March World Heritage Listed Literature Challenge – Zambia

A great February discovering the literature of the Andes and more specifically Peru, through Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s “Death in the Andes” and Daniel Alarcon’s short story collection “War by Candlelight”. On 12 February the Society of Authors announced their Translation Prizes for 2014 and the Peruvian novel “the Blue Hour” by Alonso Cueto (translated by Frank Wynne) was the winner of the Spanish translation award. I’ve secured a copy (publication date was listed for 1 April but it has been brought forward) and once received will read and review it here as part of February’s visit to Peru.

Onto March and we visit Zambia, home of Mosi-oa-Tunya (Victoria Falls). As most of you would know these are considered one of the most spectacular waterfalls on the planet.

 

Image courtesy of http://www.places.co.za/html/victoria-falls.html

Here is the brief description of the Falls from the UNESCO World Heritage Site website, listed for their “outstanding universal value”:

The Mosi-oa-Tunya/Victoria Falls is the world’s greatest sheet of falling water and significant worldwide for its exceptional geological and geomorphological features and active land formation processes with outstanding beauty attributed to the falls i.e. the spray, mist and rainbows. This transboundary property extends over 6860 ha and comprises 3779 ha of the Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park (Zambia), 2340 ha of Victoria Falls National Park (Zimbabwe), 741 ha of the riverine strip of Zambezi National Park (Zimbabwe). A riverine strip of the Zambezi National Park extending 9 km west along the right bank of the Zambezi and islands in the river are all within the Park as far as Palm and Kandahar Islands, with the Victoria Falls being one of the major attractions. The waterfall stands at an altitude of about 915 m above mean sea level (a.m.s.l.) and spans to about 1708 m wide with an average depth of 100 m and the deepest point being 108 m. Sprays from this giant waterfall can be seen from a distance of 30 km from the Lusaka road, Zambia and 50 km from Bulawayo road, Zimbabwe. Basalts have been cut by a river system producing a series of eightspectacular gorges that serve as breeding sites for four species of endangered birds. The basalts of the Victoria Falls World Heritage property are layered unlike those of the Giants Causeway World Heritage site which are vertical and columnar.

I believed the literature challenge itself would prove a challenge, however finding a work that represents Zambia in English was not as difficult as I first thought. The amazing “bibliography of Zambia’s literature in English” compiled by Ranka Primorac http://www.jahn-bibliothek.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/Dateien/OVERSHADOWED_BIBLIO_final_REV_Dec_2011.pdf) contains hundreds of works. Some I may revisit at a later stage, however my choice was Binwell Sinyangwe’s “A Cowrie Of Hope”, first published by Heinemann in London in 2000.