Zambia

Bantu-speaking farmers settled the plateau over the first millennium AD, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a number of kingdoms and chieftaincies — the Lozi of the Zambezi floodplain, the Bemba of the northeast, the Chewa, Tonga, Ngoni, and others — held the region. The explorer David Livingstone reached the Zambezi in the 1850s and named the falls for Queen Victoria; the town of Livingstone still bears his name.

Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company took control in the 1890s, and the territory became the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia. The discovery of vast copper deposits in the 1920s and 1930s created the Copperbelt, drew migrant labour, and tied the economy to a single metal. Between 1953 and 1963 Northern Rhodesia was yoked, against African opposition, into a federation with Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Nyasaland (now Malawi).

Zambia became independent in 1964 under Kenneth Kaunda, whose philosophy of "Zambian Humanism" and one-party rule from 1972 combined a welfare push with economic decline as copper prices fell. Zambia paid a heavy price for hosting the liberation movements of Rhodesia, South Africa, Namibia, and Angola. Multiparty politics returned in 1991, and power has since changed hands peacefully several times — a regional rarity. In 2020 Zambia became the first African country to default on its debt during the pandemic; Hakainde Hichilema, elected in 2021, has pursued restructuring and reform while copper prices and recurring drought keep the economy volatile.

Zambia has more than seventy ethnic groups, and a strong tradition of coexistence — partly a legacy of Kaunda's "One Zambia, One Nation" motto — means ethnic politics is muted by regional standards. The country is constitutionally a "Christian nation", overwhelmingly so in practice, with churches central to community life, alongside enduring traditional beliefs and healers.

Traditional ceremonies are the great cultural events: the Lozi Kuomboka, in which the king (the Litunga) is paddled in a great black-and-white barge from his flooded dry-season palace to higher ground; the Ngoni N'cwala first-fruits festival with its warrior dancing; and dozens of others across the country, many revived and well attended.

Extended family and clan obligations, respect for elders and chiefs (who retain authority over customary land), and a relaxed, courteous sociability are widely noted. Football is the mass sport, and Zambian music — from kalindula to contemporary gospel and hip-hop — is popular across the region.

About 20 million people live in Zambia, a young and fast-growing population, concentrated along the "line of rail" from Livingstone through Lusaka to the Copperbelt cities of Kitwe and Ndola; large areas of the country are sparsely settled bush and farmland.

The economy still rises and falls with the copper price: mining dominates exports and government revenue, alongside subsistence and commercial farming (maize, tobacco, sugar), and a growing tourism sector around Victoria Falls and the parks. Recent years have brought debt distress, a weak kwacha, and — because the country depends on the Kariba dam for most of its electricity — severe, prolonged power cuts during drought.

For most Zambians daily life is rural or peri-urban, organised around the maize field, the market, the church, and the extended family, with the cities offering trade, mining, and public-sector work.

The staple, eaten at almost every meal, is nshima — a stiff porridge of white maize meal, taken by hand and dipped into ndiwo or relish. The relish might be beans, groundnut-thickened greens (pumpkin leaves, rape, chibwabwa), okra, kapenta (small dried lake fish), dried kapenta, or, when affordable, chicken or beef.

"Village chicken" (free-range and prized over broilers), grilled or stewed beef, fresh bream and Nile perch from the lakes and rivers, and inswa (fried flying termites, a seasonal delicacy) fill out the diet. Cassava replaces maize as the staple in parts of the north and northwest.

Chibuku, a thick, mildly alcoholic sorghum or maize beer sold in cartons, and munkoyo, a lightly fermented root drink, are the traditional drinks, alongside Mosi and Castle lagers and strong sweet tea.

Victoria Falls, shared with Zimbabwe, is the headline: the Zambian side, at Livingstone, offers close-up walks along the gorge edge, the Knife-Edge Bridge into the spray, and — when the river is low — the swim to the very lip at Devil's Pool, plus rafting, bungee jumping, and microlight flights over Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park.

South Luangwa, in the east, is one of Africa's great wildlife parks and the birthplace of the walking safari: superb leopard sightings, large herds along the Luangwa River, and camps that specialise in tracking game on foot. The Lower Zambezi National Park, opposite Zimbabwe's Mana Pools, is known for canoe safaris past elephants and hippos, and the vast Kafue National Park in the west has the Busanga floodplain and far fewer visitors.

Elsewhere, Lake Tanganyika reaches into Zambia's far north near the Kalambo Falls; Lake Bangweulu's swamps hold the shoebill and the endemic black lechwe; and Kasanka National Park stages, each November and December, the arrival of some ten million straw-coloured fruit bats — one of the largest mammal gatherings on Earth.