Word: kaunda
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...last-ditch effort to promote his faltering bi-racial interim government with the American public, and even before leaving Salisbury, he got an unexpected boost for his cause from an old enemy. Faced with a grave fertilizer shortage that threatened famine and food shortages, Zambia's President Kenneth Kaunda reluctantly announced that he would reopen his country's border with Rhodesia to permit vital imports and to allow the rail shipment of Zambian copper to ports in South Africa and Mozambique...
Although dictated by economic necessity, Kaunda's decision to flout United Nations sanctions against the breakaway British colony could potentially fracture the unity of the front-line states (the others: Angola, Tanzania, Mozambique and Botswana). Their goal is to install a black majority government in Rhodesia, preferably headed by leaders of the Patriotic Front. The Front's guerrillas greeted the reopening of the railroad by blowing up tracks in southwest Rhodesia. The damage was quickly repaired...
...theft, widespread mismanagement and frequent breakdowns in equipment. Zambia, already suffering from falling world copper prices, found it increasingly difficult to get the metal to markets. Skyrocketing prices and continual shortages of such vital goods as soap, matches and cooking oil created popular unrest and encouraged political opposition to Kaunda's less-than-democratic regime...
...Kaunda's announcement came as Smith, the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, who is one of his three black colleagues on the Rhodesian Executive Council, and twelve other ranking officials in the government were en route to the U.S. Smith told a press conference in Salisbury that he hoped "to give the American people the truth. If they still think we are wrong, and they still want to condemn us, that is fair. But I don't think they will...
Prime Minister James Callaghan was deeply embarrassed by the affair. Late last week, with Foreign Secretary David Owen, Callaghan flew off to Nigeria to meet Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda for urgent discussions on the deteriorating situation in southern Africa?and also to convince black Africa that Britain's oily hands were finally clean...