[3] Kenneth Kaunda was born on 28 April 1924[4] at Lubwa Mission in Chinsali, then part of Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia,[5] and was the youngest of eight children.

[6] His father, the Reverend David Kaunda, was an ordained Church of Scotland[7] missionary[8] and teacher, who had been born in Nyasaland (now Malawi) and had moved to Chinsali, to work at Lubwa Mission.

[13] On 11 November 1953 he moved to Lusaka to take up the post of Secretary General of the Africa National Congress (ANC), under the presidency of Harry Nkumbula.

[7] The combined efforts of Kaunda and Nkumbula failed to mobilise native African peoples against the European-dominated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

In January 1964, UNIP won the next major elections, defeating their ANC rivals and securing Kaunda's position as prime minister.

[20] Kaunda instituted a policy where all children, irrespective of their parents' ability to pay, were given free exercise books, pens, and pencils.

[22] Other tertiary-level institutions established during Kaunda's era were vocationally focused and fell under the aegis of the Department of Technical Education and Vocational Training.

[25] For example, the British South Africa Company (BSAC, founded by Cecil Rhodes) still retained commercial assets and mineral rights that it had acquired from a concession signed with the Litunga of Bulozi in 1890.

The commission's terms of reference did not permit it to discuss the possible faults of Kaunda's decision, but instead to concentrate on the practical details of the move to a one-party state.

This was based on a combination of mid-20th-century ideas of central planning/state control and what he considered basic African values: mutual aid, trust, and loyalty to the community.

Similar forms of African socialism were introduced inter alia in Ghana by Kwame Nkrumah ("Consciencism") and Tanzania by Julius Nyerere ("Ujamaa").

In the 1978 UNIP elections, Kaunda amended the party's constitution to bring in rules that invalidated the challengers' nominations: Kapwepwe was told he could not stand because only people who had been members for five years could be nominated to the presidency (he had only rejoined UNIP three years before); Nkumbula and a third contender, businessman Robert Chiluwe, were outmanoeuvred by introducing a new rule that said each candidate needed the signatures of 200 delegates from each province to back their candidacy.

During his early presidency Kaunda was an outspoken supporter of the anti-apartheid movement and opposed white minority rule in Southern Rhodesia.

Beginning in the early 1970s, he began permitting the most prominent guerrilla organisations, such as the Rhodesian ZANU and the African National Congress, to use Zambia as a base for their operations.

[42]In the first twenty years of Kaunda's presidency, he and his advisors sought numerous times to acquire modern weapons from the United States.

[43] From April 1975, when he visited US president Gerald Ford at the White House in Washington, D.C., and delivered a powerful speech calling for the United States to play a more active and constructive role in southern Africa.

Until approximately 1984, Kaunda was arguably the key African leader involved in international diplomacy regarding the conflicts in Angola, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and Namibia.

He hosted Henry Kissinger's 1976 trip to Zambia, got along very well with Jimmy Carter, and worked closely with President Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester Crocker.

[45] On 26 August 1975, Kaunda acted as mediator along with the Prime Minister of South Africa, B. J. Vorster, at the Victoria Falls Conference to discuss possibilities for an internal settlement in Southern Rhodesia with Ian Smith and the black nationalists.

In response, Kaunda negotiated the TAZARA Railway (Tanzam) linking Kapiri Mposhi in the Zambian Copperbelt with Tanzania's port of Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean.

[50]Kaunda had frequent but cordial differences with US president Ronald Reagan whom he met 1983[51] and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher[52] mainly over what he saw as a blind eye being turned towards South African apartheid.

[53] He always maintained warm relations with the People's Republic of China who had provided assistance on many projects in Zambia, including the Tazara Railway.

[54] Prior to the first Gulf War, Kaunda cultivated a friendship with Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, whom he claimed to have attempted to dissuade from invading Kuwait.

[60] While expressing willingness to have the Zambian people vote on a multiparty system, Kaunda maintained that only a one-party state could prevent tribalism and violence from engulfing the country.

[62] At these elections, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), helmed by trade union leader Frederick Chiluba, swept UNIP from power in a landslide.

One of the issues in the campaign was a plan by Kaunda to turn over one-quarter of the nation's land to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an Indian guru who promised that he would use it for a network of utopian agricultural enclaves that proponents said would create "Heaven on Earth".

[67] The MMD-dominated government under the leadership of Chiluba had the constitution amended, barring citizens with foreign parentage from standing for the presidency, to prevent Kaunda from contesting the next elections in 1996, in which he planned to participate.

[77] In September 2019, Kaunda said that it was regrettable that the late president Robert Mugabe was maligned and subjected to mudslinging by some sections of the world, who were against his crusade of bringing social justice and equity to Zimbabwe.

He also wrote music about the independence he hoped to achieve, although only one song has been known to many Zambians ("Tiyende pamodzi ndi mtima umo" literally meaning "Let's walk together with one heart").

[83][84][5] Kaunda attributed his longevity to a strict lacto-vegetarian diet and commented that "I don't take meat, no eggs, no chicken, I only eat vegetables like an elephant".