Paul Theroux's Journey Down Africa’s Mighty Zambezi River

In the extravagant African sunset the Zambezi River was deep red, reflecting the crimson sky, and it shimmered in oxbows across the dusk black landscape of the floodplain like a vessel thick with blood. That vivid arterial image seemed appropriate to the Zambezi, which is teeming with life throughout its 1,600-mile length. "This magnificent stream," David Livingstone exclaimed when he first traveled the river in 1853. More tellingly he called it "God's highway," an access route for the Christianity and commerce Livingstone imagined the river would bring to the interior of Africa.

But from the sky over the upper Zambezi in western Zambia, I saw a place little changed since Livingstone's day—clusters of mud huts and fishermen in dugout canoes. What could have been clumps of boulders scattered all over the river were pods of hippos, preparing to scramble up the banks for their nighttime grazing. And the small villages of thatched-roof huts glowed by the light of cooking fires and candles. It was old eternal Africa, the one Livingstone knew when he traveled hopefully, charting the river. His gifts were his linguistic skill and his ability to get on with Africans who, having seen so many instances of enslavement, were understandably hostile toward outsiders. During 30 years of travel Livingstone charmed the African chiefs up and down the river, putting suspicions to rest. A ready smile is still a great asset on the Zambezi, though it has no discernible effect on the hippos or crocodiles.

The landing strip looked like a small bandage on the great flank of the floodplain in the twilight. We descended through the smoky air of the dry-season bush fires and rolled to a halt on this grassy plot.

In the morning I could see that the banks of the river were lush. No matter how starved the rest of the land, the banks of the Zambezi are green from end to end.

I had woken to the sounds of the busy birdlife of the river, the kingfishers, the bee-eaters, the herons and egrets and fish eagles. From time to time I could hear the warning sound of hippos, which is misleadingly comical, like a tuba played underwater. Now and then there was a sudden splash—a big tiger fish, startled by a blowing hippo.

"We're off the map here," said Bernie Esterhuyse, and indeed I never found this site on the Zambezi—Ngulwana—on any map. Like many other South Africans, Bernie and Adrienne Esterhuyse had migrated north to the Zambezi Valley to start a tourist business. They have a tent camp for fishermen who come here to battle the tiger fish, which can grow to 34 pounds.

"The Litunga gave us permission to build here," Adrienne said, referring to the king of the Lozi people, the dominant tribe in this corner of Zambia. "Most of this land is his."

We were driving through deep sand, toward the market town of Lukulu, two hours away.

"Where's the road?"

Strictly speaking there was no road, just a sandy floodplain stretching for miles along the river, like a beach that had become detached from an ocean.

At a cluster of huts under some deep-green mango trees I saw a group of women pounding corn in a mortar—taking turns with the loglike pestle. Like many other riverside villages, it was orderly and well stocked. "We know we are lucky," one of the women said, acknowledging that they owed their lives to the river.

I wondered whether in leaner times anyone ate the rats we had seen running across the floodplain. The word for rat is khoswe in Chichewa, which I had learned as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi. "Kodi ichi amadya?" I asked. "Are they edible?"

"We Lozi don't eat them," another woman boasted. She understood me: Because of the wide dispersal of Malawians, Chichewa is understood for almost the entire length of the Zambezi. "But the Luvale and Lunda people like them."

The Luvale and Lunda are the far-flung minority tribes of this immense area of the upper Zambezi, the Western Province of Zambia, once known as Barotseland, the kingdom of the Lozi, who are still loyal to their king, the Litunga.

I could see the king's people out on the great river, men in dugouts, big and small, paddling slowly upriver. I called out to the paddlers, asking them where they were going.

"To market!" The market at Lukulu was a day's paddle upriver.

All the way to Lukulu we saw people in the distance crossing the sandy floodplain using ox-drawn sleighs, with heavy wooden wishbone-shaped runners plowing the sand. And sometimes—speaking of appropriate technology—a dugout canoe was pulled across the sand by a pair of oxen.

Some of these conveyances were piled high with vegetables or firewood to sell at the market, but several held very solemn people.

"Akudwala," an ox driver said to me of his passenger. "He's sick."

They were on their way to see the only doctor for many miles around, Peter Clabbers, who runs Lukulu Hospital. I made a point of seeing him myself when I got to the town sprawling over a bluff on the river: a Catholic mission, several schools, a busy market, and an even busier hospital.

"I see one new HIV patient almost every day," Dr. Clabbers told me as we walked through the clean but spartan wards of the hospital. Dr. Clabbers, from the Netherlands, has been at the hospital for three years. He told me that AIDS and HIV cases were continuing to climb and that malaria, TB, and meningitis patients were also numerous. There were some violent injuries too.

"I once saw a young boy who'd blown his hand off after finding a grenade and playing with it," Dr. Clabbers said. The border of Angola is about a hundred miles away, and for almost 20 years the UNITA forces of Jonas Savimbi had waged a guerrilla war against the Angolan government. Upriver, where the Zambezi loops through Angola from its boggy origin in Zambia, life is still disrupted by the effects of this guerrilla war.

Like many riverside markets on this part of the Zambezi, the one in Lukulu bustled with swarms of people picking through baskets of fish and used clothes lying in enormous piles or draped on racks or else flapping like pennants on long lines.

Julius Nkwita was selling small piles of dried fish, about 60 cents for a handful. But sometimes he swapped his fish for cups of flour or an item of clothing. Julius had five children, ranging in age from three to fourteen. His wife and four of his children were in his home village, some distance from the river, while he stayed in his seasonal fishing camp—just a reed hut—with his son, fishing intensively.

"I camp on the riverbank," he said. "I catch fish, dry it at my camp, and when I have enough I come here by the river to sell it."

I was curious to know whether he had made his own dugout canoe. No, he said, he had bought it "for two cows." A 12-man canoe, a 17-footer, might cost three cows, a bride even more.

Fishing remains the primary occupation for the men on the upper Zambezi. Julius sold bottlenose fish and large bream, tiger fish and the catfish known as barbel, smoke-dried like kippers.

"We have many hippos," Julius told me. He said that hippos gobbled the garden, and out canoeing he was occasionally attacked.

"What do you do if a hippo goes after you?"

"Swim away from the canoe," he said, and explained that the hippo concentrates on the canoe rather than the people in it. The animal single-mindedly tips over the boat when its territory is threatened.

"My mother was from Malawi," said Petrus Ziwa, explaining why he, a Zambian, spoke Chichewa so well. We set off in a four-wheel-drive vehicle through the Luena Flats, where the upper Zambezi drops south through Zambia. At 62, Petrus had far exceeded the average life span of a Zambian male, which some sources say is a mere 36. A Jehovah's Witness, he was hoping for my eventual conversion, which he tried to accelerate by quoting Scripture.

He also told me he was afraid of snakes.

"What kind of snakes?"

"Egyptian cobras and black mambas."

These are among the most poisonous in Africa, and I said frankly that I did not blame him.

"They are strong, Daddy."

This "Daddy" was interesting. The term of respect in Chichewa is Bambo—Father—but Petrus always translated this "Daddy," as in "The battery is dead, Daddy" or "It is too hot, Daddy."

The floodplain was very hot, but it was beautiful—at this season a broad expanse of sand scattered with clumps of fine golden grass. We headed south, through the sand, using a compass. Our destination was Mongu, a short distance from Lealui, where the Litunga had his royal compound. I wanted to meet this British-educated king, who rules a third of the river.

We drove downstream, bumping along the riverbank for hours in the sun, pausing in the middle of the plain at a place called Mbanga, just a small collection of buildings and mango trees. I asked a man, how far to Mongu?

"By foot it is ten hours," he said. "By vehicle I don't know."

"This is all the Litunga's land," said a herdsman named Vincent Libanga I met along the way. Vincent said he walked 16 miles to the river to buy bream or dried ndombi—barbel. Vincent spoke of his king with great respect, yet he had never seen the Litunga. The Litunga kept to himself in his compound at Lealui, which I could see across five miles of marsh.

"How will we get down that terrible road?" I asked Petrus, looking ahead at the viaduct of crumbly mud.

"We will go through the marsh, Daddy."

It was stickier, and it was slow, but this route worked. Lealui was a peaceful, shady settlement of twittering birds on a low-level plain crisscrossed by canals. The royal compound, dating from the 1860s, was near the river, which plays a central role in 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 Limulunga, through the system of canals.

The gateway to the king's palace was surrounded by a tall reed enclosure with pointed stakes, like a stockade. Out of respect, no one ventured near the Litunga's compound, but his subjects and petitioners dozed under the trees, behind the royal storehouses and the council house. Some people had obviously been there for quite a while and had set up makeshift camps, where they were cooking and tending goats and looking after children.

Virtually all of Western Province, an area nearly the size of New York State, once belonged to the Litunga. To his half million or so subjects today, it still does. As a consequence, this province of the Republic of Zambia pays for its monarchist sentiments by being neglected. The Litunga's roads are poor or nonexistent, the schools are substandard, and many of the hospitals are run by foreign doctors. It looked and felt to me precisely like the rural Africa I had first seen over 30 years ago—independent, self-sufficient, and, of course, underdeveloped.

A helpful young man showed me to a small compound where a tall man emerged from a mud hut with religious mottoes tacked to the wall. He introduced himself. "I am Maxwell Mututwa, the Litunga's prime minister." His title, Ngambela, translates as "the king's chief counselor," and it was his task to determine whether I had a worthy motive in visiting the king. The chief counselor was fleshy and heavy faced, with the easy manner and the soulfulness of a blues singer.

"I am the Litunga's spokesman," the Ngambela said. "He is like a baby that needs protection. I have to speak for him." He lamented the opportunism of elected politicians and assured me that a monarchy with a chiefly system is 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 is controlled by the people."

"Give me an example," I said.

"Chiefs have to listen. If a chief makes a mistake, he will be told by the people." He gestured to the door of his hut. "Look out there in my compound."

I looked out the door and saw 50 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 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 River.

For a long time the chiefs debated my request, 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 debate, making notes to pass the time. 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." It was sadly clear to me from his tone that "tomorrow" was a metaphor for "fairly soon."

But I had permission to stay, and 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 dogs went silent soon after nine, and then there was darkness that was unrelieved by a small scrap of moon like an orange rind.

The royal drums sounded at 9:30 p.m. and midnight and 4 a.m., sometimes with chanting and the tripping notes of a marimba. At dawn, as the sun rose over the 50 or so thatched roofs, there were cock-crows 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."

Still no Litunga two days later. I spent the time bird-watching, writing my notes, and making inquiries. 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. Travelers in Africa arrived at a remote royal compound, asked for an audience, and waited for months. "One cannot get away quickly from these chiefs," Livingstone wrote in similar circumstances.

Following the Zambezi on a parallel road, Petrus and I drove southeast 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 by a hippo," the ferryman, Ivan Mbandwe, told me, as he steered us across the river, near a pod of watching hippos.

Near the ferry landing a pinkish, buttocky hippo with a cavernous mouth and peglike teeth and tiny ears, blowing sour notes through the grommets of its nostrils, only looked goofy and lovable. But it could turn 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. I waited for seven minutes and then moved on through the smooth water.

Suddenly, very near to my boat, just feet away, I saw a mottled pinkish head emerging through 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 river guide.

"How do you know?"

"Because he didn't get you."

Petrus and I followed the south bank of the Zambezi out of Zambia and into Namibia, where it flowed muddily past Katima Mulilo and Schuckmannsburg. Soon we were back in Zambia, and Petrus was saying good-bye and "Travel well," in his own language. I reminded him of the Chichewa saying, "To travel is to dance."

The many stamps in my passport—I got one every time I crossed the river—were the proof that the Zambezi is a frontier. The river flows through or forms the border with six countries. We had traveled from Zambia, across the Caprivi Strip in Namibia, farther on through Botswana, and back again to Zambia through Zimbabwe.

The Zimbabwean town of Victoria Falls was visibly more prosperous than its sister city, Livingstone, across the bridge in Zambia. But I found an older, mellower Africa in Livingstone. Its Maramba market attracts people from miles around—Africans buying clothes and getting haircuts and stocking up on provisions, and occasionally tourists from over the border in search of bargains before heading off for white-water rafting or bungee jumping on the river.

This most touristy reach of the river had once been the front line in the bush war that was waged by the soldiers of the Zimbabwean political parties ZANU and ZAPU.

"This Zambia riverbank was all ZAPU freedom fighters in the 1970s," Colin Lowe told me.

Born in Southern Rhodesia, this former farmer was now a tour operator, guiding groups down the Zambezi.

He gestured to the Zambian side and added, "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 planning their invasion, there are now farms and lodges, and on the Zimbabwean bank where the security forces had been dug in, there are again tourists in Victoria Falls National Park.

Threading our way through 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.

As the boat neared the island, low murmuring grew to a mighty roar and at last an industrial bellow and odd grinding sound that was unceasing—an ear-shattering engine of collapsing water with a rainbow suspended above it.

That night I camped midstream, as near to Victoria Falls as it was possible to be, on Livingstone Island. The explorer stayed 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 of the view from anything witnessed in England."

On the island I heard only the sound of falling water, though it was pierced briefly by the whistle of the train on its way across the other end of the gorge. I got near enough the next day to feel the spray from Victoria Falls on my face and to get a vertiginous view into the greeny depths of the gorge. The river's shadows and froth give it the look of marble, like the floor of a palace corridor.

Tourists who come to see the falls stay at sumptuous riverside safari lodges. They sip drinks under the trees and watch wildlife, as I did one sundown. Just across the river from the veranda of our lodge, a crowd of about 30 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 lodge. 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 downriver at Kariba, a relatively new town in Zimbabwe, on Lake Kariba. Until the 1950s this lake had been a deep gorge, where the Tonga people thrived. But a dam, finished in 1960, turned Kariba Gorge into a lake, with houseboats and ferries bobbing on its surface, and crocodiles—notoriously dangerous number of them—gliding just beneath.

Downstream from the dam, which generates power for much of Zimbabwe and Zambia, I glided in my canoe for a whole glorious day, accompanied by flights of birds—reed cormorants, darters, oxpeckers. The hippos in the channel snuffled and blew; some tiger fish jumped completely clear of the river. Baboons gathered in the limbs of the tamarind trees to eat the seeds they particularly like.

At dusk at a small sandy island, I drew my canoe out of the water and pitched my tent. In the morning the river level had dropped so much that my canoe was now 30 feet from the water's edge. The dam had decreased its power output during the night, and the reduced flow revealed mudbanks where there had been water the day before.

I paddled on, intrigued by commotion in the middle of the river—many heads and flapping ears. When the elephants came to a sandbar and clambered out and crossed it, I was able to count 40 of them. They were big and small, swimming from Zambia to Zimbabwe, enormous bulls up ahead and cows behind nudging the babies. The current was swift, and the babies needed encouragement.

The elephants were panting from the effort as they swam, taking little notice of me because they had a larger obstacle ahead, a steep muddy bank rising from deep water. It meant they had to climb and maintain their balance as they crowded near the bank to struggle free of the river.

The Zambezi made the elephants more elephantine—blacker, bigger, the water streaming from their flanks making their hides shine, and their tusks were washed a brilliant white in the river. It was a procession of gleaming black hides and bone white ivory, and something about their heavy breathing and the way they were winded from this crossing made them seem hardworking and vulnerable.

Not long after, I discovered just how vulnerable elephants can be.

"This is like a tour of carcasses," Mark Evans told me as he drove me in his Land Rover a quarter of a mile from a side channel of the river where a large elephant lay dead, its tusks hacked off. Mark had been a bush guide and ranger in Zambia's game parks for most of his adult life. Even so he was shocked. "Three killings in the past three days."

At first light we had heard 36 shots from poachers using what Mark guessed was an AK-47. By the time the rangers showed up, the poachers had killed an elephant, hacked one tusk away, cut off its head, and rolled it over to get at the second tusk. The corpse was covered with vultures, and for the next five days and nights it attracted hyenas and lions, and even crocs had gotten wind of it.

For over 500 years the river's elephants have been plundered. Muslim traders—Swahili from Zanzibar—were well established here by the end of the 15th century, trading cloth and other goods for ivory. One tusk produced three billiard balls, two tusks a piano. "Every keyboard entailed one elephant killed and at least two slaves to carry the tusks," wrote Timothy Holmes in Journey to Livingstone.

Although poaching has diminished as a result of the international ban on ivory since 1989, elephants still suffer from a loss of habitat caused by an irregular and smaller flow of the river here. Since Kariba Dam was built, the vast area below Chirundu no longer floods and renews the soil. The land is less fertile and supports fewer animals.

"There were once rhinos here," Mark said. "There are now virtually none. The world demand is great. The Chinese grind the horn and sell it as medicine. The Omanis use rhino horns for dagger handles."

He then added a sentiment that I heard often on the Zambezi: "Tourism discourages poaching. Rhinos feel safer near the camps and lodges where the poachers don't dare to go."

Lions padded to the river in the evening to drink and digest after feeding on the carcass of the elephant we had seen. From my boat I saw the cats licking their chops and looking sated. I drank the river too. Though I was hesitant at first about drinking the Zambezi, only wetting my lips or sipping it, I eventually developed a taste for it on my long trip. On the hottest days I dipped my cup into the river and guzzled it, without ill effects.

The Zambezi has a different character and personality every ten miles or so: The placid upper river becomes the tumbling river of falls and gorges, swells into Lake Kariba, and widens again above Chirundu.

Two more days of paddling past Chirundu brought me to Mana Pools on the Zimbabwean side. This 850-square-mile national park, closed during the war of Zimbabwean independence, is full of wild game. In the dry season, when the pans in the bush have evaporated, the larger animals make for the river to drink.

Alastair Macdonald, a Zimbabwean guide who knows the river well, joined me to explore this section of the Zambezi. We pulled our canoes into a wooded shore of Mana Pools and walked about half a mile into the bush. Then we sat behind a downed tree and watched. Four elephants plodded past us. We followed them back to a boggy area adjacent to the river. Gathered near the bog were more elephants, some waterbuck and eland, three zebras, some Cape buffalo, as well as baboons and herons and wild dogs—all sharing one source of water.

One day, paddling near the middle of a broad stretch of water below Mana Pools, we saw an enormous black mountain of seamless storm clouds advancing and made for the closest bank. The wind whipping against the current created a short breaking chop that began to slop into our boats. Within minutes we were swamped, our canoes still afloat but brimming like bathtubs. Instead of trying to bail, which would have been useless, we kept ourselves upright by bracing with our paddles as we stroked. Dangling arms and legs could attract crocodiles.

"Crocodiles are opportunists," Alastair said, as we draped our gear over hot rocks to dry it in the blazing sunshine that followed the storm. "I saw a croc bite someone's paddle a month ago. Must have thought it was edible."

The days passed slowly, with sun and storms and heat, and nights with streaks of lightning and bright stars. Gradually the stream narrowed toward Mpata Gorge, so narrow in places you can throw a stone from one side to the other.

On the Zambian side I saw small clusters of mud huts and some good-size villages—men in dugouts fishing with nets, women working in gardens, growing corn, children lugging buckets from the river to water the crops. I drifted along with the clusters of floating hyacinths—some like tiny islands—under the high Zambezi Escarpment. This ridge diminishes from a great green fortress-like wall to an assortment of low hills farther downstream. On my last day of paddling I reached Kanyemba, the place where three countries meet: Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. I could see a hill just past the point where the river twisted into Mozambique, the last country it touches.

The Zambezi flows for 630 miles in Mozambique, though for upwards of 30 years three guerrilla wars closed this hinterland. Millions of people were either killed or displaced, bridges blown up, communications shattered, roads closed, towns and villages depopulated by massacres. Because of this civil war the Mozambique Zambezi, from Zumbo to the delta in the Indian Ocean, and the main tributary, the Shire River, were inaccessible. Throughout the war the interior of Mozambique was a heart of darkness.

That was a great shame, for this part of the Zambezi is so important historically. Livingstone sailed a paddle steamer upriver from the delta to Tete and also up the Shire, the first Westerner to do so, raising his hopes that the whole river could be navigated.

The Zambezi and the Shire had allowed Livingstone to penetrate the African interior with all its marvels—Lakes Chilwa and Malawi, the country now called Malawi, the Shire's labyrinthine marsh with its abundant elephants, and the mountain Morrumbala, or "lofty watchtower," a solitary 4,000-foot-high sentry post in this riverine fastness.

In the dry season last year one of the first descents in a motorboat down the Shire and into the Zambezi was made by a Malawian-British expedition co-led by Capt. Chris Marrow. Marrow is an Englishman who supervises Mariners, an aid agency reestablishing ferry and barge services, virtual lifelines, along the Zambezi in Mozambique.

Two months after Marrow's expedition Alastair and I paddled down the Shire from Nsanje in Malawi through the confusing web of marshes and into the Zambezi. We were able to accomplish this only with the help of two Malawian paddlers, Karsten Nyachikadza and Domingo Mon, who guided in their dugout canoe.

"Don't walk far," Domingo said, when he saw me heading into the bush to relieve myself. "There are bombs all over."

He meant land mines. The peace agreement had been signed in 1992, but thousands of land mines remained. Every bridge I saw in rural Mozambique had been blown up—some had been replaced with flimsier spans, others not at all. The entire north-south railway network that had crossed the Zambezi was a rusty ruin. I saw the roofless houses, the old scorched and windowless villas, the deserted farmhouses, the tipped over locomotives. But the waterways were open.

"We go to the Zambezi all the time," Karsten Nyachikadza told me.

"What are the problems we'll have on the river?" I had asked. "What about hippos?"

He laughed. There weren't many hippos, he said. The people had eaten most of them during the war. The crocs would not bother us. I was touched when he said, "The people are good."

"No problems, then?"

"The wind," he said. "Just the wind."

The wind came up each afternoon—the same prevailing easterly I had cursed upriver, and this head wind slowed Karsten and Domingo's big dugout and turned my kayak into a clumsy weather vane at times.

We camped at the edge of riverside villages—always asking permission—woke each morning at 4:30, folded the tents and packed the boats. We pushed off before five, at first light, paddling and drinking river water and peeling the small mangoes that were just being harvested. We had lunch in the boats too, and pushed on until the wind came up. Then we looked for a likely village, introduced ourselves from our boats, and were welcomed ashore by the locals who waved us in.

We pitched our tents and broke out our food boxes and built a cooking fire and had a proper meal—a pot of the plain, starchy corn flour mixture, called nsima here, which we ate with fish or vegetables. As soon as the sun set and the mosquitoes descended, I crawled into my tent and listened to my shortwave radio and fell asleep by eight o'clock, dead from the day's strenuous paddling.

We threaded through the Ndindi Marsh, heading toward the Zambezi on waterways as narrow as creeks, with tall grass brushing us from both sides. The "vast herds" of elephants that Livingstone saw no longer existed—indeed we saw few large animals along the Shire, except for a few hippos and many crocodiles. The others have been killed or displaced.

"We're going to the Zambezi!" Karsten called out confidently to the people on shore or in dugouts, as he shoveled at the river with his lollipop-shaped paddle.

The people greeting us were a community of marsh-dwelling Africans, perhaps 2,000 of them, the sprawling Sena nation, whose precarious settlements were not on any map. No road, no school, no church betrayed the Sena's existence. When they wanted to sell fish or buy nets or cooking pots, they paddled upriver to the markets in Malawi; when they bartered their fish for bags of sugar, they loaded their flotilla of dugouts and rode down to Mozambique, sometimes to the Zambezi.

"We don't need passports, Father," Karsten told me, explaining how the locals pay little attention to borders.

They come and go, from country to country, without passports—without even saying where they are going. But I was more conspicuous. At the international border, the tiny riverside depot of Megaza with its mud huts and abandoned collection of ruined riverboats and clouds of mosquitoes, I had to go through the strict formality of Mozambique customs and immigration. This was in the open air, under a mango tree. There was a commotion in the tree—ripe fruit dropped onto the official table. A rat in the branches, nibbling fruit, kept interrupting the proceedings.

Back on the Shire, for many miles we could see Morrumbala, which is more a plateau than a mountain. Livingstone called it "salubrious," and there used to be farms and fruit orchards at the top. How had the Portuguese gotten up and down the mountain, I wondered?

"They were carried by Africans," the villagers said.

Remnants of the Portuguese colonial presence, abandoned houses and plantations, straggled on the banks. We camped in villages of the Sena people that seem as remote today as they were in the time of Livingstone. Lives follow the traditional pattern, the men fishing in the river to the cries of birds and the women and girls grinding corn: That rhythmic thud of the pestle and mortar is like a heartbeat on the river, the same here as on the upper river.

After five days of heat and mosquitoes on the muddy, slow-moving Shire, I looked up one noon and saw the river turning a corner, entering the Zambezi—clearly the Zambezi, for it was half a mile wide and tumbling down from Tete on its way to the sea.

Livingstone believed that the whole Zambezi was navigable. He was mistaken. He would be surprised that no ships ply the river; he would be startled by the hydroelectric schemes at Kariba and Cahora Bassa and by the towns on either side of the falls. But much of the river would be instantly familiar, for so little has changed.