History of Livingstone

anagers and laborers. Eventually, British capital, British settlers, and their Rhodesian descendents organized, capitalized, and built a hydroelectric plant. It took water from the Eastern Cataract of the Falls, becoming the largest hydroelectric plant in Africa. The town of Victoria Falls in Southern Rhodesia had the tourist trade, but many supplies were bought from Livingstone.

Of all the towns in Northern Rhodesia, colonial Livingstone took on the most civilized British and European character. Like most of Southern Rhodesia's or South Africa's cities at that time, it was one of the most developed urban area of sub-Saharan Africa having all the British-like facilities found anywhere in the world with gentlemen's clubs, pubs, hotels, hunting lodges, chambers of commerce, theatres, and housing estates. Surrounded by large numbers of African tribes and a still highly illiterate black urban population dependent upon British largess, it had a strongly marked segregation which while not being officially enshrined as an apartheid policy, had similar practical effects. The north and western halves of the town and the town centre were reserved for the colonial government and white-owned businesses and associated residential areas, while African townships such as Maramba (named after the small Maramba River flowing nearby) were in the east and south and were inhabited by working servants, craftsman, tradesman, as well as large numbers of non-working black families suffering under welfare dependency. Asians and people of mixed race owned businesses in the middle, on the eastern side of the centre.

As the British government began publicly discussing independence under pressure from the United States of America and Soviet Union, and news of the large scale genocide of white colonials in nearby Belgian Congo was heard, many Northern Rhodesians feared abandonment by the British