The Role of Kenneth Kaunda’s Humanism in Fostering Higher Education for Social Responsibility in Post-colonial Zambia (1964-1991)

Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s first president from 1964 to 1991, advanced a Pan-African social-political ideology of humanism as a moral code to guide all human activities in the nation’s political, economic, and social spheres. Within education, humanism envisaged producing socially responsible and public good-oriented graduates equipped with humane values and capable of driving the national development agenda. This paper critically examines the nexus between Kaunda’s humanism and education by focussing on its role in fostering higher education for social responsibility in post-colonial Zambia. In addressing this, it focusses on the University of Zambia as a case study by drawing on secondary data sources through a systematic desktop review of related literature. It examines how the university endeavoured to produce socially responsible graduates in line with the national ideology of Zambian humanism. Situated within a post-colonial theoretical paradigm, the paper advances that Kaunda’s social-political thoughts on humanism offer an alternative framework for examining the role of higher education in fostering students’ social responsibility outcomes. In so doing, it contributes to the scholarship on human development and decoloniality in education. _________________