Dr Moses Banda, director of Kalahari Geo Energy Ltd, in Zambia, visited the Rhodes Cottage Museum, on Saturday July 9, to add the Zambian flag to the museum’s collection of flags from countries that Cecil John Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (BSAC) founded.
Rhodes Cottage Museum curator Gabriel Clark-Brown said Dr Banda had visited the museum earlier this year, after attending a mining convention in Cape Town, to pay respects to Rhodes for his role in founding Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia.
During his earlier visit, Mr Clark-Brown said, Dr Banda had noticed that the other countries that Rhodes’s BSAC had founded – Malawi (formerly Nyasaland) and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), had flags outside the museum except Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia).
Mr Clark-Brown said that after assuring Dr Banda that this would be put right by the museum, Dr Banda and his wife, Olipa, had returned to Cape Town and the Zambian flag had been raised, during a small ceremony at the museum.
Mr Clark-Brown said the chairman of the Muizenberg Historical Conservation Society, Glenn Babb, had played Reveille on his bugle, speeches had been made and the national anthem of Zambia, Stand and Sing of Zambia, Proud and Free, had been sung.
“At the end of the day, Dr Banda wrote in the museum’s visitors book, ‘Today the Zambian flag proudly flies over Rhodes Cottage’,” Mr Clark-Brown said.
Dr Banda said: “I am honoured to have been given the opportunity to hoist the Zambian flag, knowing that it will forever fly at the Cecil John Rhodes Memorial Museum.”
For more information about the Rhodes Cottage Museum, visit www.rhodescottage.co.za
