Luanshya

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Luanshya is a town in Zambia, in the Copperbelt Province near Ndola. It has a population of 115,579 (2000 census).

Luanshya was founded in the early part of the 20th century after a prospector/explorer, William Collier, shot and killed a Roan Antelope on the banks of the Luanshya River, discovering copper in the process. The antelope fell to the ground, its head resting on a rock where an exposed seam of copper ore was clearly visible. The mining company eventually formed to exploit Collier's find was named "Roan Antelope Copper Mines Ltd".

For most of the 20th century, copper was mined in great quantities at Luanshya and other towns which form part of the Copperbelt. Towards the end of the century, mining became increasingly uneconomical, partly because of the prolonged depressed price of copper on world markets, but also because of high levels of corruption and inefficiency in the Zambian administration.

Today, Luanshya is en-route to becoming a ghost-town - like countless other remote mining communities whose economies (and very existence) depended entirely on the finite mineral resource upon which they were founded. The Town is nevertheless still producing famous candidates: in 2006, Luanshya was the home of the Miss Commonwealth Africa (Emma Chishimba).

There is still a fair amount of copper underground at Luanshya. Whether the town sees a revival in its fortunes will depend on how efficiently it is extracted and sold.

Luanshya is the home base of a Technical and Vocational Teacher's College (TVTC).

Luanshya held the International Sports Festival in 1985 featuring world sports champions from across the Globe (America, Europe, Africa), the event was hosted by the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM).

Luanshya hosts the tallest rugby long posts in the world. Located at the Roan Antelope Recreation fields, they stand at an impressive 114 feet and 4 inches (est. MajoMan Metrics Intl). The Rugby Club hosts an additional set of 12 foot posts to be used in the event of a challenge from any competing entity.

The town and the Roan Antelope Mine, in the beginning of the 1950s, were the subject of an anthropological research by A. L. Epstein, member of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology in the University of Manchester (Manchester School), under the supervision of Prof. Max Gluckman. The research was later published by those institutions under the title Politics in an Urban African Community.