Crossing is a recurrent theme of stories about past relations with the mid-Zambezi told today by those claiming the status of ‘river people’. They tell tales of running to the river to escape powerful pursuers, of ferrying others across or cunningly manipulating enemies’ ignorance, such that knowledge of crossing the Zambezi created a link between opposite banks, when for others the river was a barrier. In these stories, both the river itself and extraordinary non-human occupants – fish, large animals, spirits and monsters – are attributed with magical powers and are entangled in social life, often demonstrating a special relationship between the Zambezi and the ‘river people’ who lived along its banks and regarded the valley as home.

This chapter examines these stories with the aim of providing insights into the politics of landscape on the Zambezi and related modes of discourse before the first Europeans arrived in the nineteenth century, so that European explorers’ accounts (discussed in the next chapter) can be situated in the context of the place they were writing about. Of course, oral sources – traditions and histories collected by myself or recorded by others at various times – work against the possibility of historical reconstruction in a variety of ways. Not only do storytellers conflate discrete historical episodes of crossing and telescope historical actors, but the stories play a political and moral role today, linked to modern, ethnicized notions of identity, bids for chieftaincy and reparations, or a romanticized, nostalgic view of the past as heritage in which ritual and ‘sacred places’ have been revalidated as ‘sites of memory’, reified as threatened, potentially preservable cultural relics, or developed as tradable commodities. The intervening period has also left its mark, not least in the language and terms in which the stories are told, which have been profoundly shaped by biblical idiom, modern cultural nationalist validation of heroes and resistance, and notions of pre-modern ‘authenticity’. Only towards the end of the book will contemporary and intervening influences on the politics and use of these stories become clear to the reader. Here, however, my focus is on traces of the past.