Northern Rhodesia/ Zambia

Zambia, officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country in southern Africa. It borders the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Tanzania on the north-east, Malawi on the east, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia to the south, and Angola on the west. more...

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Formerly Northern Rhodesia, the country is named after the Zambezi river.

History

The indigenous Khoisan hunter-gatherer occupants of Zambia began to be displaced or absorbed by more technologically-advanced migrating tribes around two thousand years ago. The major waves of Bantu-speaking immigrants – the Bantu expansion – began in the twelfth century.

Among them, the Tonga people (also called Batonga) were first to settle in Zambia and are believed to have come from the far east near the "big sea." The Nkoya people had also come much earlier with some suggesting that they came first into what is today called Zambia from the Luba-Lunda kingdoms in the north. Other groups followed with the greatest influx coming between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. These later migrants came primarily from the Luba and Lunda tribes of southern Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Angola but were joined in the nineteenth century by Ngoni peoples from the south. By the later part of the nineteenth century, the various peoples of Zambia were largely established in the areas they currently occupy.

Except for the occasional Portuguese explorer, the area lay untouched by Europeans for centuries. After the mid-nineteenth century, it was penetrated by Western explorers, missionaries, and traders. In 1855, missionary and explorer David Livingstone, became the first European to see the magnificent waterfalls on the Zambezi River. He named them Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria. The falls are known in Zambia as Mosi-O-Tunya (in the Lozi or Kololo dialect), "the smoke that thunders." The Zambian town, Livingstone, near the falls is named after him.

In 1888, Cecil Rhodes, spearheading British commercial and political interests in Central Africa, obtained a mineral rights concession from local chiefs. In the west of the country, which came to be known as North Western Rhodesia, the British South African Company, Cecil Rhodes’ company, obtained mineral rights for the area from The Litunga, the king of the Lozi . In the east, King Mpezeni of the Ngoni resisted but he was defeated in battle and that part of the country came to be known as North-Eastern Rhodesia. The two were administered as separate units until 1911 when they were joined to form Northern Rhodesia. In 1924, the Company ceded control to the British Government Colonial Office under the Devonshire Agreement In the same year, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was proclaimed to be within the British sphere of influence. Southern Rhodesia was annexed formally and granted self-government in 1923, and the administration of Northern Rhodesia was by a Governor appointed by the crown. Mining began in the Copperbelt in 1934.

Read more at Wikipedia.org