Zambia

From Iron Age farmers and the kingdoms of the Zambezi and Luapula to the Copperbelt, Northern Rhodesia, and a landlocked African republic.

Zambia occupies a high plateau in the heart of south-central Africa, drained by the Zambezi and the Luapula. Bantu-speaking farmers and ironworkers settled the region over the first millennium CE, displacing or absorbing earlier Khoisan and Batwa hunter-gatherers; among the peoples who emerged were the Tonga of the southern plateau, and later the Lozi of the upper Zambezi floodplain, the Bemba of the north-east, the Chewa of the east, and the Lunda kingdom of Kazembe on the Luapula. From the eighteenth century these states were drawn into long-distance trade in copper, ivory, and captives, and in the nineteenth century the region was disrupted by Swahili-Arab and Chikunda slave raiders and by Ngoni warbands fleeing the upheavals of southern Africa. The Scottish missionary David Livingstone reached the great falls the local peoples called Mosi-oa-Tunya in 1855. From the 1890s Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company extended its rule over the territory, which became the protectorate of Northern Rhodesia, its economy soon dominated by the vast copper deposits of the Copperbelt. African opposition to the white-settler Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1953–1963) fed a nationalist movement led by Kenneth Kaunda and the United National Independence Party, and on 24 October 1964 Zambia became an independent republic with Kaunda as its first president. After decades of one-party rule under his philosophy of Humanism and support for southern African liberation movements, Zambia returned to multiparty politics in 1991; it remains a copper-dependent state that has wrestled with debt and seen repeated peaceful transfers of power.