The One Party state
Before 1964 Zambia, then called Northern Rhodesia (NR), was a British protectorate, unlike Southern Rhodesia (SR, later plain Rhodesia and now Zimbabwe) which was a colony with a hefty settler population. NR’s copper riches prompted the formation of the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland in the early 1950s. This was in effect an attempt by white settlers in the three countries to do two things. In the short term the aim was to transfer revenues from the booming copper industry to the south. For ten years NR supplied the financial resources with which SR’s infrastructure was developed. The longer term, and as it transpired vain, hope was to reverse NR’s protectorate status. The hope was that the enlarged federal territory could acquire dominion status (like Canada or Australia) and thus be immune to the process of decolonisation that was due to sweep Africa.

Nationalists in NR fought vigorously against Federation and for Independence. The British government was eventually persuaded to break up the Federation and grant Zambia independence under majority rule. Federation broke up at midnight of 31st December 1963 and Independence followed in October 1964. Kenneth Kaunda, a schoolteacher who had risen during the freedom struggle to the leadership of the nationalist movement, became Zambia’s first President.

Initially there was a multiparty system with two opposition parties, one the former colonial United Federal Party and the other the original African National Congress which Kaunda’s UNIP had supplanted in most of Zambia apart from the south. But the pluralistic idyll only lasted eight years before Kaunda, “KK”, followed the African fashion of the time and created a One Party “participatory democracy”. Zambia went forward under Kaunda’s dictatorship and his ideology of “Humanism”, an increasing bizarre form of African socialism that took Zambia from the more prosperous ranks of the third world to being a least developed country in less than two decades.

For some years Kaunda survived on local and international goodwill arising from his statesmanlike role in the southern African liberation struggle, and upon his expert juggling of Western, Soviet and non-aligned influences. The economic stress placed on Zambia by Ian Smith’s sanctions against Zambia during the UDI period up to 1980 was a source of sympathy for Kaunda. But with poverty deepening, southern Africa becoming free, and the Cold War drawing to a close, pressure mounted on him to agree to a resumption of multiparty politics and to a more open society generally.