The one part of the mid-Zambezi border that did not become rapidly isolated and marginalized in the first decades of colonial rule was the Victoria Falls, where the main road to ‘the North’ crossed the river. The tourist resort created around the waterfall after 1898 was very much a by-product of this developing transport infrastructure, which linked the industrial centres of South Africa via the Hwange coalfields to the mines of the Copperbelt and Katanga. The building of the bridge over the Zambezi was the occasion for triumphal celebration of European technology and imperial expansion, and the new resort at the Falls popularized new understandings and uses of the landscape of the river, in which the waterfall's position along a ‘natural border’ was less important than its status as a ‘natural wonder’ and its location on an imagined transcontinental highway from Cape to Cairo. As such, it became a focal point – a ‘site of memory’ – in the naturalization and legitimation of British imperial expansion and rule over the Rhodesias and of white settlement. The new political uses of the landscape at the Victoria Falls popularized a genealogy for Europeans in central Africa, which looked back to Livingstone and other explorers discussed in Chapter 3, and promoted a romanticized myth of their activities.

This chapter explores these new political uses of landscape and their consequences for those who lived in the vicinity of the waterfall. For the Leya and Toka people who had commanded the river's crossing points above the Falls, cultivated its banks and islands and propitiated their ancestors at the waterfall, the insecurities of the late nineteenth century were replaced not by a growing isolation, but by their close proximity to the new colonial infrastructure, competition for land and engagement in the new labour markets of the railway and railway towns. The new uses of the landscape competed directly with, and subordinated their use of, the river. As local people's access to the waterfall was undermined, cultures of colonial authority developed at the Victoria Falls initially incorporated Lozi royalty and celebrated their command over the river, reflecting the elevated place of Lozi rulers in NW Rhodesian legal and administrative structures, and the elite ‘ornamentalism’ characteristic of British imperial practice.

Much has been written in criticism of European traditions of viewing landscape, particularly in imperial contexts.