Decades earlier, missionaries had already planted the seeds: at the Lubwa Mission in Chinsali, where Kenneth Kaunda and Zambia's first political class came of age; at Mbereshi, where girls first learned to read; at Niamkolo, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, where a church built in 1895 now stands roofless, slowly being reclaimed by the very land it once tried to convert. Some of these structures still serve their communities. Others stand empty, waiting for someone to explain what they meant. More than sixty years after Independence, Zambia is still asking the very question its missionaries first raised.
In December 1991, nearly two months after taking office following Zambia’s first multi-party election since 1968, President Frederick Chiluba declared Zambia a Christian nation, giving the nation an identity many Zambians still carry proudly to this day. But this declaration, though relatively ‘new’ to the country, was arguably a century in the making.
Christian missions can be traced back to Lake Tanganyika in the late nineteenth century, decades before the Crown took direct control of Northern Rhodesia; in some places, the Cross really did precede the flag. Before Independence, missions collectively became a dominant force in education, and churches still hold significant influence in politics and society today. In Mpulungu, near Lake Tanganyika, the now-abandoned Niamkolo Church, built by the London Missionary Society between 1895 and 1896, is widely recognised as Zambia’s oldest surviving stone church. It stands today as a colonial-era structure metaphorically reclaimed by the very landscape it once tried to convert.
Further west, in Luapula, the Mbereshi Mission, founded in 1900, established what is widely regarded as Northern Rhodesia’s first dedicated girls’ boarding school in 1915, giving many young girls a chance at literacy. Its hospital still functions today as an institution of the United Church of Zambia (UCZ). Mission work at Lubwa began in 1905 under the Livingstonia Mission of the United Free Church of Scotland. Knowingly or unknowingly, this Mission was to become one of the most impactful sites in Zambian history. Dr Kenneth Kaunda studied and later taught there. Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe also studied and taught there, while Chibesa ‘Mama’ Kankasa was born at Lubwa. Lubwa’s network of mission-educated teachers and activists helped turn the area into one of the birthplaces of Zambian nationalism.
All these structures have one thing in common: they were established by missions bringing the word of God to Northern Rhodesia, often with local labour. Their significance in shaping the nation is still felt today, and each is representative of our collective search for a Messiah and Saviour from the social, political and economic troubles of the present day.
Zambia’s relationship with Christianity stretches back more than a century, and there are several relics that remind us of it. These serve as critical reminders not just of where we are, but of where we have come from. Their stories are more intertwined with Zambian history than is often acknowledged. More than 60 years after Independence, Niamkolo still stands. It has not been demolished. Its walls were repaired, but its roof was never restored. It just stands.
It starts with how these missions actually operated. Missionaries needed chiefs’ permission to work in their territories, and because of this, they sometimes built relationships and structures before colonial authority had fully secured control. Bishop Joseph Dupont became so entangled in Bemba succession politics that, according to historical accounts, a dying Chief Mwamba asked him to oversee the chiefdom while a successor was chosen. Dupont later called on the British South Africa Company to intervene, helping extend Company control into Bemba territory. François Coillard of the Paris Evangelical Mission had a similar hand in it further west: his long relationship with King Lewanika helped open the door to the 1890 Lochner Concession, and with it a new chapter in how Barotseland entered Company rule.
Not every missionary chased that kind of power, though. Father Jean-Jacques Corbeil, a French-Canadian priest of the White Fathers, arrived in the region in 1943 and spent decades documenting Bemba culture at a time when mbusa, symbolic clay emblems used in Bemba initiation ceremonies, and their associated songs and oral texts were already fading from practice. His collections formed the foundation of the Moto Moto Museum in Mbala, which opened as one of Zambia’s national museums in 1974. He and fellow priest Father Van Rijthoven also reportedly sheltered independence activists and their families from the colonial authorities, highlighting the complex relationship between the Church and the State over time.
Without Corbeil’s work, some argue, certain Bemba practices might never have been documented at all. The museum, like the hospitals, schools and mission buildings scattered across the country, still serves the community around it and, in that sense, delivers on what it came to do. Missionaries elsewhere did similar work, giving languages like Bemba, Nyanja and Lozi some of their earliest standardised written forms, grammars and translations: a side effect some see as a genuine gift and others see as another way indigenous traditions were reduced to something to be catalogued and displayed.
None of this is to say every mission was purely spiritual: some served and favoured empire above ‘the Lord’s work’. But not everyone who knelt at the missionaries’ altar did so blindly. Alice Lenshina, who emerged from the Presbyterian world around Lubwa and was baptised there after her 1953 religious experience, would go on to challenge that legacy from the inside.
After recovering from a serious illness that left her in a coma in 1953, she claimed that she had died, met Jesus and returned with one mission: to cleanse her people. She established the Lumpa Church in Chinsali, and at its height, estimates of its membership ranged from about 50,000 to 150,000 people. With the labour of her followers, she built a massive cathedral at Kasomo, which became known as ‘Zion’. The church aligned itself with neither the colonial administration nor the UNIP nationalist movement. Official accounts portrayed Lenshina and her followers as rejecting all earthly government and also accused them of refusing to pay taxes and running their own courts. That was the official story, at least. Later historians have challenged parts of it, but the Lumpa did establish separate villages where members lived primarily among fellow believers. The months leading up to Independence in 1964 saw clashes among Lumpa followers, UNIP supporters and state security forces in what became known as the bloody Lumpa Uprising.
Kenneth Kaunda, a beneficiary of the Lubwa Mission and then prime minister of self-governing Northern Rhodesia, declared a state of emergency as his government sent security forces against the independent African Christian movement led by another Lubwa figure, Alice Lenshina. When she surrendered in August 1964, she was detained without trial. Although she was released in 1975, she spent her final years under house arrest and died in 1978. In May 1970, Kaunda ordered that the cathedral at Kasomo be destroyed. The Mission had, in its own way, produced two radicals: one who fought to build the nation, and one who tried to build an entirely different order in its place. Kaunda was hailed as a hero. Lenshina was called a rebel. Either way, the religious world that shaped them watched them both turn against the rule it had helped build.
Fast-forward to 1996, and Chiluba, a self-described born-again Christian, had moved the declaration from a State House pronouncement into the Constitution’s preamble. Kaunda, the son of a missionary, never made this declaration. Neither the Zambia Episcopal Conference nor the Christian Council of Zambia had been consulted before the 1991 declaration. However, in January 1992, they joined the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia in giving it qualified support while raising concerns about the lack of consultation, preparation and safeguards for religious minorities. Catholic leaders later opposed its inclusion in the 1996 Constitution. Some of that resistance made sense: churches had arrived in Zambia at different times, carrying different theologies, nationalities and relationships with the colonial administration, and one label flattened all of it into a single umbrella. Movements like Lenshina’s had emerged in part because Christianity in Zambia was never really one thing to begin with. Under Kaunda, that plurality had remained unnamed. Chiluba’s declaration, intentionally or not, reduced it to a footnote.
Supporters saw it differently: a young democracy finally naming what most of the country already believed, giving Zambians a shared identity and a common language.
Today, the monuments left behind can be seen as inverse monuments. Niamkolo, as mentioned earlier, is abandoned and roofless, being consumed by the land it once sought to convert. Mbereshi’s hospital, on the other hand, still serves Mwansabombwe more than 60 years after Independence, doing the same job it was built for before universal adult suffrage reached the territory. The State did not replace it. Instead, it supports it as a grant-aided institution while the Church continues the work the Mission began. And the buildings, whether standing or fallen, represent our continuing collective search for a Messiah: sites where Zambia is still negotiating who gets to speak for God, and who gets praised or punished for claiming to do so.
