Why it looks like this

The British moved Northern Rhodesia's capital from Livingstone to Lusaka in 1935, picking a small railway siding on a flat plateau and commissioning a garden-city plan: government hill set apart in parkland, low-density avenues, and a commercial strip along the railway.

That strip became Cairo Road — a stretch of the imagined Cape-to-Cairo route — still the city's main artery. Independent Zambia's capital then grew far beyond the plan, with dense townships and new suburbs spreading over the plateau.