Great East Road (Zambia)

Great East Road
Highway system
Transport in Zambia

The Great East Road is a major road in Zambia and the only highway linking its Eastern Province with the rest of the country. It is also the major link between Zambia and Malawi and between Zambia and northern Mozambique. However, the route does not carry as much traffic as many of the other regional arterial roads and between the main cities it serves, Lusaka and Chipata, it passes through rural and wilderness areas. In Lusaka the road forms the main arterial road for the eastern suburbs.

Chipata, the capital of the Eastern Province was an early outpost of the British colonial administration as Fort Jameson when Zambia was Northern Rhodesia. Like most of the Eastern Province, it had much easier access to Malawi, then the British protectorate of Nyasaland, and to the Mozambique ports of Quelimane and Beira than to the rest of Northern Rhodesia, and so most trade and communication in early colonial days was eastwards. Until the mid-1920s mail, goods and passengers went between the capital of the territory at Livingstone and Fort Jameson by train through neighbouring countries — via Bulawayo and Beira to Blantyre and then by road.

Before the Great East Road, the first direct vehicle access to the east of any kind was a track made in 1929 by transport companies following a more northerly route than the present road, and which crossed both the Lunsemfwa River and the Luangwa by pontoons made from dugout canoes roped together.

Eventually the Northern Rhodesian authorities needed a better road to assert their control over the Eastern Province, and the first Great East Road was built in 1932 from the Great North Road at the small railway town of Lusaka (Livingstone was still the capital, and this junction of the 'Great Roads' together with the main north-south railway contributed to the decision to site the capital in Lusaka in 1935).

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Wikipedia