Red Ink: Learning the real Africa from Kaunda and the African presidents

Think John Silber is BU’s most notorious former president?

Silber, meet Kenneth Kaunda.

Kaunda, the former 27-year president of Zambia, has taken residence at Boston University, imported by BU to impart his knowledge and experience to students and faculty thousands of miles from home. For one year, he’ll be living and working on the banks of the Charles River, his home base, as he travels cross-country to deliver his message on Africa’s perpetual struggle.

And while we extend our hands in welcome to this once powerful leader, we cannot shake off the feeling of uncertainty.

It was the Rev. Charles Stith’s altogether intriguing vision to bring former and current African presidents to Boston University — a proposal entirely without precedent among American universities. Kaunda is the first president to accept Stith’s invitation, which comes with provisions of a posh on-campus residence and security. His arrival marks the first in what may be a long line of leaders whose place in history is yet unclear.

Over 27 years, Kaunda claimed both the victory of Zambian independence and the downfall of the system he helped create. It was Kaunda’s United National Independence Party that led Zambia’s peaceful revolt toward liberation after nearly a century under British colonial rule. Kaunda became the new republic’s first president in 1964, and his early reforms brought new hope to an oppressed people.

Typical of the region, however, auspicious beginnings were not to last.

Kaunda banned the multi-party system, giving his own UNIP complete control of the country’s government, and misguidedly attempted to nationalize Zambia’s economy. When Kaunda was ultimately ousted from office in a landslide election, he left the nation with a foreign debt estimated at $7 billion.

With his arrival at the Boston University campus, the one thing that can be said with absolute certainty is that Kaunda shoulders an impressive legacy of power. Moreover, he offers himself as a paragon of the African struggle.

Democracy continues to flounder on the African continent, where Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has provided the latest example of government gone wrong. There, Mugabe’s supporters are said to have rigged March’s presidential election by threatening those who would vote against the president.

Elsewhere, Africa is plagued by famine, war and disease. While civil war rages on in such nations as Sudan, Burundi and the Congo, millions continue to starve in southern Africa, including in Zambia.

All of this is compounded by the unparalleled spread of AIDS in Africa, where roughly 3/4 of the world’s AIDS cases are found. Kaunda himself leaves a country where the average child is not expected to live past 37, and where about 20 percent of the country’s adult population is infected with the HIV virus.

With scars so deep, healing Africa is a task too monumental for even the most ambitious of governments. And while many tyrants — such as Mugabe — do nothing to aid their own people, others find they have the will but not yet the way.

Certainly, many of Zambia’s problems — exacerbated by Kaunda’s successor, Frederick Chiluba — might have been averted under stronger leadership. However, the failures of Kaunda’s government do not reflect on what he can offer Boston University. On the contrary, they are the very soul of BU’s President-in-Residence program.

If Americans are to be involved in the shaping of Africa’s future, it will be up to such men as Kaunda to teach us how the continent’s experiments with democracy have fared. Why is the system so often abused? And also, why is it so frequently abandoned?

Having an African president on campus can only help us to get to know the real Africa — flaws and all. It is an opportunity for American students and leaders to come to know the region’s many problems and search for insight as to their causes. Kaunda is a great start, given his background in teaching. Before becoming Zambia’s president, he was a teacher, and served as the University of Zambia’s chancellor for many decades.

While Boston University is right to note Kaunda’s commitment to democracy, it is his failure to live up to the democratic ideal that makes him a fitting candidate. In this program, notoriety can be a president’s best asset.

It may indeed come to be that Kaunda is the most harmless of the program’s appointees. Director Charles Stith has been asked whether he would extend an invitation to an African tyrant, such as Mugabe. His answer, on behalf of the University, was, “We’d certainly look at it.”

Such a thought might be a little scary, but great ideas sometimes are.