Livingstone Museum, Zambia
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Established | 1934 |
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Location | Livingstone Zambia |
Coordinates | 17°50′53″S 25°51′19″E / 17.8481°S 25.8553°E |
The Livingstone Museum, formerly David Livingstone Memorial Museum and Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, is the largest and the oldest museum in Zambia, located in Livingstone near Victoria Falls. The museum has exhibits of artifacts related to local history and prehistory, including photographs, musical instruments, and possessions of David Livingstone, the explorer and missionary.
The Livingstone Museum is the largest and the oldest museum in Zambia, established in the 1934 as the David Livingstone Memorial Museum. In 1948, Captain A.W. Whittington offered to sell the two specimens of a fossilized human femur ("Rhodesian man") to the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, but the museum could not afford to make the purchase. A new Spanish colonial-style building was opened in 1951. Jock Millar, former mayor of Livingstone, requested that Harry Susman donate a 'four-faced' tower clock to the museum, but before it was unveiled in the museum, Susman died.
In 1960 the museum recreated villages from five ethnic groups to give visitors a sense of traditional tribal life and to present the "way of life during the bronze and iron age." Its original name the Rhodes–Livingstone Museum was changed to Livingstone Museum in 1966. In 2003 the buildings were renovated with funds from the European Union.
Over the years, the museum has been a trustee of numerous archaeological expeditions in Zambia. In 1956 the museum was a trustee, along with National Monuments Commission of Northern Rhodesia (a former name for Zambia) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, of the excavation of the Kalambo Falls Prehistoric Site.
In 2005, a statue of David Livingstone was erected in front of the museum in memory as was a statue of Emil Holub, a noted Czech doctor, explorer, cartographer, and ethnographer who made the first map of the Victoria Falls region.
The Livingstone Museum is located in the heart of the Livingstone town on the Mosi-o-Tunya Road. It is 10 km away from the Victoria Falls, on the Zambian side. Road access is from three directions. The 11 kilometres (6.8 mi) drive from across the border near the town of Victoria Falls crosses over the famous Victoria Falls Bridge. The second approach is 60 kilometres (37 mi) from Botswana involving crossing the border at Kazungula by ferry. Livingstone is 470 kilometres (290 mi) from Lusaka, taking the southbound Kafue Road, crossing the Kafue River Bridge and taking a right turn towards Mazabuka.