After having spend the mayor part of the morning and the early afternoon in Zambia, The Wandelgek decided to spend all afternoon in Zimbabwe. From the border it was a short walk towards the entrance of the Victoria Falls National Park and after paying a steep entrance fee (higher than the Zambian entrance fee to the falls), he walked through a dense but small piece of tropical rain forest, which was only here because the Falls were here. In this forest lived baboons which had learned how to steal food or other shiny bling objects from tourists. They were not afraid of people at all.

Dr. David Livingstone

David Livingstone (19 March 1813 – 1 May 1873) was a Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary with the London Missionary Society and an explorer in Africa, one of the most popular national heroes of the late-19th-century in Victorian Britain. He had a mythical status that operated on a number of interconnected levels: Protestant missionary martyr, working-class “rags-to-riches” inspirational story, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of commercial and colonial expansion.

 

 

 

 

 

His fame as an explorer and his obsession with discovering the sources of the River Nile was founded on the belief that if he could solve that age-old mystery, his fame would give him the influence to end the East African Arab-Swahili slave trade. “The Nile sources,” he told a friend, “are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. It is this power which I hope to remedy an immense evil.” His subsequent exploration of the central African watershed was the culmination of the classic period of European geographical discovery and colonial penetration.

 

 

At the same time, his missionary travels, “disappearance”, and eventual death in Africa—​​and subsequent glorification as a posthumous national hero in 1874—​​led to the founding of several major central African Christian missionary initiatives carried forward in the era of the European “Scramble for Africa”.

His meeting with Henry Morton Stanley on 10 November 1871 gave rise to the popular quotation “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Exploration of southern and central Africa

Livingstone was obliged to leave his first mission at Mabotsa in Botswana in 1845 after irreconcilable differences emerged between himself and his fellow missionary, Rogers [sic] Edwards and because the Bakgatla were proving indifferent to the Gospel. He abandoned Chonuane, his next mission in 1847 because of drought and the proximity of the Boers and his desire “to move on to the regions beyond”. At Kolobeng Mission Livingstone converted Chief Sechele in 1849 after two years of patient persuasion, but only a few months later Sechele lapsed. In 1851, when Livingstone finally left Kolobeng, he did not use this failure to explain his departure, although it played an important part in his decision. Just as important had been the three journeys far to the north of Kolobeng which he had undertaken between 1849 and 1851 and which had left him convinced that the best long term chance for successful evangelising was to open up Africa to European traders and missionaries by mapping and navigating its rivers which might then become “Highways” into the interior. So Livingstone explored the African interior to the north between 1852 and 1856, mapping almost the entire course of the Zambezi, and was the first European to see the Mosi-oa-Tunya (“the smoke that thunders”) waterfall, which he renamed Victoria Falls after his monarch Queen Victoria, and of which he wrote later, “Scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.” (Jeal, p. 149)

Livingstone was one of the first Westerners to make a transcontinental journey across Africa in 1854–56, from Luanda on the Atlantic to Quelimane on the Indian Ocean near the mouth of the Zambezi. Central and southern Africa had not been crossed by Europeans at that latitude, despite repeated European attempts (especially by the Portuguese), owing to their susceptibility to malaria, dysentery, and sleeping sickness which was prevalent in the interior and which also prevented use of draught animals (oxen and horses). Such journeys had also been hindered by the opposition of powerful chiefs and tribes, such as the Lozi, and the Lunda of Mwata Kazembe.

The qualities and approaches which gave Livingstone an advantage as an explorer were that he usually travelled light, and he had an ability to reassure chiefs that he was not a threat. Other expeditions had dozens of soldiers armed with rifles and scores of hired porters carrying supplies, and were seen as military incursions or were mistaken for slave-raiding parties. Livingstone, on the other hand, travelled on most of his journeys with a few servants and porters, bartering for supplies along the way, with a couple of guns for protection. He preached a Christian message but did not force it on unwilling ears; he understood the ways of local chiefs and successfully negotiated passage through their territory, and was often hospitably received and aided, even by Mwata Kazembe. His great trans-Africa journey was performed with the help at first of 27 Africans loaned to him by Sekeletu, chief of the Kololo, for the trip to Loanda (Luanda) on the Atlantic Ocean from Linyanti, and with 114 men, loaned by the same chief, on certain conditions, for the last leg of the journey from Linyanti to Quelimane on the Indian Ocean.

Livingstone advocated the establishment of trade and religious missions in central Africa, but abolition of the African slave trade, as carried out by the Portuguese of Tete and the Arab Swahili of Kilwa, became his primary goal. His motto—now inscribed on his statue at Victoria Falls—was “Christianity, Commerce and Civilization“, a combination that he hoped would form an alternative to the slave trade, and impart dignity to the Africans in the eyes of Europeans. He believed that the key to achieving these goals was the navigation of the Zambezi River as a Christian commercial highway into the interior. He returned to Britain to garner support for his ideas, and to publish a book on his travels which brought him fame as one of the leading explorers of the age.

Livingstone believed that he had a spiritual calling for exploration to find routes for commercial trade which would displace slave trade routes, rather than for preaching. He was encouraged by the response in Britain to his discoveries and support for future expeditions, so he resigned from the London Missionary Society in 1857. According to his Victorian biographer W. Garden Blaikie, the reason was to prevent public concerns that his non-missionary activities such as his scientific work might show the LMS to be “departing from the proper objects of a missionary body”. Livingstone had written to the directors of the society to express complaints about their policies and the clustering of too many missionaries near the Cape Colony, despite the sparse native population. Blaikie, not wishing to offend Livingstone’s relatives, still living in 1880 when his book was published, concealed the real reason why Livingstone left the LMS and the manner of it. In a letter from the directors of the LMS, which Livingstone received at Quelimane, he was congratulated on his journey but was told that the directors were “restricted in their power of aiding plans connected only remotely with the spread of the Gospel”. This brusque rejection of his plan for new mission stations north of the Zambesi and his wider object of opening the interior via the Zambezi, was not enough to make him resign at once. When he was approached by Sir Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, who put him in touch with the Foreign Secretary, Livingstone said nothing to the LMS directors, even when his leadership of a government expedition to the Zambezi seemed increasingly likely to be funded by the Exchequer. “I am not yet fairly on with the Government,” he told a friend, “but am nearly quite off with the Society (LMS).” And while he negotiated with the government, he deceived the LMS into thinking that he would return to Africa with their mission to the Kololo in Barotseland, which Livingstone had used his national fame to coerce them into initiating against their better judgement. As biographer Tim Jeal shows in Chapter 12 of his biography, the end result would be the death of a missionary and his wife, the death of a second missionary’s wife and the deaths of three children from malaria. Livingstone had suffered over thirty attacks during his journey but had deliberately understated his suffering so not to discourage the LMS from sending missionaries to the Kololo. Consequently the missionaries had set out for a marshy region with wholly inadequate supplies of quinine and they had soon weakened and died.

In May 1857 Livingstone was appointed as Her Majesty’s Consul with a roving commission, extending through Mozambique to the areas west of it.

The River Nile

In January 1866, Livingstone returned to Africa, this time to Zanzibar, and from there he set out to seek the source of the Nile.

In 2002, The Wandelgek had alreay visited The Livingstone House near Stonetown on Zanzibar…

From this house, many of his expeditions started.

The discovery of Mosi-oa-Tunya

Here follows a cited part from: Livingstone, David, Missionary Travels and Researches In South Africa (1858) describing in Dr. David Livingstone’s own words, his discovery of Mosi-oa-Tunya:

“Sekeletu intended to accompany me, but, one canoe only having come instead of the two he had ordered, he resigned it to me.

After twenty minutes’ sail from Kalai we came in sight, for the first time, of the columns of vapor appropriately called ‘smoke,’ rising at a distance of five or six miles, exactly as when large tracts of grass are burned in Africa. Five columns now arose, and, bending in the direction of the wind, they seemed placed against a low ridge covered with trees; the tops of the columns at this distance appeared to mingle with the clouds. They were white below, and higher up became dark, so as to simulate smoke very closely. The whole scene was extremely beautiful; the banks and islands dotted over the river are adorned with sylvan vegetation of great variety of color and form…no one can imagine the beauty of the view from any thing witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight. The only want felt is that of mountains in the background. The falls are bounded on three sides by ridges 300 or 400 feet in height, which are covered with forest, with the red soil appearing among the trees.

When about half a mile from the falls, I left the canoe by which we had come down thus far, and embarked in a lighter one, with men well acquainted with the rapids, who, by passing down the centre of the stream in the eddies and still places caused by many jutting rocks, brought me to an island situated in the middle of the river, and on the edge of the lip over which the water rolls. In coming hither there was danger of being swept down by the streams which rushed along on each side of the island; but the river was now low, and we sailed where it is totally impossible to go when the water is high. But, though we had reached the island, and were within a few yards of the spot, a view from which would solve the whole problem, I believe that no one could perceive where the vast body of water went; it seemed to lose itself in the earth, the opposite lip of the fissure into which it disappeared being only 80 feet distant. At least I did not comprehend it until, creeping with awe to the verge, I peered down into a large rent which had been made from bank to bank of the broad Zambesi, and saw that a stream of a thousand yards broad leaped down a hundred feet, and then became suddenly compressed into a space of fifteen or twenty yards.

 

The entire falls are simply a crack made in a hard basaltic rock from the right to the left bank of the Zambesi, and then prolonged from the left bank away through thirty or forty miles of hills. If one imagines the Thames filled with low, tree-covered hills immediately beyond the tunnel, extending as far as Gravesend, the bed of black basaltic rock instead of London mud, and a fissure made therein from one end of the tunnel to the other down through the keystones of the arch, and prolonged from the left end of the tunnel through thirty miles of hills, the pathway being 100 feet down from the bed of the river instead of what it is, with the lips of the fissure from 80 to 100 feet apart, then fancy the Thames leaping bodily into the gulf, and forced there to change its direction, and flow from the right to the left bank, and then rush boiling and roaring through the hills, he may have some idea of what takes place at this, the most wonderful sight I had witnessed in Africa.

 

 

In looking down into the fissure on the right of the island, one sees nothing but a dense white cloud, which, at the time we visited the spot, bad two bright rainbows on it. From this cloud rushed up a great jet of vapor exactly like steam, and it mounted 200 or 300 feet high; there condensing, it changed its hue to that of dark smoke, and came back in a constant shower, which soon wetted us to the skin…

On the left of the island we see the water at the bottom, a white rolling mass moving away to the prolongation of the fissure, which branches off near the left bank of the river… The walls of this gigantic crack are perpendicular, and composed of one homogeneous mass of rock. The edge of that side over which the water falls is worn off two or three feet, and pieces have fallen away, so as to give it some- what of a serrated appearance. That over which the water does not fall is quite straight, except at the left corner, where a rent appears, and a piece seems inclined to fall off Upon the whole, it is nearly in the state in which it was left at the period of its formation…On the left side of the island we have a good view of the mass of water which causes one of the columns of vapor to ascend, as it leaps quite clear of the rock, and forms a thick unbroken fleece all the way to the bottom. Its whiteness gave the idea of snow, a sight I had not seen for many a day. As it broke into (if I may use the term) pieces of water, all rushing on in the same direction, each gave off several rays of foam, exactly as bits of steel, when burned in oxygen gas, give off rays of sparks. The snow-white sheet seemed like myriads of small comets rushing on in one direction, each of which left behind its nucleus rays of foam.”

The doctor and The Wandelgek…

Before I started this blogseries and before I started my journey across Southern Africa I wrote a first introductory blog (The Wandelgek on an adventure through Southern Africa) in which I mentioned the importance to experience the sight that Dr. David Livingstone had seen those many years ago in 1855. I wanted to feel a tiny bit of the enormous excitement of what he must have felt.

When I was still in primary school I had read about it and history teachers had read about this in front of classrooms and I had always been completely fascinated and drawn into this specific story. For me it has always been The example story of discovering something new.

And although I don’t dare to compare what he must have endured while travelling from Zanzibar to Mosi-oa-Tunya, with my own travel experiences which were undoubtedly much more comfortable, it still was a very emotional thing to me to reach this part of the world, for which I had longed for so many years and for which I had been preparing in a real practical sense since 2004!

And so I was really impressed to finally stand at the statue of the doctor and even find his canoe (a bit shattered) beside it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a short walk The Wandelgek reached the gorge where the mighty Zambezi river (which is Africa’s 4th longest river after the Nile, Congo and Niger) plunges over a 108 metre high and 1,700 metres wide cliff edge.

And yesssss this was very spectacular and I could only think “How is this possible???“…

There was even a double rainbow above the gorge and I could actually see now why the Zambian name Mosi-oa-Tunya was so much better fitting than Victoria Falls. The trillions of tiny drops of water were propelled into the air casing a smoke like curtain that was way higher than the falls themselves. This was also the rain that made the tropical rain forest on the verge of the gorge viable. I couldn’t have been more impressed…

Although… I began to feel the urge to get me a canoe and……….

 

Victoria Falls, or Mosi-oa-Tunya (Tokaleya Tonga: The Smoke That Thunders), is a waterfall in southern Africa on the Zambezi River at the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. It has been described by CNN as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the world.

David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary and explorer, is believed to have been the first European to view Victoria Falls on 16 November 1855, from what is now known as Livingstone Island, one of two land masses in the middle of the river, immediately upstream from the falls on the Zambian side.

Livingstone named his discovery in honour of Queen Victoria of Britain, but the indigenous Tonga name, Mosi-oa-Tunya—”The Smoke That Thunders”—continues in common usage as well. The World Heritage List officially recognizes both names.

The nearby national park in Zambia is named Mosi-oa-Tunya, whereas the national park and town on the Zimbabwean shore are both named Victoria Falls.

Size

While it is neither the highest nor the widest waterfall in the world, Victoria Falls is classified as the largest, based on its combined width of 1,708 metres (5,604 ft) and height of 108 metres (354 ft), resulting in the world’s largest sheet of falling water. Victoria Falls is roughly twice the height of North America’s Niagara Falls and well over twice the width of its Horseshoe Falls. In height and width Victoria Falls is rivalled only by Argentina and Brazil’s Iguazu Falls. See table for comparisons.

For a considerable distance upstream from the falls, the Zambezi flows over a level sheet of basalt, in a shallow valley, bounded by low and distant sandstone hills. The river’s course is dotted with numerous tree-covered islands, which increase in number as the river approaches the falls. There are no mountains, escarpments, or deep valleys; only a flat plateau extending hundreds of kilometres in all directions.

The falls are formed as the full width of the river plummets in a single vertical drop into a transverse chasm 1708 metres (5604 ft) wide, carved by its waters along a fracture zone in the basalt plateau. The depth of the chasm, called the First Gorge, varies from 80 metres (260 ft) at its western end to 108 metres (354 ft) in the centre. The only outlet to the First Gorge is a 110-metre (360 ft) wide gap about two-thirds of the way across the width of the falls from the western end, through which the whole volume of the river pours into the Victoria Falls gorges.

There are two islands on the crest of the falls that are large enough to divide the curtain of water even at full flood: Boaruka Island (or Cataract Island) near the western bank, and Livingstone Island near the middle—the point from which Livingstone first viewed the falls. At less than full flood, additional islets divide the curtain of water into separate parallel streams. The main streams are named, in order from Zimbabwe (west) to Zambia (east): Devil’s Cataract (called Leaping Water by some), Main Falls, Rainbow Falls (the highest) and the Eastern Cataract.

The Zambezi river, upstream from the falls, experiences a rainy season from late November to early April, and a dry season the rest of the year. The river’s annual flood season is February to May with a peak in April. The spray from the falls typically rises to a height of over 400 metres (1,300 ft), and sometimes even twice as high, and is visible from up to 48 km (30 mi) away. At full moon, a “moonbow” can be seen in the spray instead of the usual daylight rainbow. During the flood season, however, it is impossible to see the foot of the falls and most of its face, and the walks along the cliff opposite it are in a constant shower and shrouded in mist. Close to the edge of the cliff, spray shoots upward like inverted rain, especially at Zambia’s Knife-Edge Bridge.

As the dry season takes effect, the islets on the crest become wider and more numerous, and in September to January up to half of the rocky face of the falls may become dry and the bottom of the First Gorge can be seen along most of its length. At this time it becomes possible (though not necessarily safe) to walk across some stretches of the river at the crest. It is also possible to walk to the bottom of the First Gorge at the Zimbabwean side. The minimum flow, which occurs in November, is around a tenth of the April figure; this variation in flow is greater than that of other major falls, and causes Victoria Falls’ annual average flow rate to be lower than might be expected based on the maximum flow.

Gorges