Zambezi River
Africa's fourth river, master of Victoria Falls
The Zambezi is the largest African river flowing east to the Indian Ocean and the fourth longest on the continent, but it is best known for a single spectacle. Midway along its course the river hurls itself off a basalt cliff more than a kilometer and a half wide into a narrow gorge, creating Victoria Falls, one of the greatest waterfalls on Earth. From a small spring in the African interior to a broad delta on the Indian Ocean, the Zambezi carves a path through six countries of southern Africa.
The Zambezi runs about 2,574 kilometers, though a recent study tracing its most distant source into Angola puts the figure closer to 3,400. It rises in a wetland on the borders of Zambia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, flows across the Barotse floodplain, then plunges over Victoria Falls into the Batoka Gorge. Downstream it is impounded behind two of Africa's largest dams, Kariba and Cahora Bassa, before crossing Mozambique to spread into a wide delta on the Indian Ocean coast.
The Tonga and other peoples have lived along the river for centuries — the missionary-explorer David Livingstone, the first European to see the great falls, named them for his queen, though local people knew them as Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders. The two great dams generate much of the region's electricity but flooded valleys and displaced communities, and they have altered the floods that once shaped the delta. The Zambezi today is a major draw for safari tourism and a shared resource among riparian states.