Great East Road

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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.[1] 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.

History

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.

  1. Terracarta: Zambia, 2nd edition, International Travel Maps, Vancouver, Canada, 2000.