The Livingstone Museum has several rooms, and it seems to have been reorganized a little recently. According to one travel site, there was water damage to the roof that threatened the collection, so that may account for it.
From the outside, it's quite imposing.
And if you look closely at the plaque, you can see that there seems to have been some revisionist meddling along the way, too.
Rhodes was actually responsible for Livingstone being where Livingstone is. The community had been lower on the river before the bridge went in; when the bridge went up, the old community, wich just happened to have been a hotbed of malaria, moved to higher, drier ground near the new locus of activity. But as much as Rhodes accomplished, he's almost universally reviled for being, oh, a bigot and slaver and exploiter of just about everything and everyone.
Livingstone is a character of much more universal appeal. How can you criticize a man who is described in Wikipedia as having "a mythic status, which operated on a number of interconnected levels: that of Protestant missionary martyr, that of working-class 'rags to riches' inspirational story, that of scientific investigator and explorer, that of imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader and advocate of commercial empire." The upshot is that the museum is known as the Livingstone Museum as much for the man as for the town: There is an entire room devoted to Livingstone, who, remember, really only stopped here for about 2 weeks. I think I saw a small picture and brief description for Rhodes.
In the entryway, they have a couple of displays that help you get, as someone once said, "orientated." The map is helpful, and I wish I'd had it for the blog sooner.
This is sub-equatorial Africa. And this is the Zambezi, the Falls, and the gorge:
The part of the river with all the islands is where the river cruises go. The "H" near the eastern shore is the reserve where the hotels are. The little blip into the gorge just east of the bridge is where I walked down--not nearly far enough. I so need to go back.This is the only room where you can take pictures, so the rest of the visit found me scrambling for a piece of paper to take notes on--I'd left my notebook in my tote, which I stored with the tour company while I was in the museum. I know, Dad--learned that lesson the hard way.
The first room is dedicated to the anthropology of the area. There are skulls and tools/weapons from various Ages and some beautiful rock art. The display cases are pretty old and dusty around the edges. This exhibit looks as if it hasn't been changed since the '30s, but it is extensive, and it's pretty interesting.
The next exhibit is something called "Our Village." When I walked into this part of the museum I had a "what's over there" moment, though, so I followed a narrow little door up a ramp and was surprised by a terrific, old-fashioned natural history exhibit. We're talking stuffed lions standing over their kill, bucolic scenes of graceful, elaborately antlered buck grazing--all worthy of the American Natural History museum. The public area was nothing to speak of, though--as beautiful and retro as the exhibits were, the area reminded me of an old school cafeteria without the tables or chairs. I think I saw one bench in there, and the lighting was in the "ping ping pinnnnnnggggg" family of fluorescents.
Back down the ramp to Our Village, which is a more modern exhibit that chronicles the life of a village through the centuries. It starts with the San people--the hunter/gatherer tribe that moved north when settlers started to take over their land in South Africa. The dirt floor, the huts, the cooking areas, the public spaces--all were almost exactly like the Mukuni Village. It was a little weird. But I started to read the cards about the San, and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud.
The San are known to the rest of us as the Bushmen. And the Bushmen, of course, are of, shall we say, "small stature." There was one warrior figure who was quite elaborate (gee I hope I'm remembering this right), and the card above him explained that, when you met a San on the road, he would ask you, "How far away did you see me?" You are supposed to answer, "I saw you from very far," because to answer otherwise--say, "I just saw you now"--would be taken as an insult to his "small stature." I had a cruel and inappropriate vision of the little guy wandering the countryside kicking people in the shins.
Our Village then moves to more recent times, and we see people like the men at the Mukuni Village, lazing about, while women do much of the work.
The path through the exhibit is serpentine, so the stages of evolution are in semi-discreet areas, and the whole place seems much bigger than it really is. When you get to the end of the dirt road, there is a wall and a door, and over the door is a sign: Their Town.
Their Town has a paved path that is not the ess-shape that the path in Our Village is. It's more like a, well, city block. And it follows the development of Town from the trading post to "modern day," replete with a powder blue VW bug, just like Dad's old car but with the steering wheel on the wrong side. Not coincidentally, the Bug is at an intersection, where the light is red.
There's a sign over the door leading out of this exhibit, and I tried to read it, to memorize it, and to write it on the back of my ticket, but I failed. It was simple but profound on the subjects of villages and towns and "our" and "their." It made me want to go through the exhibit again, but the clock was a-tickin.
The next space was devoted to Livingstone himself, and it had some artifacts (his coat, a gun, and, rumor has it, an arm bone that helped to identify his body when it was sent back to England, but I don't remember seeing that. There were original papers and letters, and some very good descriptions of the man's life and work. The biggest problem was, though, that it was behind glass and very difficult for me to read without my monocular or a seeing eye friend. So I didn't get it all. I did find the part about Stanley, though--because I'm a big fan of the Spencer Tracy movie.
Livingstone really was remarkable. He took medicine to the tribes and took tribal cures to the Europeans. His family supported all the work he did, and he was, it seems, admired and revered by all. It was, by no means, an easy life for him. He went far into parts of Africa that had not been visited (he traveled 40,000 miles), and he was accompanied to the very end by his servants/guides/companions Chuma and Susi. The pictures were great.
The final exhibit was the history of Zambia, but it ended in 2001. There were panels discussing European settlement, independence (1964), and governments since then. There were many, many displays of newspaper clippings behind glass, so I looked at as much as I could and, yes, found the gift shop.
The gift shop was more local crafts, and, try as I might, I did not find anything all that tempting. I wandered outside and looked around. There is a new statue of Emil Holub, the man who actually mapped the area.
And there's a plane, with absolutely no signage or explanation.
That's downtown in the background. Livingstone, according to my driver, is expanding quickly, especially since the troubles in Zimbabwe. There are new hotels and some shopping malls going up, and there seems to be more traffic at the airport.As soon as I got to the outer reaches of the parking lot, I was accosted by merchants. I kept saying no and no and no, but one guy showed me some lovely postcards that he'd painted (or so he swore), but when I said I only had Rand available, things got a little dicey. He only wanted American. And as we were negotiating, another guy, with jewelry, kept hovering around the edges. The artist finally got mad at the jeweler and started to yell at him. That's when the very nice, very tall guard started to saunter closer and closer to us. Jeweler left, then artist agreed to take Rand, and I wandered back to the front door, where my driver had finally arrived.
There were two other passengers in the van. Yup, Geek and Glitter. They barely nodded hello.
More of downtown:
We got to the airport, and the driver, who earlier had shown me the book of prayers and bible verses he was planning to publish, proceeded to wave us off with a smile and the Good Word. He was very nice and very helpful.
This is the Livingstone International Airport:
My flight was delayed about 90 minutes, but we were finally allowed to enter the official boarding area.
where our plane awaited. While we were walking out to the stairs, another plane was landing. Everyone looked at the landing plane, then at our plane, then at the distance between where we were walking and the landing plane...you could see them all doing the word problem: If a plane lands at the rate of x/mph at the end of a runway, and pedestrians are traveling 50 yards across its path at the rate of y, how long before the landing plane takes out one or more of the passengers?
Everyone quickened their step, and we all boarded safely. My connecting flight in Jo'burg, though, was a worry....
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