A Zambian king moves house every flood season, and the Zambezi throws a festival
The Zambezi, Africa's longest east-flowing river, swells each rainy season until its Barotse floodplain spreads 25 km wide. The Lozi king then leaves his lowland compound for higher ground in a celebrated journey called the Kuomboka, one of Zambia's best-known festivals. Downstream the same river plunges over Victoria Falls.
Fourth-longest in Africa at 2,574 km, the Zambezi is also the continent's largest river emptying into the Indian Ocean, with a basin of about 1.39 million square kilometres, a little under half the Nile's. It rises at roughly 1,524 m in a dark, boggy dambo amid miombo woodland in Zambia's North-Western Province, a spot now protected as a national monument. From there it loops through eastern Angola, skirts Namibia and Botswana, follows the Zambia–Zimbabwe border and finally crosses Mozambique.
The upper river falls about 400 m over its first 400 km to Chavuma Falls, then barely 180 m more across some 800 km to Victoria Falls. That flat stretch creates the Barotse Floodplain, where the yearly flood governs nature and society over more than 200 km. The Lozi chief keeps one compound at Lealui on the plain and another at Limulunga on higher ground, and his seasonal move between them is the Kuomboka.
Victoria Falls divides the upper from the middle river. Below, the Zambezi races east through the Batoka Gorge between basalt walls only 20 to 60 m apart, a legendary whitewater run, dropping 250 m in 240 km. It then fills Lake Kariba, made in 1959 when the Kariba Dam was finished; that dam powers much of Zambia and Zimbabwe. The Kafue and Luangwa join from the left, and the old Kebrabassa rapids vanished beneath Lake Cahora Bassa after its dam went up in 1974, supplying Mozambique and South Africa.
The lower 650 km to the ocean can be navigated, though dry-season shallows are common as the river spreads 5 to 8 km wide over sandy beds. Only at the Lupata Gorge, 320 km from the mouth, is it pinched to about 200 m. Some 160 km from the coast the Shire River brings in the outflow of Lake Malawi, and the delta's main branches are each blocked by a sand bar. Coal seams near Tete and below Victoria Falls, and scattered gold-bearing rock, hint at the basin's mineral wealth.
Source: Zambezi
