Development - that most vague of terms - has been an elusive concept over the years for the Upper Zambezi Valley (UZV) region including Zambia's Western Province (the former Protectorate of Barotseland), southeastern Angola and Northeastern Nambia. In the case of the old Barotseland Protectorate, for some seventy years during the colonial era, Great Britain oversaw the underdevelopment of Barotseland, first by the British South Africa Company (BSAC) of Cecil Rhodes and secondly by commercial labour recruitment agencies from the South. With no minerals to take advantage of, Barotseland had first attracted the interests of Cecil Rhodes as a barrier land to stop the Portuguese linking Angola on the Atlantic coast with Mozambique on the Indian Ocean, thereby putting a spoke in the wheel of Rhodes' Cape to Cairo 'Ribbon of Pink' ambitions. For the King of Barotseland and elites of the UZ, by contrast, by 'inviting' the British to protect Barotseland, they could effectively address the threat from potent African usurpers - the Matabele as well as try to take advantage of the modernisation represented by the most successful of the European invaders of the era.

Disappointingly, but rather typical of the British colonial philosophy of the day, having achieved their aim of stmying Portuguese and German expansionist ambitions, the British only ever viewed the Barotseland and Caprivi as a pool of migrant labour for the mines of South Africa and plantations of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Barotseland received no modernisation in return for the draining of its lifeblood, the labour to manage the natural resources of the UZV, its fertility and potential productivity. Instead, Britain stands accused of underdeveloping Barotseland during the colonial period into a 'living museum' propping up yet sucking the lifeblood out of the traditional authority, the Barotse Royal Establishment (BRE) as a legitimate leadership structure in the lives of peoples of the valley. Portugal equally, paid little attention to the southern and south eastern parts of Angola and that neglect has continued in the post-independence era. The Caprivi was ignored by German, British and South African colonial administrations except when it proved to be of geopolitical nuisance value and, once again, since independence, the area has been viewed with great suspicion not least as the riverine, floodplain and its peoples have little or nothing in common with the rest of Namibia with the exception of the Kavango area close to the Okavango-Kuito.

The period since independence has served the UZV little better. Modernity, technological advance and social development, dreamed so ardently of by the Lozi Litunga Lewanika and his son Yeta seem, so far, to have passed the region by in favour of other regions, partly due to politics and partly, at least in the case of Zambia and Namibia as a result of the perception of the UZV as an outlier country region with questionable loyalties that did not agree with the nationalist politics of the independence era and the centres of power that had followed colonial trends. The colonialists did their worst but for newly independent governments that feared what the past narrated, the idea of having a strong and well developed outlier region, far from the new centres of power which were and are dominated by peoples not at all associated with or in tune with the UZV was anathema to independence governments in Lusaka, Luanda and , more latterly, Windhoek. Underdevelopment, therefore continued into start of the 21st century when the UZV region was quite suddenly reconsidered to be of value as the location for new highways to pass through providing links to the Atlantic Ocean for exports in the southern centre of Africa relying on poor and unwieldy connections to the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam and increasingly overburdened ones to the South African port of Durban or via a moribund connection to Beira in Mozambique.

barotseland.net - Africa Development Zone (ADZ)

barotseland.net has a development mission that could be applied anywhere in Africa so long as there is supporting government. Here, it is directed to become a net contributor to the region and countries of the UZV. Put simply, it is to empower a self-sustaining development zone, a development bubble so to speak, with no political affiliation except the acceptance of the host government. The mission is to create a thriving self-governing (by technocratic management), self-supporting and sustaining zone, located where power and resources can be generated in an environmentally sound manner. This zone would be populated by committed African (in this case primarily citizens of the Upper Zambezi Valley (UZV) who seek to create surplus to their needs. Essentially, this means, food, energy, water, biodiversity, value-adding production economic viability. The emphasis is on what might be termed futurability which is to suggest a methodology and modus operandi that focuses on SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT. The project would initially be termed the Africa Development Zone (ADZ) and would resenble an African style 'silicon valley', the difference being that all facets of life would come under development.