your government. You were talking about what we should do in order to get a better situation for ourselves and for our children. So, it's different from what I was doing when I was a teacher in the classroom, teaching kids, young people, and boys and girls, but this time I was dealing with their parents and explaining to them what was wrong: poor education, poor health services, poor communication, bad roads, no food, and so on. These are things that one got at the center of the struggle, and that could be made better if we got our own government and controlled it, controlled things. That's how this came about.
Our interviews are watched a lot by students all over the world, and I always like to ask distinguished individuals like you to reflect on your life. Tell us what insights you have about the skills that are required for political life. The students will deal with a different set of problems and we'll talk about those in a minute, but it sounds to me like courage is very important, just starting off from what you've said.
A very important question, Harry. First of all, there must be determination to do what is right, knowing that you might have to go to prison, away from your family, away from everybody, and you're just going to a prison. How long, you don't know. And much depends on what you do, what goes wrong, wrong according to your colonial masters. You have to think of all these things, and once you make up your mind that you are determined to go ahead regardless of what happens, then of course, you'll say, "Yes, I'm going to do it. God is great, God will guide me in my thoughts, in my words, in my deeds, whatever I think, say, and do." Once you decide that way, you're then ready to get moving in any situation regardless of what comes to you. And then you are almost there.
People skills must be also very important. I know that you had to deal with ethnic differences, and so on, working with people. How do you learn that?
The first thing, Harry, is that you have to love people, first thing. You have to genuinely have feelings of love for your people. You look at what is happening in society, all that angers you, disturbs you, and so you decide, "I am going to participate in this fight to establish something better so my people can have something better than whatever they work their way through now as a people. " Then you ask yourself, "Am I ready to go to prison for my beliefs?" If the answer is yes, very good, you'll go ahead. If you can't make it, you must only suit yourself and say, "I'm sorry, I cannot participate in this because I can't go to prison." That's how the approach is, or was in those days. I'm sure it still is today.
When you achieved independence and you took over the government, you must have had to avoid despair, because it's not as if, for example, the British left you a university system, an educational system in place. They didn't. You had to build it, right?
Yes. When we took over, Harry, we found one hundred university graduates only. In the seventy years of British rule they produced only one hundred university graduates. And of these, three were medical doctors. That's all we had. So, when we took over the first thing to do was education, health services, communication, roads, and so on. And we set to work on those problems.
We established what was called five-year development plans. We first [spent] eighteen months to buy time to build proper five-year development plans, and we got through that period with quite a bit of success, I must say. We were beginning, and from there on we got used to it, we understood what we were doing. We accepted it as a challenge and we built. By the time we were leaving office in 1991 we had more than 35,000 university graduates in various fields, which was of course an achievement. We left now, at this time, many schools, primary schools, colleges, and universities. We left clinics, dispensaries, in various districts of the country. We have about fifty-three districts and we covered all these, and in the cities, of course district hospitals, ending up with general hospitals, one for each province, eight provinces, and the ninth one was the capitol. We built there a teaching hospital, what we called the university teaching hospital. So, we had established something quite decent by the time we were leaving office. We were very proud of what we had achieved.
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