Zambia Emoji

🇿🇲 the Zambia flag emoji shows a green field with an orange eagle in flight and, under it at the fly end, three vertical stripes of red, black and orange. The sequence is made of two regional indicator symbols, 🇿 and 🇲, for region code ZM; supported devices render the pair as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters ZM instead, but whoever opens your message on a phone still sees the flag.

The flag was first raised on 24 October 1964, when Northern Rhodesia became the independent Republic of Zambia, and its green was made a little brighter in 1996. The Zambia flag colours have official meanings: green for the land and its natural resources, red for the struggle for freedom, black for the people of Zambia and orange for the country's mineral wealth, above all copper. Where flags don't show, people write them as hearts, 💚❤️🖤🧡, in bios, usernames and every Independence Day post.

The bird on the flag is the African fish eagle 🦅, Zambia's national bird; it stands for the people's ability to rise above the nation's problems, so this is the "Zambia flag bird" people ask about. On the coat of arms, an eagle rises above a crossed pick ⛏️ and hoe and a shield of black and white wavy lines that stand for the Victoria Falls; a man and a woman support the shield, standing on a base with a mine shaft, a maize cob 🌽 and a zebra 🦓. Its motto is One Zambia, One Nation 🤝, the watchword of the first president, Kenneth Kaunda, for a country of more than seventy ethnic groups.

Zambia currency symbol: the kwacha, K and ngwee

The Zambian kwacha (ISO code ZMW) is written with a capital K before the amount, as in K50 or K 1,000; banks and exchange boards write ZMW 50. There is no special Unicode sign for it, so the "kwacha symbol" you can copy is simply the letter K, and in chats people add 💵, 🪙 or 💰. One kwacha is divided into 100 ngwee.

Both names come from the independence struggle. Kwacha means "dawn" in Nyanja and Bemba, and Kwacha ngwee!, roughly "the bright dawn has come", was the cry of the freedom movement, which is why 🌅 fits any post about the currency. The kwacha replaced the Zambian pound in 1968. In January 2013 it was rebased: three zeros were dropped, so 1,000 old kwacha became 1 new kwacha, and the code changed from ZMK to ZMW, which is why older prices and articles show much bigger numbers. Malawi's currency is also called the kwacha, with its own code, MWK.

Victoria Falls, the Zambezi and South Luangwa in emoji

Zambia's best-known place is Mosi-oa-Tunya, "the smoke that thunders", the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi, which it shares with Zimbabwe. In flood season, roughly March to May, the spray rises hundreds of metres and can be seen from far away, so 🌊💦🌫️ is the honest emoji for it, with 🌈 for the rainbow that hangs in the spray on sunny days and 🌕 for the lunar rainbow visitors come to see on full-moon nights. The town on the Zambian side is Livingstone, named after the Scottish explorer who saw the falls in 1855.

The 1905 Victoria Falls Bridge 🌉 between the two countries is where people bungee jump; below it the Zambezi gorges are some of the best-known white-water rafting runs in the world 🚣, and in the low-water months a natural rock pool at the very lip of the falls, the Devil's Pool, lets swimmers 🏊 look straight over the edge. 🚁 is the "flight of angels" over the gorges, 🛥️ a houseboat on Lake Kariba, and 🎣 the tigerfish anglers chase on the upper Zambezi.

Inland, South Luangwa is famous for leopards 🐆, for its crowded hippo pools 🦛 and for Thornicroft's giraffe 🦒, a kind found only in the Luangwa Valley; it is also where the walking safari 🥾 began. Add 🐘 🦁 🐃 🐊 for a game drive in the 🚙, 🦏 for the black rhinos brought back to North Luangwa, and 🦇 for Kasanka, where millions of straw-coloured fruit bats arrive each year from about October to December, often called the largest mammal migration on Earth.

Zambian food emoji: nshima, ifisashi and kapenta

Every proper Zambian meal is built on nshima, a stiff porridge of white maize meal, rolled into a ball by hand and dipped into a relish, ndiwo in Nyanja, umunani in Bemba. In emoji that is 🌽🍲. 🥬🥜 is ifisashi, greens such as pumpkin or rape leaves cooked in a groundnut sauce, 🐟 is kapenta, the small sardine-like fish dried in the sun and fried with tomato and onion, or a whole bream from the lake, and 🐔 a village chicken, slow-cooked and tougher and tastier than a shop bird.

🐛 is no joke: ifinkubala, caterpillars picked in the rainy season and dried or fried, are a delicacy, above all in the north. The rains bring wild mushrooms 🍄 to the roadside sellers too, and 🍠 and 🫜 stand for sweet potatoes and cassava. 🍩 is the nearest emoji to vitumbuwa, the fried dough balls sold in the morning, 🥭 the mangoes that fall everywhere in November, 🍯 the forest honey of North-Western Province, and 🍺 a cold Mosi, the lager named after the falls. Chikanda, a firm "African polony" made from wild orchid tubers and groundnuts, has no emoji at all.

Ceremonies, Zamrock and the Chipolopolo: the emoji Zambians send

Zambia has dozens of traditional ceremonies. The best known is Kuomboka 🛶🥁 of the Lozi people: when the Zambezi floods the Barotse plain at the end of the rains, the Litunga 👑, the Lozi king, moves from his palace at Lealui to higher ground at Limulunga in the Nalikwanda, a great royal barge with an elephant on its roof, paddled by around a hundred men to the sound of the royal drums. The Ngoni hold Ncwala in February, the Lunda of Mwata Kazembe hold Umutomboko in July, and the Luvale Likumbi lya Mize, where the Makishi masked dancers 🎭 perform, a tradition on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage.

In the 1970s Zambian bands such as WITCH and Amanaz mixed rock guitars 🎸 with local rhythms into what is now called Zamrock, rediscovered worldwide decades later; today 🎶🎤 is for Zed hip hop and the kalindula bands. On the pitch the national football team are the Chipolopolo, "the copper bullets" ⚽, and 🏆 means one night above all: in February 2012 Zambia won the Africa Cup of Nations in Libreville, Gabon, close to where the plane carrying the national team had crashed in 1993. In athletics, 🥈 is Samuel Matete's 400 m hurdles silver at Atlanta 1996 and 🥉 Muzala Samukonga's 400 m bronze at Paris 2024.

The 1991 declaration that Zambia is a Christian nation is written into the preamble of its constitution, and Sunday ⛪✝️🙏 is busy everywhere. The big public holidays include Independence Day on 24 October 🇿🇲🎉🎆, Africa Freedom Day on 25 May 🌍, Heroes and Unity Days at the start of July, Farmers' Day 🧑‍🌾 at the start of August, and the National Day of Prayer and Christian Heritage on 29 December.

Zambian languages: Bemba, Nyanja and how to write them

English is Zambia's official language, but by CLDR estimates only about 3.3 million of the country's roughly 21 million people use it, while about 7 million speak Bemba, the main language of the north and the Copperbelt, and about 4 million Nyanja, the everyday language of Lusaka and the east. Tonga (about 2.3 million), Lozi (about 1.1 million), Kaonde, Lunda and Luvale complete the seven regional languages used in schools and on national radio; each has its own collection here, from Bemba and Nyanja to Tonga (Zambia), Lozi and Luvale.

Nyanja is written in the Latin alphabet, which includes the letter ŵ. It writes the sound /ŋ/ with ng', as in ng'ombe (cow); this is the same sound as the "ng" in English sing. Across the border, Malawi's Chichewa, the same language as Nyanja, also uses the letter ŵ; it has its own page in the Malawi collection.

A few words that turn up with emoji: Muli bwanji? (How are you?) and Zikomo (Thank you) in Nyanja, Muli shani? and Natotela in Bemba. In Lusaka Nyanja, English and Bemba mix freely in a single sentence, and young people text in exactly that mix.