European colonialists introduced Western sports in Zambia in the early 1900s but strictly restricted participation by non-Europeans. Africans had the greatest access to these activities in the Copperbelt mining townships, where the mining authorities provided better sporting facilities for its workers than the government did for the rest of the colony. As a result, most of Zambia’s best athletes had their start in the Copperbelt region.

Although boxing, netball, volleyball, squash, rugby, golf, and athletics are all popular, football (soccer) is considered the national sport. Football, first introduced in Livingstone, has become so popular throughout the country that it is common to find streets empty and business at a standstill when an important international match is being played. The country was devastated in 1993 when all but three players on the national football team—as well as several coaches and officials—died in a plane crash on their way to a World Cup qualifying match. Among Zambia’s most revered players have been the late Godfrey Chitalu, who died in the 1993 crash, and Kalusha Bwalya, one of the best-loved sportsmen in the country. Bwalya, or “Great Kalu” as he is fondly known, led the national team that beat world champion Italy at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul.

Zambia’s Olympic committee was formed in 1964 and recognized by the International Olympic Committee that year. The country was known as Northern Rhodesia when it attended its first Games in 1964 but has since competed under the name Zambia, missing only the 1976 Montreal Games as part of the African boycott.

Media and publishing

The once-noted independence of the press was compromised by government and party control; ownership of the Times of Zambia passed to the party in 1982, and the Zambia Daily Mail has been in government ownership since 1965. The church-owned weekly National Mirror, founded in 1970, was able to take a more independent line, as has The Post, which first appeared in 1991 in the wake of moves toward a more pluralist political system.

The Zambia Educational Publishing House (formerly the Kenneth Kaunda Foundation) is a government-backed publisher of the works of Zambian authors and school textbooks. The University of Zambia publishes books and journals. Some other publishers are church-supported. Zambian scholars have contributed to knowledge in a wide range of disciplines, often in locally published academic journals, though economic difficulty has limited research opportunities.

The state-owned Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation operates both national and Line of Rail radio stations; programming is offered in a variety of languages. There are also commercial radio stations, and the Roman Catholic religious community operates several additional stations.

Archaeology and early history

Stone tools attributable to early types of humans have been found near Victoria Falls and in the far northeast, near Kalambo Falls. Excavations at Kabwe in 1921 revealed the almost complete skull of Homo sapiens rhodesiensis (“Broken Hill Man”), which may be well over 100,000 years old. However, by 20,000 bce the only surviving type of human throughout the Old World was the ancestor of modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, who developed the use of spears, the bow and arrow, game traps, and grindstones. Remains of such industries have been found in much of central and northern Zambia, sometimes near lakes and rivers but often in caves and rock-shelters.

During the 1st millennium ce, Zambia was occupied by migrants from farther north who probably spoke Bantu languages; they certainly cultivated crops and kept domestic stock. Traces of ironworking in central and western Zambia have been dated to the first five or six centuries ce. Iron tools and weapons greatly increased mastery over both man and nature and, together with food production, promoted population growth. Stone-using hunters and gatherers were liable to be overrun and absorbed by the food producers, though some survived on the edges of farming zones until a few centuries ago. The complex layers of paintings found in rock-shelters in northeastern Zambia indicate that the homes of stone-using hunters became the shrines of invading farmers.

In central Zambia, by the 6th century ce, the first food producers worked copper as well as iron. By about 1000 ce, copper ingots were being made at Kansanshi, at the western end of the Copperbelt, which implies that copper was being traded extensively and perhaps used as currency.

Early in the 2nd millennium ce, cattle keeping became more intensive on the Batoka Plateau of southern Zambia, while cotton spinning and pipe smoking were introduced. The associated pottery seems directly ancestral to that made locally in the 20th century. Similar evidence of cultural continuity over a long period has also been found in the resemblance between modern pottery in central, northern, and eastern Zambia and a kind of pottery that has been dated to the 12th century ce. The differences in pottery traditions have been ascribed to immigration. They also indicate thicker settlement of woodland through the adoption of chitemene cultivation, widespread in Zambia even today. That technique depends heavily on the use of iron axes, because seed is sown in the ashes of branches lopped from trees.

In southern Zambia, archaeology has thrown light on both the emergence of class distinctions and the beginnings of trade with the east coast. About the 14th century a few people were buried wearing ornaments of seashells and exotic glass beads near Kalomo and at Ingombe Ilede, near the confluence of the Zambezi and Kafue rivers. The latter burials also included gold beads, copper ingots, and iron bells of a kind later associated with chieftainship. Those metals would have come from south of the Zambezi, but they were probably being reexported down the river by Muslim traders, either Arab or African.

The period between about 1500 and 1800 remains relatively obscure. This was when copper was most intensively mined at Kansanshi, but it is not known who was buying it. The main evidence for these centuries consists of oral traditions. In much of Zambia, from the upper Kafue to the Malawi border, there are legends of tribes being founded by chiefly families who came from Luba country in what is now southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Such stories should not be taken at face value; they dramatize prolonged processes of population drift and the spread of cultural influences. By the 18th century, small-scale chieftainship was probably widespread in northern and eastern Zambia, but few of the tribal names current today would have meant much; such names refer not to long-enduring communities but to changing perceptions of cultural and political differences. In the early 19th century, however, there were at least four areas in which the growth of kingdoms was strengthening the sense of tribal identity: in the east, among the Chewa; in the northeast, among the Bemba; on the lower Luapula, among the Lunda (who had indeed invaded from the west about 1740); and on the upper Zambezi, among the Luyana (later called Lozi). In the Lunda and Luyana kingdoms a prosperous valley environment encouraged dense settlement and prompted the development of relatively centralized government.