[Front Page] On the last leg of her African tour, Vice President Kamala Harris paid a visit to an otherwise unremarkable office building in Zambia. Her staff and local embassy personnel had spent a great deal of time looking for it and everyone was hoping it was the right place.Kamala, with her Jamaican and Indian roots, needed a tangible connection to Africa to win over African-American voters and convince them that she was one of them. And everyone settled on the office building as being the next best thing because it was the former spot of the building where she had once stayed as a little girl with her Indian mother on a visit to her grandfather.
President Hakainde Hichilema welcomed her as "a daughter of our own country, someone who spent time here in her early years."
Kamala responded by launching into a story about having visited "Zambia, Mr. President, as a young girl when my grandfather worked here" as "an advisor to Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda" to "serve as a director of relief measures and refugees."
The vice president then began singing the praises of Kaunda, a brutal socialist dictator allied with the Soviet Union, who had banned opposing political parties and ran as the only candidate for president until he was finally ousted, and praised Zambia’s "democracy". Kaunda, whom Kamala fondly recalled meeting with JFK and MLK "to discuss peaceful forms of protest" had demanded nuclear weapons from LBJ. Hichilema, who had narrowly survived being arrested by a previous regime, had nothing to say about Kamala’s fond memories of Zambian democracy.
Or the "peaceful forms of protest" carried on with nuclear missiles and terrorism.
But behind Kamala’s childhood time in Zambia and her grandfather’s work is a lot of blood, along with a horrifying and mostly forgotten story of terrorism, atrocities and mass murder.
P. V. Gopalan, Kamala’s grandfather, had been a member of India’s socialist Congress party which was aligned with the USSR. What "refugees" was he aiding in Zambia?
Gopalan was posted to Zambia from 1966 to 1969. Formerly known as Northern Rhodesia, Zambia played a key role in the genocidal terrorist campaign against what was known as Rhodesia before it fell to a brutal dictatorship and became known afterward as Zimbabwe.
There are no "stupid questions."