Zambia
Capital: Lusaka · Southern Africa
Home of the Lozi's Kuomboka river pageant, the Bemba and Lunda royal traditions, and Victoria Falls — Mosi-oa-Tunya, 'the smoke that thunders'.
Ethnic communities
- BembaNorthern kingdom under the Chitimukulu
- LoziBarotseland monarchy; Kuomboka ceremony
- TongaZambezi valley farmers; Lwiindi rain rites
- Chewa, Lunda, Luvale, NgoniRich masquerade (makishi) and royal traditions
More communities of Zambia
- Chewa (Nyanja) · Eastern Gule Wamkulu nation
- Lunda (Luapula & NW) · Kazembe's river kingdom and Mwant Yav kin
- Luvale · Makishi masquerade keepers (UNESCO)
- Kaonde · Northwestern farmers of chisungu rites
- Ngoni · Nc'wala first-fruits kingdom of Zulu descent
- Lala & Bisa · Central woodland farming peoples
- Namwanga & Mambwe · Northern corridor agro-pastoralists
- Tumbuka & Senga · Eastern valley farming communities
- Ila · Kafue flats' great cattle culture
- Lenje & Soli · Central province's old chiefdoms
- Toka-Leya · Victoria Falls' riverside communities
- Lamba · Copperbelt's original farming people
Languages
Major languages: Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, Lozi, English
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Barotseland (Lozi)
- • Bemba kingdom
- • Kazembe-Lunda
- • Undi's Chewa state
Heritage sites
- • Mosi-oa-Tunya / Victoria Falls
- • Kalambo Falls archaeological site
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Zambia
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Science, business & activismb. 1969
Dambisa Moyo
Economics
Economist whose book Dead Aid forced an uncomfortable public argument about whether development assistance helps or entrenches poverty.
- Sportb. 1963
Kalusha Bwalya
Football
African Footballer of the Year in 1988 and the survivor who rebuilt Zambia's national team after the 1993 Gabon air disaster killed the squad.
- Politics & liberation1924–2021
Kenneth Kaunda
Independence and frontline diplomacy
Zambia's founding president, who sheltered liberation movements from across southern Africa at heavy economic cost and conceded power peacefully after losing the 1991 election.
- Music & the artsb. 1953
Rikki Ililonga
Zamrock
Founder of Musi-O-Tunya and a central figure in Zamrock, the heavy psychedelic sound of newly independent Zambia now rediscovered worldwide.
Deep-dive community profiles
Basubiya
River people of the Chobe and Zambezi floodplain whose kingdom once held the whole four-country corner, who were pushed aside by the Lozi and then the Kololo, and whose land was fenced off for a national park in 1960.
Open deep profile →Bemba
The crocodile-clan kingdom of Zambia's northern plateau — whose paramount Chitimukulu still reigns, whose chisungu girls' initiation is a masterwork of ritual pedagogy, and whose miners' migrations made Bemba the lingua franca of the Copperbelt.
Open deep profile →Bisa
Traders and hunters of the Bangweulu swamps and the Luangwa valley who carried ivory to the Indian Ocean before any European did, and whose valley became South Luangwa National Park.
Open deep profile →Chewa
The Maravi heirs who gave Malawi its name — a matrilineal farming civilization whose Nyau secret society dances the Gule Wamkulu, 'the Great Dance', where masked spirits of the dead, beasts and moral caricatures instruct the living.
Open deep profile →Chokwe
The master carvers and hunters of the Angolan plateau — whose Chihongo and Pwo masks, sand-drawn sona mathematics and the epic of Chibinda Ilunga made a once-small hunting people the great art-civilization of three borders.
Open deep profile →Ila
The cattle people of the Kafue flats — herders of a seasonal floodplain who follow the water with their animals, whose men once wore towering horn-shaped hairstyles, and whose grazing grounds are now a dam-regulated wetland shared with lechwe antelope.
Open deep profile →Kaonde
The people of Zambia's north-west — Luba-descended farmers and hunters whose territory holds the copper of Solwezi and Kansanshi, and whose chiefs still perform the Ntongo and Juba ceremonies over ground now valued for what is under it.
Open deep profile →Lala
The people of the Muchinga foothills — Bemba-related farmers of central Zambia whose country produced Alice Lenshina's Lumpa Church, the mass religious movement that Kenneth Kaunda's new government crushed in the year of independence.
Open deep profile →Lamba
Matrilineal farmers and smiths of the Copperbelt, on whose land the mines were sunk and the towns built, and who watched a copper economy grow around them without becoming part of it.
Open deep profile →Lozi (Barotse)
The flood-plain kingdom of the upper Zambezi — whose Litunga leads the Kuomboka, the world's most majestic climate migration, moving his court by royal barge from flooded lowland to highland each year as drums command the river.
Open deep profile →Lunda
The empire of the Mwant Yav — heirs of Ruwej and Chibinda Ilunga's marriage whose 'perpetual kinship' statecraft ruled a three-nation web of tributaries, and whose Mutomboko festival still crowns the eastern kingdom's year.
Open deep profile →Luvale (Lwena)
The people of the upper Zambezi headwaters — matrilineal cultivators and fishers whose makishi masqueraders emerge from the boys' initiation camps, a tradition inscribed by UNESCO and shared across three countries.
Open deep profile →Mambwe
Ridge-mound cultivators of the plateau between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Rukwa, whose grass-mound farming built fertility out of poor soil, and whose country the First World War's last campaign crossed on its way to the final surrender.
Open deep profile →Nganguela
The peoples of Angola's eastern woodlands — a cluster of communities named collectively by outsiders, whose hunting and beekeeping country became UNITA's base, and whose land is among the most heavily mined on earth.
Open deep profile →Ngoni
The northern branch of the Zulu diaspora — regiments that marched two thousand kilometres out of the Mfecane, absorbed the peoples they conquered, and planted Nguni kingship, praise poetry and the ingoma dance across four countries.
Open deep profile →Nkoya
People of Zambia's Kafue headwaters whose royal drums are older than the kingdoms that later claimed them, whose Kazanga ceremony was revived in 1988 as an argument about history, and who have spent a century contesting their subordination to the Lozi.
Open deep profile →Nsenga
Matrilineal farmers of Zambia's Luangwa valley escarpment, whose chief Kalindawalo's country lay on the nineteenth-century slaving road, and whose vimbuza-related healing dances and Nyau connections tie them to both the Chewa and the lakeshore worlds.
Open deep profile →Nyiha and Lambya
The iron-smelting people of the northern highlands — farmers of the Songwe river country whose furnaces supplied hoes across three modern countries, and whose highland is now Malawi's coffee and Tanzania's maize frontier.
Open deep profile →Nyungwe
The people of Tete — Zambezi valley farmers and traders at the old Portuguese river port, heirs to the chikunda slave-soldier tradition, and now the community sitting on top of one of the world's largest coking coal deposits.
Open deep profile →Tabwa
People of the Marungu highlands and the south-western shore of Lake Tanganyika, whose scarification and sculpture worked a visual language of balanced opposites, and whose nineteenth century was defined by the ivory trade and the warlord Nsama.
Open deep profile →Tonga (Batonga)
The Zambezi-valley people uprooted by Kariba Dam — matrilineal farmers and fishers famed for the budima and ngoma buntibe dance-orchestras, the Nyaminyami river-serpent, and a resilient culture that survived one of Africa's great forced resettlements.
Open deep profile →Tumbuka
The people of the northern Malawi highlands — heirs of the old Chikulamayembe trading state, whose vimbuza healing-dance (a UNESCO heritage) exorcises illness through drum-driven trance, and whose language became a lingua franca of the north.
Open deep profile →