Simon Maonde, the first Zambian secondary school headteacher, died on Sunday 22nd June 2014 aged 84, of kidney failure. He was headteacher of Namwala Secondary School from 1967 to 1975. Afterwards he was the Zambian Ambassador in Peking and until his retirement he was deputy director of the Copperbelt University. He leaves behind his wife, Lydia, four children and several grandchildren.
There were many mourners at the funeral ceremony in the Holy Cross Church in Lusaka, including several former Namwala Secondary School pupils from the 1960s and 1970s. He was buried in the Memorial Cemetery in Lusaka.
« From 1972 to 1975 I taught at the school in Namwala under the leadership of Simon Maonde and grew to admire and estimate him highly. Since 2004 I have visited him and his family regularly on his farm near Lusaka, where he settled after his retirement. During this time I visited him three times with a group of pupils from the Stiftsschule in Einsiedeln, Switzerland. Therefore we were witnesses to how Simon Maonde realised his dream of building a school for children from the surrounding countryside on his farmland with the support of a group of former Namwala teachers from Canada. »
– Johannes van der Weijden
