Who is popular today?

Like our own political leaders, except more literally, the late Kenneth Kaunda was well known for pulling on the green shirt. In his case, it was part of the safari suit with which he became synonymous. Such was it and Kaunda’s enduring popularity in Zambia that, when I visited Lusaka in 2013, shops were selling a special edition with his name on it, launched to mark his 88th birthday.
But green shirts apart, Kaunda also had real and strong links with this country. When I attended the St Patrick’s Day ceremony at the Irish embassy that year, he was there too, as usual, and as usual he sang a song.
It was almost 50 years then since, having led the country to independence, he appointed a Tipperary-born lawyer as his first justice minister. James John Skinner, formerly of Clonmel, was the only white member of the cabinet. Alas, they fell out a few years later when Skinner’s legal principles clashed with Kaunda’s populism, after which the Irishman resigned and moved home for a while before returning to Africa as chief justice in Zambia’s next-door neighbour, Malawi.
One of Kaunda’s longer-lasting friendships was with another Irishman I met in Lusaka, Fr Prof Michael Kelly, from Offaly.
Fr Kelly had by then spent most of his life in Zambia, where as a school principal he educated Kaunda’s sons.
Years later, at the University of Zambia, he became a globally renowned expert on Aids, then ravaging the country.
His work to educate people about the disease received a huge boost in 1987 after Kaunda acknowledged publicly that one of his own sons had died from it.
When I interviewed Fr Kelly in 2013, he still had the soft accent of the Irish midlands, but every time he spoke of Zambia he used the term “we”. By a happy coincidence, the Zambian football shirt is also green.
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It was James J Skinner’s politics, as well as his expertise, that brought him to Kaunda’s first cabinet.
Having moved to what was then Northern Rhodesia in the 1950s, he found himself increasingly defending the local nationalist population against the British colonial regime and later joined the independence movement, enduring ostracism from many white people as a result.
He credited his beliefs in part to an “Irish nationalist” upbringing.
“I didn’t like the social or racial atmosphere [in Northern Rhodesia] at that time, and I reacted against it,” he said.
His father, WJ Skinner, had also been a lawyer and a member of first Sinn Féin, then Cumann na nGaedheal, before rising to be the county registrar for Tipperary in 1926. In that role, Skinner snr made at least one small piece of legal history.
There was a custom then whereby, if a scheduled court session had no criminal cases to hear, the registrar had to present the judge with a pair of white gloves.
This cannot have happened very often. Indeed, when the practice was abolished in 1956, an Irish Times editorial – unsure whether it was a trivial matter or the beginning of the end for civilisation – noted that it had already fallen into disrepute in places, with surprised registrars sometimes unable to produce gloves and instead substituting scraps of “white paper” in a “bag”.
But when Clonmel Circuit Court failed to produce a single alleged criminal on March 25th, 1941, the registrar was not found wanting. The landmark event was recorded solemnly by this newspaper: “There being no criminal case for hearing at Clonmel, Nenagh, or Thurles, Judge Sealy was yesterday presented with white gloves by Mr W.J. Skinner, County Registrar.”
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Back in Lusaka in 2013, as my diary has just reminded me, it was a white shirt I found myself short of, embarrassingly. Among the events I had to attend there was the 50th anniversary dinner of the Wild Geese Society, a black-tie affair. I was further distressed by the state of my suit after unpacking: it looked like actual wild geese had been nesting in it.
But I must have been planning to buy a shirt locally, to complete the outfit, before the plan fell victim to other social pressures.
It may be relevant that I had also paid a fact-finding visit earlier to a bar called O’Hagan’s, where I was “waylaid” (it says in the diary) by two Zambian students who were drinking green beer in St Patrick’s honour and who considered me eccentric for sticking to the black variety: the local Guinness.
They were very friendly, although what we talked about has disappeared from memory and my diary doesn’t help, except to say that I eventually extricated myself from their company, “with some difficulty”. I don’t recall what colour shirt I wore to the dinner.