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General Information
DID YOU KNOW?
Zambia has only 11 million inhabitants for a surface that is equal to the surface of France, the Netherlands,
Belgium and Switzerland combined.
Livingstone was the capital of Zambia until 1935. When a more central location was needed, Lusaka was
chosen to be the government administrative centre by a town planner from London. Lusaka was a desolate,
windswept place at the time, and it was not envisaged that there would be any industrial development.
Zambia is the world’s fourth largest producer of copper and the largest producer of cobalt.
Although Livingstone is very well known for making the Victoria Falls famous, he was almost totally unsuc-
cessful in his own aims, failing to set up any trade missions or to convert Africans to Christianity.
Despite a large number of different ethnic tribes and languages (over 73), Zambia is one of the only African
countries never to have suffered any wars or civil wars.
Zambia is renowned for its peacefulness and safety. 40,000 years ago, the Zambezi River was falling into
the Batoka Gorge, 90km away from the Victoria Falls. A long process of erosion resulted in the eight gorges
that now form the river’s slalom course after it has passed over the present Falls. Each gorge was once a
great waterfall.
Zambia holds two thirds of Southern African water resources. 60% of the land is arable and only 15% is
exploited.
Lake Tanganyika is the deepest of the Rift Valley lakes of Central / East Africa with a maximum depth of
1,470m. It is estimated to be about 15 million years old.
The main commercial street in Lusaka is named Cairo Road. During the British rule, the vision of Cecil
Rhodes was to connect adjacent African possessions of the British Empire through a continuous line from
Cape Town, South Africa, to Cairo, Egypt.
Although copper has been known and used for centuries in the Copperbelt area, the early European dis-
covery was made by prospector William Collier who discovered copper on the site where he had shot a
roan antelope in 1902; the first company to exploit the resources in Luanshya was called Roan Antelope
Mining Corporation.
The Kariba Dam was one of the most ambitious undertakings in Africa. 34,000 people had to be relocated.
It took five years, GB £78 million and a million cubic metres of concrete to build the wall 128m high that
formed a lake of 5,200 km2.