Zambia: Victoria Falls, Zamrock and the Ubuntu Spirit
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Victoria Falls — Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Smoke That Thunders — is shared between Zambia and Zimbabwe, but the Zambian side offers the most dramatic view: you can walk to within metres of the main falls along the rainforest path on the lip of the gorge, get soaked in the spray, and look directly across at the full 1,708-metre width of the falls. During high water season (February to May), the spray from Victoria Falls is visible 50 kilometres away and generates a permanent rainbow that hangs above the gorge. It is one of the world's great natural spectacles and the context that makes all photographs of it inadequate.
Zamrock was a Zambian rock music movement of the 1970s that produced some of Africa's most original rock music — Witch, Amanaz, Ngozi Family, Paul Ngozi — a fusion of Western rock guitar with Zambian rhythms and concerns, recorded in Lusaka studios during the country's first decade of independence. The music was locally popular for a decade before AIDS and poverty devastated the musicians and the recording industry. International rediscovery of Zamrock in the 2000s brought the music to a new global audience. It deserved it.
Zambia's Bemba, Tonga, Lozi, and Nyanja peoples — among the country's 72 ethnic groups — all maintain distinct cultural practices around marriage, initiation, and community governance. The Kuomboka ceremony of the Lozi people — in which the king moves his capital from the flooded Barotse Plain to higher ground each year in a procession of royal barges — is one of the most spectacular ceremonial events in Southern Africa, combining practical necessity with centuries of accumulated ceremony.
