Zambesia, the hidden heart of Central Africa, was terra incognita for millennia, except for the San, its inhabitants for tens of thousands of years. Intrusions by peoples from the north followed from around two millennia ago.

The ‘discovery’ of this interior came after centuries of cartography in Old Europe and by Portuguese on the coast. Revealed as Monomotapa, this ‘unknown land’ emerged as Zambesia from the 1850s.

Moffat, Livingstone, Mauch, Baines, and Selous opened Zambesia to the world after eons of illiteracy. It was Africa’s foremost ‘literary desert’ until Cecil Rhodes in 1890 forged an epic break from its feudal past.

Zambesia: The Literary Safari explains this shift, and how Stone Age and Iron Age histories were uncovered. Literacy and literature flourished thereafter as intelligentsia brought these arts of civilisation to this unlettered world.

The ‘known’ in 1891 was fractional to that uncovered since, about its geography, landscapes, resources, peoples, histories, San rock art, material cultures, and subsistence modes de vie.
Zambesia was ‘revealed’ in books, journals, and thousands of published works by archaeologists and historians, to shape one of the most literate societies in Africa.