Two countries start with the letter Z: Zambia and Zimbabwe. They are neighbours in south-central Africa, they share the Zambezi river and Victoria Falls between them, and neither name existed anywhere on a map before 1964 — both were coined at independence to replace a colonial label.
Both names are younger than the jet engine
This is the fact that makes Z interesting rather than merely short. Until the 1960s the region was administered by Britain as Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia, both named after Cecil Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company had chartered the occupation of the territory in the 1890s. Neither name is on a map now:
- Northern Rhodesia became Zambia at independence in October 1964, taking its name from the Zambezi river that forms much of its southern boundary.
- Southern Rhodesia declared independence unilaterally in 1965 as Rhodesia under a white-minority government, was never recognised internationally, and after a fifteen-year war became Zimbabwe in April 1980. The name comes from Great Zimbabwe, the stone-built city that was the capital of a substantial medieval state — the ruins are usually read as dzimba dza mabwe, houses of stone, in Shona.
So the letter Z owes both its entries entirely to post-colonial renaming. Pick a different decade and Z is as empty as W. That pattern runs across the alphabet, and we cover more of it in countries that changed their names.
Zambia
- Capital: Lusaka
- Area: about 752,600 km² — a little larger than Texas
- Population: roughly 21 million
- Neighbours: eight — Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe
- Coastline: none; Zambia is landlocked
Zambia is a high plateau country, mostly between 1,000 and 1,400 metres, which moderates a climate its latitude would otherwise make punishing — Lusaka sits at about 1,280 metres and has a far milder year than its position roughly 15 degrees south of the equator suggests. The single wet season, running broadly November to April, is heavy enough to make much of the country seasonally green and the dry months genuinely dry.
Eight land neighbours is a lot; only a handful of African states have more, and it leaves Zambia dependent on other countries' territory for every tonne of trade. That dependence drove one of the more remarkable infrastructure projects of the Cold War. The TAZARA railway, built with Chinese assistance in the early 1970s, runs some 1,860 km from the Copperbelt to Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean, and it was constructed for an explicitly political reason: to give Zambian copper a route to the sea that did not pass through white-ruled Rhodesia, Portuguese Mozambique or apartheid South Africa.
Copper is the other thing to know. The Copperbelt in the north, continuing across the border into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has dominated the Zambian economy for a century, with the predictable consequence that national fortunes track the world copper price closely. Zambia is also one of the more urbanised countries in the region, a legacy of mining towns rather than of manufacturing.
Zimbabwe
- Capital: Harare
- Area: about 390,800 km² — roughly half of Zambia, comparable to Japan
- Population: roughly 16 million
- Neighbours: four — Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia
- Coastline: none; also landlocked
Zimbabwe occupies the highveld between the Zambezi in the north and the Limpopo in the south, a plateau mostly above 1,000 metres that made the territory attractive to European settlement and gave it, at independence in 1980, one of the more developed economies and one of the strongest education systems on the continent. Its eastern edge rises again in the Eastern Highlands along the Mozambican border, the wettest part of the country.
The subsequent trajectory is one of the sharpest economic reversals recorded anywhere in peacetime: land redistribution from 2000, the collapse of commercial agricultural output that had made the country a food exporter, and hyperinflation severe enough that Zimbabwe abandoned its own currency in 2009 in favour of the US dollar. Mineral wealth remains — platinum group metals, gold, chrome, and lithium deposits that have attracted serious recent investment — but it has not substituted for what agriculture used to earn.
The country's stone heritage is genuinely unusual. Great Zimbabwe's dry-stone walls, built without mortar between roughly the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, enclose an area that housed several thousand people at its height, and the site was the centre of a trading state whose reach extended to the Indian Ocean coast — Chinese and Persian goods have been excavated there. Colonial-era accounts routinely attributed the construction to Phoenicians or other outsiders; the archaeological consensus is unambiguous that it was built by ancestors of the region's Shona-speaking population.
The river they share, and the waterfall on the line
The Zambezi forms most of the border between the two countries, and about halfway along that stretch the river drops more than 100 metres into a narrow basalt gorge. Victoria Falls — Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders — is roughly 1,700 metres wide, which by the combined measure of width and height makes it the largest single sheet of falling water on earth, though it is neither the tallest waterfall nor the widest when those are measured separately.
The falls sit precisely on the boundary, and both countries run a tourism industry from their own bank: Livingstone on the Zambian side, Victoria Falls town on the Zimbabwean, linked by a bridge completed in 1905. Flow is strongly seasonal — the Zambian side can reduce to bare rock late in the dry season while the Zimbabwean side keeps water year-round, which is why guidance on when to visit differs by bank.
Downstream the river was dammed in the late 1950s to create Lake Kariba, for decades among the largest reservoirs in the world by volume, which the two states jointly own and operate for hydroelectricity through a shared authority. Both are therefore unusually exposed to drought in the Zambezi basin: when the lake level falls, both countries load-shed at the same time, and severe drought years have cut generation at Kariba to a fraction of capacity. The dam also displaced tens of thousands of Tonga people from the valley floor, a grievance still live on both banks. Our guide to the Zambezi follows the river along its full course.
How the two Z countries compare
They are frequently treated as a pair, and on some measures they behave like one — but the differences are substantial:
- Size: Zambia is nearly twice Zimbabwe's area, but the two have populations within about five million of each other, so Zimbabwe is markedly more densely settled.
- Neighbours: eight for Zambia, four for Zimbabwe — a difference that shapes trade routes, migration and border management very differently.
- Economic base: Zambia is a copper economy that never had a large settler agricultural sector; Zimbabwe had one of the largest in Africa and its loss defined the last quarter-century.
- Independence: 1964 by negotiation for Zambia; 1980 after a long war for Zimbabwe. The sixteen-year gap explains much of the divergence, including why Zambia spent the 1970s building a railway to avoid its neighbour.
Language tells a similar story of difference beneath a shared border. Zambia recognises English as its official language over roughly seventy local languages, with Bemba dominant in the Copperbelt and Nyanja in and around Lusaka — no single indigenous language comes close to a majority. Zimbabwe's picture is more concentrated: Shona is spoken by something like three-quarters of the population and Ndebele by most of the remainder in the south-west, a division that has structured the country's politics since independence and produced serious violence in Matabeleland in the 1980s. Zimbabwe's 2013 constitution went on to recognise sixteen official languages, one of the highest counts of any country in the world.
The river itself belongs to neither exclusively. The Zambezi rises in north-western Zambia, loops through Angola and back, collects the Kafue and the Luangwa, forms the Zambia–Zimbabwe border for hundreds of kilometres, then crosses Mozambique to reach the Indian Ocean after roughly 2,570 km — the fourth-longest river in Africa and the longest flowing east from the continent.
The Z names that came and went
Two other Z states have existed within the last sixty years, which is why older atlases disagree with newer ones:
- Zaire — the name of the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1971 to 1997. For 26 years the letter Z had three countries, not two, and the largest of them by far.
- Zanzibar — briefly independent in 1963–64 before merging with Tanganyika to form Tanzania. It remains a semi-autonomous part of that union, with its own president and legislature.
Add the near-misses that were never sovereign — the Zulu Kingdom, absorbed into British southern Africa in the nineteenth century; Zealand, the Danish island; Zurich, a Swiss canton — and Z looks less like a naturally thin letter and more like one whose membership has churned. It stands at two, having been at three inside living memory, and both current members are younger than most of the people reading their names. For the opposite experience, the countries beginning with A include names in continuous use for centuries.