People & Culture

In 1921, miners cutting into a lead and zinc deposit at what is now Kabwe broke into a cave and uncovered a skull unlike any found before in Africa. Named Homo rhodesiensis by Arthur Smith Woodward that year, it is now generally classed as Homo heidelbergensis, and direct dating published in 2020 put it at 299,000 years old, give or take 25,000, far younger than the roughly half a million years long assumed. The date matters, because it means the Kabwe individual lived when Homo sapiens was already emerging elsewhere in Africa, evidence that several human lineages shared the continent rather than one replacing the next in a tidy line. The skull never came home. The mining company that found it donated it to what is now the Natural History Museum in London, and Zambia has sought its return since 1972, a claim now before UNESCO's restitution committee. Long before any of this was written down, Bantu-speaking farmers moved into the region carrying iron tools, pottery and crops such as sorghum, beans and bananas, settling small villages from around the fourth century AD. By the eighth century their pottery styles had diverged by region and the loose village world was organising into something closer to chiefdoms. The clearest material trace of what followed sits on a hill above the Zambezi near its confluence with the Lusitu, at Ingombe Ilede. Burials excavated there in 1960, none earlier than the mid-fifteenth century, held gold ornaments, copper and bronze objects, imported glass beads and fine iron tools, the residue of a trading town that moved Copperbelt copper toward the Indian Ocean coast and tin from far to the south, centuries before any European reached the interior. Out of that same trading world grew states built on Lunda and Luba political ideas carried east from the Congo basin. Around 1740 an offshoot of the western Lunda empire founded the kingdom of Kazembe in the Luapula valley, growing through conquest into one of south-central Africa's most formidable polities. At its peak around 1800 it held territory into what is now Congo's Katanga, fielded an army reported at 20,000 men, and controlled trade routes reaching both the Atlantic through Angola and the Indian Ocean through Mozambique, drawing Portuguese envoys from both directions. It did not survive, since succession disputes after 1850 tipped into civil war and the kingdom was broken by rival attacks around 1890. To the east, the Bemba trace their ruling line to a migration out of Luba country, the brothers Chiti and Nkole fleeing a dispute with their father and founding a state under a paramount chief, the Chitimukulu, with succession passing through the mother's line. Bemba power rested on position rather than on land, since sitting across routes carrying captives, ivory and copper to Swahili and Portuguese buyers let the kingdom centralise, and it reached its height in the 1870s. Further west, the Lozi built a different kind of state on the Zambezi floodplain from the seventeenth century, ruled by a Litunga rather than a chief, a distinction the Lozi still hold today. Because the Zambezi drowns the plain every year, the Litunga's court has moved between Lealui and Limulunga since that century, a migration marked by the Kuomboka ceremony, meaning getting out of the water. Into this landscape came the Ngoni, refugees from the upheaval that convulsed southern Africa in the early nineteenth century after the rise of the Zulu kingdom, remembered as the Mfecane or, in Sesotho, the Difaqane. A commander named Zwangendaba led one group north across the Zambezi in the early 1820s, through what is now Zimbabwe into Zambia and on toward Lake Tanganyika, and when he died in 1848 his followers split into several kingdoms that still anchor Ngoni communities in eastern Zambia and Malawi. Further south, Portuguese traders had since the sixteenth century held prazo estates on the Zambezi worked by Chikunda, enslaved men raised to soldiers and agents who defended the estates and pushed the ivory and slave trade upriver, and when the prazos collapsed, Chikunda bands struck out on their own along both banks, trading salt, cloth, beads and guns for ivory and captives. Further north, Swahili and Arab caravan networks reached just as deep, with traders visiting the Kazembe court for copper, ivory and captives, and operators working from lake ports such as Ujiji building trading empires on ivory and human traffic carried out of the Congo basin toward the coast. Between Chikunda routes from the southeast, Swahili and Arab networks from the northeast, and Kazembe's own trade west to Angola, almost no part of Zambia sat outside the nineteenth-century slave and ivory economy. David Livingstone was the first European recorded to see the waterfall on the Zambezi, on 16 November 1855, viewing it from an island that now bears his name and naming it for his queen. Communities along the river already had a name for it, Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, describing the spray column visible for miles before the roar of the falls carries, and both names are recognised today, one on each side of the border the falls now mark. In 1890 the Lozi king Lewanika signed the Lochner Concession with an agent of Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company, granting exclusive mineral rights over his kingdom for an annual payment and a promise of protection. Lewanika believed he was dealing with the British government itself. He was not, and he disputed the terms once he understood what the company had actually secured. The company administered the territory as Northern Rhodesia until the Colonial Office took over in 1924, by which time copper had been found on the Copperbelt. The mines ran on an occupational colour bar reserving skilled work for white miners, mostly from South Africa, while Africans were confined to manual labour, and though it was formalised by 1941 it had already provoked strikes in 1935 and 1940 that killed thirteen men, and it was worn down only after African miners organised a union in 1949 and won a fifty-eight day stoppage in 1955. Opposition hardened when Britain merged Northern Rhodesia with Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland into the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1953, a move Black Northern Rhodesians read correctly as a step toward permanent settler control. Kenneth Kaunda built his career resisting it, moving from the African National Congress to found the more radical Zambia African National Congress, which the colonial government banned, and his followers rebuilt it as the United National Independence Party, which he led to victory in the 1964 election as the Federation collapsed. Zambia became independent on 24 October 1964 with Kaunda as president. Weeks earlier, in London, Kaunda's government had signed the Barotseland Agreement with the Litunga and the British government, guaranteeing the Lozi kingdom internal self-rule inside the new state. Zambia's parliament abrogated it in 1969, folding Barotseland into an ordinary Western Province, a decision many Lozi still regard as a broken promise and the root of a live, unresolved argument over the territory's status. Kaunda's government nationalised retail, transport and manufacturing in the Mulungushi reforms of 1968 and took a controlling stake in the copper mines in 1969, only to watch the copper price collapse of the 1970s turn foreign borrowing into debt that swelled from roughly 800 million to 3.2 billion dollars. One-party rule, imposed in 1972, gave way in 1991 when Frederick Chiluba's Movement for Multiparty Democracy won power in an election Kaunda conceded outright, a peaceful handover still cited across the continent as a model. What survives of all this is what a visitor actually walks up to. The falls carry both names on the signage at Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park, and Livingstone, the town built in 1905 when the railway and its bridge reached the Zambezi, still holds the country's colonial-era railway heritage. Ingombe Ilede's hill overlooks Lake Kariba. Every year, usually in March or April, the Litunga still travels from Lealui to Limulunga aboard the royal barge Nalikwanda as the Kuomboka re-enacts the same flight from the flood the Lozi have made for centuries, accompanied by drums said to be more than a hundred and seventy years old. North of the Copperbelt, the English settler Stewart Gore-Browne spent much of his life building an English manor house at Shiwa Ng'andu, and was later the only white man in Zambia's history given a state funeral, with Kaunda delivering the eulogy. The Copperbelt towns still carry the shape of the industry and the labour struggle that built modern Zambian politics. In South Luangwa, Norman Carr partnered with the Kunda chief Nsefu in 1950 to set aside tribal land as a game reserve and pioneered the walking safari, still practised under strict guiding standards. Kasanka's forests host up to ten million straw-coloured fruit bats each October to December, a migration only recognised in 1980 whose full route out of the Congo rainforest remains unmapped. And at the far northeast corner, Lake Tanganyika, the world's longest freshwater lake, reaches Zambia at Mpulungu, first mapped for Europeans by Burton and Speke searching for the Nile's source. None of this is staged for visitors. The Kuomboka is a royal ceremony rather than a performance, and its protocols hold accordingly: dress modestly, do not photograph the Litunga or the Nalikwanda without permission, keep to the public areas, and join the salute other spectators offer as the king passes. A walking safari in South Luangwa runs on similarly firm rules, with six guests to a guide and armed scout, single file, silence, phones away, and dry-season months only. Zambia's chieftaincies remain living institutions with their own protocol around access and photography that varies from chief to chief, so asking first is the rule wherever it applies.