Zambia

Zambia sits high on the central African plateau. The Zambezi rises in the far north-west and plunges into a basalt gorge at Mosi-oa-Tunya, ‘the smoke that thunders’, which David Livingstone named Victoria Falls; below them it fills Lake Kariba. In the east the Luangwa valley teems with game, and in the north lie the Bangweulu swamps, haunt of the shoebill, and the southern tip of Lake Tanganyika. Late each year millions of straw-coloured fruit bats roost in the forest at Kasanka.

A skull found at the Broken Hill mine at Kabwe in 1921 belonged to an archaic human who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. Bantu-speaking farmers later founded the Lunda kingdom of Kazembe on the Luapula and the Lozi kingdom on the upper Zambezi. Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company took the territory in the 1890s, and in 1924 it passed to the Crown as Northern Rhodesia. Under Kenneth Kaunda the country became independent in October 1964 and took the river’s name.

When the Zambezi floods the Barotse plain, the Lozi king moves to higher ground in a royal barge paddled by his people, the ceremony of Kuomboka. In the 1970s bands such as WITCH played Zamrock, a heavy, fuzz-guitar rock. The national football team won the Africa Cup of Nations in 2012 at Libreville, close to where the team of 1993 was killed when its aircraft came down. Copper and cobalt from Chingola, Kitwe and Mufulira dominate exports.