IN Lusaka’s Rhodes Park area, there is a road called Beit Road. Which is named after Mr Alfred Beit, a brilliant financier and a director of the British South Africa Company.
Alfred Beit, born in 1853, into a Jewish family in Hamburg. He was arguably the single most effective person in the transformation of Southern Africa from a sleepy dry agricultural backwater, into not one, but several modern industrial countries.
But you would probably never know it – he hated publicity and preferred others to shine in the foreground
In his will he set up the Beit Trust through which he bequeathed large sums of money for infrastructure development in the Northern Rhodesia.
Some of the monies in his will were used to build State House, Independence Avenue Road, Cairo Road, Lusaka City Airport, Supreme Court of Zambia, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Zambia, Cabinet Office and the European Hospital (now UTH) 
Also funded were some bridges that are found in Zambia such as the first Luangwa Bridge on the Great East Road from Zambia to Malawi, the first Kafue Bridge and Otto Beit Bridge, which opened in 1939, which spans the River Zambezi between Zambia and Zimbabwe at Chirundu
The Will of Mr Alfred Beit also had interests in the the development of Northern Rhodesia’s railway system.
In 1905 when the 150 km Livingstone-Kalomo line was built in advance of completion in September of that year of the Victoria Falls Bridge from the then Southern Rhodesia to Livingstone. Mr Alfred Beit together with Cecil Rhodes financed the Livingstone-Kalomo railway.
The first wagons on the line were hauled by oxen, then a single locomotive was conveyed in pieces by cableway across the gorge where the bridge was being built to start up operations to Kalomo in advance of the main line connection.
Another major bridge was required to cross the Kafue River and the 427 m long Kafue Railway Bridge, the longest on the Rhodesian Railways network was completed in 1906.
The line reached Broken Hill (Kabwe) in 1906 and Ndola in the Copperbelt in 1909 (connecting to Sakania in the Congo), some 20 years before the first large-scale copper mines opened there.
Beit supported the development of a new system of deep-shaft mining, a system that was also used extensively to develop various mine operations at Kitwe, Mufulira, Roan Antelope in Luanshya, Nchanga (Chingola), Chililabombwe (Bancroft), Chibuluma and Chambeshi.
More than 100 years after his death, Beit in fact left many trusts that are funding various charities, including the Beit Cure Children’s Surgical Hospital in Lusaka.
In 1932 a large grant from Mr Alfred Beit was made to help establish civil aviation by paying for the survey of routes, landing grounds, emergency landing grounds and certain airport buildings.
It included the building of the city airport in Lusaka (which is the now Zambia Air Force Headquarters) which opened in 1936.
He did not set out to be a rich or powerful man. He just loved to make things happen in the most effective way to benefit as many people as possible and he relished the work involved.
He was popular and attracted business like a magnet. He had an enviable reputation for generosity, integrity and fair play.
Nevertheless, when he died at the age of just 53 on 16 July 1906, he was possibly one the wealthiest men in the world.
The Trust’s benevolent mandate is exclusively for Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. It does not fundraise. The 1906 Beit bequest, and its prudential management for over 100 years, remains the Trust’s sole funding source.
Courtesy of Mwebantu, beittrust, Kimberly
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
