History
The Bemba people are descendants of inhabitants of the Luba kingdom, which existed in what is now the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in north-eastern Zambia.
Since British rule, English has been Zambia's main literary language, and is now its only official language. However, the Bemba language has played a prominent political role. Zambia's first president, Kenneth Kaunda, though Malawian by descent, was raised in a Bemba-speaking community, and every Zambian president since has been a Bemba-speaker. In the years after the MMD took power in 1991, it was accused numerous times of promoting Bemba over other regional languages in the country.
Read more about this topic: Bemba Language
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)