When European explorers began to travel along the mid-Zambezi from the 1850s onwards, they imagined it in much the same way as other important African rivers, such as the Nile, the Congo or the Niger – as a route of access between coast and interior. Fifty years later, however, the mid-Zambezi was understood as a barrier and ‘natural border’, and had been mapped as a boundary between separate colonial states. This chapter charts the process through which this transition occurred. Like the African ways of talking about the river discussed in the previous chapter, colonial discourse about the Zambezi mattered: it was intimately related to power, and to shifting structures of authority and their justification.

Recent interest in nineteenth-century exploration has been concerned primarily with the metropolitan ideas the writers reflected and helped to shape. My interest here, in contrast, is in the relationship between European discourse about the mid-Zambezi and the politics of the place itself – in how European views were influenced by the African idiom, practices and relations of power, how the river route came to be cast as violent and the effects of this caricature, and how imperial discourse developed over time, and in turn, shaped mid-Zambezian history.

By examining explorers’ sources of information, and the perspectives of the African intermediaries who moved with them as guides and interpreters, it is possible to suggest ways in which local discourse shaped travellers’ writing. I argue that British imperial discourse about the mid-Zambezi incorporated African ideas of hierarchy and difference, and the violence attributed to the river route and riverine society in some texts could be made more credible by drawing on African discourses and stereotypes of African others, and actual conditions of acute insecurity and conflict on a contested frontier.

As European explorers selectively appropriated African ideas, they also reframed and redeployed them, in ways post-colonial critics have elaborated. Travellers entangled local notions of hierarchy and difference with contemporary European ideas about race, class, tribe, degeneration and ‘the tropics’, recast African landscape ideas in terms of natural history, or aestheticized the places they moved through, drawing on strands of romantic thought that privileged individual, visual responses. Yet further understanding of how European representations incorporated aspects of local discourse is important, partly because the history of the places being described tends to get lost in this work.