Kwacha Ngwee—Into Thezambian Morning Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia by Macpherson
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Kwacha Ngwee—Into theZambian Morning Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia By Macpherson Nineteen sixty-three had been a year of conflict and confusion, yet it had been certain that the goal of all the striving would be reached. As some of the nationalists had prophesied on several occasions, it had been the darkest hour before the dawn, a time when agitated people were rushing up and down, as it were, stumbling blindly, shouting, knocking into one another roughly and unreasoningly in the darkness. Then, like a tiny strip of light, at first no bigger than a man’s finger, the dawn had begun to reach from the east into the area of jaded, sleepless strife, coming from where national sovereignty was virtually an accomplised fact, in East Africa and in the land soon to be called Malawi. For Northern Rhodesia, 1964 was to be the time of the lightening of the sky, in which the country was to move swiftly through what one commentator would call ‘the most amicable pre-independence talks’ with Britain ‘for the past five years’, to the status of a republic within the British Commonwealth, welcomed into the United Nations Organisation, and widely acclaimed as a star of hope in Africa. This realisation of a new dispensation was what was meant, in essence, by the slogan ‘KWACHA NGWEE’. Indeed the word "Kwacha' had, as we have noted, been the watchword of the nationalist movements of both Central African Protectorates, a word meaning either ‘The dawn is about to break’ or ‘The dawn has come’, according to the inflection of the voice. "Ngwee' is one of a group of expletives of intensification in which African languages are so rich. It is the root of a verb, kungweruka in the dialects of eastern Zambia and Malawi, which means ‘to be light’, as, for example, the lightening after clouds have gone or the white light of a new day. Shouting "Kwacha' had been a criminal offence in both territories in the various ‘emergencies’ which preceded the dismantling of the Federation. After formally attaining independence, both new nations would use the word kwacha for their main denomination of currency and Zambia would use ngwee for one hundredth of a kwacha. In this dawn there would still be confusion and strife, but what Welensky, Greenfield, van Eeden, Field, Smith, Verwoerd and Vorster stood for would not now oppress people’s personalities and aspirations or treat of two levels of humanity, one superior and one inferior, which is the essence of apartheid and herrenvolk and the ultimate negation of Kenneth Kaunda’s cardinal conviction that, however human societies may be structured, ‘MAN must come first’. In these pages, it has not been possible to give an adequate picture of the social forces at work over the seventy crucial decades of what Gann called a ‘plural society’. It has been necessary to give place to the endless chain of stresses and clashes that brought to the situation an element of real peril, and to attempt to present these as they impinged upon the majority of the country’s people and upon Kaunda in particular. The deficiencies of such a survey are patent. Little notice has been given to the ordinary doings of quiet people, or, for instance, to the significant increase of Europeans with an understanding of the need for change and a readiness to participate in making the situation better. There is need also to study more closely than has been possible here, the awakening of the churches, however belated, to the ‘signs of the times’. The amelioration that was discernible, alongside increasingly articulate ‘reactionary’ utterances and actions, was the work of more than a handful and, as we have noticed, UNIP’s leaders paid numerous tributes to the contributions of good men to a better society. It is nonetheless a historical fact of considerable importance that Zambia’s attainment of independence and her international standing and influence thereafter have been realised, to a great extent, because people who have exercised power have been magnetized by the quality of sincerity and honesty of mind, manifested without arrogance or self-praise, in the nation’s young leader. We have already noted how quickly and positively Iain Macleod had reacted to Kaunda’s character. Hard-headed men, no less than others, have commented on the effectiveness of the combination, in his character, of spiritual integrity and clear-headed realism.John Stonehouse of the British Labour Party, who was deported from the Federation in 1959, and who ‘judged people by their ability to achieve their objectives and above all to survive’, has traced Kaunda’s ability ‘to ride the tiger’ to the fact that ‘what appeared to be weaknesses years ago are in fact his strength because he needs deep emotion in order to be able to communicate with the masses of Zambia.’ ‘They’ve got to feel that they have a chap at the top who has this basic sympathy.’ In the opinion of another Labour Party man, Frank Judd, who has associated himself closely with the ‘Zambia lobby’ in Westminster, the most impressive quality in Kaunda was ‘his willingness to talk about the values which he believes should be relevant in political action’, a quality which we have seen extensively in his circulars and speeches to his followers since 1953. Kaunda, Judd noted, did ‘not hesitate to admit that he himself and his government may fall far short of the standards which they set themselves’, while evincing a response to ‘the real challenge to see how one must present one’s arguments for the things in which one believes, in order to change the state of public opinion’.3 Thus, what caught the attention of many who met him and watched his leadership in action was that it was ‘the man more than his politics’ which they were encountering. A Conservative M.P., Noel Fisher, who had rallied support for Macleod in early 1961, had met Kenneth when on an unofficial tour of the Federation in mid-1960, and at once understood the aspirations which he expressed, though ‘technically at that time he could have been regarded by some people as an extremist.’ Fisher saw Kaunda as a man who passionately wanted a profound change in race relations, a man ‘whose record, from my point of view, was terribly good’. Harold Macmillan, Fisher has recorded, shared his own shock at the patent fact that Welensky did not seek to know African leaders personally though he claimed to be the spokesman of the Federation. Kenneth, on the other hand, had no such ‘colour bar’ in his thinking and readily gave and expected trust.4 It always shocked Kenneth that, as he said when he heard on the radio that Macleod had agreed to a crucial modification of the 15-15-15 scheme in Welensky’s favour, ‘a man would say one thing and do another’. This cri de coeur has been vividly recalled by Father Patrick Walsh who was with him and his colleagues in Freedom House when the report of the constitutional adjustment was broadcast. ‘I’m giving it as aninstance of the integrity and honesty which I’ve always found to be a very characteristic trait in Dr. Kaunda,’ said Walsh. ‘He couldn’t deceive a person. It wouldn’t matter whether the decision he had to make was popular or unpopuCommunist. Perhaps the split of 1958 had beed both inevitable and irreconcilleable because Nkumbula had been relying on egotisn and on slogans and had therefore failed to chart a way forward; whereas, as a one-time associate said of Kaunda, 'he gave a tremendous amount of thought to what he was saying... was really conscious of where he might be going, where he might not be going, what all this could mean.' Other chroniclers will trace the development of Zambia's international relations in the years after independence and attempt to reconstruct the multifarious network of information and counsel on which the President and Government had to rely in shaping foreign policy. In the years before 1964 it was clear that Kenneth Kaunda was trying to place reliable, percepective men of initiative in key foreign capitals but that there was no cadre of trained diplomats to draw upon and so he supplemented their work by an informal system of consultation whereby he sought corroborative evidence and comment from people in the countries concerned whom he believed he could trust. At first, naturally, there could be only a handful of such confidants but the awareness that his country was moving swiftly, not only to the coveted status of national sovereignty but to an increasingly crucial role in continental African affairs, necessitated a concerted programme of personal contacts. The Pan-Africanist role that, as we have seen, Kaunda played almost constantly during the years immediately before independence, was the fulfilling of a vision that he shared with other leaders but which he had largely pioneered in the Protectorate. Within a few days of his appointment as Nkumbula’s Secretary-General in 1953, he had written to Nairobi and Johannesburg, responding to a suggestion of the Kenya Africa Union and the South African ANC that Lusaka should be the rendezvous of nationalists from countries south of the Sahara. As we saw, this led to his planning an abortive Pan-African Regional Conference. What was significant was that the Kenyan and South African letters, which had been lying in the Congress office for some weeks, were now answered by Kenneth with enthusiasm. ‘One cannot help dropping a tear of joy,’ he had written then, ‘when one notices the fact that our long-dreamt of Pan-Africanism is now afoot and one can foresee the fruits of this on-coming cooperation.’ He had thus seen the growth of both PAFM.ECA and, from meetings of the All-Africa Conference, the Organisation for African Unity, and, as the London Financial Times observed, he had been a leading figure in all the inter-African conferences since the big gathering at Addis Ababa in 1960 of Independent African States.8 The exploitation of every opportunity to send young colleagues abroad had been necessary not only to the welding of fraternal relations but to the injection into his Party of a sense of belonging to a wider community.