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Frontline Livingstone
Livingstone has been on the front line of two racial conflicts in Southern Africa – the nationalist challenge to
the white minority governments of Rhodesia and South Africa during the second half of the 20th century.
During the war against Ian Smith’s UDI government, Joshua Nkomo’s ZIPRA had a base near Livingstone. His troops were responsible for shooting down two commercial Air Rhodesia flights between Kariba and what was then Salisbury in the late 1970s.
The Rhodesian Special Forces drew up a plan to attack Nkomo’s headquarters but never carried it out. Later, Livingstone was used as a transit point for African National Congress (ANC) guerillas fighting the National Party government in South Africa. In 1987, South African commandos attacked Livingstone in a pre-dawn helicopter raid and destroyed the National Provident Fund building, claiming that it was used to cache arms. Four Zambians died in the attack. The Zambian government and the ANC claimed that innocent civilians also died but the South African government claimed it as a victory against “terrorists”.
The raid appeared to be carefully timed to bolster the apartheid government’s support among the white electorate. When a negotiated settlement was reached between the white government and the liberation movements in the early 1990s, ANC exiles from Zambia formed the core of the first democratic South African government.
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