Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia's founding president who led his country for 27 years and championed Africa's struggles against apartheid and HIV/AIDS, has died at the age of 97.
"KK", as he was popularly known, was being treated for pneumonia at the Maina Soko Medical Centre, a military hospital in Lusaka."On behalf of the entire nation and on my own behalf, I pray that the entire Kaunda family is comforted as we mourn our first president and true African icon," President Edgar Lungu said in a message on his Facebook page.
"This is the biggest challenge for Africa. We must fight AIDS and we must do so now," he told Reuters in 2002. Though he was widely admired as a warm and emotional man, the voters judged he had overstayed his welcome in office and mismanaged the economy.Kenneth David Kaunda was born on April 28, 1924, the youngest of eight children of a Church of Scotland minister at Lubwa mission in the remote north of the country.
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. The coup turned out to be a fiction and the lieutenant was arrested, but the public reaction had shown how low Kaunda's popularity had sunk.Kaunda was not ashamed to weep in public and had a unique speaking style, emphasising key thoughts by repeating whole sentences, his trademark white handkerchief in his left hand.
Despite accusations of corruption against his UNIP party, he won credit for bending with the winds of political change and preferring peaceful transition to violent confrontation.
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