At the Upright African Movement, we advocate for the inclusion of stories of figures like Dr. Kaunda in the curriculum
• “In this era of cancel culture and liberal extremism called wokeness, it is hard to celebrate anyone’s life upon their passing without being terrorized for it simply because the deceased was not angelic.” (Molosi)
• President Mogae gave Kaunda the gift of a Botswana watch
For Dr. Kenneth Kaunda’s 95th birthday two years ago, his friend President Festus Mogae gifted him a Nako Timepieces watch bearing the image of The Three Dikgosi (graphic attached). President Mogae must have given long thought to what to get for Dr. Kaunda who was not only a giant of the colonial struggle for the independence of the southern African region but also a renowned statesman and respected elder by his fellow SADC Former Presidents. I believe that President Mogae wanted to give Dr. Kaunda a gift that shows that young conscious Africans have picked up the baton to continue the decolonizing efforts of Dr. Kaunda’s liberation-struggle generation.
What President Mogae knew is that Nako’s naming in Setswana is radical since we Africans have become too used to the absence of our languages in luxury design as though something has to be named in a European language, for example, in order for the product to scream excellence. I also speculate that when the watch was handed over, President Mogae wanted to share with his friend one of the innovative ways that young Batswana are telling the story of Botswana’s past – of which Kaunda was a key player from the 1960’s – in new ways.
I believe that Dr. Kaunda appreciated seeing that his dream of a technologically-advanced Africa who is proud of herself remains fired up in the work of Africa’s innovators of the day and what better resource does humanity have than time? In the pictures that accompany this article we note President Mogae’s personal note to Dr. Kaunda that accompanied the watch which further proves the respect that fellow African leaders bestowed upon Dr. Kaunda who, among his many achievements, negotiated the TAZARA railroad which links Zambia to the Indian Ocean. This railroad still ensures that Africans can trade across borders without necessarily doing it with western markets.
The criminal cruelty of the colonial curriculum taught in Botswana today is that it robs the nation’s children of knowing their history. Despite Dr. Kaunda’s key role in the Botswana story and his role in the formation of a corridor (which ran through Botswana) for freedom fighters who liberated Southern Africa his name elicits no response from young Batswana. It is not entirely the young people’s fault as their sense of pan-Africanism has suffered damage at the hands the currently colonial curriculum in Botswana schools. By excluding comprehensive study of figures like Dr. Kaunda, the current curriculum teaches them that the stories of our elders do not matter. This is especially cruel since the same curriculum insists on such colonial rituals as learning the British Royal Family Tree and learning racist falsehoods such as Lake Ngami having been “discovered” by David Livingstone and other white men. Like many African history-makers, Dr. Kaunda is effectively banned from today’s African classroom save perhaps a photo and a few paragraphs in a random textbook. Are we proud of that?
At the Upright African Movement, we advocate for the inclusion of stories of figures like Dr. Kaunda in the curriculum so that we may all know, as we drive and stroll along Central Gaborone’s Kaunda Road, who the larger-than-life revolutionary called Dr. Kenneth Kaunda was and is. This is a shared concern of the Upright African Movement and Nako Timepieces Brand. Dr. Kenneth Kaunda was the last of the Frontline States leaders which included Khama, Neto and Machel all of whom we still exclude from the curriculum as philosophers whose philosophies current generations may access. We are still allowing the colonial mindset to rule over us through our very own Black African minds.
We name streets after people whom we would like to remember across time. One of the arteries that run through Central Gaborone is Kaunda Road. It begins on the steps of the FNB Headquarters next to the Japanese Embassy, and it ends at IDM where it touches Samora Machel Drive and Mobuto Drive. The road is named after Dr. Kenneth Kaunda the Zambian giant of the struggle for the independence of the Southern African region from colonial rule. Dr. Kaunda eventually became the first President of Zambia in 1964 and this week Batswana have been in a 7-day mourning period of this revolutionary whom President Masisi called “Botswana’s Best Friend.”
In this era of cancel culture and liberal extremism called wokeness, it is hard to celebrate anyone’s life upon their passing without being terrorized for it simply because the deceased was not angelic. The rabid and ruinous misguided enthusiasm of young activists to specifically problematize figures from the past through the morality of today remains rampant, trendy and worrisome. Yes, we can debate about Kaunda’s one-party state policy through Choma Declaration, and even about the reliability of the facts in his book Zambia Shall Be Free. We can debate whether he was Malawian or Zambian and we can even relive the spectacle of him being stripped of Zambian citizenship in 1999, almost a decade after serving as Zambian President for 27 years. We can also put those things in a balance with the good that Kaunda was intending to do and resultantly did. Perhaps someone should caution the trendy crop of cancel culture terrorists that one need not be angelic to be mourned with dignity, particularly in acknowledgement of the overwhelming good they have done. It appears to me that cancel culture fails the humanity of our grandparents who, like Kaunda, have had to evolve their ideas with evolving times.
In his childhood, Dr. Kaunda himself suffered the fate of a colonial classroom as a child. After his father, the family breadwinner, died when young Kaunda was just eight, young Kenneth was kicked out of school since his mother could not afford the two and six pence, or half a crown, for school fees. Kenneth was briefly expelled therefore and this is despite the fact that this was a school that his own father had founded. But the school was running colonially in colonial Northern Rhodesia and it had to necessarily make the education of an African child a profiteering exercise in a poor colony. Perhaps this is why one of Dr. Kaunda’s lasting legacies is that he declared education free for all Zambian children when he took office in 1964.
• Donald Molosi is an actor, writer and public intellectual. He is the author of We Are All Blue and Dear Upright African. Molosi is founder of the Upright African Movement.
