• Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s founding president who led his country for 27 years and championed Africa’s struggles against apartheid and HIV/AIDS, passed away on June 17, He was 97.

• Indian PM Narendra Modi expressed his condolences at the death of Zambia’s first president and said he was a respected world leader and statesman.

Kaunda was dubbed ‘Africa’s Gandhi’

• Kenneth David Kaunda was born on April 28, 1924. He worked as a teacher and a mine welfare officer and entered politics in 1949 as a founding member of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress.

• Kaunda was dubbed ‘Africa’s Gandhi’ for his espousal of non-violent independence activism in the 1960s.

• A 1963 landslide victory for UNIP, which had broken away from the ANC five years earlier, led to Kaunda becoming prime minister of Northern Rhodesia. At independence in 1964, he became president of the new Zambia.

• Kaunda was a high-profile figure among the seven southern African states which led the fight against apartheid, and he let Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) make a home-in-exile in Lusaka during the three decades it was banned in South Africa.

• He allowed the guerilla organisations to maintain military bases, training camps, refugee centers and administrative offices.

• Kaunda also played a major role in Mozambique’s independence talks in 1975, Zimbabwe’s in 1980 and Namibia’s in 1990.

• He led the country, which became a one-party state, until 1991.

• In 1991, he was forced to hold the first multi-party elections in 23 years, which he lost to trade unionist Frederick Chiluba.

• By the time he lost power, Kaunda’s popularity had slumped and hardship gripped most of his 11 million people as the price of copper, the country’s main export, plummeted.

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