The ‘unfinished business’ of Lake Kariba and Tonga claims to the river discussed in the last two chapters have begun to bring this book back to where it began. By illuminating the current politics of landscape on the Zambezi, the last two chapters examined the contexts in which stories about crossing, privileged relations with the river or past episodes of intervention are told today, exploring why the idea of being ‘river people’ has retained its salience. They showed how current claims have been shaped by changing cultures of state power and histories of nation-building, neoliberal reforms, economic austerity and international validation of multiculturalism and indigeneity.

This final chapter further analyses state and international influences on the politics of local claim-making along the river by returning to Victoria Falls to pick up some lost strands of the narrative before revisiting the main themes of the book. As the waterfall was awarded the status of World Heritage Site in 1989, and is upheld by both Zambian and Zimbabwean governments as their primary national monument and tourist destination, Victoria Falls provides a revealing site for exploring how the power of international tourism, the global infrastructure of the heritage industry and state promoted ideas of nationhood shape local claims.

Although the waterfall and broader Zambezian landscape are central to tourism and state revenue, they are located on a frontier, and are marginal to cultural nationalism in Zimbabwe. As we have seen, local efforts to reclaim the landscape through ethnic mobilization proved divisive, had an uneasy relationship with nationalism, and sat uncomfortably with the ethnic diversity and history of the north-west. Moreover, any momentum for changing the public face of the resort to render it more appropriate for a post-colonial context was also tempered by the importance state officials attached to maintaining flows of tourists and control over the foreign exchange they brought in. The tourist and heritage industries operate through rather than outside state interests and institutions, even in such a commercialized site as the waterfall, and the influence of divergent state nationalisms and cultures of state power is thus no less apparent here than in other sites along the river and other historical periods.

This conjuncture of state and international influences has created both convergences and tensions with local interests.