Day 22 – Livingstone: Where the Lines End

The last morning began quietly at Jollyboys, bags half-packed, with the feeling that something was closing. One thing remained to do in Livingstone, and I had saved it for the end on purpose. Before the airport, the Livingstone Museum.

It is the oldest and largest museum in Zambia, and most of it has nothing to do with the man whose name it borrows: room after room on Zambian prehistory, archaeology, culture, independence. I gave it the time it was due. But I had come for one gallery. The place was once called the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, and that discarded name holds two of the three ideas I had been chasing for three weeks without quite admitting it: David Livingstone, whose route I had loosely traced, and Cecil Rhodes, whose railway dream had been running underneath the whole trip.

The David Livingstone gallery is small. Behind the glass are his letters, dozens of them in his own hand, and personal objects, a medicine chest among them. I have read about Livingstone for years and spent three weeks on his ground, and it is a strange thing to turn a corner and find yourself in front of the actual handwriting. He renamed the falls that the local people already called Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, after his queen. He died in 1873 at Chitambo, in what is now Zambia, and two of his African companions, Chuma and Susi, carried his body on foot for the better part of a year, close to two thousand kilometres, to reach the coast and send him home. I had covered a fraction of the same ground by train, bus, car and one flight, and complained about the delays.

Then the day became what it really was: airports. A transfer out to Harry Mwanga Nkumbula International, the small airport on the edge of Livingstone. A short Airlink hop to Johannesburg, a long layover, then Emirates north through Dubai and on to Dublin, the route that had carried us down run backwards. Somewhere after take-off, the country tilting away beneath the wing, it registered properly. This was the end of it.

What comes back, at altitude, is not the itinerary but pieces of it. Stone Town after dark, taarab sung in Swahili with half the meaning left unsaid. Hours at the window of the TAZARA while the highlands went by under baobabs. The quiet of the Mushroom Farm above Livingstonia, reached on a boda boda I probably should not have got on. Nkhata Bay, and putting my face into Lake Malawi to find it full of fish. The long drive down into Zambia. South Luangwa, where I stopped simply seeing animals and started looking for them, learning their names and how to frame them. The president of Zambia, of all people, at an airport gate. The Zambezi at the foot of Victoria Falls, loud and cold. And Chobe, where the boat crossed into Botswana, the fifth country of the trip, then put us briefly ashore on Impalila Island, the eastern tip of Namibia, an unexpected sixth.

And the people, more than the places in the end. Rama, who got us onto the Tazara. Zuwena in Stone Town. Kevin at One Love. Gift on the mountain roads of Malawi. Malama who walked us through South Luangwa, and the drivers who talked the whole way across two borders. A trip is meant to be about where you go. This one was, but it is the faces I came back with.

In the first post I said the journey had three lines behind it, and by the end I could hold each one. The first was the railway itself, the TAZARA, built in the 1970s with Chinese assistance to give landlocked Zambia a way to the sea that did not run through the white-ruled south. It was the backbone of the whole plan, and its delay was the first thing to knock the itinerary off course. Weeks later and a country further south, with less time to spare, a jackknifed lorry shut the Great East Road, and we finally gave up on the overland route and flew from Mfuwe to Lusaka. Protect the direction, not the itinerary. The second line was Livingstone, and I had just said goodbye to him in a glass case in the town that wears his name. The third was Rhodes, and his imperial dream of a railway the length of the continent, Cape to Cairo, one colour from top to bottom. It was never built. I had seen an echo of it the day before, at Kazungula, where the new bridge carries a single railway track down its centre, connected to nothing, waiting for a line that still has not been finished. Not Rhodes’s line; a later, separate scheme. But the same unfinished idea, in fresh concrete.

Rhodes wanted the continent stitched together for empire. The one great line that did get built, the TAZARA, was stitched together to get out from under it.

We landed in Dublin the next evening. I was at work the following morning.

The dollars I had left over are still in a drawer, in good condition, post-2013 notes, waiting. They are not going back into euros.

They are for the next one.

Practical Notes

What I visited

Livingstone Museum, Mosi-oa-Tunya Road, Livingstone. Zambia’s oldest and largest museum, from prehistory to independence, with a dedicated David Livingstone gallery of letters and personal effects. Open daily, 09:00 to 16:30. Non-resident adult admission US$5.
My take: worth an hour or two in its own right, but the Livingstone gallery is the reason to come, and it lands harder saved for the end of a trip like this one.

Getting home

Livingstone to Johannesburg with Airlink, then Johannesburg to Dubai to Dublin with Emirates.

Money

Through this trip, good-condition US dollars were repeatedly useful for tourist-facing costs, some accommodation, park fees, tours and activities, though it varied a lot by country and operator, and local currency still mattered everywhere for daily spending. That is why I am keeping the leftover notes for another trip rather than changing them back to euros and paying the spread a second time.