THE
HISTORY OF ZAMBIA
©Tim Holmes
 The
Great Rift Valley, which cleaves the earth from the Lower Zambezi River in Southern
Zambia to the headwaters of the Nile in Egypt, is now known to be one of the
cradles of the human race, and Zambia’s present population lives on lands that have
been inhabited by our forebears for almost uncountable aeons.
Archaeologists have established that in the northern African
Rift Valley, the civilizing process got underway at least 3 million years ago, and crude
stone implements, similar to some of that age found in Kenya, have also been found beside
the Zambezi river.
Early stone age sites
have been unearthed
in many parts of Zambia, the most significant being at the Kalambo Falls in the North and
at Victoria Falls in the south. At the former there is evidence that primitive humans
began using fire systematically some 60 000 years ago. At the latter, a complex has been
fully exposed showing the development of skills from the most distant past (this
‘dig’ is enclosed at the Field Museum at the Victoria Falls).
The skull of Broken Hill Man, dated to 70 000 years ago,
gives an indication of what humans of that period looked like.
It was during the next phase - the
middle Stone Age -
with its refinement in the manufacture of tools,
differentiation between populations, and burial
of the dead, that modern man probably emerged in
Zambia, at least 25 000 years ago.
 We may imagine family groups of small-statured people
living near water and sustaining themselves by hunting the abundant game as well as
gathering fruits, tubers and honey from their surroundings (some skulls show serious tooth
decay caused by honey?) They would often be on the move, following the antelope as they
migrated with the seasons. By 15 000 years ago, the
Late Stone Age commenced.
People began to live in caves and rock shelters, the walls
of which they decorated with paintings. Very few of these have survived Zambia’s
seasonally humid climate, and those which have, do not display the sophistication found in the Rock Art found in Zimbabwe or South
Africa. But a surviving drawing of an eland at Katolola in the Eastern Province suggests
that this art was more than decorative, that it had a ritual or religious meaning: it has
been shown in South Africa that this animal was sacred to the Late Stone Age people there.
This spiritual and artistic development occurred alongside
another, the invention of the bow and arrow, which revolutionised hunting and also gave
humans a mechanical weapon of war and a musical instrument! Although the people of the
Late Stone Age neither tilled the soil nor kept livestock, we could not fail to recognise
ourselves in them.
New Arrivals
The Zambian Stone Age people probably resembled the
present-day San, but towards the end of the period here, there is evidence, from skeletal
remains, of Negroid physical features, the first indication that the hegemony of the
aboriginal population is coming to an end. During the centuries between
300BC and
400AD
Zambia was gradually taken over by Negroid people, who by the later date
had occupied the whole country, even if so sparsely in some areas that the earlier way of
life persisted into the present era.
The newcomers’ material culture was radically
different from that of the Stone Age. They were cultivators who kept domestic animals,
they mined and worked metals, made pottery and lived in lath and plaster houses. We cannot
know what language these
Early Iron Age
people used, but they were
possibly the first of the ‘Bantu’ speakers - Black Africans whose millennia-long
migration from, it is believed the Nigeria/Cameroon highlands, has made them dominant over
most of the continent south of roughly 7 degrees N - a process completed in South Africa
in 1994.
A glance at the National Heritage Map of Zambia shows that
Early Iron Age sites occur throughout the country and in the south this population was
probably dense enough to displace (or absorb) the aboriginals completely. Iron Age
technology triumphed, not merely because metal made good strong weapons, but because the
how, axe and the knife allowed agriculture to establish itself and to expand through the
forests. Slash and burn, known as chitemene is the prominent system of agriculture
in parts of Zambia to this day.
As iron ore does not outcrop everywhere, there was no doubt
trade between places producing the metal and others which could sell, for example, dried
fish from lakes or rivers, pottery or salt.
Besides Iron, copper began to be mined and refined about
350 AD. It was used to make jewellery and, cast in the for of a cross, as currency: as
copper is today Zambia’s largest industry that this has been a mining country for at
least 1600 years.
The archaeological record shows that by
800 AD
the Early Iron Age population was becoming less homogenous, with for instance, distinct
pottery styles in different areas and indications that political entities were developing.
Some of these were related to the control on mineral resources and trade routes, and by
1300
AD the Early Iron Age had been superseded by a more complex culture.
In the Zambezi Valley, a few dozen kilometres downstream
from the present Kariba Dam is a site called Ing-ombe Ilede (where the cow lies down)
which was uncovered accidentally during civil engineering works in 1960. Here, one below
the other, are villages dating from about 700 - 1000 AD and another from about 400 years
later. The first settlement is typically Early Iron Age, but the second testifies to a far
more sophisticated economy. The pottery is of a much higher quality than that found
elsewhere in the country: the dead, presumably only the rulers, were buried with beads of
gold (probably from the mines of Zimbabwe) and with copper currency crosses. There were
also large numbers of glass beads which could only have been imported from the Indian
Ocean seaboard, 1000 kilometres to the east of the site where the Muslim Swahili were
trading with Asia. (The Ing-ombe Ilede Treasure, as it is called, is on display at the
Livingstone Museum)
Ing-ombe Ilede was obviously a small commercial state or
principality, ruled by nobles, perhaps a plutocracy - and markedly different in structure
from the village societies of the preceding period. It was a prototype of the kingdoms
which characterised the Later Iron Age. They like Ing-ombe Ilede had firm trade patterns
with the distant outside world.
The centuries between
1500 and 1800 AD
saw
many of the peoples of Zambia organised into chieftaincies or monarchies. The Chewa in the
East, the Lozi in the West, the Bemba and Lunda in the North, were the largest of these,
all established under the influence, some as direct extensions of the large and powerful
Lunda Empire of the Mwata Yamvo in what is now southern Zaire. By the 18th Century,
probably much earlier, the empire was trading with the Atlantic Coast, and other states on
the eastern seaboard, where the world economy was represented by the Swahili city-states
from Somalia to south of the Zambezi delta. Copper, ivory, rhino horn had a ready market
as well as slaves.
The
European Factor
The wealth of the Indian Ocean trade was one of the
elements (another was to spread the Gospel) that in the 15th Century inspired the
Portuguese, who had recently reconquered their country from Muslim Moors, to embark on
their bold ‘Voyages of Discovery’.
Africa has been circumnavigated from east to west by a
Phoenician fleet in Pharaonic times, and the Portuguese were determined to do the same
from west to east and break the Muslim grip on the supply of spices from Asia to Europe,
which was being drained of bullion to pay for them. In 1498, Admiral Vasco da Gama, having
sailed his ships around the Cape of Good Hope, arrived at Calcutta in southern India, and
having bombarded and plundered the city, returned to Lisbon with a cargo of immense value.
By 1515 the Portuguese had through the force of arms seized
the Indian Ocean trade and, what is relevant to the course of events in Zambia,
established themselves on the coasts of Mozambique and Angola.
Although the Portuguese happily bought the ivory and copper
that central Africa produced, the slave rapidly became and for centuries remained a major
item of commerce. This monstrous crime against humanity was as easily condoned by
believers on God as was the holocaust by the Nazis.
The tentacles of the slave trade penetrated remorselessly
into the deep interior of central Africa, where, during the same period, the Later Iron
Age monarchies we have mentioned were being instituted.
Domestic slavery was part of the social order of these
central African states, with, for example, miscreants, criminals and prisoners of war held
in bondage. Very rarely did the Portuguese have to go raiding to capture slaves: by
selling the rulers goods such as cloth, rum, jewellery and firearms they drew the rulers
into their colonial economy as suppliers of slave labour for the mines and plantations
across the Atlantic.
Inevitably some of the African rulers became raiders,
preying on weaker peoples around them to maintain their supplies of imported luxuries.
Beside the influence brought to bear on Zambia by the
Swahili and the Portuguese, the effects of the Dutch (and subsequent British) colonisation
of the Cape and its hinterland from 1652 onwards would also be felt.
Invasions
from the South
Perhaps as a response to foreign intrusions in southern
Africa, Shaka of the Zulu, and Nguni clan, set about creating a centralised militaristic
state in the
early 19th century.
Surrounding peoples who did not
voluntarily agree to absorbtions in the growing Zulu empire had no option but to flee for
survival. Three of these groups were to make a forceful impact on Zambia, 1500 km to the
north of the Zulu heartland in eastern South Africa.
One of these was a Sotho clan from today’s Orange Free
State: its leader was Sebitwane and he named his people Kololo after his favourite wife.
Another was Mzilikazi, one of Shaka’s generals who quarreled with him and moved
away. After being defeated by the Dutch settlers in the Transvaal, he and his Ndebele
invaded and conquered Western Zimbabwe.
The third, like Mzilikazi an Nguni, was Zongendaba. He led
his followers out of Shaka’s domains in the 1820’s. These Ngoni (as they are
known today) crossed the Zambezi in 1835 and went northwards as far as Lake Tanganyika
where they settled for a while among the Bemba. In 1865, under Zongendaba’s successor
Mpenzeni I, they established themselves permanently in what is now Zambia’s Eastern
Province.
Mzilikazi conquered Zimbabwe in 1837, while Sebitwane has
crossed the Zambezi a few years previously and taken over territory just north of the
Victoria Falls. From there he marched west to conquer the Lozi kingdom of the Upper
Zambezi and founded his Kololo state.
It would be a mistake to talk of Zambia at this time as a
‘country’. The area defined by the present boundaries was occupied by various
kingdoms, for example the Bemba, the Lunda, the Kololo, the Chewa, the last much weakened
by Ngoni pillaging. It has been argued that these entities, if left alone, could have
developed into 20th Century nation states - central African Bhutans or Swazilands. But
there are no ifs in
history.
Missionaries
and Colonisers
 In 1840,
David
Livingstone,
a 27 year old Scottish doctor and ordained minister, sailed from Britain to
the Cape, to work as a medical evangelist with the London Missionary
Society. He was to open central Africa to the gaze of British imperialists.
Meanwhile, Portugal was planning to consolidate its African territories by
uniting Angola and Mozambique across the central plateau. Unlike the
Portuguese, the British knew next to nothing about the interior of this part
of Africa. "Armchair Geographers" as Livingstone called them, thought the
areas was a desert of blistering sand and were in the 19th Century as
ignorant as their predecessors in the 18th, who had been nicely satirised by
Jonathan Swift:
‘So geographers in Afric-maps, With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps, And o-er
uninhabitable Downs, Place Elephants for want of Towns.’
Livingstone was to give the true picture. He started his
activities at the L.M.S. station at Kuruman (in today’s Northern Cape), but soon
moved north to found his own mission at Kolobeng, near Gaberone, Botswana, where he stayed
for a decade. He made only one convert, Chief Sechele, who soon lapsed. Livingstone grew
bored with conventional missionising and started going on longer and longer journeys of
exploration, receiving help from a wealthy Englishman named William Cotton Oswell: the two
of them were the first Europeans to visit Lake Ngami in the middle of the Kalahari, led
there by Tswana guides who knew the way. Asked once to describe Livingstone, Oswell
remarked: ‘Well to look at the man you would think nothing of him, but he is a plucky
little devil.’
In 1851
Livingstone and Oswell crossed the
Kalahari to visit Sebitwane, whom we have already met, on the Upper Zambezi. Oswell in his
memoirs describes the King thus: ‘This really great Chief....just though stern, with
a wonderful power of attaching men to himself.’
Livingstone was equally impressed and thought it a sign of
God’s blessing that the Kololo language was similar to the Tswana he had become
fluent in. But at Sebetwane’s he had his first sight of the slave trade - the Kololo
nobles were wearing Manchester cloth obtained from the Portuguese in Angola in return for
ivory and slaves.
He and Oswell, who was also a staunch abolitionist,
concluded that the only way to stop the trade would be through a new type of mission where
a combination of Christianity and Commerce would lead to Civilisation: in fact a sort of
Christian development programme under which slaving would be replaced by
‘legitimate’ trade in for instance cotton, which grew in the area and for which
there was a large market in Britain. The scheme would be managed by carefully selected
Scottish settlers.
Sebitwane, though scarcely interested in Christianity
itself agreed that Livingstone could establish a mission in his country, if only because
it might afford him protection against his enemy Mzilikazi of the Ndebele, whose warrior
kingdom bordered his own.
Although Sebitwane died shortly after coming to this
agreement, his successor, Sekeletu undertook to honour it, and Livingstone promised to
establish the mission himself. All that remained was to find a suitable outlet to the sea.
The most economical passage for anticipated cotton (and
ivory) exports might be through the Portuguese port of Luanda on the Atlantic and
Livingstone decided to see if there was a feasible route from Barotseland (as the Kololo
Kingdom is called) to there.
The journey was financed by Oswell and Sekeletu, and after
an interlude at the Cape to get supplies, Livingstone set off from the Upper Zambezi in
1853. The return journey of over a year was a nightmare, the route totally unsuitable for
the export trade.
 Livingstone then convinced himself that the
Zambezi could be
‘God’s Highway’ to the Indian Ocean. Again with the support from Sekeletu,
Livingstone marched off eastwards down the river. He ‘discovered, and named after
Queen Victoria, the great
Waterfall, which
the Kololo has already called Mosi oa Tunya (The Smoke that Thunders). To the Leya,
who lived right beside it and held it sacred, it was called Shongwe (Rainbow).
After reaching the port of Quelemaine, Mozambique, towards
the end of 1856, Livingstone sailed to Britain by way of the Red Sea and the
Mediterranean. He was welcomed in triumph as the greatest explorer of the age.
Livingstone put his 15 months in Britain to good use. He
wrote and published Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
(1857), a
detailed and ideologically loaded account of his experiences, which became an
inspirational best-seller. He made speeches up and down the land promoting his idea of a
cotton exporting Christian venture in central Africa, with the Zambezi as its
‘highway’.
He resigned from the London Missionary Society, but
arranged for them to send a mission to the Kololo (thus by not going himself, breaking his
promise to Sekeletu). Meanwhile, the church of England backed a Universities Mission to
Central Africa, which Livingstone would have under his aegis.
To crown his glory he was appointed leader of a government
sponsored expedition to the Zambezi, the secret objective of which was to found a British
colony on the ‘healthy highlands’ (Livingstone’s phrase) near the present
town of Mazabuka in southern Zambia. There would be a port for steamers nearby at the
confluence of the Zambezi and Kafue Rivers.
But the whole grand scheme collapsed in ruin and
recrimination when it was found that the Cabora Basa gorge in Mozambique, which
Livingstone had not inspected, made God’s Highway totally unnavigable. The LMS
mission to the Kololo was likewise a complete failure as most of its members died.
After the Cabora Basa fiasco, Livingstone turned his
attention to the area around Lake Malawi (which he claimed falsely to have discovered) and
placed the Anglican mission at the foot of the highlands to its south. Its personnel
suffered deaths and disasters and the remnants were soon withdrawn.
At the end of 1863 the mandate of the Zambezi Expedition
expired. Livingstone returned to Britain under a cloud of failure and disappointment with
nothing seemingly accomplished.
By the end of 1865 he was off to Africa
again, seeking another place for his colony and searching in vain for the source of the
Nile. He was apparently lost in the heart of Africa when his much-dimmed reputation was
suddenly restored by the newspaper man H.M. Stanley in his reports and in his book How
I found Livingstone (1872).
 Livingstone died, his ambitions unfulfilled, at Chief
Chitambo’s village near the southern shore of the Bangweulu Swamps in Zambia in 1873.
Stanley had convinced the world that Livingstone was a hero-saint, and his embalmed body,
was carried to the coast by his servants and shipped to Britain, to be entombed with royal
honours in Westminster Abbey, London. A
memorial
has been erected on the spot in his honour.
Livingstone’s new reputation however, did not crumble
to dust with his remains. Within a year it had inspired Scottish missionaries to begin
work in Malawi in his name. Also in his name the French Huguenot Francois Coillard was
established in Barotseland a decade later and other Protestant missionaries were moving
into Zambia. Not to be outdone, the Roman Catholics sent Henri Dupont of the White Fathers
to convert the Bemba
Empire
With considerable help from both Coillard and Dupont, the
British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes’ British South African Company
(BSAC) had been able to take over the whole of Zambia by the end of the 19th century: that
Frenchmen should have served the British Empire so well is one of the quirks of history!
In 1911 the territory was named Northern Rhodesia, its capital the Town of
Livingstone, overlooking the
Victoria Falls. (In 1935 the seat of
government was moved to Lusaka).
Rhodes ambition was to make Africa British from Cape to
Cairo (hence the name of Lusaka’s main street, Cairo Rd). Even in Zambia did not
contain much mineral wealth - an important consideration for BSAC shareholders - the
territory had to be occupied of only to prevent the Portuguese from winning their age-old
claim to the area. It was now that the country’s borders came to be drawn, by
agreement with other colonial powers.
The BSAC’s treaties of submission with Zambia rulers
were often obtained by fraud and deceit and rulers who refused to capitulate willingly,
like Mpezeni of the Ngoni or Mwata Kazembe were dealt with by force. The BSAC was not a
benevolent Society. It was a business that had to make a profit and its rule was stamped
with that motive, though it may be said that by putting an end to the tyrannical rule of
cruel kings, to the slave trade, and to Ngoni raiding wars, it initially improved the lot
of many people.
Any BSAC hopes for substantial revenue from mining were
soon dashed and to obtain income it imposed the Hut Tax (payable in cash) on all African
males who had reached puberty. Tax revolts were surpressed with bullets, defaulters has
their houses burned down and were imprisoned if caught. Forced labour at a pittance by men
trying to forestall these penalties became the order of the day - tens of thousands were
sent to work in the South African or Southern Rhodesian mines: the railway between the
Victoria Falls and Katanga (Zaire) was financed from the Hut Tax - which consistently
turned a profit.
Some 20 000 Zambia forcibly recruited as porters for the
British forces in East Africa during the First World War perished of disease or
debilitation.
Parts of Zambia were virtually depopulated of able-bodies
men, large tracts of land (including the fine area where Livingstone would have
established his colony) were handed over to White settlers. Africans enjoyed little or no
say in their destiny, but the basic education provided for them by missionaries was not
long in producing a cadre of politically conscious individuals.
By 1923, Company rule had become an objectionable
anachronism for the British government, and in that year, the Colonial Office took over
the territory, proclaiming it a Protectorate where African interests would be paramount.
As far as Africans were concerned, Colonial Office rule may
have been more benign, in a paternalistic way, than the Company’s, but it was a form
of apartheid under which they were subject to racial discrimination including pass
laws and restrictions on the occupation of land, their political aspirations expected to
be fulfilled through a revamped tribal system. Whites meanwhile were a privileged elite
with a protected economic position and the beginnings of representative government.
Persons of mixed blood, and immigrants, mainly traders, from what are today India and
Pakistan held an ambivalent place under this regime.
King Copper
The discovery and opening up during the late
1920’s
and 1930’s of the rich underground orebodies along the Zambian Copperbelt
were soon to make that small region - 120 km long by forty km wide - one of the
worlds’ most concentrated and renowned mining areas.
A number of small gold and copper mines had operated during
BSAC times, but they were hardly viable, though the lead and Zinc development at Kabwe
(first called Broken Hill - where the prehistoric skull was found in 1921), was.
The deep orebodies of the Copperbelt, most of which were
located beneath ancient workings, were promising enough to attract large-scale investment
from abroad. Over the years, the industry came to be controlled by two large groups, the
South African Anglo American Corporation and Roan Selection Trust with a predominantly US
shareholding. The BSAC, which owned the mineral rights, was to earn handsome royalty
payments - 83 million pounds by 1963.
Exploitation of the reserves required a large labour force
and Zambians from all over the territory were drawn to the Copperbelt. While the migratory
system of the past tended to disperse people, the Copperbelt concentrated them so that a
permanent population of African miners, working in a modern, technically advanced industry
soon took root. They were essential to the production of up to 800 000 tons of refined
metal a year. Even when ‘tribal’ affiliations remained in force, they became
increasingly irrelevant in this new situation: a miner was primarily a miner, not a Tonga
or a Bemba, and the same applied to workers in the enterprises that sprang up around the
mines.
As much as colonial authorities promoted
‘tribalism’ in their system of direct rule through the chiefs, the Copperbelt
broke it down, creating a unity of interest that was eventually to be expressed in the
state motto ‘One Zambia One Nation’.
The management of the mines and all skilled jobs were in
the hands of Whites, many of them from South Africa and imbued with racialism. An
occupational colour bar prevented Blacks rising above manual or menial labour, but
strengthened their unity of purpose.
In 1935, they staged a strike against unfair taxes; in 1940
there was a pay strike with 13 miners killed. In 1948, the first African Mineworkers Union
was formed; in 1955 there was 100 % stoppage over pay conditions that lasted 58 days -
ending with victory for the miners. The mining companies now started seriously, if slowly,
to move Africans into management.
On the broadly political front, African nationalist feeling
had been growing since the 1939-45 world war, in which many Zambians fought for the Allies
in Burma. By the end of the 1940’s, the Northern Rhodesia African Nationalist
Congress, led by Harry Nkumbula, had been formed out of various Welfare Associations
initiated by the ‘mission graduates’ of the pre-war decades.
Federation
The nationalist movement was given impetus in the early 1950’s
when the Colonial Office agreed to have Northern Rhodesia joined in a
federation with Nyasaland (Malawi), a British ‘protectorate’, and
Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Southern Rhodesia, under White settler rule,
was bankrupt, and saw Northern Rhodesia, with its copper wealth as, to quote
one of its political figures, a ‘milch cow’.
Zambian opposition to Federation, in which few Whites and Asians were
prominent, was not strong enough to prevent its imposition in 1953. During
its ten years of existence, as Zambians had anticipated, hundreds of
millions of pounds were siphoned off to Southern Rhodesia. The White
settlers
there built up and impressive
economic structure while the ‘milch cow’ remained without a single decent tarred
highway, let alone a university or even an adequate school system or health service.
In the mid- fifties, the failed campaign against Federation
became a struggle for full independence. When battle-weary Nkumbula seemed inadequate to
the task, his ANC split. Younger and more dynamic nationalists formed first the Zambia
African National Congress (which was banned and its leaders imprisoned) and then in 1958,
the United National Independence Party. When he came out of detention, Kenneth David
Kaunda, a charismatic activist who had been a school teacher was given the leadership of
the new party. UNIP engaged in a continuous and largely peaceful campaign for independence
(though there was a violent uprising in the north if the country, put down by the Federal
Army).
By 1960 the British Government, in the famous ‘There
is a wind of change blowing through Africa’ speech by the Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan, had acknowledged that the days of colonial (or minority) rule on the continent
were coming to an end. The premier of the White dominated Federation Roy
Welensky,
threatened to declare unilateral independence from Britain, but was baulked. When Zambia
trade unions, including now powerful miners, threw their weight behind UNIP, the
nationalist momentum became unstoppable. Intense and often violent rivalry between
Kaunda’s UNIP and Nkumbula’s ANC was eventually neutralised in a transitional
coalition government.
Independence
The Federation was dissolved in 1963, its only enduring
monument the Kariba Dam across the Zambezi, intended by the federalists to bind Northern
and southern Rhodesia forever. In January the following year Zambia’s first universal
adult suffrage elections were held and though the ANC performed well in a few substantial
areas, UNIP won convincingly, Kaunda becoming Prime Minister. Then at midnight on
24th
October 1964, Zambia became an independent republic with him as president.
Kaunda remained in office for 27 years. Although during his
early years great strides were made in the areas of education, health and infrastructure,
his attempts to ‘decolonise the economy by nationalising it completely, produced only
inefficiency, corruption and a disastrous decline.
His one party participatory democracy; which gave UNIP sole
power, soon fossilised into an autocracy maintained by police-state methods.
In 1990 an obviously collapsing economy together with
political frustration, led to serious food riots and an attempted military coup
d’etat that had people dancing in the streets. When the disorders could be halted
with only firearms, opposition to the regime became so deep and widespread and the demand
for change so urgent that Kaunda had to concede.
Democracy
The one-party state was abolished and free elections were
held in October, 1991. Kaunda and UNIP were defeated eighty per cent to twenty per cent by
the newly formed Movement for Multi-party Democracy, a broad coalition of different
interest groups.
The MMD’s Frederick Chiluba, a trade unionist who had
been locked up by Kaunda, became Zambia’s second president. He promised democratic,
transparent and accountable governance, but inherited and empty treasury, a foreign debt
of seven billion US dollars and a country in a worse state than it had been when it won
its independence in 1964.
Whether the liberal free-market policies Zambia is now
experiencing will put the country back on track to prosperity is a subject of constant
debate.
Upon assuming the
presidency, Chiluba made christianity the official state religion. And on the economic
front the government embarked on an economic reform programme. It abolished foreign
exchange controls, passed new investment laws, set up a stock exchange, and embarked on a
privatisation programme which at one point was dubbed by the World Bank as the best on the
continent.
All this led to Zambia being courted enthusiastically by aid
donors, and saw a surge, in investor confidence in the country reflected in a growing
number of investors.
But in the '90's there was been a cooling in relations with the
donors amid negative perceptions of constitutional tinkering ahead of the November 1996
elections, which prevented former president Kenneth Kaunda from standing as a presidential
candidate. The elections in 1996 saw blatant
harassment of opposition parties.
In 2001 Chiluba announced he was going to
amend the constitution and stand for a third term. The public outcry was
immense amid increasing allegations of corruption. He finally agreed to
stand down and named Levy Mwanawasa as his successor. After a very
controversial election in Dec 2001 MMD won again and Mwanawasa sworn in as
President. The election was marked by administrative problems with at least
two parties filing legal petitions challenging the results.
Opposition parties currently hold a majority
of seats in the National Assembly. In a surprising turn of events, Mwanawasa
impressed the country by announcing that Chiluba's presidential immunity be
removed and that he be brought to trial for the corruption allegations while
in power. But as of 2007, it hasn't happened yet.
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