The Pedicle exists because two European colonial enterprises collided here in the 1890s, and neither side was willing to back down. Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company was pushing north from what is now Zimbabwe. King Leopold II of the Belgians, who personally owned the Congo Free State, was pushing south from the Congo basin. Between them stood a real African kingdom: the Yeke or Garanganze realm of Msiri, ruled from Bunkeya. Msiri had built his kingdom on ivory and copper trading, and he understood exactly what the Europeans were doing. For years he played the BSAC and the CFS against each other, signing treaties with both and honoring neither, trying to preserve his independence in the narrowing space between them.

That strategy ended in December 1891, when a Congo Free State expedition led by Canadian Captain William Grant Stairs arrived at Bunkeya demanding that Msiri submit to Belgian authority. Msiri refused. An altercation followed. One of Stairs's officers shot Msiri dead. The Belgians moved quickly to consolidate their claim to Msiri's territory - Garanganza, later renamed Katanga - while the British were left negotiating over leftovers. In some quarters of Northern Rhodesia, Stairs was remembered as a traitor to the British Empire for helping the Belgians seize what London considered a British sphere of influence. For Msiri's people, the killing meant the end of sovereign Yeke power and the beginning of the colonial period that shaped everything that followed.

The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 had agreed on European spheres of influence in Africa but had not drawn detailed borders. Those came through bilateral negotiations, and for the Katanga boundary the British and Belgians could not agree on how far the Belgian territory should extend into the Bangweulu Wetlands. They needed a neutral arbitrator. The king of Italy was selected. He drew a north-south line - a line of pure longitude - through the point on the map where the Luapula River was thought to exit the Lake Bangweulu swamp system. That line became the eastern edge of the Pedicle. It was about 70 kilometers wide and roughly 200 kilometers long, and it gave the Belgians the game-rich wetlands they had wanted and access to the Luapula headwaters they considered essential. The Anglo-Belgian Agreement of 12 May 1894 made it official.

An Anglo-Belgian Boundary Commission surveyed the Pedicle between 1911 and 1914, and found that the line drawn in Rome did not match the land on the ground. The Luapula does not flow in a single channel south of Bangweulu - it disperses into a tangled floodplain where multiple channels braid through swamps tens of kilometers wide, and the main flow shifts with the seasons. The Italian king's line of longitude crossed this floodplain at multiple points, which meant the 'boundary' cut through water and reeds that could not be fenced, patrolled, or even consistently located. The borderline remains what it was - a notional geographic feature imposed by European convenience on a landscape that does not recognize it. For the people living there - Bemba-speaking communities with family networks that cross the border, fishermen who work both sides of the wetlands - the line is often more bureaucratic inconvenience than meaningful barrier.

For five decades after independence, the Pedicle mostly functioned as a curiosity. That changed with the Congo Crisis of 1960-63, when political turmoil across the border turned the Pedicle into a strategic problem. The wedge cuts Zambia's Luapula Province and western Northern Province off from the Copperbelt, which is the country's industrial and commercial heart. The most direct road between them - the Congo Pedicle road - runs through Congolese territory, which means Zambian commerce depends on border crossings that have sometimes been closed during moments of political tension. When closed, the alternative is a long detour around the northern and eastern edges of the Bangweulu system. Cross-border crime, arms smuggling, and poaching have all used the Pedicle as a through-route. The Caprivi Strip in Namibia was created by similar colonial logic - a thin wedge of territory drawn by Europeans who did not have to live with the consequences. The people living in the Pedicle and its surroundings still do.