This cemetery is now almost the only surviving trace of the first European settlement of Livingstone. It is situated on the bank of the Zambezi, about one and half kilometers upstream of the entrance to the Mosi-Oa-Tunya Zoological Park.

The presence of an urban settlement in this area owed to two major factors: the line of the main entry-route from the south into the then Northwestern Rhodesia, and the proximity into Northwestern Rhodesia were carried by ox – or mule-drawn wagons and ferried across the Zambezi at the point, some nine kilometer upstream of the Victoria Falls, where the river is at its narrowest for some distance. The northern end of this crossing, known as the Old Drift or Sekuti’s Drift (after the Toka Chief whose village was then nearby), soon became the first European settlers’ town in the Northwestern Rhodesia. The first settler, F J Clarke, arrived in 1898 and set himself up as a trader, hotel-keeper and forwarding agent. By 1903 the European population had grown to sixty-eight, including seventeen women and six children. There is, unfortunately no record of the number of Africans attached to the settlement. The British South African Company established an administrative post nearby.

The site of the Old Drift settlement was flat, marshy and malaria infested being only a metre or so above high water level.

In most years some twenty per cent of the settlers died and in 1903 the figure was considerably higher. Many of these early settlers were buried in the Old Drift cemetery.

The railway from Bulawayo reached the south bank of the Zambezi at the Victoria Falls in April, 1904, and work began almost immediately on the construction of the bridge, which was officially opened in September 1905.

As soon as work began on the bridge it was apparent that, with the completion of the railway, the Old Drift would fall into disuse and that the only argument for retaining the Livingstone settlement in that unhealthy spot would fall away.

By the end of 1904 a new township had been laid out on the present site of Livingstone and by the end of the following year the Old Drift was deserted.

A monument beside Riverside Drive some five hundred metres east of the cemetery marks the site of the old river crossing.

A detailed account of early Livingstone is given in the book Mosi-Oa-Tunya: a Handbook to the Victoria Falls Region, edited by D W Phillipson, published in 1975.