OPININION | Marshall Remembers KK

Some conversations stay with you long after they end.

At the 2026 BBC Correspondents’ Dinner in London, I found myself seated next to Julian Marshall, the former BBC World Service presenter best known for Newshour. It was one of those unexpected moments that remind you why journalism is such a privilege.

Marshall spent decades covering some of the defining events of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, interviewing world leaders and reporting history as it unfolded. Listening to his stories felt like opening a living archive.

Our conversation became even more fascinating when I learnt that he had spent part of his early life in Zimbabwe, where he also attended university. We spoke about Africa, journalism, history and Zambia’s founding President, Dr Kenneth Kaunda.

I asked Marshall if he would share one personal memory of KK. What he sent me was more than a recollection; it was a quiet reminder that the true measure of a leader is often found not in the office they held, but in the character they carried after they left it. Too often, we only fully appreciate the people who shaped our history when they are no longer with us.

This is what he wrote.

It must have been the winter of 1991/2 that I was made aware that President Kaunda was on a visit to London. I managed to track him down to the London Metropole Hotel, then owned by Tiny Rowland’s Lonrho conglomerate.

I phoned him in his room and because perhaps my name was familiar to him from his years of listening to the BBC he accepted my invitation to dinner at our family home in Acton, west London.

I knew he was a vegetarian but not that he liked his food cold so I came up with the compromise of a vegetarian lasagne which I cooked the day before and put in the fridge.

It was clear that KK didn’t have the means to travel from his hotel to our house – no chauffeur driven car, no taxi – so I went to pick him up.

It was an intimate occasion – just my wife and I – and he had the good grace not to comment on our kitchen ceiling which had collapsed the week before!

Conversation over dinner touched on his own political career but I found most interesting his observations about the former Soviet leaders with whom he had dealings, among them East Germany’s Eric Honecker who had once kept him waiting for hours for a meeting.

When the time came to leave I again volunteered to drive KK back to his hotel where he cut a lonely figure making his way back to the hotel entrance.

I was struck throughout the evening by his humility – but clearly an ex-President with many memories but little means, someone who had not accumulated wealth during his long years in power.