Kamala Grew Up Around Terrorists

The untold story of Kamala’s grandfather and her childhood in Africa.

by Daniel Greenfield | October 21, 2024

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.

Before Robert Mugabe spent nearly four decades ruling Zimbabwe, the Communist thug led a terrorist organization known as ZANU allied with another counterpart terrorist group: Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU. Often wrongly described as guerrilla groups by their western supporters, their combat tactics mostly focused on massacres of civilians and planting bombs on roads.

Zambia under Kaunda harbored ZAPU and ZANU bases across the border where the Soviet-backed terrorists ran training camps under the guise of providing shelter to ‘refugees’. Some of the refugees were civilians who supported the terrorists. Others were terrorists themselves.The ‘refugee’ camps were run by ZAPU and ZANU which indoctrinated the civilians, brutally punished them for even slight offenses and made it their goal to turn them into terrorists.

In 1965, Rhodesia declared independence from the ruling Labour government in the UK which was determined to hand over the country to Marxist terrorist organizations. By 1966, when Kamala’s grandfather arrived in Zambia, the war for Rhodesia was truly underway.

The Marxist terrorists had plenty of weapons supplied by the USSR and Communist China, but preferred attacking Rhodesian civilians to trying to fight the brave little country’s volunteer army. Typical ZANU and ZAPU attacks involved firing RPGs at civilian houses and throwing hand grenades at little girls. Missionaries were murdered and shoppers were gunned down.

Among the easiest targets were American and British missionaries providing education and medical care to the black population. At Elim Mission, Marxist terrorists raped the women and then beat and axed them to death along with their children. The victims were British citizens.

The New York Times described the scene. “a woman, dressed in a bathrobe with her hair in curlers, had an ax imbedded in her neck. Four children—a boy 4 years of age, two sisters aged 4 and 8, and another girl of 5—lay huddled close together. All were dressed in pajamas, and like the other victims they had all been struck on the head with clubs. Some also had stab wounds. One of the girls had the imprint of a boot on the side of her face.“

“Nearby lay the body of a woman, her arm encircling her dead 3-week-old daughter. Near them was a heavy wooden limb with blood on it.”

The mother was Mrs. Joyce Grace and her daughter had been named Pamela Grace.

The Marxist terrorists finally got lucky and hit Air Rhodesia Flight 825 in the late seventies. The surviving passengers were rounded up, promised water and help, and then gunned down.

All of this came after Kamala’s grandfather had gone back home to India and Kaunda had decided that backing the terrorists was too dangerous once they threatened his regime.

There are few details about the exact role played by P.V. Gopalan except that he was advising the Kaunda regime on the “refugees”. The refugee camps were terrorist bases. It’s unknown what complicity her grandfather might have had with them, but he had been dispatched to Zambia the year that Indira Gandhi took power. And this Gandhi was no humanitarian.

Indira Gandhi aligned India with the USSR and its Communist movements including those operating in Africa. In the 1970s, while the worst of the violence was taking place, Gandhi had visited Zambia and backed Kaunda’s call for the takeover of Rhodesia by the Marxist terrorist groups. She had expressed her joy that she was “back on the mainland of Africa when the final battle was about to be joined” for the final ethnic cleansing of Rhodesia’s white population.

If P.V. Gopalan had been in Zambia to help prop up the Marxist terror groups, it would not have at all been at odds with the policy of the Gandhi regime. Indira Gandhi had met with both Mugabe and Nkomo: terrorists responsible for the massacre of Rhodesian women and children.

Were Mugabe and Nkomo among the visitors passing through the Gopalan home?

Kamala, who was a 5-year-old when her Marxist father and radical leftist mother brought her to Africa, knew none of this. As the LA Times put it, “the young Kamala was oblivious to the intrigue swirling around her, with Gopalan’s government-issued car whisking him to meetings with Zambian officials and diplomats dropping by for visits.”

But in the succeeding years, Kamala either failed to educate herself about the history around her or knows exactly what happened and has chosen to stand with Kaunda and his crimes.

According to the Voice of America, a government broadcast agency, “Zambia was personal, and the work of her grandfather — who served as an adviser to Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda, in the 1960s — influenced her own trajectory to the highest office.”

And so there may be no way to detach the crimes of those days from Kamala’s political career.

Especially since she heads a party that was directly complicit in the Marxist atrocities.

The same year that Flight 825 was shot down, Carter’s UN Ambassador Andrew Young gushed that Mugabe was a “very gentle man. I can’t imagine Joshua Nkomo, or Robert Mugabe, ever pulling the trigger on a gun to kill anyone. I doubt that they ever have.”

Nkomo had not only taken responsibility for the downed airliner, he had laughed about it.

Kamala’s radical third world family closely parallels Obama’s radical third world family. Neither of their experiences are rooted in the black community, but in the Soviet globalism of the sixties.

“I am a daughter of the civil rights movement,” Kamala Harris claimed. Her parents have been described as “civil rights activists”. These attempts to make her sound as if she were African-American are highly misleading. Kamala had not come out of a black southern Christian movement. Her family was not African-American, they were third world academic radicals who used parts of America and other places in the world as bases for their militant activism.

Kamala’s links to Africa are not racial, but political. Her mother’s radical Indian family was there as part of a Soviet bloc aligned agenda. While Kamala enjoyed being in an exotic place, 60 miles away at the border, people were fighting and dying over the supremacy of Communism.

The Kaunda regime, an object of horror for Zambia, Zimbabwe and Rhodesian refugees, is a nostalgic memory for Vice President Kamala Harris. And for many in her political movement.

Kamala and Obama both come from radical Third World families who loathed America and Western civilization. Obama’s family played a role in Islamist massacres in Indonesia and Kenya while Kamala’s family appears to have had a role in the Communist war against Rhodesia.

People are not prisoners of their past but the way that Obama and Kamala were raised provide important insights about their worldviews, their politics and their plans for America.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.