Background
Elijah Mudenda was born on June 6, 1927, at Macha near Choma in the south, son of Chief Macha.
Elijah Mudenda was born on June 6, 1927, at Macha near Choma in the south, son of Chief Macha.
Educated locally, then at Munali Secondary School from 1943 to 1947. He studied at Makerere University College in 1948 and graduated with an MA from Fort Hare University College in 1951. From 1952 to 1955 he was at Cambridge University, England, where he obtained a BSc in Agriculture.
He joined the government service as an agricultural research officer in 1955 and specialised in plant breeding. He resigned in 1962 to take up politics full-time. After the October 1962 elections he was appointed Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture. At independence in 1964 he became Minister of Agriculture and gave a new stimulus to African farming.
In 1967 he was promoted Minister of Finance and held the portfolio for two years. Since 1969 as Foreign Minister he has been active as a member of OAU conciliation committees, bringing together the two big Angolan liberation movements, MPLA and FNLA, on December 13, 1972 and linking Rhodesia's ZANU and ZAPU in a joint political council on March 17, 1973. An ardent promoter of Afro-Asian influence at the UN, he was chosen chairman of a ministerial meeting of non-aligned countries at the UN headquarters in New York on October 1, 1972.
When the border crisis erupted in January 1973 with Premier Ian Smith closing the Rhodesian side, Mudenda became the main negotiator of altemative outlets for Zambia's exports. He went to Tanzania on January 14 and told President Nyerere that Zambia preferred to use East African ports rather than Lobito in Angola. Special arrangements were made for Zambia to use Dar es Salaam.
At the border crisis with Rhodesia in January 1973 he had the necessary cool head and steady nerve to analyse the situation incisively, upon which President Kaunda relied to help him win international support. He made his mark as an OAU mediator in March 1973 when meetings under his chairmanship resulted in agreement by the two Rhodesian nationalist movements, ZANU and ZAPU, to start working together.
Plant breeder who has become one of the leading intellectuals in government, holding several important cabinet posts first Agriculture, then Finance, before Foreign Affairs. A writer in his spare time with two books published in the Tonga language, he has a quiet assertive style which has won him a high reputation at UN and OAU meetings.