Zambia is set to become the first African country to have a white President in the post-colonial era. This follows the death of President Michael Sata, 77, in a London hospital. Another former Zambian president, Levy Mwanawasa, also died abroad, in Paris in 2008.
President Guy Scott, 70 was vice-President although Edga Lungu, the Defence Minister was acting President during Mr Sata's absence after he flew for treatment in London two weeks ago. In accordance with the Zambian Constitution, Dr Scott has now taken over for an interim period of 90 days until new elections can take place. He becomes the first member of a white tribe of Africa to lead his country since FW De Klerk stepped down in South Africa in 1994 and the first democratically appointed.
Scott was born in Livingstone (the town nearest to Mosi-oa-Tunya - Victoria Falls). His father was active in the independence movement and served as MP for Lusaka (the capital) in the 1950s, the area Dr Scott represents. Of his secondary education in neighboring Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, he has related:
"Racism in Zimbabwe is a serious issue. I was sent to school down there and it was like being in the Hitler Youth: the theories about black inferiority and this kind of stuff.
"It was a whites-only school; they tried to introduce an Indian and he was hounded out at the instigation of the parents of the boys. I think Mugabe is a product of having to contend with that."
Dr Scott has compared Zambia's political relationship with South Africa to that of southern American countries to the USA:
"I dislike South Africa for the same reason that Latin Americans dislike the United States, I think. It's just too big and too unsubtle."
Warming to his theme, Scott let rip at South African President Jacob Zuma, comparing him with the last apartheid leader, FW de Klerk. "He's very like De Klerk. He tells us, 'You just leave Zimbabwe to me.' Excuse me, who the hell liberated you anyway, was it not us? I mean, I quite like him, he seems a rather genial character but I pity him his advisers."
Following independence in 1964, Zambia went through a period of one-party rule under the liberation leader Kenneth Kaunda from 1971. A sustained decline in the copper price, the country's principal export, led to a period of economic instability leading to riots in 1990 against Kaunda's rule. He re-instated multi-party politics in 1991 and was defeated in the subsequent elections. From the turn of the century, the economic situation has considerably improved with the country attracting more and more international investment.
Most commentators are interpreting provisions in the Zambian constitution about the nationality of candidates' parents as excluding Scott from standing in the elections, although not to be re-appointed vice-President. From the Telegraph with a bit more about Dr Scott himself:
The colourful and plain-speaking Mr Scott is popular among his countrymen.
As the agriculture minister he was credited with steering his country out of a food crisis prompted by a drought in the early 1990s.
He was born in Livingstone, Zambia, but his father was from Glasgow and emigrated to Northern Rhodesia in 1927, where he worked for as a doctor on Cecil Rhodes' railway, then a politician fighting for African rights, a lawyer and a newspaper publisher.
Mr Scott's mother was from Watford and moved to Zambia in 1940. Mr Scott studied mathematics and economics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, gained a doctorate in cognitive science from Sussex University and lectured and researched robotics at Oxford.
Zambia today is in the happy position of having moved through the journey that many post-colonial African countries are taking. A popular liberation leader becomes authoritarian and hangs onto power. Events take over and they become increasingly unpopular and eventually the country returns to a multi-party democracy. (In my view South Africa is at the start of this journey with the ANC becoming a virtual one party autocracy.) Dr Scott is still, just, of the Zambian "liberation generation" but has himself moved on with his country.
Shortly after his election in 2011, the Guardian quoted Scott as saying: "I have long suspected Zambia is moving from a post-colonial to a cosmopolitan condition. People's minds are changing: they are no longer sitting back and dwelling on what was wrong about colonialism". My visit to the country in 2001 leads me to believe his analysis. Zambia has a strong press which holds its leaders to account. Its people are well informed (I wonder if an American farmer would have asked me about an outbreak of cattle disease in the UK if I had visited there that year; a village secretary 40 miles outside of Lusaka did.)
Dr Scott's albeit temporary Presidency may be as significant to the continent as Barack Obama's election in the USA. He has experience of establishing high added-value agricultural production in the country. It's tourism industry is underdeveloped and could provide a valuable alternative to copper production which can be in danger of becoming merely a victim of Chinese neo-imperial ambitions to exploit Africa's natural resources. It has shown that it can draw on the talents of all of its tribes to take the nation forward. Most of all, Zambia has shown itself to be a nation where people are not "judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."