Bemba tradition remembers its own origin as a migration, a founding party moving east from the Kola kingdom of the Luba-Lunda world, in the region of the modern Democratic Republic of Congo, under a leader whose title, Chitimukulu, every paramount chief has carried since. Settling the plateau around what is now Kasama, the migrants built a kingdom on matrilineal descent and a chiefly hierarchy whose legitimacy rested on inherited relics and ancestral spirits rather than on conquest alone, a structure already old by the time British traders and administrators arrived in the 1890s.
Colonial Northern Rhodesia drew Bemba men in large numbers to the Copperbelt mines, and Christian missions, Catholic White Fathers prominent among them, followed the same roads. The Watchtower movement, which became Jehovah's Witnesses, spread rapidly through the same migrant labour networks from early in the twentieth century. None of this displaced the ancestral religion so much as ran alongside it: Audrey Richards, doing fieldwork among the Bemba in the early 1930s, documented Chisungu and the ancestor cult as living institutions in villages that were, by her own account, already substantially Christian. Zambia's 1991 constitutional declaration of itself as a Christian nation describes the country most Bemba live in today, without describing the ancestral custom that continues underneath it.