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The Victoria Falls 1900-1940: landscape, tourism and the geographical imagination

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 19:58 authored by JoAnn McGregorJoAnn McGregor
This article is about the politics of landscape ideas, and the relationship between landscape, identity and memory. It explores these themes through the history of the Victoria Falls, and the tourist resort that developed around the waterfall after 1900. Drawing on oral and archival sources, including popular natural history writing and tourist guides, it investigates African and European ideas about the waterfall, and the ways that these interacted and changed in the course of colonial appropriations of the Falls area. The tourist experience of the resort and the landscape ideas promoted through it were linked to Edwardian notions of Britishness and empire, ideas of whiteness and settler identities that transcended new colonial borders, and to the subject identities accommodated or excluded. Cultures of colonial authority did not develop by simply overriding local ideas, they involved fusions, exchanges and selective appropriations of them. The two main African groups I am concerned with here are the Leya, who lived in small groups around the Falls under a number of separate chiefs, and the powerful Lozi rulers, to whom they paid tribute in the nineteenth century. The article highlights colonial authorities' celebration of aspects of the Lozi aristocracy's relationship with the river, and their exclusion of the Leya people who had the longer and closer relationship with the waterfall. It also touches on the politics of recent attempts to reverse this exclusion, and the controversial rewriting of history this has involved.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Journal of Southern African Studies

ISSN

0305-7070

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

3

Volume

29

Page range

717-738

Department affiliated with

  • International Relations Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2015-02-10

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