About the park

The history of Lower Zambezi

Name: Lower Zambezi National Park
Address: Zambia

The north bank of the middle Zambezi got its national park twenty years after the south bank, and the reasons are the story: a chieftainess's country, a fly that kept the valley thin, a conservation experiment that collapsed after two years, and a president who kept the place for himself. Here is the documented history, including the copper mine that is still not settled.

If you only want the answer

The valley floor here is the country of the Goba people under Chieftainess Chiawa, kept thinly settled for centuries by tsetse fly. An early 1970s attempt to run the area as the International Game Park collapsed within two years, and the land then served as the private game reserve of Zambia's presidency under Kenneth Kaunda until it was gazetted as Lower Zambezi National Park in 1983, twenty years after Mana Pools across the river was first protected. Ivory poaching crossed this bank through the 1980s, Conservation Lower Zambezi was founded in 1994 to help fight it, and since 2011 the park has been resisting an open-pit copper mine at Kangaluwi that is halted but has never been definitively killed.

Chieftainess Chiawa's country

Before the border, the middle Zambezi valley was one country with a river through it. The people of the north bank are the Goba, Shona speakers whose language and kinship run straight across the water into Zimbabwe, and whose lands along the lower Kafue and the Zambezi fall under the Chiawa chieftaincy, held by a chieftainess. The American anthropologist Chet Lancaster lived among the Goba in the 1960s and wrote the standard account of their world: river-margin farming on the alluvial soils, fishing, hunting, and a religious life organised around ancestral spirits tied to specific stretches of land. The chieftaincy still holds its Kailala ceremony each year to thank those spirits for the harvest.

The colonial border that made the south bank Rhodesia and the north bank Northern Rhodesia turned one riverside people into two nationalities, and the awkwardness never fully went away. As recently as 2015, Chieftainess Chiawa was publicly appealing to the Zambian government to stop treating her people as foreigners, because their Shona speech sounded Zimbabwean to officials issuing passports. Her chiefdom's name is on the map every visitor uses: the Chiawa Game Management Area, the customary land between the Kafue confluence and the park's western boundary where most of the valley's lodges actually stand. Anyone who flies into Royal Airstrip and sleeps beside the river is, in most cases, a guest in her country before they ever enter the park.

The valley the fly kept thin

The same insect that shaped the Zimbabwean bank shaped this one. The middle Zambezi valley carries two species of tsetse fly, Glossina morsitans and Glossina pallidipes, and it sits inside one of the region's documented historical zones for the sleeping sickness the fly transmits. Cattle could not survive the valley floor, the disease made permanent settlement risky, and malaria and seasonal flooding did the rest. Goba communities lived along the river and farmed its margins, but the deep valley behind the bank, and above all the escarpment, stayed close to empty.

That thinness is the precondition for everything that follows. When governments and presidents later drew lines around this landscape, there were no towns to move and few fields to buy out. The wilderness that safari marketing presents as untouched was, as at Mana Pools across the river, partly the work of a fly.

A false start: the International Game Park

The park's first protected incarnation is a chapter almost nobody tells, and the record for it is thin. In the early 1970s the Zambian government handed a management contract for this stretch of the valley to Wildlife Conservation International, and in late 1973 or early 1974 the area was gazetted as the International Game Park. A young Robin Pope, later one of Zambia's best-known safari names, worked here as a field assistant at Old Mushika Camp in 1973 and 1974. The recollections of people who were there are the main source for this period, and we present it on that basis rather than as settled institutional history.

The experiment did not survive its second year. The project ran into political difficulty, donors hesitated, and by 1974 or 1975 it had collapsed. The timing was fatal in a larger way too: Zimbabwe's liberation war was turning the Zambezi into a frontline, guerrillas were crossing from the Zambian side, and parts of this bank were mined. Tourism on the north shore stopped before it had begun, and de-mining had to be carried out after the war ended in 1980.

The president's reserve

What filled the vacuum was the park's defining origin story. Through the years before 1983, the area that is now the national park was held as a private game reserve of Zambia's presidency, and Kenneth Kaunda, the country's first president, used it as a personal retreat. The remains of his lodge, the Kenneth Kaunda Ruins, still stand inside the park. The claim appears in essentially every published account of the park, from Zambian tourism material to the safari operators who work here, though no gazette instrument for the presidential reserve itself has been published that we could find, so the legal form it took remains vaguer than the fact of it.

Whatever the paperwork said, the effect on the ground is not in dispute. For a decade in which other Zambian parks were being roaded, lodged and hunted, this valley was kept closed. Nobody built anything except the president, nobody ran mass tourism, and the north bank stayed as empty as the fly and the war had left it. In 1983 the reserve was gazetted as Lower Zambezi National Park, 4,092 square kilometres from the riverbank to the top of the escarpment, one of the youngest of Zambia's twenty national parks.

Twenty years behind the other bank

The comparison with the south bank is the sharpest way to see what the late start meant. Mana Pools, directly across the water, was gazetted as a game reserve in 1963, became a national park in 1975, and was inscribed as Zimbabwe's first World Heritage Site in 1984, a story we tell in full on our Mana Pools history page. Lower Zambezi reached its first national park status in 1983, two decades behind, and has never been inscribed.

The delay preserved a great deal. Because the valley spent those decades as first a war zone and then a presidential preserve rather than a developing park, it arrived at 1983 with no road network, no camps beyond the president's, and an escarpment interior that had never been surveyed, let alone opened. The park never had to be emptied of villages the way so many older African parks were, because the fly and the closed years had done the emptying long before, and no mass eviction appears anywhere in its record. What the delay cost was formal protection during dangerous years. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s this bank had no park budget, no scout force to speak of and no international status, at exactly the moment the ivory trade was industrialising, and the bill for that arrived almost immediately.

The ivory years

Through the 1980s the middle Zambezi valley was one of the hardest-hit ivory frontlines in Africa, and the honest telling puts the launch point on this side of the river. Armed gangs worked from the Zambian bank, shooting elephants here and crossing at night to shoot them in Zimbabwe, where ZimParks rangers fought them in repeated armed contacts through the decade. On the northern side the new park's scouts were fewer, poorer equipped and spread over four thousand square kilometres of roadless country, and the elephants of the valley floor paid for it in numbers nobody was in a position to count properly. The international ivory trade ban of 1989 slowly took the profit out of the trade, but poaching in this valley never fully stopped, it only changed scale.

The response that lasted came from the private sector. In 1994 the safari operators and residents of the valley founded Conservation Lower Zambezi, a nonprofit built to do the unglamorous work the wildlife authority could not fund: rations and equipment for scout patrols, radios, vehicle support and, in time, an aircraft flying detection patrols over the valley. CLZ has worked alongside the Department of National Parks and Wildlife ever since, and its growth from a handful of staff to the operation described on our about page tracks the park's recovery. The one rigorous number attached to that recovery is modest and worth stating plainly: the 2015 national aerial survey estimated 973 elephants in the surveyed valley stratum, with a carcass ratio its assessors read as consistent with a stable population. The herds a visitor sees swimming between the islands today are the survivors' descendants, not an unbroken abundance.

Kangaluwi: the mine inside the park

The park's defining modern battle began in 2011, when Zambia granted Mwembeshi Resources a 25-year licence for an open-pit copper mine at Kangaluwi, on the escarpment inside the national park, with a footprint of about 12 square kilometres between two seasonal rivers that drain straight into the Zambezi. In 2012 ZEMA, the environmental regulator, rejected the project's impact statement with the plainest possible finding, that the site sits in the middle of a national park. In 2014 a ministerial decision on appeal overrode the regulator, and the fight moved to the courts and the public. Chieftainess Chiawa declared her opposition publicly in 2019, tourism operators and conservation groups campaigned internationally, and the case became the test of whether a Zambian national park boundary means anything against a mining licence.

The legal record since is a series of reversals rather than a verdict. The High Court dismissed the conservationists' challenge on a technicality in 2018 and 2019, and the Court of Appeal dismissed the final appeal in February 2021. In May 2022 government signals that the mine would proceed set off a major public outcry. Then the direction turned: in August 2023 ZEMA cancelled its permission for non-compliance, in April 2024 a nationwide sweep cancelled the licences of more than 2,500 companies including Mwembeshi, and in March 2025 the Minister of Green Economy ordered all activity on the 494 million dollar project halted for violating environmental conditions.

Where it stands, dated precisely: as of 12 September 2026 the mine has never been built and is not operating, no reliably dated development has been published since the March 2025 halt order, and the licence has never been definitively and finally extinguished. Both popular versions of the story, that the mine was approved and is coming, and that it was cancelled and is dead, are wrong. The full dated timeline is on our about page, and anyone researching this seriously should check for news later than March 2025.

The UNESCO question

When Mana Pools was inscribed in 1984, the World Heritage Committee asked Zambia to consider nominating this bank so the two could one day form a joint transboundary listing. The idea then sat for a generation. A first joint technical meeting was finally held at Chirundu in November 2017, the two countries have since been encouraged to finalise the memorandum behind the Lower Zambezi and Mana Pools transfrontier conservation area, and Lower Zambezi now appears on Zambia's UNESCO tentative list as a river, floodplain and escarpment ecosystem complementing the property across the water. A tentative listing is a declaration of intent, not an inscription, and the submission date on the entry could not be independently verified by us, so we flag it rather than quote it. Forty years after the invitation, the valley's two halves still hold one World Heritage Site between them, and it is on the other bank.

What you can see of this history today

The clearest exhibit is where you sleep. Most of the valley's lodges stand not in the park but in the Chiawa Game Management Area, on customary land under the chieftaincy whose people were here first, and the employment and revenue that flow through the GMA are the modern settlement between the park and Chieftainess Chiawa's country. Deeper in, the Kenneth Kaunda Ruins are the presidential reserve made visible, a former head of state's retreat slowly going back to bush inside the park it became.

Conservation Lower Zambezi's base sits beside the river at the park's western approach, with its education centre, scout patrols and the Cessna that flies the valley, the working descendant of the 1994 decision that the operators would fund protection themselves. And behind everything stands the escarpment, roadless, effectively unvisited and still largely unsurveyed, which is at once the purest product of the park's late, closed history and the exact ground the Kangaluwi mine would open. The river below it still runs free on this stretch, and the emptiness on the north bank, made by a fly, a war and a president, is the thing the next chapter will be fought over.