Bank of Zambia in the 1938 formation of the Southern Rhodesia Currency Board, which was based in Harare, in present-day Zimbabwe. The Board's jurisdiction included Northern Rhodesia, now called Zambia and Nyasaland, known as Malawi today. In 1954 the Southern Rhodesia Currency Board was renamed the Currency Board of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and as the winds of change were strong in Africa at the time, the currency board was transformed into the Bank of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1956. In 1964 the Bank of Zambia was created from the Bank of Northern Rhodesia, which itself had only formed a year earlier in 1963
Northern Rhodesia cattle farming in Barotseland, but Northern Rhodesia had attracted little white settlement, in contrast to its southern neighbour. Unlike Southern Rhodesia, which had seen a flood of fortune-seeking prospectors seeking to set up independent mines, Northern Rhodesia's mining policy was to agree large-scale deals with major commercial mining companies. Large-scale mining on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt started after 1924 and was mainly financed from the United States of America and South Africa. Chester Beatty's and Sir Edmund Davis's Selection Trust already had an interest in the fairly small Bwana Mkubwa copper mine, which had opened in 1901 on the site