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About the park

The history of Kafue

Africa's second-largest national park spent most of its life being overlooked. It was Nkoya and Ila country, then Norman Carr's proving ground, then a park too big for its budget while a dam rewired the river downstream. Since 2022 it has been the centre of one of the continent's most ambitious recovery projects. Here is the documented story, with the uncomfortable parts left in.

If you only want the answer

The Kafue basin was home to the Nkoya, the Ila and other peoples before the colonial government declared a game reserve in the early 1920s and moved communities out. The national park was proclaimed in 1950, opened up by Norman Carr as its first Wildlife Warden from 1957, and only legally gazetted in 1972. The Itezhi-Tezhi dam, completed in 1977, rewrote the ecology of the Kafue Flats downstream, and decades of underfunding earned Kafue the label of the forgotten park. Since 1 July 2022 African Parks has managed it with Zambia's DNPW under a 20-year agreement.

Ila and Nkoya country first

The Kafue basin was peopled long before it was parkland. West of the river lived the Nkoya, under chiefs including Mwene Kabulwebulwe; to the north, the Kaonde; and downstream of today's park, on the great floodplain called the Kafue Flats, the Ila, alongside the Balundwe and the Batwa fishing communities. The Ila were cattle people, and the flats fed them through a flood calendar older than any written record: fish in the high water, grazing on the drawdown, and lechwe in numbers early travellers struggled to describe.

The lechwe were harvested through an institution called the chila. At intervals a local leader, regarded as the spiritual owner of the hunting ground, would call the Ila, Balundwe and Batwa together to encircle the herds with spears, dogs and canoes, taking anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand animals in a single event. The meat and skins were redistributed through the community, hunting was closed for a period before and after, and the leader supervised the ground in between. It was regulated use, not free-for-all slaughter, and researchers who reconstructed the system describe it as a functioning common-property regime.

Colonial law dismantled all of it. The 1925 Game Ordinance transferred ownership of wildlife to the state, and by the early 1950s the hunting rights of the flats communities had been reduced and then withdrawn, with the chila reclassified as poaching. Inside the future park itself, the record is thinner but pointed: when the Kafue Game Reserve was declared in the early 1920s, the administration moved the Nkoya communities of Mwene Kabulwebulwe out of their hunting grounds eastward into Mumbwa District, a removal usually dated to 1924. How many people that involved has never been properly documented, and we flag the scale as unverified. What is not in doubt is the pattern, the same one we document at Gonarezhou: the emptiness that later made Kafue famous was made, not found.

Proclaimed in 1950, legal in 1972

You will read everywhere that Kafue National Park dates to 1924. It does not, and our about page unpacks the confusion. The early 1920s created only the Kafue Game Reserve, a paper designation with almost no staff and no infrastructure, while the tsetse fly and sheer distance did the real protecting. Serious discussion of a national park began in the late 1940s, and in 1950 the Northern Rhodesian administration proclaimed one, at a scale nobody in the territory had attempted: 22,400 square kilometres, a single protected area larger than Wales.

Then came a strange bureaucratic afterlife. The park operated, and was developed, through the 1950s and 1960s, but the formal legal gazetting only followed in 1972, under independent Zambia's legislation, a 22-year gap between proclamation and full legal standing. The practical work of turning a proclamation into a park fell to one man, and he arrived from the Luangwa Valley.

Norman Carr's other park

Norman Carr is remembered as the father of the Luangwa safari, and his early career, the 1950 agreement with Senior Chief Nsefu and the invention of the walking safari are told on our South Luangwa history page. What the retellings usually skip is that between his two Luangwa chapters, Carr's working life belonged to Kafue. He transferred here as a Game Ranger in 1951, the year after Nsefu Camp opened, and served through 1956. On 9 August 1957 he was appointed the park's first Wildlife Warden, a post he held until 1960.

The assignment was to turn a proclamation into something a visitor could actually reach. In 1958 Carr was given two rangers, Barry Shenton and Johnny Uys, and in roughly a year the three of them opened up about 900 kilometres of road, built Ngoma Lodge in the south and added the first bush camps. Ngoma remains the park headquarters today, and much of the road network visitors drive still follows Carr's alignments.

Kafue also gave Carr the story that made him famous. During his wardenship he raised two orphaned lion cubs, Big Boy and Little Boy, and returned them fully to the wild, an experiment he described in his 1962 book Return to the Wild, which became an international bestseller and later a film. And in 1959 he put on record a view of Kafue that reads well today: the park, he argued, should never be developed to the intensity of other reserves, because exclusiveness and peacefulness were its defining attractions. He then went back to the Luangwa, and the park he had opened up began a long slide.

The dam at Itezhi-Tezhi

The Kafue Flats, the floodplain downstream of the park that had sustained the Ila for centuries, were dammed at both ends within a decade. The Kafue Gorge dam, at the bottom of the flats, began generating in the early 1970s. Then, between 1974 and 1977, the Itezhi-Tezhi dam was built at the top, on the park's south-eastern edge, to store water for the Gorge's turbines. It created a reservoir of roughly 370 square kilometres, Lake Itezhi-Tezhi, with the park on its western shore.

For the flats, the consequences were structural. The dams flattened the flood peak and raised the dry-season low, leaving a permanently flooded core where there had been an annual pulse. Hydrologists who studied the system describe the natural seasonal rhythm as effectively rewritten. The Kafue lechwe, the endemic subspecies whose life cycle tracked the flood line, collapsed from around 100,000 in the early 1970s to about 23,000 by 2022, with researchers attributing a substantial share of the decline to habitat change from the dams, compounded by illegal hunting. Households supported by fishing on the flats fell from about 2,600 to 1,150 between 1977 and 1984, and the invasive shrub Mimosa pigra spread across the altered floodplain.

Inside the park the dam's legacy is the lake itself, a fishing and game-viewing shoreline that never existed before 1977, and an absence: the Kafue lechwe had already disappeared from the park area around the 1960s, and it took until 2024 for 401 of them to be reintroduced on the Itezhi-Tezhi shore. Our wildlife page explains how to tell them from the Busanga red lechwe.

The forgotten park

From the 1970s to the end of the century, Kafue's size worked against it. A park larger than some countries needed a budget to match and never received one, and researchers writing about the period are blunt: chronic underfunding meant that for long stretches there was little effective anti-poaching presence at all. Commercial ivory gangs moved through the park in the same decades they emptied the Luangwa, and Kafue's elephant population collapsed. Figures for how many elephants the park held before the ivory years vary too widely to print with confidence, so we flag them as unverified; what is documented is the bottom of the curve, a few thousand animals where a park this size should hold many times more.

Tourism withered alongside the wildlife. The lodges were few, the roads deteriorated, and the safari industry concentrated on the Luangwa Valley, where Carr himself was building his second legacy. Kafue became a park that guidebooks described with the same two words for thirty years: forgotten and empty. The label was earned, but it hid something important. The park's habitats were never converted, its rivers were never diverted above Itezhi-Tezhi, and the far north-west held a floodplain, the Busanga Plains, that the lean decades left essentially untouched.

The turn: KAZA, the GMAs and African Parks

The recovery came in layers. In 2011 five countries signed the treaty creating KAZA, the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, and Kafue became the largest single protected area inside it. Conservation planners increasingly treated the park and the nine Game Management Areas buffering it as one unit, the Greater Kafue landscape of roughly 66,000 square kilometres, with organisations such as Panthera documenting its value for lion, cheetah and wild dog.

The decisive change came through Zambia's Department of National Parks and Wildlife. In February 2021 DNPW and African Parks began a Priority Support Plan for Kafue, a funded trial that doubled law-enforcement investment and created over 200 jobs. It worked well enough that on 1 July 2022 the Zambian government and African Parks announced a full 20-year management agreement, making Kafue the twentieth park in the African Parks portfolio. What the partnership has done since, from aerial surveys and collaring to the 2024 lechwe reintroduction and record visitor numbers, is covered on our about page; the short version is that the forgotten park is no longer forgotten, while remaining one of the quietest major parks in Africa to visit.

One honest caveat belongs here. The Busanga Plains are routinely called the park's crown, and they are, but their fame is recent. For most of Kafue's history almost nobody saw them, because they flood from December to June and lie at the end of the park's longest roads. Their current status as one of Africa's great floodplain spectacles rests on the same remoteness that once kept the whole park off the map.

What you can see of this history today

Start with the roads. The spinal network Carr, Shenton and Uys cut in 1958 still underlies the park's circuits, and Ngoma, the lodge site Carr chose, is still where the park is run from. Driving south from Hook Bridge to Ngoma is a transect through the 1950s park, now regraded under the current management.

Lake Itezhi-Tezhi is the most legible piece of history in the park: a 1977 reservoir that visitors now treat as a natural feature, with the reintroduced Kafue lechwe back on its shores since 2024. Recent drought years have drawn the lake down severely, a reminder that its levels answer to turbines and rainfall, not to the river's old rhythm. The Kafue Flats themselves, and what the dam did to them, lie downstream outside the park, protected in fragments at Lochinvar and Blue Lagoon.

The Busanga Plains reward the historical eye differently. The floodplain, its tree islands and its lechwe herds look as they did before the park existed, and the handful of small seasonal camps is the direct inheritance of Carr's 1959 argument that Kafue should trade on peace and exclusiveness rather than volume.

And the human history is present mostly as absence. There are no old villages to visit inside the park, and the descendants of the people moved out in the 1920s live beyond its boundaries, in Mumbwa and the chiefdoms of the Game Management Areas, where community programmes now route a share of park revenue. The Ila still keep cattle on the Kafue Flats. The chila is gone, but the lechwe it managed for centuries are, at last, being counted upward again.

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