"This is all the Litunga's land," a herdsman named Vincent Libanga told me along the way. He said he walked sixteen miles to the river to buy bream or dried ndombe, catfish.
Vincent spoke of the Litunga with great respect, yet he had never seen his king. The Litunga kept to himself, did not circulate even in Mongu, his nearest town, which we reached in the late morning. It was an unprepossessing place: its roads had potholes and its shops contained little merchandise; but it was also an administrative center, with schools and fuel depots, and so it was a hub of activity. Within minutes of arriving I was offered a leopard skin by a whispering poacher, or perhaps I might be interested in buying some ivory? I said no, and before I could register my disapproval, the young fellow slipped away.
The center of Mongu was high enough for one to see, across five miles of marsh, the royal settlement of Lealui.
"How will we get down that terrible road?" I asked, looking ahead at the viaduct of crumbly mud.
"We will go through the marsh instead, Daddy."
It was stickier, and it was slow, but the route worked. In contrast to Mongu, Lealui was a peaceful, shady place of twittering birds on a low-level plain crisscrossed by canals. The royal compound, dating from about 1866, is near the river, which is central to the Litunga's rule and his rituals, the most elaborate being the annual royal progress, called the Kuomboka, from his summer to his winter quarters. At the end of the rains, when the river is in flood, the royal barge and the attendant canoes are paddled with great ceremony from one palace to the other, Lealui to Limalunga, through the system of canals.
The palace buildings of the Litunga were large and solid, some with tin roofs, others thatched, all of them stately in spite of their plainness. They were surrounded by a tall reed enclosure, like a stockade, with pointed stakes. The gateway was not guarded, but out of respect no one ventured near it. In the leafy center of the settlement, behind the royal storehouses and the council house, the king's subjects and petitioners were dozing under the trees. Some people had obviously been there for quite a while and had set up makeshift camps, where they were cooking, tending goats, and looking after children.
Virtually the whole of the Western Province, an area the size of New York State, once belonged to the Litunga; to his half-million subjects today, it still does. As a consequence, this province of the Republic of Zambia pays for its monarchist sentiments by being neglected by the central government in Lusaka. The roads are poor or nonexistent, the schools are substandard, and many of the hospitals are run by foreign doctors. The result of this neglect is an air of independence and self-sufficiency, and of course underdevelopment. It looked and felt to me precisely like the rural Africa I had first seen more than thirty years ago.
I was eager to see this reputedly urbane king. He had been one of Zambia's ambassadors before the sudden death of his father, the late Litunga, in 1987 and his subsequent coronation. The Zambezi is a long river, and this man rules a third of it, and there are no other kings on its banks. It seemed to me no small thing to be the king of the Zambezi.
"You must first introduce yourself to the Ngambela," the court historian, Jonathan Mashewani, told me. "Court historian" was an informal title. He was a young man in his mid-twenties with a tattered notebook under his arm, hoping somehow to win a scholarship to study abroad.
He showed me to a small compound where a tall man introduced himself. "I am Maxwell Mutitwa, the Litunga's prime minister." His title, Ngambela, was translated as "the king's chief councilor," and it was his task to interview me to determine whether I had a worthy motive in visiting the king.
He was big and fleshy and heavy-faced, with the easy manner and the soulfulness of a blues singer. His house was poor, just a mud hut with religious mottoes tacked to the wall.
"I am the Litunga's spokesman," the Ngambela said. "He is like a baby. I have to speak for him." He lamented the opportunism of elected politicians and assured me that a monarchy with a chiefly system was the ideal form of government.
"A monarchy is a family, you see," he said. "People love their chiefs more than they do their president. Because it is in their blood—the same blood. We are all related. We are one people."
A chief was not a despot, he said; a chief was controlled by the people.
"Give me an example," I said.
"Chiefs have to listen. If a chief makes a mistake, he will be told so by the people. But if a commoner comes to power, it is very hard to convince him that he is wrong when he makes a mistake." He gestured to the door of his hut. "Look out there in my compound."
I looked out the side door and saw about fifty people.
"All of them want to speak to me." He laughed. "They want to see the Litunga, they need help, they need advice. I am their prisoner!"
The Ngambela approved my visit but said that I also had to be presented to the Kuta, which was the council of chiefs.
"If this is going to take time," I said, "I will have to make camp."
"You must ask the Kuta for permission to camp here."
It was late in the afternoon before I was granted an audience with the Kuta. This council was composed of nine elderly men, the sentries of a threadbare monarchy, sitting on old creaking chairs propped on ceremonial straw mats in an unswept stone building, the council house. I sat some distance away on a low chair and thanked them for their attention.
"What is your mission?"
I explained that I wished to see His Royal Highness, to discuss the Zambezi, which they called Lyambai, in their own language. Livingstone wrote, "The term Leeambye means 'the large river,' or the river par excellence. Luambeji, Luambesi, Ambezi, Ojimbesi, and Zambezi, &c., are names applied to it at different parts of its course ... and all possess a similar signification."
Each chief spoke in turn, commenting on my request. They asked detailed questions, such as, "Who sent you to see the Litunga?" and "What sort of information will you request of His Highness?"
And then, for a long time, they debated this, each chief and minister in turn, speaking at length, while roosters crowed outside. A skittering and squealing above the thin board of the ceiling was almost certainly a family of rats.
I sat, baffled by the progress of the Lozi debate, making notes to pass the time. What impressed me about this council and about life at Lealui in general was that everyone who lived here did so out of respect for their king. No one was paid for serving him. The courtiers and servants carried out their duties in the royal administration and from time to time returned to their home villages, where they had families and gardens.
After two hours my petition to camp in the royal village was granted, and so was my request to visit the Litunga in the royal compound. "Maybe tomorrow," I was told.
It was sadly clear to me from the tone of this that "tomorrow" was a metaphor for "fairly soon."
But I had permission to stay, so I pitched my tent near the Ngambela's compound and after dinner, turned in. Through my mosquito net I could see only candle flames and lamplight. The laughter of children, the muttering of adults, even the barking of dogs went silent soon after nine, and then there was darkness, unrelieved by a small scrap of moon like an orange rind.
The royal drums sounded at 9:30 and midnight and 4 A.M., some-times with chanting and the tripping notes of a marimba. At dawn, as the sun rose over the fifty or so thatched roofs of Lealui, there were cockcrows and the lowing of cattle and the children laughing again.
"We cannot find the king," one of the chiefs said to me. "We have looked everywhere."
The king's councilors were eager for me to see the royal personage, who wore a British admiral's uniform on ceremonial occasions, a relic of an earlier Litunga's visit to Britain. The chiefs found me sympathetic and friendly; they wondered aloud whether, after my audience, I might pass my findings on to the president of the United States. I said that I would do what I could. They needed help, they said. They hoped to restore Lealui to its former glory, when it was the home of ten thousand people.
Still no Litunga. I spent two days bird watching, writing my notes, and making inquiries. In the meantime, was I interested in knowing the meaning of the nighttime drums? I said yes, and learned from Jonathan Mashewani, the informal court historian, that each drum sequence had a specific name and was a signal, the first indicating a curfew, later an "all's well," and so on. Some of the drumming was accompanied by the marimba sound of the silumba, with songs praising the king, until sunrise, when a particular kettledrum, the sinkoya, was struck "to welcome the Litunga to the next day."
On the third day, seeing that the number of people waiting for an audience with the king had swelled, I made my excuses to the Ngambela and left. My not meeting the king was part of an old tradition of travelers in Africa arriving at a remote royal compound, asking for an audience, and then waiting for months. Sir Richard Burton was one who vividly recorded this suspense, but there have been many others. "One cannot get away quickly from these chiefs," Livingstone wrote in similar circumstances.
***
Following the Zambezi bank closely on a parallel road in a southeasterly direction, Petrus and I headed for the only ferry that was operating on the upper Zambezi that month, at Sitoti, south of Senanga.
"Usually we have no trouble with hippos, but one man was killed last month. He was cut in the stomach," the ferryman, Ivan Mbandwe, told me as he steered us across the river near a pod of watchful hippos.
By now I was convinced that the pinkish, buttocky hippo near the ferry landing, with its cavernous mouth and peglike teeth and tiny ears, blowing sour notes through the grommets in its nostrils, only looked goofy and lovable. Roused by the intimation that its portion of the river was being invaded, it turned swift and deadly, a big bossy brute.
"A hippo can hold its breath and stay submerged for seven minutes," Petrus told me.
I kept the figure in mind. Not long after, while paddling an open canoe on the river, I saw some hippos ahead and of course gave them a wide berth. They snorted, they complained, they disappeared underwater. I waited for seven minutes and then moved on through the smooth water.
Suddenly, just feet away from my boat, I saw a mottled pinkish head emerging from swirling water. I dug my paddle into the water and thrust it, hearing the flap and blow of the hippo fussing astern. I kept going until I was well downstream.
"That was a mock charge," I was told later by a Zimbabwean river guide.
"How do you know?"
"Because he didn't get you."
Near Ngonye Falls, south of the Sitoti ferry, crocodiles rested on patches of sand, with their mouths open for ventilation and also to allow oxpeckers and egrets to clean their teeth. Otters plunged, looking sleek, some playing, others clearly chasing fish. And all over the fourteen cataracts of Ngonye, in the rising mists in this broad complex of red cliffs and frothy pools, birds flitted.
The whole of the Zambezi is lovely, but it turns dramatic at the beginning of the middle Zambezi with Ngonye Falls. These falls, not as well known as the much larger Victoria Falls, have become an accidental rendezvous spot where foreign tourists meet Africans in the presence of crocodiles and otters. The falls are a day's drive south of Mongu, or a day's drive north of Katima Mulilo, on the Caprivi Strip of Namibia. Afrikaner families, up from Namibia for the weekend, put on life jackets and are run out to islands in rubber dinghies for picnics, while Lozi women wash laundry at the river's edge and children scrub the soot off cooking pots with wet sand, wincing at the sound of the outboard motors.
The Zambezi north of Sioma or Maziba Bay is out of the reach of most travelers, but beginning at these falls, and extending all the way—seven hundred miles—to Kanyemba at the border of Mozambique, are the sightseers, the safari people, the bungee jumpers and white-water rafters, the canoeists, the game viewers, the gourmet travelers, the gapers, the vacationers, the men working the timber concessions, and the sort of ignorant strangers who, when told about the poor harvest in the west, say simply, "That's their problem. The government does too much for these people."
Petrus and I followed the south bank of the Zambezi out of Zambia and into Namibia where it flowed muddily past Katima Mulilo and Schuckmansburgh. Soon we were back in Zambia, and Petrus was saying goodbye and "Travel well" in his own language. I reminded him of a Chichewa saying: "To travel is to dance."
The many stamps in my passport—I got one every time I crossed the river—were proof that the Zambezi was a frontier. The river flows through or forms the border with seven countries. We had traveled from Zambia, across the Caprivi Strip in Namibia, farther on through Botswana, and back again to Zambia by way of Zimbabwe.
The Zimbabwean town of Victoria Falls is visibly more prosperous than its sister city, Livingstone, across the bridge in Zambia. But I found an older, mellower Africa still exists in Livingstone, and its Maramba market attracts people for miles around—Africans buying clothes, getting haircuts, and stocking up on provisions, and tourists from over the border in search of bargains.
This most touristy reach of the river had once been the front line in the bush war that was waged by the African soldiers of the political parties ZANU and ZAPU.
"This Zambia riverbank was all ZIPRA freedom fighters in the 1970s," Colin Lowe told me.
Born in Southern Rhodesia, a tobacco farmer when it was Rhodesia, Colin was now a canoe tour operator, guiding groups of tourists down the Zambezi.
He gestured to the Zambian side and added, "The camps were allowed by Kaunda, and there were quite a few guerrillas dug in on the bank. The Rhodesian security forces were on the other side—over there. They would shoot and shoot, and when fire was returned they would pinpoint it and let fly."
On the Zambian bank where the guerrillas had hunkered down, planning their invasion, there are now farms and small hotels, and on the Zimbabwean bank where the security forces had been dug in, there is now the Victoria Falls National Park with its grazing animals.
Threading our way around the pods of hippos, Colin guided me by canoe downriver. At the Zambian bank that was nearest to Livingstone Island, I was taken by a narrow boat, known on the Zambezi as a banana boat, to the island itself.
It was my good fortune to be able to approach Victoria Falls by the river, and that night I camped midstream, as near to the falls as it was possible to be, on Livingstone Island. The explorer himself camped on this small mound of rock and palm he called Garden Island in November 1855, and afterward he wrote: "No one can imagine the beauty from anything seen in England."
Few sights in Africa can equal Victoria Falls for sheer physical beauty. Ahead of me, beyond the rocks and swiftly moving channels, was the same sort of smoke I had seen for weeks from the bush fires of slash-and-burn agriculture. The smoke rose fifty feet above the river and the rocky lip of the gorge, and closer it more resembled vapor from a cauldron, pink in the twilight. But this visual prelude did not prepare me for the sound that rose a moment later as the boat drew near: a low murmuring that grew to a mighty roar and at last to an industrial bellow and an odd grinding sound that was unceasing. It was an ear-shattering engine of collapsing water with a rainbow suspended above it, arching from Zambia to Zimbabwe, and above that rainbow the rising vapor, musi oa tunya, "the smoke that thunders."
Victoria Falls happens fast. The flat water of the upper river rushes past rocky islets, and at the lip of the ravine the sheet of water begins to flutter as it drops, widening to a white slashing skirt of foam and tearing down two hundred feet in noisy fury.
The gorge is narrow. If the falls were not so loud, it would be possible to speak to the people walking on the opposite side in Zimbabwe. Camped on the island, I heard only the sound of falling water, though it was pierced briefly by the whistle of a train on its way across the other end of the gorge. What makes Victoria Falls so loud, so smoky-seeming, so dramatic, is the slender steepness and the great depth of the chasm. It also means that you have to be almost on top of it in order to appreciate it, but that is easy—it is accessible from either side
, and it is possible to go near enough to feel the spray on your face and to get a vertiginous view in the greeny depths of the gorge. The river's shadows and its froth give it the look of marble, like the floor of a palace corridor.
So-called adventure travelers were bungee jumping off the Livingstone Bridge or were on river-rafting trips in the sixty miles of gorge below the falls. Meanwhile, the more sedate checked into the sumptuous riverside safari lodges and sat under the trees sipping drinks, wearing fashionable outfits, and watching wildlife.
At sundown one evening I saw some of these travelers, having a drink on the verandah of their lodge, while just across the river a crowd of about thirty Chacma baboons were doing the same, crouched at the river's edge, sipping and barking companionably.
Some carmine bee-eaters began to gather on a branch near the verandah. They roosted side by side, their number growing—now there were nine of them. People were counting excitedly. Now there were eleven.
"The record is twelve," the resident bird watcher said.
And then I sneezed, and a cry of disappointment went up.
I resumed paddling by joining a downriver canoe expedition at Kariba, a relatively new town in Zimbabwe, on Lake Kariba.
Until the 1950s, this lake had been a deep gorge, where the Batonka people thrived. But the dam that was finished in 1962 turned Kariba Gorge into a lake, with houseboats and ferries bobbing on its surface, and crocodiles—a notoriously dangerous number of them—gliding just beneath. The Kariba's stocks of bream, tiger fish, and kapenta have been dwindling, according to the latest reports.