Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe was a Zambian Politician. He was an anti-colonialist and author who served as the second vice president of Zambia from 1967 to 1970.
Education
Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe was educated at Lubwa Mission School, where along with Kaunda he returned later as a student teacher. He helped to found Northern Rhodesia’s African National Congress in 1946 when teaching at Kitwe in the Copperbelt. He returned with Kaunda in 1949 to Lubwa where they started a farm and organised the Chinsali Young Men’s Farming Association. Kapwepwe Spent four years in India from 1951 to 1955 on a scholarship.
Career
He began full-time political work on his return home on January 6, 1955, when the party was leaderless because of the arrest of Nkumbula and Kaunda for possessing prohibited literature. Success as an organiser resulted in his appointment as ANC treasurer. Following quarrels with Nkumbula over a lack of radicalism in the party programme and the dismissal of provincial officials, Kapwepwe and Kaunda left the ANC.
With Kaunda as president and Kapwepwe as treasurer the Zambian African Congress was founded on October 24, 1958. The revival of militant African nationalism led to Kapwepwe’s arrest on March 12, 1959, in a police round-up which also caught Kaunda and the banning of ZAC. He was taken to Kabompo and kept in detention for nine months.
As delegate of the newly-formed United National Independence Party, he played a key role with Kaunda in the London meetings in December 1960, which paved the way for the dissolution of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and for the new constitutions taking Northern Rhodesia to independence. His first experience of cabinet responsibility was as Minister of Agriculture and Minister of Home Affairs from January until October 1964 when he became Minister of Foreign Affairs in the independence government.
Kapwepwe was a bitter opponent of British policy towards Rhodesia and the Smith government. A fortnight before UDI he threatened that Zambia would leave the Commonwealth if Britain allowed Rhodesia to become independent before majority (African) rule. Just after UDI he urged Wilson to use British troops to end the Rhodesian rebellion. When the British government repeatedly rejected force he accused it at the United Nations on December 9, 1966, of "humiliating appeasement to Britain’s kith and kin”.
By defeating Reuben Kamanga in UN1P elections for deputy party leader on August 19, 1967, Kapwepwe moved up to be Vice-President of the country after a bitter inter-tribal struggle resulted in a Bemba victory. It enabled Kapwepwe to extend his influence from foreign to economic affairs and when a copper crisis hit the country with a fall in prices, it was Kapwepwe who introduced an austerity budget in January 1969.
He also intervened on the industrial front to halt unrest in the Copperbelt in March 1969.
All the time the gulf was increasing between Kaunda, who was trying to curb tribal infighting and hold off international pressures, and Kapwepwe, who was strengthening his challenge for more authoritarian and radical action. As a test of strength Kapwepwe announced his resignation as Vice-President and deputy party leader on August 25, 1969, in a move he said was designed to avert bloodshed. It failed to win widespread sympathetic support. He responded to an appeal from President Kaunda and withdrew his resignation on August 27, 1969, until the normal expiry of his term a year later.
Politics
Former Vice-President who left the government on August 21, 1971. The firebrand among the founders of the nationalist movement which won independence for Zambia. His militancy was the perfect foil for the soft-voiced approach of his partner and boyhood friend, Kenneth Kaunda. His split from President Kaunda seriously weakened the country’s stability. Not a man of violence himself, Kapwepwe could arouse extremist political passion in others by his ability as an open-air orator. His resort to vituperation sometimes provoked crises as when he left the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference discussions on September 13, 1966, in London on Rhodesia’s rebellion, accusing Harold Wilson, then British Prime Minister, of “coming to be a racialist’’.
Personality
Tall, often academic and sensitive in manner, well-read and widely travelled, he relied for his power base upon his tribal strength as a Bemba from the North. His fiery temper landed him in quarrels at home and abroad but his dynamic enthusiasm was missed when he left the Kaunda cabinet and formed the United Progress Party in August 1971.