100 000 Kwacha - Elizabeth II Queen Mother

This piece belongs to a wave of outsized commemorative issues produced in the early 2000s by smaller central banks — Zambia prominent among them — that licensed royal and celebrity likenesses for collector market revenue rather than domestic circulation. The Bank of Zambia had no particular constitutional or Commonwealth tie compelling this issue; it was commercially motivated. Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother died in March 2002 at age 101, and several mints rushed commemoratives to market that year.

At 3 kilograms of .999 silver cast into a 130mm disc, handling without purpose-built storage is genuinely inadvisable.