The Zambian Flag

The Zambian Flag

So this is the Zambian flag then, for those readers who are at all interested, and as far as flags go, I quite like it. It's cheerful and it's colours seem to match the country. Some flags strike me as a bit crap although it does seem to fit in and seems evocative for the people of Zambia. You might like it or not, it doesn't really matter and i suppose I could have written about it before but I didn't and that probably doesn't matter either. Things are in no chronological order. This seems a good a point as ever. The first time i visited the country i was embarking on a new career in primary school teaching and had arranged, for experience, to work in two Lusaka primary schools. It was during teaching a class in the first, a school for children with, or orphaned through HIV/ Aids, that I learnt about the colours of the Zambian flag. I possibly learnt more at the school than the children I was supposed to be teaching, and i'll expand on that some other time. I taught them about slightly unimpressive wildlife in England and inadvertently, how to say words like "boat" in a Yorkshire accent. I overheard them arguing at play time about it and they were adamant that I didn't speak English; they did.  They taught me games and what to do when you find a poisonous toad, of which there are many  found. The Zambian tribes are suspicious of reptiles; they harbour bad spirits. 
Anyway, the flag, or the colours of it are as above seen fluttering down some street somewhere and the reasons for each are something like as follows:

• Green: Prety obvious really when you get there. A lot of plants grow very quickly in Zambia, during the rainy season, and they need them to, quite badly. If the rains fail, and they did in recent memory, a year in the 90's I think, and the country was a bit buggered. There is a fine and fragile line here. There is a lot of  wild bush where the elephants live. Giraffes and literally tonnes of hippos. There are literally about two and very precious as a result, balck rhinos. All their mates and ancestors have been wiped out someway or another.

• Orange: is for the seams of natural copper that are found in the north central and resulting main industrial  area of the country, the Copperbelt This, I believe, and all future rights to any more ever found has been sold to the Chinese. Copper ore also contains all the silver and gold in the country too and this was like a free gift with the copper. I'n no business man but the move doesn't strike me as the shrewdest.

• Black: this represents the Bantu people of southern Africa.

• Red: is the colour of the blood of the Bantu people that has been bled here and there in history, notably in the case of the Zambian flag, during the move towards independence in the second half of the last century. It wasn't the bloodiest of transitions but there were riots and people died. I don't know that much about it.

• Eagle: the Sea Eagle is the national bird of Zambia. Although there is no sea there are loads of Sea Eagles in the branches of the trees that line the Zambezi. That's where I've seen them. They sit up there looking like the national bird. I don't know anything more about the sea eagle and neither did anybody else in the class that I asked apart from them being brown feathers on the body with a white neck and head. People don't seem to get as excited as we do in this country about wildlife. It's not that they take it for granted, it's more like they just coexist peacefully with it. It's almost just there with them, or down the road. The regular victims of crocodile attacks don't though. Saying that, there is a zoo in Lusaka that I haven't been too, don't know who does and can't really get my head round but then there's a few things like that. It's true though.