Speaker Professor Mike Dixon - A visit to Zambia

Professor Dixon had been to visit his sister-in-law in Zambia who was married to a high ranking Zambian official and lives in Lusaka. He gave a slide show of the visits that he made.

Firstly they visited Victoria Falls and enjoyed the wonders of this area from the Zambian side of the river as it was totally forbidden to enter Zimbabwe. From here they went to Lake Kariba which used to be the worlds largest man made dam. Here they had a trip on the African Queen.

After this they returned to Lusaka and the flew on to Mfuwe where they stayed at Mfuwe Lodge and were able to go on several big game safaris seeing hippopotamus, elephants, lions and giraffes as well as many antelopes and zebra. The greatest danger here were the fruits of the sausage tree which could fall off and hit you and if they did they would cause severe damage as they weigh up to 10kg. Mike said how remarkably a lot of the elephants had very small or non-existant tusks. They had bred like this because over the years a lot of the animals with large tusks had been shot by poachers. Thus as they evolved the ones with small tusks bred and created te gene pool of today.

Mike went on to say that H.I.V. was endemic in Zambia with 10% to 20% of the population being H.I.V. positive. This had led to there being almost 1 million orphans in a country of 17.3 million people. On finding out about this he had become a supporter of The Zambia Society Trust which is a UK based charity that funds H.I.V. work in Zambia.