50 000 Kwacha Bank of Zambia 40th Anniversary

The Bank of Zambia was established in 1964 coinciding with independence from Britain, making this 2004 issue a commemoration of four decades of central banking under what had been, for much of that period, a single-party state. Zambia's monetary history across those forty years was turbulent: the kwacha, introduced in 1968 to replace the Zambian pound, was subjected to repeated devaluations tied to the collapse of copper revenues, copper having once accounted for over 90% of the country's export earnings.

By 2004, the kwacha had depreciated so severely that a face value of 50,000 on a commemorative silver piece was functionally modest.