Livingstone

Sister cities

• Santa Fe
• Funchal

History

Mukuni, to the south-east of present-day Livingstone, was the largest village in the area before Livingstone was founded. Its Baleya inhabitants, originally from the Rozwi culture in Zimbabwe, were conquered by Chief Mukuni who came from the Congo in the 16th century. Another group of Baleya under Chief Sekute lived near the river west of the town. The predominant people in the area, though, were the Batoka under Chief Musokotwane based at Senkobo, north. These are southern Tonga people but are culturally and linguistically similar to the Baleya. The Subiya paid tribute to the Lozi of Barotseland but in 1838 the Kololo, a Sotho tribe from South Africa displaced by Zulu wars, migrated north and conquered the Lozi. The Kololo placed chiefs of their subordinate Subiya people of Sesheke over the Tokaleya. In 1855 Scottish missionary traveller David Livingstone became the first European to be shown the Zambezi in Livingstone's vicinity, and to see Victoria Falls by the Subiya-Kololo Chief Sekeletu. In the 1890s Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company established British rule north of the Zambezi and launched a wave of mineral prospecting and exploration activity, in addition ventured into other natural resources such as timber, ivory and animal skins in a territory called North-Western Rhodesia. The main crossing point of the Zambezi was above the falls at the Old Drift, first by dugout canoe, later by an iron boat propelled by eight Lozi paddlers, or a barge towed across with a steel cable. The Batoka Gorge and the deep valley and gorges of the middle Zambezi (now flooded by the Kariba Dam) meant there was no better crossing point between the Falls and Kariba Gorge, north-east. As the Old Drift crossing became more frequently used, a British colonial settlement…