Before the railway
The land was settled by farming and iron-working Bantu-speaking peoples over many centuries, and by the eighteenth it held real states: the Lunda kingdom of Kazembe on the Luapula, the Bemba in the north-east, and in the west the Lozi kingdom of Barotseland, whose Litunga still moves his court between the flood plains each year in the Kuomboka ceremony.
Trade ran east to the Swahili coast and, increasingly and destructively, in people. David Livingstone reached the great falls on the Zambezi in 1855 and renamed them for his queen; the local name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, was there long before and is coming back into use.
Northern Rhodesia
Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company took the territory by treaty and concession in the 1890s and ran it as a company holding before the Crown assumed control. The name — Northern Rhodesia — announced who it was thought to belong to.
Then copper. The Copperbelt in the north became one of the richest mining zones on the continent, and the wealth flowed south to settler Southern Rhodesia and to London. The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, imposed in 1953, formalised that drain and was fought hard by Africans in all three territories.
Kaunda, and the cost of principle
Kenneth Kaunda led the country to independence on 24 October 1964 and ran it for 27 years under a philosophy he called Humanism, and after 1972 under a single party. He also made Zambia a front-line state: it sheltered the ANC, ZAPU, SWAPO and others, and paid for it in Rhodesian and South African raids and in a border closed against its main trade route. The TAZARA railway to Tanzania, built with Chinese help in the 1970s, was an attempt to route around white-ruled neighbours.
When the copper price collapsed, so did the model. Debt, shortages and structural adjustment defined the 1980s. Copper had been folded in the 1970s into the state conglomerate ZCCM, and its forced privatisation under lender pressure in the 1990s — cheaply, and to foreign firms — is still argued over as the sale of the family silver. The Kariba dam on the Zambezi had meanwhile flooded the Gwembe Tonga off their valley land in the 1950s, a displacement of tens of thousands whose grievances remain live.
Voting a founder out
In 1991, under pressure at home and abroad, Kaunda allowed multiparty elections and lost them to Frederick Chiluba and the trade-union-backed MMD. He conceded and stepped down. At the time, an African independence leader accepting defeat at the ballot box was close to unheard of, and the handover is still Zambia's strongest claim on its own democratic record.
The pattern has held, roughly. In 2021 Hakainde Hichilema won on his sixth attempt, unseating an incumbent; a peaceful transfer, and a reminder that the copper question — debt, Chinese loans, who profits — never really goes away. Chiluba's own presidency later ended under a cloud of corruption charges, and the debt Zambia ran up in the years after, much of it owed to China, tipped the country into default in 2020 — the first in Africa to fall in the pandemic.