THE HISTORY OF ZAMBIA

The Great Rift Valley, which cleaves the earth from the Lower Zambezi River in Southern Zambia to the headwaters of the River Jordan in Egypt, is now known to be one of the cradles of the human race, and Zambia’s present population lives on lands that have been inhabited by our forebears for almost uncountable aeons.

"Very deep is the well of the past" Thomas Mann.

Archaeologists have established that in the northern African Rift Valley, the civilizing process got underway at least 3 million years ago, and crude stone implements, similar to some of that age found in Kenya, have also been found beside the Zambezi river.

Early stone age sites have been unearthed in many parts of Zambia, the most significant being at the Kalambo Falls in the north and at Victoria Falls in the south. At the former there is evidence that primitive humans began using fire systematically some 60 000 years ago. At the latter, a complex has been fully exposed showing the development of skills from the most distant past (this ‘dig’ is enclosed at the Field Museum at the Victoria Falls).

The skull of Broken Hill Man, dated to 70 000 years ago, gives an indication of what humans of that period looked like.

Zambia's history goes back to the debut of Homo sapiens: evidence of human habitation going back 100,000 years has been found at Kabwe, north of Lusaka. Beginning around 1000 AD, Swahili-Arab slave-traders gradually penetrated the region from their city-states on the eastern coast of Africa. Between the 14th and 16th centuries a Bantu-speaking group known as the Maravi migrated from present-day Congo (Zaïre) and established kingdoms in eastern and southeastern Zambia.

In the 18th century, Portuguese explorers following the routes of Swahili-Arab slavers from the coast into the interior became the first known European visitors. After the Zulu nation to the south began scattering its neighbours, victims of the Difaqane (forced migration) began arriving in Zambia in the early 19th century. Squeezed out of Zimbabwe, the Makalolo people moved into southern Zambia, pushing the Tonga out of the way and grabbing Lozi territory on the upper Zambezi River.

The celebrated British explorer David Livingstone travelled up the Zambezi in the 1850s, searching for a route into the interior of Southern Africa, hoping to introduce Christianity and European civilisation to combat the horrors of the slave trade. Livingstone's efforts attracted missionaries, who in turn brought hunters and prospectors in their wake. In the 1890s much of Zambia came under the control of the British South Africa Company (BSAC), which sought to prevent further Portuguese expansion in the area.

Under the BSAC, the area became Northern Rhodesia in 1911. At about the same time, vast copper ore deposits were discovered in the north-central part of the territory (the area now called the Copperbelt). Large-scale mining operations were set up and local Africans employed as labourers. They had little choice: they needed money to pay the hut tax introduced by the Europeans, and their only other source of income vanished when much of their farmland was appropriated by European settlers. The colony was put under direct British control in 1924. Lusaka
became the capital in 1936.

Settlers began pushing for federation with Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Malawi) - an arrangement delayed by WWII and finally coming about in 1953. Meanwhile, the influence of African nationalism spread throughout the country. Kenneth Kaunda founded the United National Independence Party (UNIP) in the 1950s, advocating the end of British rule. That rule ended in 1963, when the federation dissolved and Northern Rhodesia took the name Zambia, after the Zambezi River. Independence came too late to halt the haemorrhaging of money occurring under British rule, however. Taxing Zambians to the bone, Britain and the BSAC spent most of that money on Southern Rhodesia - a drain that continued to plague the country well into the 1990s.

Following independence, Kaunda led Zambia for 27 years, a feat he accomplished by declaring the UNIP the only legal party and himself as the sole presidential candidate. Calling his mix of Marxism and traditional African values 'humanism', Kaunda rapidly bankrupted the country with a bloated civil service and a nationalisation scheme wracked by corruption and mismanagement. Falling copper prices and rising fuel prices accelerated the slide, and by the end of the 1970s Zambia was one of the poorest countries in the world. Not content to fiddle at home, Kaunda stuck his nose in the domestic political spats of several of his neighbours, including Ian Smith's Rhodesia, who promptly restricted Zambia's imports and exports by closing its rail routes to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

For more information on the history of Zambia, visit the following website:
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/africa/zambia/history.htm