Zambia

Overview

Zambia, officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country of 752,617 km² in Southern Africa on the high Central African plateau, bordering eight countries including the DR Congo, Tanzania, Angola, and Zimbabwe. Its capital and largest city is Lusaka; the population (about 20 million) concentrates in Lusaka and the Copperbelt. The name derives from the Zambezi River.

History

The region's earliest inhabitants were Khoisan hunter-gatherers; Bantu-speaking peoples arrived from around AD 300. Successive major states shaped the area: the Luba and Lunda kingdoms from the Congo Basin, the Maravi (Chewa) Empire founded in 1480, the Mutapa Empire's northern reach, and the Lozi (Barotse) kingdom on the Zambezi floodplain, whose Kuomboka ceremony survives today. The 19th-century Mfecane brought Ngoni migrants from the south. David Livingstone's explorations (he "discovered" Victoria Falls for Europe in 1855) opened the region to missionaries and traders, and in 1888 Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company obtained mineral concessions from the Lozi Litunga. The company-administered territories of Barotziland–North-Western Rhodesia and North-Eastern Rhodesia merged in 1911 as Northern Rhodesia, from 1924 a British protectorate whose copper deposits drove the economy. From 1953 to 1963 it belonged to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, dissolved under African nationalist pressure.

Northern Rhodesia became independent Zambia on 24 October 1964, with Kenneth Kaunda of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) as president. Kaunda made Zambia a frontline state, hosting liberation movements fighting Rhodesia, Portuguese colonialism, and apartheid — provoking Rhodesian raids such as the 1978 Green Leader attack near Lusaka. From 1972 Zambia was a one-party "Humanist" state under the motto "One Zambia, One Nation." The mid-1970s collapse of copper prices, compounded by closed transport routes, plunged the country into debt. Riots and a failed coup in 1990 forced Kaunda to restore multipartyism; he lost the 1991 election to Frederick Chiluba in a peaceful transfer of power. Subsequent presidents included Levy Mwanawasa, Rupiah Banda, Michael Sata (died in office 2014), Edgar Lungu, and Hakainde Hichilema, elected in a landslide in 2021.

Later history and present status

Copper still dominates the economy alongside cobalt, agriculture, and tourism (Victoria Falls, big-game parks); poverty and inequality remain high. Zambia is about 95% Christian — declared a Christian nation in 1991 — with over 70 ethnic groups (Bemba largest) and English the official language.