Across the plateaus that became Zambia, the high god was Leza, remote but acknowledged in proverb and prayer, while daily religion worked through ancestors, territorial spirits and the diviners who read misfortune's causes. David Livingstone died kneeling at Chitambo in 1873, and his followers buried his heart under a mpundu tree there before carrying his body to the coast, an event that made the region a target of memorial mission fervour.
The London Missionary Society, the Paris Evangelical mission in Barotseland, Scottish Presbyterians in the northeast and the White Fathers all planted stations, and the copper towns later mixed their converts into new urban congregations. The interwar Copperbelt also bred independent movements, most notably the Watchtower or Kitawala preachers whose millennial message unsettled colonial administrators, and later Alice Lenshina's Lumpa Church.
At independence in 1964 Kenneth Kaunda, a mission son, preached a gentle humanism, but it was Frederick Chiluba who in 1991 declared Zambia a Christian nation, a phrase written into the constitutional preamble in 1996 and defended fiercely in public life since. Pentecostal churches have boomed under its banner, a national house of prayer has been built, and candidates for office still contend over who best embodies the declaration.
Sources A History of ZambiaAndrew Roberts with President Frederick Chiluba and Zambia: Evangelicals and Democracy in a "Christian Nation" (in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa)Isabel Apawo Phiri, in Terence O. Ranger (ed.)