The Sunday News
All true heroes are over and above everything else failures and losers. They are failures and losers because the liberation that they fight for is always a destiny and not a destination. It is phony liberation and pseudo-revolutions that are declared to have arrived.
True liberation is “perpetually unfinished business” that is always imperfect and impure, and the true liberators are the humble fighters that carry all the blame and the condemnation for lost causes, broken promises and dreams that have turned into nightmares. Like the messiahs in the world’s religions the true test and sign of all great liberators and heroes is that they end up at the cross of crucifixion, condemned to symbolic if not physical death itself. It is my observation today that Dr Kenneth David Buchizya Kaunda was a true hero and liberator whose death on 17 June at Maina Soko Military Hospital in Lusaka has left the wide world in mourning.
His indigenous name was “Buchizya” (the unexpected one) because his parents thought they had long done with making and producing babies when he was unexpectedly conceived and eventually born on 28 April 1924 at Lubwa Mission in the Chinsali area of Northern Rhodesia that is now called Zambia. In his life, leadership of Zambia, and mediation in African historical and political affairs, behind everything else, Kaunda remained a typical last born, a big baby of a kind. In power he became those powerful but soft rulers.
The tears of Kenneth
A Ugandan friend of mine that is posted at the High Commission of Uganda to South Africa in Pretoria has told me a story of tears. Kaunda made a state visit to Uganda that was under the leadership of Milton Obote at the time. With love and honour for KK as Kaunda was affectionately called Obote threw a mother of all banquets. When Kaunda entered the venue of the reception, everyone including Prime Minister Obote was already in advanced stages of serious enjoyment. The crowd ululated and whistled. Kenneth Kaunda wept.
With his trademark white handkerchief, he wiped the tears of sorrow. Kaunda had become a strict teetotaler after years of youthful smoking and drinking. The story is that one day in prison, 1955, Kaunda just resolved never to drink and smoke again. Incarcerated with no access to smoke and drink KK hated the dependence on substances for happiness. Slavery to smoke and strong fluids was never to be his forever. It is a sober KK that wept bitterly over a drunken Ugandan state reception in his grand honour.
Kaunda wept a lot. He wept at both good and bad news. Never afraid to be seen as and called a sissy, he wept many times and in public. In the Zambian parliamentary gatherings and cabinet meetings comfort breaks were called “weeping breaks” as the President would, during debates over contentious and weighty issues, need time to weep. As strong and bold as he was in the struggle against the colonisation not only of Zambia but Africa, not afraid for his skin, Kaunda was a softie and true Mama’s Big Baby that hated suffering in others.
The negotiations for the peace and liberation of African people that he held with the British Empire and the South African apartheid regime were all punctuated and watered with tears. The sight of a big dark powerful man weeping rather uncontrollably and helplessly is a psychological spectacle and also a political symbol, a monument of the humility and vulnerability of power.
Against war: A humanist in Zambia
Weeping is one of the most human activities. It is communication with the emotive diction and vocabulary of tears. It is material and sacramental, humble and true. Kaunda was a true human being that performed his humanness without the shame or the bravado that usually goes with political power. He called his political philosophy African Humanism, well before the South African vogue of Ubuntu popularised by Arch-Bishop Desmond Tutu came to be celebrated the world over.
To Kaunda all war was unnecessary as being human as opposed to being animal meant that people can communicate, negotiate and arrive at agreements and settlements without the shedding of blood and much suffering. He had contempt for war-mongers and celebrants of war in Africa and he expressed this contempt:
“Some people draw a comforting distinction between force and violence. I refuse to cloud the issue by such word-play. The power which establishes a state is violence; the power which maintains it is violence; the power which eventually overthrows it is violence. Call an elephant a rabbit only if it gives you comfort to feel that you are about to be trampled to death by a rabbit. To Kaunda as it is to many philosophers and fighters for liberation war has no winner and in war everyone, the victors and the vanquished are losers. Kaunda’s abhorrence for violence and war became legendary.
In a continent that in its struggle against colonialism mobilised and deployed what Ali Mazrui called the “warrior tradition” Kaunda became an example of a leader that could have easily been mistaken for a coward that feared bare-knuckled combat and blood. Yet, in truth Kaunda’s opposition to war was not based on fear but love for humanity; it was not based on weakness but in the strength of being above animalism and evil. Kaunda frequently said it that : “war is just like bush-clearing, the moment you stop the jungle comes back even thicker, but for a little while you can plant and grow a crop on the ground you have won at such a terrible cost.”
The human cost of war and the temporality of power and peace that are based and founded on war were too clear to Kaunda who lived a life of avoidance to war and bloodletting even as he commanded an army, police and all sorts of spooks and technicians of violence and war.
A state that gets born of war and bloodshed forever carries a birthmark of blood and violence that becomes its life and its eventual demise. Once politics and its struggles tastes blood and meat it maintains that appetite for brute force and eventually dies of it. Violence and death are the true sickness of politics and power.
Cetshwayo Zindabazwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]
