Lusaka

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The capital and largest city of Zambia, a landlocked country in southern Africa
2. A major city in southern Africa that serves as the seat of government for Zambia
3. The principal urban center and administrative capital of the nation of Zambia in central southern Africa

Etymology: The city's origins lie in a railway. In the early 1900s, as the line was pushed north through what was then Northern Rhodesia, a camp grew up on the plateau near a small existing village of the Lenje people. The place took its name from that village, and the name is generally given as the name of a local headman, though the exact origin of the name is uncertain. For its first decades the town was a modest administrative and railway centre. Its rise came in 1935, when the colonial government moved the territory's capital there from Livingstone, closer to the copper belt, whose mining towns were then driving the territory's economy. When Zambia gained independence in 1964, Lusaka kept the role.