Zambia

The territory that is now Zambia has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, with archaeological finds at Kabwe (the Broken Hill skull) attesting to early hominin presence. From roughly the first millennium of the common era, Bantu-speaking agriculturalists and ironworkers migrated into the region in successive waves, gradually displacing or absorbing earlier Khoisan-speaking foragers. By the later medieval period a number of organised polities had formed, including the Tonga and Ila chieftaincies of the south, the Lunda and Luba-derived kingdoms of the Luapula and the Kazembe state, the Bemba paramountcy in the northeast, the Lozi (Barotse) kingdom on the upper Zambezi floodplain, and the Chewa-related Maravi confederation in the east. These societies traded ivory, copper, and slaves with Swahili and Portuguese networks reaching inland from the Indian Ocean and the Zambezi.

European intrusion intensified in the nineteenth century, beginning with the explorations of David Livingstone in the 1850s and 1860s and accelerating after the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885. Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company secured mineral and political concessions from the Lozi king Lewanika and other rulers, and from the 1890s administered the territory as North-Western and North-Eastern Rhodesia. The two were merged in 1911 as Northern Rhodesia, which the British Crown took over directly as a protectorate in 1924. The discovery of vast copper deposits along what became the Copperbelt in the late 1920s reshaped the territory, drawing African labour migration and white settler capital, and tying its economy to global commodity cycles.

In 1953 Britain joined Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, a structure widely opposed by the African majority. Nationalist mobilisation under Harry Nkumbula's African National Congress and, more decisively, Kenneth Kaunda's United National Independence Party (UNIP) brought the federation down in 1963. On 24 October 1964 Northern Rhodesia became the independent Republic of Zambia, with Kaunda as its first president. His government pursued African socialism (Humanism), nationalised the copper mines, and supported liberation movements in neighbouring Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and South Africa, at considerable economic cost. A one-party state was formalised in 1972 and entrenched in the 1973 constitution.

Falling copper prices, debt, and popular pressure forced a return to multiparty politics at the end of the Cold War. In the elections of October 1991 Frederick Chiluba of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy defeated Kaunda, inaugurating a peaceful transfer of power that became a regional reference point. Subsequent presidencies, those of Levy Mwanawasa from 2002, Rupiah Banda from 2008, Michael Sata from 2011, and Edgar Lungu from 2015, oversaw liberalisation of the mining sector, recurrent disputes over constitutional amendments, and rising indebtedness, including a sovereign default in 2020. In August 2021 the opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema of the United Party for National Development won the presidency, marking the country's third alternation of power through the ballot box.

Zambia today is a unitary presidential republic under the constitution of 1991, as substantially amended in 2016. Executive authority rests with a directly elected president serving a renewable five-year term, alongside a unicameral National Assembly, while the traditional authorities of the precolonial polities retain a recognised, if circumscribed, customary role.