The history of Zambia

Zambia is a landlocked country on the plateau of south-central Africa, bounded by the Zambezi in the south and by the lakes and rivers of the Congo basin in the north. It holds some of the oldest evidence of human ingenuity anywhere, and from the first millennium CE it was settled by Bantu-speaking farmers and metalworkers whose descendants built kingdoms such as Kazembe, the Bemba state and the Lozi kingdom of Barotseland. In the 1890s Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company took control of the region, which became the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia and, from the 1920s, one of the world's great copper producers. Independent since 1964, Zambia was ruled for 27 years by Kenneth Kaunda, mostly as a one-party state, and since 1991 has seen several peaceful changes of government at the ballot box, though heavy dependence on copper has left it exposed to debt and economic crisis.

The Zambian plateau has been inhabited for hundreds of thousands of years. At Kalambo Falls, on the border with Tanzania near Lake Tanganyika, waterlogged deposits preserved two logs joined by a deliberately cut notch, dated in 2023 to at least 476,000 years ago. They are the oldest known wooden structure in the world, made by a human species earlier than our own. In 1921 miners at Broken Hill, now Kabwe, found a nearly complete fossil skull, known as Kabwe 1 or Broken Hill Man, which is about 300,000 years old and belongs to the archaic species usually called Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis. At Twin Rivers near Lusaka, people were collecting and grinding coloured pigments more than 200,000 years ago.

In later millennia the region was home to hunter-gatherers whose way of life resembled that of the San of southern Africa and the Batwa of central Africa. They left geometric and animal paintings in rock shelters across the north and east, such as those at Nsalu and Mwela, and some of their descendants were absorbed into farming communities, while others survived as hunters into recent centuries.

From the early centuries CE, Bantu-speaking communities arrived as part of the Bantu expansion, bringing farming, cattle, pottery and iron-working. Early Iron Age villages appear across the plateau from around the fourth century, and copper was being mined and worked at Kansanshi in the north-west within a few centuries. Over the following millennium new pottery traditions spread, probably reflecting further movements of people, and the ancestors of the modern Tonga, Ila and other peoples settled the southern plateau.

The richest evidence comes from Ingombe Ilede, a hilltop site in the Gwembe valley of the Zambezi, where people were buried around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with gold beads, copper crosses used as ingots, iron gongs, glass beads and woven cloth. They were part of a long-distance trade linking the copper of the Zambian and Katangan plateau with the gold-rich Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe to the south and the Indian Ocean ports of the Swahili coast. From the sixteenth century the Portuguese Empire established trading stations on the lower Zambezi, at Sena and Tete, and its traders and Afro-Portuguese adventurers reached the middle Zambezi.

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, states and ruling clans spread into the region from the Luba and Lunda heartlands in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Around 1740 a Lunda general, sent eastwards by the Mwata Yamvo, the ruler of the Lunda Empire, founded the kingdom of Kazembe in the Luapula valley. Its kings, who took the title Mwata Kazembe, controlled the trade in copper, ivory and slaves between the interior and both coasts. The Portuguese governor Francisco de Lacerda reached Kazembe's capital in 1798 hoping to open a route across the continent and died there weeks later.

To the east, the Bemba, who trace their origins to the Luba Empire, formed a kingdom on the north-eastern plateau under a paramount chief, the Chitimukulu. In the nineteenth century the Bemba expanded by raiding their neighbours and grew powerful through the ivory and slave trade with Swahili and Arab caravans from the east coast. In the far east the Chewa were linked to the Maravi states centred in Malawi, under rulers bearing the title Undi.

In the west, the Luyana people built a kingdom on the rich floodplain of the upper Zambezi, later called Barotseland, ruled by a king, the Litunga, whose court moved each year with the floods. The royal barges still make the journey from the flooded plain to higher ground in the Kuomboka ceremony. In the 1830s or 1840s the kingdom was conquered by the Kololo, a Sotho-speaking people from the south under Sebetwane, whose language became the basis of modern Silozi. The Lozi rose against Kololo rule and restored their own dynasty in 1864.

The wars associated with the rise of the Zulu Kingdom under Shaka, known as the Mfecane, sent waves of migrants northwards. The Ngoni led by Zwangendaba crossed the Zambezi in 1835 and passed through eastern Zambia, and one branch under Mpezeni later settled on the plateau around modern Chipata, raiding neighbouring peoples. By the mid-nineteenth century the slave trade was spreading inland, as Swahili-Arab traders such as Tippu Tip and the Yao and Afro-Portuguese caravans bought captives for the plantations of Zanzibar and the Indian Ocean, and the Bemba and others took part in the trade.

The Scottish missionary David Livingstone travelled up the Zambezi with Kololo guides in 1851 and in November 1855 reached the great waterfall called Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, which he named after Queen Victoria. His accounts of the slave trade stirred British public opinion. He died at Chitambo, near Lake Bangweulu, in 1873, and his companions carried his embalmed body to the coast.

In the Scramble for Africa, Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company sought to secure the lands north of the Zambezi for the British Empire against Portugal and Belgium's Congo state. In 1890 the Lozi king Lewanika, hoping for British protection against the Ndebele and others, signed the Lochner Concession, granting the Company wide mineral rights; he later complained that he had been misled about its terms. Other treaties and military campaigns brought the north-east under Company control, including the defeat of Mpezeni's Ngoni in 1898 and the submission of the Bemba around 1899. The Company's territories of North-Western and North-Eastern Rhodesia were merged as Northern Rhodesia in 1911, with its capital at Livingstone.

The Company introduced hut taxes, payable in cash, which forced men to migrate to work in the mines and farms of Southern Rhodesia, South Africa and the Congo. During the First World War tens of thousands of Africans were conscripted as carriers in the East African campaign, and the German commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck surrendered at Abercorn, now Mbala, in November 1918, after the armistice in Europe. In 1924 the British Colonial Office took over the administration, and the capital moved to the new town of Lusaka in 1935. Barotseland kept a special protected status under its own king.

From the late 1920s, rich copper deposits were developed along the border with the Belgian Congo, and mining towns such as Luanshya, Kitwe and Mufulira grew rapidly. Copper became the colony's lifeblood, though the profits went to foreign companies and the colour bar reserved skilled jobs and higher wages for white miners. African miners struck in 1935, when police killed six strikers at Luanshya, and again in 1940, and the African Mineworkers' Union was founded in 1949. Welfare associations and churches, including the Watch Tower movement, spread new ideas, and in 1948 educated Africans formed the Northern Rhodesia African Congress, later led by Harry Nkumbula.

In 1953 Britain joined Northern Rhodesia with Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, despite strong African opposition. The Federation was dominated by Southern Rhodesia's white settlers, and much of the copper revenue was spent south of the Zambezi, including on the Kariba Dam. Kenneth Kaunda, a teacher's son from the north-east, broke from Nkumbula's congress in 1958, and his United National Independence Party, founded in 1959, led a campaign of civil disobedience in 1961 known as Cha-cha-cha. After elections in 1962 produced an African majority, Britain allowed the territories to leave, and the Federation was dissolved at the end of 1963. Shortly before independence, clashes between government forces and the Lumpa Church of the prophet Alice Lenshina killed hundreds of people.

Zambia became independent on 24 October 1964 as part of the wider decolonisation of Africa, with Kaunda as president and a philosophy he called Zambian humanism. The country had very few African graduates, and the government spent heavily on schools, a university and health services. In 1968 and 1969 it took majority control of many companies, including the copper mines. Kaunda banned all parties except UNIP in 1972, and the constitution of 1973 created what he called one-party participatory democracy.

Zambia's position as a front-line state against white minority rule shaped its foreign policy. When Rhodesia declared independence in 1965, Zambia's trade routes through the south were threatened, and China built the TAZARA railway from the Copperbelt to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, opened in 1975. Lusaka hosted liberation movements from Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia and South Africa, whose African National Congress was based there, and Rhodesian and South African forces raided targets on Zambian soil. Kaunda tried to steer between the sides of the Cold War.

The collapse of copper prices from 1975, combined with rising oil prices, ended the boom. Debt mounted, living standards fell, and the HIV epidemic, which became severe in the 1980s and 1990s, cut life expectancy sharply. Attempts to cut maize subsidies led to riots in 1986 and 1990, and after a failed coup attempt in June 1990 Kaunda agreed to restore multiparty politics.

In October 1991 Frederick Chiluba, a trade union leader, and his Movement for Multiparty Democracy won a landslide, and Kaunda stepped down peacefully, one of the first African leaders to lose power at the ballot box. Chiluba privatised the copper mines and much of the economy, and his government was accused of corruption; a coup attempt in 1997 failed, and public protest forced him to abandon a bid for a third term in 2001. His successor, Levy Mwanawasa, pursued corruption cases against Chiluba and won large-scale debt relief, but died in office in 2008. Rupiah Banda served the rest of his term before losing in 2011 to Michael Sata of the Patriotic Front, whose populist campaign appealed to Copperbelt workers resentful of foreign and especially Chinese mine owners. Sata died in office in 2014, and Edgar Lungu won elections in 2015 and narrowly in 2016.

Lungu's government borrowed heavily for roads and other infrastructure, much of it from Chinese lenders, and was criticised for restrictions on the opposition and the press; the opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema was held on treason charges for four months in 2017 before they were dropped. In November 2020 Zambia became the first African country to default on its debt during the Covid-19 pandemic. Kaunda died in June 2021.

In August 2021 Hichilema, a businessman and leader of the United Party for National Development, defeated Lungu with 59 per cent of the vote, and Lungu conceded. Hichilema's government negotiated a restructuring of the country's debts, introduced free primary and secondary education and sought new investment in copper mining, while critics accused it of using the police against opponents. In December 2024 the Constitutional Court ruled that Lungu could not stand again, and he died in South Africa in June 2025, followed by a long legal dispute between his family and the government over his burial.

At the general election of 13 August 2026 Hichilema won a second term with 60.5 per cent of the vote against 37.9 per cent for Brian Mundubile of the opposition Tonse Alliance, and his party won a majority in the National Assembly. Mundubile was arrested during the count and rejected the result, and international observers found the vote free and transparent but not fair, citing misuse of state resources and restrictions on opposition campaigning.