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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 37, Number 5. 3rd April 1974

[Introduction]

Two hundred and twenty-five miles to the east of Lusaka and fifteen miles west of the Mozambique border, not far from Cabora Bassa, lies the small Zambian township of Nyimba. In 1965 the town's population expanded dramatically as a result of the Zambian Government's decision to establish the country's first refugee settlement there.

Today Nyimba is one of three refugee settlements established by the Zambian Government to deal with the problems created by the people who have fled to Zambia to escape from the racial oppression of the regimes to Zambia's south, east and west—Rhodesia, South Africa, Mozambique and Angola.

The refugees have provided the Zambian Government with a major headache. They arrive from across the border with no means of support—no money, no food, no clothes, no possessions. In many instances they come not in ones and twos, but as whole families. As a developing country which has yet to celebrate ten years of independence the strain which such an influx creates is not inconsiderable.