Zambia

Zambia: capital Lusaka, population 21.9M, area 752,612 km². The 61st most populous country, in Africa. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

Zambia is landlocked on a high plateau between the Congo basin and the Zambezi, which forms its southern border and drops 108 metres at Victoria Falls. Kalambo Falls in the north has yielded the oldest known wooden structure anywhere, and a mine at Kabwe gave up the first archaic human fossil ever found in Africa. Northern Rhodesia became Zambia on 24 October 1964; the Copperbelt in the north, the walking safaris of the Luangwa valley and the bat swarms of Kasanka mark much of the country today.

• Archaeologists announced in 2023 that two worked wooden beams at Kalambo Falls had been shaped and locked together 476,000 years ago, the earliest known structure built by any hominin.
• Miners at Broken Hill turned up a heavy-browed skull in 1921, the first archaic human fossil found in Africa; dated to about 300,000 years, it is now classed as Homo heidelbergensis.
• As Lake Kariba filled behind its new dam, Rupert Fothergill's teams spent 1958 to 1964 lifting more than 6,000 stranded animals off shrinking islands and carrying them to dry land.
• An air force plane carrying most of the national football team crashed off Libreville on 27 April 1993, killing all thirty aboard; Zambia won its first Africa Cup of Nations in that city in 2012.

• Edward Mukuka Nkoloso trained his Afronauts by rolling them downhill inside oil drums and planned to launch his drum-shaped rocket from Independence Stadium on 24 October 1964.
• Godfrey Chitalu scored 79 goals for Zambia, still the record for an African man in international football, and was coaching the squad when it boarded the 1993 flight.
• Kalusha Bwalya was named African Footballer of the Year in 1988 and placed twelfth in the 1996 FIFA world player vote, the first nominee to have played that whole year outside Europe.
• Namwali Serpell won the Caine Prize in 2015 for the story The Sack, then put Nkoloso and his teenage Afronaut into her 2019 novel The Old Drift.

• Victoria Falls drops 108 metres across a chasm 1,708 metres wide, the largest sheet of falling water anywhere; the Lozi name Mosi-oa-Tunya means the smoke that thunders.
• Up to ten million straw-coloured fruit bats crowd into two hectares of swamp forest in Kasanka each year from October to December, the largest mammal migration on record.
• South Luangwa was set aside as a game reserve in 1938 and covers 9,050 square kilometres along the Luangwa River, where Norman Carr made the guided walking safari a way to see game.
• Kalambo Falls pours 235 metres in a single drop at the southeast end of Lake Tanganyika, the tallest waterfall in both Zambia and Tanzania, into a gorge up to 300 metres deep.

• When the upper Zambezi floods, the Kuomboka moves the Litunga of the Lozi from Lealui out on the plain to Limulunga on higher ground; the word means to get out of water.
• Boys finishing the Luvale mukanda initiation are welcomed home by masked makishi dancers, whose masks are burned or buried afterwards; newer ones have been carved as radios and video players.
• Zamrock bands such as WITCH, Amanaz and Rikki Ililonga's Musi-O-Tunya welded Zambian playing to psychedelic and hard rock in the early 1970s, drawing on Black Sabbath, Cream and the Rolling Stones.
• Zambia's flag, adopted on 24 October 1964, puts its fish eagle and three coloured stripes at the fly rather than the centre or the hoist, where nearly every other national emblem sits.

What is the capital of Zambia?

The capital of Zambia is Lusaka.

What is the population of Zambia?

Zambia has about 21.9M people — the 61st most populous country in the world.

How big is Zambia?

Zambia covers 752,612 km², making it the 38th largest country by area.

Which region is Zambia in?

Zambia is in Eastern Africa, Africa.