Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula

Who is Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula?

Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula was born on 15 January 1916 in the village of Maala in the Namwala district of what is now Zambia's Southern Province. Educated at Methodist mission schools before completing his teacher training at the Kafue Training Institute in 1934, he taught in Namwala district and later on the Copperbelt before winning a scholarship, arranged with the support of the settler politician Sir Stewart Gore-Browne, to study at Makerere University College in Uganda. He went on to earn a diploma from the Institute of Education at the University of London and briefly attempted an economics degree at the London School of Economics before returning to Northern Rhodesia in 1950. In 1948 he had already become a founding figure of the territory's first African political party, the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress, and in 1951 he was elected its leader, steering the movement's early opposition to colonial rule and the Central African Federation. A dispute over strategy led Kenneth Kaunda and other members to break away in 1958-59 and form a rival, more militant party, which eventually eclipsed Nkumbula's ANC in the run-up to independence. Nkumbula continued to lead the ANC as the official opposition after 1964 until signing the Choma Declaration in 1973, merging it into Kaunda's UNIP as Zambia became a one-party state. Remembered as the "Old Lion of Zambia" for his decades in the independence struggle, he died on 8 October 1983.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Harry Nkumbula" · G. Macola, "Liberal Nationalism in Central Africa: A Biography of Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula" (2010) · Chalo Chatu, "Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula"