Mosi-oa-Tunya: A leap of broken faith

What does the incautious fate of an orphaned baboon tell us about the extraordinary bridging of the Victoria Falls?

Christine Mungai in Livingstone

Net work: A 1905 photo shows the temporary safety net below Victoria Falls Bridge as it was being built.

As we rumbled along the tracks on a train that felt ancient – right down to the Rhodesia Railways logo on its windows – the view opened up to that dramatic sheet of water: Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders. It really does.

This year, I saw Victoria Falls for the first time. We were on an excursion on the last day of a journalism conference in Livingstone, Zambia.

We stopped briefly on the bridge across the Zambezi – an engineering marvel built from both sides of the gorge to connect in the middle. Completed in 1905, it was the highest bridge in the world at the time.

Standing on it 120 years later, I tried to imagine the level of ambition and audacity it took to look at that raging river with its huge gorge and think, “Yes, we will put a bridge here.”

The British surveyors arrived on horseback all the way from Walvis Bay in Namibia. The structure itself was designed and prefabricated in England, shipped as parts to Beira in Mozambique, then brought inland by railway and assembled over the course of a year. It cost £72,000 – an astronomical sum in 1905. In September that year, the bridge was completed. The work had progressed exactly on schedule.

During our stop, Thulani, our tour guide, fought mightily to reel off all these facts in a speech he has given a million times before. His audience seemed far more interested in the free drinks on the train – paid for by our conference hosts – than in the facts being mic-dropped in this moment. So, when everyone got off the train to take photos against that majestic backdrop, I asked him to tell me a true story about the bridge, one I wouldn’t find on Wikipedia.

Thunderous smoke: Mist rises from Mosi-oaTunya – Victoria Falls – in Livingstone, Zambia. (Photo: Guillem Sartorio/AFP)

Thulani told me that a baboon gave birth near the bridge construction site and died soon afterwards. A British engineer raised the orphaned infant like a pet. It became a companion to workers on the site, wandering about freely and sleeping in the camp at night.

Now, for safety during construction, the engineers had installed a huge net under the bridge, to catch anyone who might fall. A drop from the bridge takes you more than 100m down to the raging water and rocks below. When the net was first installed, a British engineer volunteered to jump and test it. He survived. Having watched the man drop and bounce safely, the young baboon figured this was a game. Every day, he’d leap off the bridge onto the net, tumbling and shrieking with joy.

Then, not long after the work was completed, the net was removed.

But no one told the baboon.

The next morning, as was his routine, the little one leapt. There was nothing there. It plunged into the gorge and was gone. Thulani said that the British engineers cried for a long time about the baboon’s death.

I don’t know why, of all the local stories, Thulani chose to tell me this one. Is it a metaphor for the unintended casualties of the colonial impulse to dominate and control? Does it matter, as Thulani said, that it was a British engineer – and not one of the estimated 200 to 400 local workers – who turned the baboon into a pet? Why – and on whose authority – does one take a wild animal and domesticate it into a pet, helper, or mascot? Does that act mirror the logic of empire – to capture, tame, and claim authority over nature and people? And what do we do with the fact that the baboon died straight after the project was declared a success?

What I’m left with is that image: the net gone, the trusting leap made anyway.