Victoria Falls

Far from Bulawayo, about 440 km to the north-west on the Zambezi, at the border with Zambia. It is here because for generations the road and railway to the Falls began in Bulawayo.

Also known as Mosi-oa-Tunya, The Falls, Vic Falls.

The great waterfall of the Zambezi, known to the Kololo as Mosi-oa-Tunya, 'the smoke that thunders'; a UNESCO World Heritage Site shared by Zimbabwe and Zambia since 1989.

The Victoria Falls are not in Bulawayo, and this site is about Bulawayo, so why include them? Because for most of the twentieth century, the Falls were where Bulawayo went on holiday. The railway reached them from Bulawayo in 1904, and the bridge across the gorge was completed the next year. Generations of families took the overnight train north. Many readers will have their first sight of the spray in a family album, and those photographs are part of Bulawayo’s story too.

The smoke that thunders

The Zambezi here is well over a kilometre wide. It drops all at once into a narrow crack in the basalt and leaves through a zigzag of gorges cut by earlier falls. The spray rises high enough to be seen from far away. Long before any European saw it, the people who lived along the river had names for it. The Kololo name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, “the smoke that thunders,” is the one the falls share today with the name Livingstone gave them.

Three first impressions

Three nineteenth-century travellers’ descriptions of their first sight of the Falls are kept here. They are the outsiders’ view, and they read as such, but each of them tried hard to describe something none of them had words for.

• David Livingstone, who was taken to the falls by Kololo guides in November 1855, described the falling water breaking up into “myriads of rushing, leaping, aqueous comets.”
• James Chapman, who came in 1862, “approached the brink with trembling, and carefully parting the bushes with our hands, looked at once on the first grand view.”
• Emil Holub, the Czech physician who reached them in the 1870s, thought them “one of the most imposing phenomena of the world.”

What the photographs show

The photographs in this set follow a visitor’s walk through the rain forest: the entrance and “Welcome to the falls” sign, the statue of Livingstone, baobabs on the road in, the paths through the dripping garden vegetation, the main falls in full flood, the Horseshoe Falls, the calm Zambezi above the edge, the mist and a rainbow, tourists at the viewpoints, and the Victoria Falls Bridge between Zimbabwe and Zambia.

What we don’t know yet

Your Victoria Falls. The overnight train from Bulawayo, the old Victoria Falls Hotel, a honeymoon, a school trip, a first job in the town. If you have photographs from the 1950s to the 1990s, especially of the journey north from Bulawayo, we would like to see them.

44 photographs of Victoria Falls →