Zambia, officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country located in Southeast Africa. It is bordered to the north by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania to the north-east, Malawi to the east, Mozambique to the southeast, Zimbabwe and Botswana to the south, Namibia to the southwest, and Angola to the west. The capital city of Zambia is Lusaka, located in the south-central part of Zambia.
The territory of Zambia was known as Northern Rhodesia from 1911 to 1964. It was renamed Zambia in October 1964 on its independence from British rule.
Early History and Bantu Expansion
Archaeological excavation work on the Zambezi Valley and Kalambo Falls shows a succession of human cultures. Modern Zambia once was inhabited by the Khoisan and Batwa peoples until around AD 300, when migrating Bantu began to settle the areas. It is believed the Khoisan people originated in East Africa and spread southwards around 150,000 years ago.
The Bantu people or Abantu (meaning people) are an enormous and diverse ethnolinguistic group that comprise the majority of people in much of eastern, southern and central Africa. Many of the historical events in these three regions happened simultaneously. Thus, Zambia's history, like that of many African nations, cannot be presented perfectly chronologically.
The Bantu people originally lived in West and Central Africa around what is today Cameroon and Nigeria. Approximately 5000 years ago, they began a millennia-long expansion into much of the continent. This event has been called the Bantu expansion; it was one of the largest human migrations in history. The Bantu are believed to have been the first to have brought iron working technology into large parts of Africa.
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The first Bantu people to arrive in Zambia came through the eastern route via the African Great Lakes. They arrived around the first millennium C.E, and among them were the Tonga, Ila and Namwanga people and other related groups, who settled around Southern Zambia near Zimbabwe. These first Bantu people lived in large villages. They lacked an organised unit under a chief or headman and worked as a community and helped each other in times of field preparation for their crops. Villages moved around frequently as the soil became exhausted as a result of the slash-and-burn technique of planting crops.
The first Bantu communities in Zambia were highly self-sufficient. Early European missionaries who settled in Southern Zambia noted the independence of these Bantu societies.
These early Bantu settlers also participated in the trade at the site Ingombe Ilede (which translates to sleeping cow in Tonga because the fallen baobab tree appears to resemble a cow) in Southern Zambia. At this trading site, they met numerous Kalanga/Shona traders from Great Zimbabwe and Swahili traders from the East African Swahili coast. The goods traded at Ingombe Ilede included fabrics, beads, gold, and bangles.
The Luba and Lunda States
The second mass settlement of Bantu people into Zambia was of people groups that are believed to have taken the western route of the Bantu migration through the Congo Basin. The Bemba, along with other related groups such as the Lamba, Bisa, Senga, Kaonde, Swaka, Nkoya and Soli, formed integral parts of the Luba Kingdom in Upemba part of the Democratic Republic of Congo and have a strong relation to the Luba people.
Over time, these communities learned to use nets and harpoons, make dugout canoes, clear canals through swamps and make dams as high as 2.5 meters (8 ft 2 in). As a result, they grew a diverse economy trading fish, copper and iron items and salt for goods from other parts of Africa, like the Swahili coast and, later on, the Portuguese.
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The Luba Kingdom was a large kingdom with a centralised government and smaller independent chiefdoms. It had large trading networks that linked the forests in the Congo Basin and the mineral-rich plateaus of what is today Copperbelt Province and stretched from the Atlantic coast to the Indian Ocean coast. Literature was well developed in the Luba Kingdom.
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In the same region of Southern Congo, the Lunda people were made into a satellite of the Luba empire and adopted forms of Luba culture and governance, thus becoming the Lunda Empire to the south. According to Lunda genesis myths, a Luba hunter named Chibinda Ilunga, son of Ilunga Mbidi Kiluwe, introduced the Luba model of statecraft to the Lunda sometime around 1600 when he married a local Lunda princess named Lueji and was granted control of her kingdom. Most rulers who claimed descent from Luba ancestors were integrated into the Luba empire.
The Lunda, like its parent state Luba, also traded with both coasts, the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The Luba-Lunda states eventually declined as a result of both Atlantic slave trade in the west and Indian Ocean slave trade in the east and wars with breakaway factions of the kingdoms. This instability caused the collapse of the Luba-Lunda states and a dispersal of people into various parts of Zambia from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Maravi Empire
In the 1200s, before the founding of the Luba-Lunda states, a group of Bantu people started migrating from the Congo Basin to Lake Mweru then finally settled around Lake Malawi. These migrants are believed to have been one of the inhabitants around the Upemba area in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In 1480 the Maravi Empire was founded by the kalonga (paramount chief of the Maravi) from the Phiri clan, one of the main clans, with the others being Banda, Mwale and Nkhoma. The Maravi Empire stretched from the Indian Ocean through what today is Mozambique to Zambia and central parts of Malawi. The political organisation of the Maravi resembled that of the Luba and is believed to have originated from there. Iron was also manufactured and exported.
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In the 1590s the Portuguese endeavoured to take monopoly over Maravi export trade. This attempt was met with outrage by the Maravi of Lundu, who unleashed their WaZimba armed force. The Maravi are also believed to have brought the traditions that would become Nyau secret society from Upemba.
The Ngoni and the Mutapa Empire
As Great Zimbabwe was in decline, one of its princes, Nyatsimba Mutota, broke away from the state forming a new empire called Mutapa. The Mutapa Empire ruled territory between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers, in what is now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, from the 14th to the 17th century. By its peak, Mutapa had conquered the Dande area of the Tonga and Tavara.
The Mutapa Empire predominately engaged in the Indian Ocean transcontinental trade with and via the WaSwahili. Like their contemporaries in Maravi, Mutapa had problems with the arriving Portuguese traders. In the 1600s internal disputes and civil war began the decline of Mutapa.
The Ngoni made their way into Eastern Zambia from KwaZulu in South Africa. The arriving Nguni under the leadership of Zwagendaba crossed the Zambezi river moving northwards. The Ngoni were the final blow to the already weakened Maravi Empire.
European Influence and Colonial Era
One of the earliest recorded Europeans to visit the area was the Portuguese explorer Francisco de Lacerda in the late 18th century. Other European visitors followed in the 19th century. The most prominent of these was David Livingstone, who had a vision of ending the slave trade through the "3 Cs": Christianity, Commerce, and Civilisation. He was the first European to see the magnificent waterfalls on the Zambezi River in 1855, naming them the Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Locally the falls are known as "Mosi-o-Tunya" or "thundering smoke" in the Lozi or Kololo dialect. The town of Livingstone, near the Falls, is named after him.
In 1923, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a conquered territory which was also administered by the BSA Company, became a self-governing British colony. In 1953, the creation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland grouped together Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland (now Malawi) as a single semi-autonomous region. This was undertaken despite opposition from a sizeable minority of the population, who demonstrated against it in 1960-61. Northern Rhodesia was the centre of much of the turmoil and crisis characterising the federation in its last years.
Independence and the Kaunda Era
A two-stage election held in October and December 1962 resulted in an African majority in the legislative council and an uneasy coalition between the two African nationalist parties. The federation was dissolved on 31 December 1963, and in January 1964, Kaunda won the only election for Prime Minister of Northern Rhodesia. Northern Rhodesia became the Republic of Zambia on 24 October 1964, with Kenneth Kaunda as the first president.
From 1972 to 1991, Zambia was a one-party state with UNIP as the sole legal political party under the motto "One Zambia, One Nation" coined by Kaunda. Kaunda was succeeded by Frederick Chiluba of the social-democratic Movement for Multi-Party Democracy in 1991, beginning a period of socio-economic development and government decentralisation.
At independence, despite its considerable mineral wealth, Zambia faced major challenges. Domestically, there were few trained and educated Zambians capable of running the government, and the economy was largely dependent on foreign expertise.
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