Word: kaunda
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...more than a month, the action stirred by Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence has centered in London and Salisbury. Last week the focus shifted to another capital: Lusaka, where Zambia's moderate black African President Kenneth Kaunda was caught in an ever tightening bind...
...Rhodesia's northern, black-ruled neighbor, Zambia is expected by other black-nationalist regimes in Africa to lead the fight against Ian Smith and his white-minority government. Kaunda certainly wants to defeat Rhodesia's whites, but not in a racial war. He wants white troops to go into Rhodesia to bring down Smith. But Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson is nowhere near ready to face the prospect of the Queen's white British troops shooting Rhodesia's white British troops. And Kaunda admits that if he asked for Russian help, he would stand...
...turbines and generators of the giant Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River, which forms the border between the two countries. Completed in 1960 under the now defunct Central African Federation, Kariba supplies both Zambia and Rhodesia with power, ties them together like sullen Siamese twins. For two weeks Kaunda has demanded that Britain at least send troops to "neutralize" the Kariba power station on the Rhodesian side of the river, arguing that Smith's soldiers would not fire on Britons if they marched across the dam. Harold Wilson is not so sure...
Instead, he offered to send a token force-a squadron of R.A.F. fighters and a battalion of the Royal Scots-to the copper belt, some 250 miles north of the dam. Kaunda accepted the air protection (Zambia has only ten military aircraft of its own), but rejected the offer of troops unless they were sent directly to the dam. Into the copper-belt center of Ndola at week's end swooped ten British Javelin jet fighters, accompanied by big-bellied Argosy and Beverley transports carrying the squadron's maintenance supplies. A brace of Britannia turboprop transports arrived...
Blackout. Last week Kaunda's pleas for British troops carried a new urgency. A narrowly averted incident on the border with Rhodesia led him to pull his own small army back to Lusaka to avoid an accidental clash. In the rail center of Livingstone, the town's first race disturbance-a minor scuffle in which nobody was seriously hurt-caused 300 white railwaymen to strike for government protection, and the walkout crippled the nation's copper shipments. Three hundred miles to the north came the most serious incident of all: saboteurs blew up the main power line...