Zambian Independence
The territory had been administered by the British South Africa Company and then as a protectorate, its economy organised around copper mines worked by African labour under a colour bar and owned from London and Johannesburg. Kaunda's UNIP led the campaign against the Central African Federation, which had joined Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland in an arrangement Africans in the north saw as a mechanism for extending settler rule; the Federation dissolved in 1963 and independence followed a year later. High copper prices funded rapid expansion of schooling and health in the first decade, and the mines were nationalised in 1969. Zambia then absorbed the cost of its geography and its politics: it supported liberation movements in Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique and Namibia, hosting their headquarters and enduring cross-border raids, while its trade had to move through the territories it was opposing. The copper price collapsed in the mid-1970s, and the combination of a single-commodity economy, closed borders and accumulating debt produced a long contraction from which recovery only began in the 2000s.
- Year: 1964 CE
- Category: Political
