Chambishi
Chambishi is a town on the Copperbelt Province of Zambia. According to the 2010 Census its population stands at slightly above 51,000. It is located in the approximate centre of the province, and between the cities of Kitwe and Chingola.
It was re-established in 1963 as a company township for the mine workers of Chambishi Mine which was under Chibuluma Mine of Kalulushi. This was after an announcement by Sir Ronald Prain, Chairman of Roan Selection Trust, in May 1962 that the company was going to open up the Chambishi open pit-pit mine at a cost of 7.5 million British Pounds.
Chambishi has been under civic administration of Kalulushi Municipal Council from 1963, another mining town on the Copperbelt Province of Zambia.
The name Chambishi comes from two Lamba words “Cha” and “mbishi”. Cha means “belonging to” or “an area of” while “mbishi” is a Lamba word for a zebra. The area was home to larger herds of zebras a century ago. Therefore, Chambishi means a place of zebras.
Captain George Grey is credited to be the founder of Chambishi in 1899. He was a prospector for Tanganyika Concessions Limited a company formed by Robert Williams a former associate of Cecil Rhodes.
The same year 1899 Grey visited a village in North-Western Zambia under Chief Kansanshi who showed him a nearby copper mine, to which Grey gave the chief’s name.
Grey with four prospectors and 25 armed Africans, claimed the Chambishi, Nkana (Kitwe) and Kansanshi copper workings on the southern side of the border. He also played a major role in discovering major copper ore bodies in Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He died in 1911 at the age of 45 in a Nairobi hospital, Kenya after two of his bullets failed to stop a charging lion on the Kapiti plains.
William Collier a prospector working for Sir Edmund Davies, pegged claims on the Luanshya Mine and Bwana Mkubwa deposits in 1902, making the year one of the important ones in the history of mining in Zambia.
The following year Collier pegged further claims around the ancient workings at Chambishi, where the peggings of an earlier prospector, George Grey in 1899, had been slightly off target.
After the First World War the demand for copper by the automobile and the electrical industries skyrocketed.
Another important development was the treatment of lower grade ores using the flotation method by Minerals Separation Limited of London. Copper sulphide ores in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) became more attractive than oxide ores in Katanga. This is because the recovery of copper from the mine’s ores improved from 50% to 90% . This last discovery changed the outlook for Zambia forever.
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