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    Zambezi Cavalcade
    Zambezi Cavalcade
    Zambezi Cavalcade
    Ebook62 pages55 minutes

    Zambezi Cavalcade

    By Mark Igoe

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    About this ebook

    Zambezi Cavalcade is the story of the Zambezi River and the many visitors who have travelled its waters or settled by its banks, from the earliest riverside kingdoms and Muslim traders to the first tourist at the end of the 19th century. The author tells of some of the history of the river itself, and of its geology, legends, merchants, hunters, warriors and missionaries that travelled on it, and supplies more than 20 interesting links. Here you can discover the lost river ports of Ingombe Ilede and Zumbo, find the story of Diogo Simões Madeira and the African princes, hear of the bandit chief Bongo the Wildcat and meet the French aristocrat who rolled his cigarettes from an English Bible. Here is the cavalcade of characters that through history has passed along Africa’s fourth longest river

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMark Igoe
    Release dateJul 2, 2013
    ISBN9781301196647
    Zambezi Cavalcade
    Author

    Mark Igoe

    Marco Books are written and published by Mark Igoe. Mark has written widely on travel, history and sport over thirty years in a half dozen different countries in Europe and Africa. He has published a dozen books, often co-authored by his wife Hazel, including a best selling guide to Zimbabwe and a popular guide to buying French property, published by Cadogan and branded by the Sunday Times. He has three grown up children and now lives in Norfolk, England with his wife and two bicycles, all better looking than he is.

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      Book preview

      Zambezi Cavalcade - Mark Igoe

      Zambezi Cavalcade

      Strangers on the River

      MARCO BOOKS

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright Mark Igoe 2013

      Proofreading by Rum. Obrigado

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Contents (click)

      From the Sea of Zanj

      The River of Good Omens

      Heart of Darkness

      The Valley of the Iron God

      Grove of Perpetual Showers

      Postscript & Acknowledgments

      From The Sea of Zanj

      David Livingstone didn’t discover Victoria Falls, my old mate and drinking companion historian Dave Beach used to say What about the people who were living there? Hadn’t they noticed them?

      Perhaps they thought everybody had them, and didn’t think they were unusual? But we were being pedantic, commenting on the sea change in historical perspective, in which things are not simply seen from a Western standpoint. Anyway, I thought I was being quite funny. The thought that everybody had Victoria Falls in their back garden was zany enough to appeal to us both. I mean if you have only lived by them for hundreds of years, how do you know they are uncommon?

      But the Kalolo knew. The Kalolo knew because they were new. They had not lived by the Falls for centuries; they had barely arrived before Livingstone. Their language belongs to the Sotho language group of South Africa. Yet it was their name for the Falls that people recall and repeat, The Smoke-that-Thunders, Mosi-oa-tunya. When the Ndebele came across them they called them aManza Thunqayo, Water-which-rises-like-Smoke. The older Toka-Leya people seem to have called it Shongwe, but that is one name that isn’t used. When Livingstone visited the falls in 1855 he was a guest of the Kalolo, at that time the dominant people, so he used their name for it, and it stuck. His name for it, though, Victoria Falls, is the one with the wider usage.

      What’s in a name? People have been living by this river since the Early Stone Age. The river itself must have had thousands of names in its many millennia along its 2500 kilometres. How many names and how many peoples since the Stone Age? Even in recorded history some have been changed or moved. And where did Zambezi come from? The first mapmakers here were the Portuguese who started to call the river The Cuama, but then used the name that their trading partners, in what they called the land of the Monomotapa used, The Zambeze. But this Monomotapa lived on the Zimbabwean plateau and his subjects were the ancestors of today’s Shona people, so they may have got the name from the valley dwellers, perhaps, who would later be called Tonga. We can only be sure that the name has been around for at least half a millennium.

      The River (map) itself has been around for a great deal longer, although it may well have had a dramatically different course. Rising in north western Zambia, it flows into Angola for a while before re-entering Zambia and flowing into the Barotse Flood Plain, of which more later. Feeding on any number of tributaries and descending two small falls it eventually arrives at The Smoke-that-Thunders, plunges through its gorges and provides spectacular white water where tourists on rafts can frighten themselves silly. It now is the Middle Zambezi. A bit of a meander, and then it’s Lake Kariba, a vast man-made inland sea, built to generate electricity but now also a valuable tourist and fishing facility. 300 km on is the town of Kariba, with its dam, arguably only the second town on the river after Victoria Falls. There are more gorges below the dam but of less consequence, and the canoeist has a leisurely paddle down to the bridge at Chirundu. The next point of interest is Mana Pools, a spectacular game reserve of which more below. The Zambezi, which has been flowing between Zambia and Zimbabwe since the Falls, now enters Mozambique. Here on the north bank is Zumbo, not much of a place now, but a spot of great historical significance. Then comes Lake Cahora Bassa, another vast man-made lake that takes us past the lost town

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