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:
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)