A Thousand Roads to Zambia
By Derek Mwale
There are a thousand roads to Zambia.
Some are made of asphalt.
Some are made of red dust.
Some run beside rivers.
Some disappear into forests.
Some pass through cities that never seem to sleep, while others cut through villages where the loudest sound at night is the wind moving through the trees.
Some roads are physical.
Others exist entirely inside memory.
A road can be a highway from Lusaka to Livingstone. It can be a bus leaving Ndola before sunrise. It can be a plane descending toward Kenneth Kaunda International Airport. It can be a train moving slowly through the Copperbelt. It can be a childhood journey back to your grandparents’ village.
And sometimes, the road to Zambia is not a road at all.
It is a song.
A photograph.
A story.
A plate of nshima.
A football match watched in a crowded bar.
A conversation with someone you met for five minutes but somehow remember for twenty years.
That is the strange thing about Zambia.
You can arrive here geographically and still not understand where you have arrived.
Because Zambia is not simply a country you enter.
It is a country you gradually discover.
You discover it in layers.
You discover it in cities and villages, in mountains and rivers, in copper mines and farms, in old railway stations and modern shopping malls, in artists painting walls and programmers writing code in cafés, in musicians turning ordinary experiences into extraordinary songs.
You discover it through people.
And perhaps that is why there are a thousand roads to Zambia.
Because every person who comes here arrives through a different door.
The Country in the Middle
Look at a map of Africa and Zambia has an interesting position.
It sits almost like a crossroads.
It has no coastline, yet it has always been connected to movement.
It shares borders with eight countries: Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Eight neighbors.
Eight different directions.
Eight different cultural and economic worlds pressing against one country.
And yet Zambia has developed its own identity.
This is one of the things I find fascinating about Zambia.
We are landlocked, but we are not isolated.
The absence of an ocean does not mean the absence of horizons.
If anything, Zambia’s geography teaches us something important:
You do not need a coastline to be connected to the world.
You need roads.
You need railways.
You need airports.
You need telecommunications.
You need imagination.
And, increasingly, you need the internet.
The modern Zambian road is no longer simply a physical road.
It is fiber.
It is mobile money.
It is WhatsApp.
It is YouTube.
It is TikTok.
It is a website hosted somewhere in a data center thousands of kilometers away.
It is a Zambian developer writing software for someone in Europe.
It is a musician releasing a song to listeners in Lagos, London, Johannesburg and Lusaka simultaneously.
It is a photographer posting Victoria Falls online and reaching someone in Tokyo before that person has ever heard of Livingstone.
Technology has created new roads.
And Zambia is walking on them.
The First Road Is Memory
Before tourists discovered Zambia, before colonial maps divided territories, before railway lines connected mines to ports, there were already roads.
Human roads.
Trade routes.
Migration routes.
Hunting paths.
Rivers.
Footpaths.
Communities moving through landscapes they understood intimately.
The history of Zambia cannot be reduced to the modern borders we see on a political map.
The country has always been a meeting place.
People moved.
Languages moved.
Ideas moved.
Goods moved.
Cultures interacted.
Kingdoms rose and fell.
Communities expanded and changed.
The land remembers all of this.
You can sometimes feel it when you leave the city.
Drive far enough away from Lusaka and the concrete begins to disappear.
The landscape opens.
The horizon becomes enormous.
The road becomes narrower.
The buildings become fewer.
And suddenly you understand that Zambia is much larger than its cities.
The country begins to breathe differently.
There is something powerful about that transition.
You leave behind traffic, billboards, office buildings and notifications.
Then you enter a landscape that does not care about your smartphone.
The trees do not care about your followers.
The river does not care about your LinkedIn profile.
The sunset does not care about your job title.
Nature has a way of reminding us that we are still human.
Lusaka Is One Road
Every country has a city that becomes its conversation with the outside world.
For Zambia, Lusaka is that city.
Lusaka is fast.
Sometimes too fast.
It is ambitious, chaotic, modern, frustrating, creative and contradictory.
It is construction sites beside unfinished roads.
It is expensive coffee shops beside roadside markets.
It is corporate offices beside small businesses.
It is developers building applications from apartments.
It is musicians recording songs at night.
It is entrepreneurs trying to build companies with limited capital and unlimited optimism.
It is young people who have never lived in a world without smartphones.
And it is older generations who remember a completely different Zambia.
Lusaka is where these worlds collide.
That collision creates energy.
You can feel it.
There is a particular kind of ambition among young Zambians.
Maybe it comes from knowing that the world is changing rapidly.
Maybe it comes from seeing what is possible elsewhere.
Maybe it comes from frustration.
Maybe it comes from hope.
Probably all four.
The young Zambian is increasingly connected to the planet.
They know what is happening in Lagos.
They watch football in Europe.
They listen to American hip-hop.
They follow Korean pop culture.
They use American technology.
They buy Chinese electronics.
They study online.
They freelance internationally.
They build businesses from phones.
And yet they still wake up in Zambia.
That creates an interesting identity.
We are simultaneously local and global.
African and digital.
Traditional and experimental.
Rooted and restless.
That tension is not a weakness.
It may actually be one of our greatest creative advantages.
The Copper Road
Then there is the Copperbelt.
If Lusaka represents political and administrative Zambia, the Copperbelt represents industrial Zambia.
Copper is more than a mineral here.
It is part of the country’s modern story.
It helped shape towns.
It shaped migration.
It shaped employment.
It shaped infrastructure.
It shaped families.
It shaped dreams.
Cities such as Kitwe, Ndola, Chingola, Mufulira and Luanshya carry the fingerprints of an industrial history that transformed the region.
But the Copperbelt is not frozen in the past.
This is important.
A region should never be defined only by what it used to produce.
The future of the Copperbelt can be bigger than mining.
Technology can become another industry.
Creative industries can become another industry.
Tourism can become another industry.
Manufacturing can become another industry.
Software can become another industry.
Artificial intelligence can become another industry.
Education can become another industry.
The question is not whether Zambia can reinvent itself.
The question is whether we are willing to.
There is something poetic about this.
A country whose modern economy was heavily shaped by digging beneath the earth may eventually build its next economy by looking upward.
Toward software.
Toward satellites.
Toward renewable energy.
Toward biotechnology.
Toward artificial intelligence.
Toward creative technology.
The mineral beneath the ground is finite.
Human imagination is not.
The Road Home
There is another Zambia that tourists rarely see.
Home.
Not the Zambia advertised in brochures.
Not the Zambia represented by wildlife photographs.
Not the Zambia of luxury lodges and safari packages.
Home.
The Zambia of family compounds.
The Zambia of village football.
The Zambia of cousins arriving without warning.
The Zambia of someone shouting your name from across the street.
The Zambia of cooking outside.
The Zambia of sitting under a tree for hours.
The Zambia of stories that begin with, “When I was young…”
There is a particular feeling that comes with returning home.
You may travel across the world.
You may live in cities with skyscrapers.
You may experience new cultures.
You may learn new technologies.
You may reinvent yourself.
But eventually something pulls you back.
Sometimes it is not even a conscious decision.
You simply find yourself on a road heading toward the place where your story began.
And suddenly the familiar landscape becomes beautiful again.
The trees look different.
The sky looks larger.
The air feels lighter.
You realize that you have been carrying a piece of this place everywhere you went.
Home is strange like that.
You can leave it.
But it does not necessarily leave you.
Kapiri Mposhi and the Geography of Quiet
There are places that do not need to shout.
Kapiri Mposhi is one of them.
It sits at an important crossroads, historically and geographically connected to the movement of people and goods.
But there is another kind of importance in places like this.
Quiet places teach you things.
They teach you that progress does not always look like a skyscraper.
Sometimes progress looks like a road connecting two communities.
Sometimes it looks like a school.
Sometimes it is a farmer gaining access to a market.
Sometimes it is a young person getting internet access for the first time.
Sometimes it is simply having enough peace to think.
The modern world has created an obsession with speed.
Everything must be faster.
Faster internet.
Faster cars.
Faster delivery.
Faster careers.
Faster money.
Faster success.
But Zambia has another rhythm.
There are places where time slows down.
And perhaps we should not always try to speed them up.
Development should improve people’s lives.
It should not erase the things that make life meaningful.
The Road to Victoria Falls
Then there is Livingstone.
Some places become symbols larger than themselves.
Victoria Falls is one of those places.
The Zambezi approaches the edge.
The water falls.
Mist rises.
The landscape becomes almost impossible to describe.
You can photograph it, but the photograph does not completely capture it.
You can record it, but the recording does not capture the sound properly.
You can explain it, but explanation becomes inadequate.
Some things have to be experienced.
Victoria Falls is one of them.
And perhaps this is why tourism matters.
Tourism is often described using numbers.
Arrivals.
Hotel occupancy.
Foreign exchange.
Employment.
Revenue.
Those numbers matter.
But tourism is also about emotion.
It is about giving someone a memory.
A person can leave Zambia with photographs, but what they really take home is a story.
“I stood beside Victoria Falls.”
“I watched elephants crossing the road.”
“I saw the Zambezi at sunset.”
“I met a family in a village.”
“I ate something I had never tasted before.”
“I heard a song in a place I had never imagined.”
The story becomes the product.
The destination becomes the memory.
And memory travels.
The Thousand Roads of Tourism
Perhaps Zambia’s greatest tourism challenge is not a lack of beauty.
It is that too much of our beauty remains under-discovered.
We have wildlife.
We have rivers.
We have waterfalls.
We have national parks.
We have landscapes.
We have cultural traditions.
We have food.
We have music.
We have history.
We have adventure.
But tourism is not simply about possessing attractions.
You have to connect the attractions.
A tourist should be able to imagine a journey.
Not just a destination.
This is where the idea of a thousand roads becomes powerful.
Imagine a visitor arriving in Zambia.
They could take the wildlife road.
The adventure road.
The cultural road.
The food road.
The history road.
The photography road.
The luxury road.
The backpacker road.
The music road.
The fishing road.
The hiking road.
The family road.
The honeymoon road.
The digital-nomad road.
The road for people who simply want to disappear from the world for a week.
Every road tells a different story.
And every story can become an economic opportunity.
Zambia Needs to Tell Better Stories
This is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities of the digital age.
We need better storytelling.
Not propaganda.
Not exaggerated marketing.
Storytelling.
There is a difference.
A good story does not simply say:
“Zambia is beautiful.”
It shows you why.
It introduces you to the fisherman.
The guide.
The artist.
The chef.
The farmer.
The musician.
The entrepreneur.
The conservationist.
The developer.
The child growing up near a national park.
The hotel owner who inherited a family business.
The young woman building a tourism startup from Lusaka.
The artist painting Zambia from memory.
Suddenly the country becomes human.
And humans are what people connect with.
A destination website can show a waterfall.
A story can show the person who grew up listening to that waterfall.
That is more powerful.
The Digital Road to Zambia
The internet has created something extraordinary.
You can now visit a place before physically visiting it.
You can watch videos.
Read articles.
Look at photographs.
Use maps.
Read reviews.
Talk to people.
Book accommodation.
Plan routes.
Learn cultural etiquette.
Research food.
And by the time you arrive, you already have an emotional relationship with the destination.
This means Zambia’s tourism future is not only about building physical infrastructure.
It is also about building digital infrastructure.
We need better websites.
Better maps.
Better online booking systems.
Better travel information.
Better photography.
Better video.
Better storytelling.
Better search visibility.
Better mobile experiences.
Better digital payments.
Better connectivity.
A tourist should be able to discover Zambia from anywhere in the world and feel like the country is inviting them in.
The road can begin before the airport.
It can begin on a screen.
The Road of Art
I have always found it interesting that artists and technologists are often treated as completely different species.
They are not.
Both are obsessed with creation.
An artist sees something that does not exist and tries to make it visible.
A programmer sees something that does not exist and tries to make it executable.
A musician imagines a sound and turns it into a song.
An architect imagines a space and turns it into a building.
An entrepreneur imagines a business and turns it into an organization.
Creation is creation.
Zambia needs more of it.
Our tourism industry can benefit enormously from creative people.
Fashion designers.
Graphic designers.
Photographers.
Filmmakers.
Musicians.
Writers.
Game developers.
Animators.
Software engineers.
Artists.
These people can create new ways of experiencing Zambia.
Imagine a video game set in the streets of Lusaka.
Imagine a virtual tour of Victoria Falls.
Imagine an interactive digital museum about the Copperbelt.
Imagine an augmented-reality experience at historical sites.
Imagine African fashion inspired by Zambia’s landscapes.
Imagine music festivals connected to tourism routes.
Imagine digital art galleries showcasing Zambian artists to the world.
Technology does not have to replace culture.
It can amplify it.
The Road of Food
Every country has a culinary language.
Zambia has one too.
Nshima is not simply food.
It is social infrastructure.
It brings people together.
It appears at family gatherings.
At celebrations.
At ordinary dinners.
At important moments.
But Zambian cuisine extends far beyond one staple.
There are vegetables.
Fish.
Meat.
Peanuts.
Fruits.
Traditional recipes.
Regional variations.
Street food.
Modern interpretations.
And there is an opportunity here.
Food tourism is powerful because food is one of the easiest ways to experience culture.
A visitor may forget the name of a building.
They may forget the exact route they took.
But they will remember the meal.
They will remember who cooked it.
They will remember sitting around a table.
They will remember the smell.
They will remember the laughter.
That is tourism too.
The Wildlife Road
Zambia’s wildlife story is enormous.
But conservation is not simply about protecting animals for tourists.
It is about protecting ecosystems for everyone.
Wildlife tourism works when communities benefit.
Conservation works when people see value in protecting what surrounds them.
The future cannot be built on a model where local communities simply watch outsiders profit from their environment.
Tourism must create shared prosperity.
The person living near the park should not feel that the park belongs to someone else.
They should see the connection between conservation and their own future.
That means jobs.
Education.
Entrepreneurship.
Infrastructure.
Community tourism.
Local ownership.
And long-term thinking.
A wild animal is not merely an attraction.
It is part of an ecosystem.
And an ecosystem is part of an economy.
And an economy is part of people’s lives.
Everything is connected.
The Road of Young Zambia
The most interesting Zambia may not be the Zambia we see today.
It may be the Zambia being built by people who are still very young.
A teenager learning to code.
A university student building an app.
A musician recording music in a bedroom.
A photographer documenting a village.
A farmer experimenting with technology.
A designer selling clothes online.
A filmmaker creating documentaries on a phone.
A gamer building an African game.
A writer publishing stories globally.
These people are creating roads that did not previously exist.
And this matters.
Because countries do not change only through governments.
They change through millions of individual decisions.
Someone decides to learn.
Someone decides to build.
Someone decides to invest.
Someone decides to return home.
Someone decides to start a company.
Someone decides to create art.
Someone decides to tell a different story about their country.
That is how nations evolve.
Zambia Is More Than a Destination
There is a temptation in tourism to reduce a country to a destination.
Come here.
Take pictures.
Spend money.
Leave.
But Zambia is not simply a destination.
It is a living system.
People live here.
People dream here.
People struggle here.
People create here.
People fall in love here.
People raise families here.
People build companies here.
People write songs here.
People lose jobs here.
People find opportunities here.
People leave and return.
People leave and never return.
People return after decades and discover that everything has changed.
That complexity is part of Zambia.
A beautiful country does not have to pretend that everything is perfect.
In fact, honesty makes a place more interesting.
Zambia has problems.
Infrastructure challenges.
Economic challenges.
Unemployment.
Inequality.
Climate pressures.
Development gaps.
And countless other problems.
But a country should not be defined only by its problems.
Nor should it be defined only by its beauty.
It is both.
The contradictions are part of the story.
A Country Between Worlds
Perhaps Zambia’s greatest identity is that it exists between worlds.
Between Southern Africa and Central Africa.
Between tradition and modernity.
Between mining and technology.
Between rural and urban life.
Between local culture and global culture.
Between the old economy and the digital economy.
Between what we inherited and what we want to build.
This middle position can sometimes feel like uncertainty.
But it can also become an advantage.
Countries at crossroads often become connectors.
Zambia can connect regions.
Markets.
Cultures.
Ideas.
People.
Goods.
Technology.
Tourism.
Knowledge.
The question is whether we will build the infrastructure required to become that connector.
Roads matter.
Railways matter.
Airports matter.
Ports outside our borders matter.
Fiber matters.
Data centers matter.
Education matters.
Political stability matters.
Good institutions matter.
But imagination matters too.
Because infrastructure without imagination simply creates faster ways to go nowhere.
The Road We Haven’t Built Yet
There are roads to Zambia that have not yet been built.
That might be the most exciting part.
A road between a Zambian artist and an international audience.
A road between a farmer and a global market.
A road between a developer in Lusaka and a customer in Berlin.
A road between a tourist in Canada and a lodge in Western Zambia.
A road between a student in Chipata and a university somewhere across the world.
A road between a Zambian musician and listeners in Lagos.
A road between a startup in Ndola and investors in Nairobi.
These roads are invisible.
But they are real.
They are made from technology, trust, creativity and human relationships.
And they are growing every day.
There Is No Single Zambia
This is perhaps the greatest lesson.
There is no single Zambia.
There is the Zambia of Lusaka.
The Zambia of the Copperbelt.
The Zambia of the Eastern Province.
The Zambia of Western Province.
The Zambia of Southern Province.
The Zambia of Northern Province.
The Zambia of Central Province.
The Zambia of Luapula.
The Zambia of Muchinga.
The Zambia of Northwestern Province.
And within all of those Zambias are thousands of smaller Zambias.
The Zambia of musicians.
The Zambia of farmers.
The Zambia of programmers.
The Zambia of entrepreneurs.
The Zambia of miners.
The Zambia of teachers.
The Zambia of students.
The Zambia of artists.
The Zambia of tourists.
The Zambia of grandparents.
The Zambia of children.
Each person carries a different version of the country.
That is why one story can never be enough.
We need thousands.
Maybe millions.
A Thousand Roads
A thousand roads to Zambia means a thousand ways of belonging.
You might arrive because of wildlife.
You might arrive because of business.
You might arrive because of family.
You might arrive because of love.
You might arrive because you are curious.
You might arrive because you saw Victoria Falls in a photograph.
You might arrive because a Zambian musician changed the way you hear African music.
You might arrive because you read a story.
You might arrive because someone you know lives here.
You might arrive because you are looking for somewhere quiet.
You might arrive because you are looking for somewhere to build.
You might arrive because you simply want to see what is beyond the horizon.
And once you arrive, your road becomes part of Zambia’s story.
That is the beauty of travel.
The traveler changes the destination.
The destination changes the traveler.
Neither remains exactly the same.
The Road Back
Eventually, every journey has a road back.
You leave Livingstone.
You leave Lusaka.
You leave Ndola.
You leave the village.
You leave the river.
You leave the national park.
You return to the airport.
The plane rises.
Zambia becomes smaller beneath you.
The roads become lines.
The rivers become silver threads.
The cities become lights.
And for a moment, you can see the entire country differently.
Not as a collection of places.
But as one enormous story.
A story still being written.
Perhaps that is what Zambia really is.
A story without a final chapter.
A country still deciding what it wants to become.
A country with ancient memories and futuristic possibilities.
A country whose roads carry more than cars.
They carry history.
They carry commerce.
They carry families.
They carry dreams.
They carry tourists.
They carry ideas.
They carry the future.
And somewhere between the red soil and the city lights, between the quiet village and the modern office, between the waterfall and the smartphone screen, between the Copperbelt and the capital, between where we came from and where we are going, there is a Zambia waiting to be discovered.
Not by one traveler.
Not through one story.
But through thousands.
A thousand roads.
A thousand perspectives.
A thousand beginnings.
A thousand destinations.
And perhaps, ultimately, a thousand different answers to the same question:
What is Zambia?
Maybe it is the Zambezi moving toward the horizon.
Maybe it is copper beneath the earth.
Maybe it is nshima on a family table.
Maybe it is a child kicking a football in a dusty street.
Maybe it is a musician singing beneath a Zambian sky.
Maybe it is a developer writing code at midnight.
Maybe it is a farmer watching the rain.
Maybe it is an artist painting something nobody has seen before.
Maybe it is a tourist standing at Victoria Falls for the first time.
Maybe it is someone returning home after years away.
Maybe it is someone leaving home for the first time.
Maybe it is all of these things at once.
That is the strange beauty of a country.
It cannot be reduced to a map.
It cannot be contained inside a photograph.
It cannot be completely explained by statistics.
You have to travel through it.
You have to listen to it.
You have to meet its people.
You have to taste it.
You have to walk its roads.
And sometimes you have to get lost.
Because getting lost is part of discovering a place.
And Zambia has a lot worth discovering.
So perhaps there really are a thousand roads to Zambia.
Some will lead to waterfalls.
Some will lead to cities.
Some will lead to wildlife.
Some will lead to villages.
Some will lead to businesses.
Some will lead to art.
Some will lead to technology.
Some will lead to history.
And some will lead you all the way back to yourself.
The road is waiting.
The country is waiting.
The story is still being written.
Welcome to Zambia.
There are a thousand roads here.
Choose one.
