Siavonga is the largest shoreline town on the Zambian side of Lake Kariba. It’s top four economic mainstays are hydropower from Kariba Dam, wild kapenta fishing, tilapia farming on the lake, and tourism. Tourism is the reason I had come to town in April, 2022. I had come to see for seeing’s sake; and to touch, for the first time, the dam and the lake it holds back. The dam is an enormous hunk of curved concrete.

On September 7th, 2021 the president of Zambia twitted: But for any country to be part of the progress and technological innovation happening around the world, it must pay attention to developments in high-tech; both the consumer internet software tech such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Google, WeChat, and the electronics hardware tech producing chips to embed in smart devices: iPhones, Teslas, drones and for 5G roll-out—Zambia is not doing that.

Zambians went to the polls to elect a president on August 12, 2021—they needed to re-elect the incumbent or choose a new one, along with new 156-member parliament (an additional 10 members are nominated by the president for a total of 166). Sixteen presidential candidates took part in the polls. The results reported by the Elections Council of Zambia (ECZ) show that the two leading presidential candidates, Hakainde Hichilema (HH), of the United Party for National Development (UPND) and Edgar Chagwa Lungu (ECL) of the Patriotic Front (PF) received 98% of the 4.

On August 12, 2021, Zambians reprised, what we must by now consider settled habit—they elected a new government. They have made a custom of changing governments with a certain directness and dispatch to the process: no self-doubt, no longing regretful glance back over the shoulder, no breakup tears, no hint or hedge leaving the door open for a future reunion in the curt goodbye. They did so for the first time in 1964 when the Zambian flag; amber, black, red, and green replaced the Union Jack and unfurled atop flag poles across the newly independent country of Zambia; again in 1991 when they said goodbye to the first Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda; and again in 2011 when they bid farewell to the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy and, once more, in the latest iteration, when they said enough to the Patriotic Front (PF) and choose the United Party for National Development (UPND) to manage their affairs.

Esri Story Maps combine maps with narrative text, images, and multimedia content to create compelling user experiences. This is a story map about the discovery and mining of copper in Zambia and its inexorable influence on the country’s affairs. The country is so intertwined with copper that copper shows up in many of its symbols. Copper’s influence, however, reaches beyond mere symbolism—it exerts influence in other ways that impact Zambians in their daily lives.