Livingstone was built to be passed through. Laid out in the colonial era as a railway and river town at the edge of the Victoria Falls, its whole purpose was movement — of goods, of travellers, of empire heading north and south. A place designed as a gateway has to work hard to become a destination in its own right. The Livingstone International Cultural and Arts Festival is, in essence, that argument made annually: that the town where cultures have always crossed can be somewhere they gather rather than merely transit.

That history is the festival’s raw material. The Ministry of Tourism’s account of LICAF situates the event within Livingstone’s layered identity — colonial-era town, tourism gateway, and long-standing meeting place of regional cultures. Reading the sector across the decades is really reading how a transit point learned to stage itself.

From Colonial Gateway to Cultural Crossroads

Livingstone’s identity was always plural. As the town at the Falls, it drew people from across the region and beyond, and the cultures that met there — Zambian, southern African, international — did so because the geography forced the encounter. For much of its history that mixing was incidental, a by-product of trade and tourism rather than a thing the town deliberately hosted.

A festival changes the register. It takes the informal crossing of cultures that the geography already produced and gives it a stage, a calendar and a name. What LICAF does, at its core, is convert Livingstone’s accidental cosmopolitanism into a scheduled event — turning the fact that people have always met here into a reason to come.

The takeaway: a gateway lets cultures pass; a festival gives them a reason to stop.

Dance, Music and Art as the Working Content

The substance of the festival is performance and craft — dance, music, and visual art drawn from the region and displayed together. This is not decoration around a tourism campaign; it is the content that gives the event its reason to exist. A festival lives or dies on whether the work on its stages and in its exhibitions is worth travelling for.

For Zambian artists, that content is also a shop window. Dance troupes, musicians and visual artists who might otherwise perform to local audiences alone gain, through LICAF, a platform that reaches visitors and regional peers at once. The festival’s cultural programme and its economic function are the same programme seen from two angles — heritage on stage, and market access behind it.

The takeaway: the art is not the wrapper around the festival; it is the festival.

Cross-Border Participation and Regional Meaning

What lifts LICAF above a purely national event is its cross-border character. Livingstone sits at a regional seam, and a festival there naturally draws participation from beyond Zambia’s borders — performers and audiences from the wider southern African region for whom the Falls are a shared landmark. That reach gives the event a meaning larger than the town.

This is where the local becomes regional. A festival in a single Zambian town, framed well, becomes a gathering point for a whole neighbourhood of cultures — a place where the region shows itself to itself. The value of that positioning is hard to overstate: it makes Livingstone not just a Zambian cultural venue but a regional one, which is a far stronger claim on visitors and investment alike.

The takeaway: a festival at a border town is only as strong as the region it manages to convene.

Reading the Sector Across the Decades

Seen over its span, LICAF is the story of a town negotiating its own identity — using culture to convert a colonial-era gateway into a modern destination, and using the region’s shared geography to give a local event continental resonance. The arc matters because it tells operators in tourism and the creative economy what the asset actually is: not the Falls alone, which sell themselves, but the layered cultural meeting-place the town has always been.

For Zambia, the lesson travels. Livingstone shows that heritage, staged deliberately, becomes an economic asset rather than a backdrop. The decades of the festival are, in the end, decades of a town learning that being a place cultures pass through is less valuable than being a place they choose to gather.