Remembering The Remarkable Humanist Kenneth Kaunda
On this day, on 28 April 1924, Kenneth David Kaunda, fondly known as KK, was born at Lubwa Mission in Chinsali, which was then part of Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. Kenneth was the youngest of eight children, he was christened Buchizya, “the unexpected one”, whose father, the Reverend David Kaunda, was an ordained priest of the Church of Scotland. His father also served as a teacher, who had been born in Nyasaland, now Malawi. Reverend Kaunda had moved to Chinsali, to work at Lubwa Mission. His mother, Helen Nyirenda Kaunda, was also a teacher and was the first African woman to teach in colonial Northern Rhodesia. His parents were both teachers among the Bemba ethnic group which is located in northern Zambia.
Kenneth Kaunda received his education at Lubwa Mission until the early 1940s. Unfortunately, his father died when he was still a child and he decided to follow in his parents’ footsteps to become a teacher. He attended the Munali Training Centre in Lusaka between 1941 and 1943 and began to teach initially in Northern Rhodesia, and later, in the middle of the 1940s, in the Territory of Tanganyika, now part of Tanzania. Kenneth Kaunda also worked in Southern Rhodesia, where early in his career, he was fascinated by the writings of Mahatma Gandhi.
Education was his passion, as Kaunda became a teacher, a Boarding Master and then a Headmaster at Lubwa from 1943 to 1945, beginning at the Upper Primary School at
