Last May 10 It was inaugurated the Kazungula bridge between Botswana and Zambia, and the ceremony was attended by the presidents of the respective countries together with those of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The bridge, nearly a kilometer long, spans the Zambezi River and has an unusual curvilinear shape. The reason is not structural: it was designed in this way because of the very strange border that crosses, precisely between Botswana and Zambia, in fact passing through a passage of just over a hundred meters that separates two different points where the borders meet. of three states.
The triple borders and the 135 meter border between Botswana and Zambia (Wikimedia Commons)
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With a slight curve, the Kazungula bridge can start from the Zambezi bank in Botswana, at the point where it joins the Chobe tributary, and arrive on the other side in Zambia, without crossing over into Zimbabwe and Namibia, thus connecting directly the two countries concerned without other customs crossings, which would have compromised their commercial usefulness.
The place where it is located has long been considered the only one in the world where four different states meet: Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia. In reality, the political interpretation that has been affirmed for some decades is that it is not a fourfold border, but two very close threefold borders, separated by the shortest border in the world, that of 135 meters between Zambia and Botswana.
The bridge had been under construction since 2014 and has cost a total of more than 250 million dollars (approximately 210 million euros). It was funded by the Japanese agency JICA, which financially supports projects in developing countries, and by the African Development Bank. The works, on the other hand, were carried out by the Korean company Daewoo E&C.
There has been talk of building a bridge there for some time, mainly to remedy an age-old problem of local traffic. To go to South Africa, in fact, the bulk of the freight traffic headed towards what is called the “infamous” border of Beitbridge, in Zimbabwe, known to be perpetually congested (the lines of trucks can last even days). The bridge that crosses the Zambezi opens a new route and will allow traffic to bypass Beitbridge, which is why the former president of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe decided not to participate in the project, for fear of seeing traffic decrease on the route it crosses. his country.
The border between Zambia and Botswana is so short that for very small-scale maps it is impossible to represent, and moreover in the past there have been heated disputes between the African states involved to decide whether the border was fourfold or not. In the 1960s, South Africa – controlled Namibia – and Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was known at the time) considered the fourfold border to be able to make claims on commercial traffic between Zambia and Botswana, and the boat that allowed exchanges between the two countries was declared illegal from South Africa. In 1970, again due to the border controversy, there were even some military clashes, and a few years later the Rhodesia army sank the boat as a pretext.
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In the following years, the dispute then settled and today the small border of 135 meters is generally considered valid. The recently inaugurated bridge will cross this border and will replace the boat in use previously, which had the capacity to carry only two trucks at a time. As the site writes Big Think, this means that thanks to the bridge there will be a new and easier trade route to drain the raw materials extracted in the southern part of the Congo, which is particularly rich in mines.
The bridge under construction (Wikimedia Commons)
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