About the park
Kafue National Park: Zambia's vast original wilderness
At 22,400 square kilometres, Kafue is Zambia's largest and oldest national park and widely cited as the second-largest national park in Africa. It spans three provinces, anchors the world's biggest transboundary conservation area, and since 2022 has been co-managed by African Parks in one of the continent's most ambitious park revivals.
The history, told correctly
You will read everywhere that Kafue was established in 1924. It was not. The Kafue Game Reserve dates to the early 1920s, but the national park was established in 1950 and developed through that decade. Norman Carr, the father of Zambian safari, served here as Game Ranger from 1951 to 1956 and was appointed the park's first Wildlife Warden on 9 August 1957, before he went on to make his name in the Luangwa Valley.
Today the park forms part of KAZA, the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area linking five countries, the largest of its kind in the world. Park headquarters sit at Ngoma in the south, with Chunga serving as the northern-sector operations base and airfield.
Four landscapes in one park
| Landscape | Character |
|---|---|
| Busanga Plains, far north-west | The park's signature: seasonally flooded grassland fed by the Lufupa system, with tree islands of sycamore fig and wild date palm hosting every camp. Floods December to June, dries progressively July to November |
| Kafue River | Bisects the park north to south; the M9 crosses it at Hook Bridge. On the central and southern stretch the river is the boundary and the park lies on the west bank, which is why east-bank lodges like KaingU sit in the GMA, not the park |
| Lake Itezhi-Tezhi | A 1970s hydro reservoir on the southern-central edge. Two consecutive drought seasons have left it severely depleted, and one lakeside camp carries a standing notice that the lake has not returned |
| Nanzhila Plains, south | A dambo and miombo mosaic that forms southern Kafue's game-viewing heart, easily reached from Livingstone |
The African Parks era
In July 2022, after an 18-month priority support phase, Zambia's Department of National Parks and Wildlife signed a 20-year management agreement with African Parks for Kafue. The results have come quickly: tourism revenue reached $1.8 million in 2024, up 25 percent on 2023 and the highest in the park's history, with visitor numbers up 85 percent since the takeover. A ten-year General Management Plan for 2025 to 2035 was launched on 4 June 2025.
The conservation work is just as visible. In 2024, 401 Kafue lechwe, 85 males and 316 females, were reintroduced around Lake Itezhi-Tezhi, restoring a locally extinct population. Seven species now carry tracking collars: elephant, buffalo, lion, wild dog, cheetah, eland and hyaena. Annual aerial surveys confirm elephant numbers increasing, with buffalo, puku, sable and hartebeest in good numbers.
One thing African Parks does not do here is run lodges: the organisation owns no bed inventory in Kafue. All accommodation is third-party concession, and the park's own contribution to the visitor offer is infrastructure, the visitkafue.org portal, re-graded spinal roads, and the new three-day and six-day walking trails.
A park still being rediscovered
Kafue's paradox is that a park this large, this old and this rich stayed off the safari map for decades, under-resourced and under-visited while the Luangwa Valley took the limelight. That is precisely what is changing, and precisely why it rewards visiting now: the biodiversity of a flagship park, 158 mammal species, 515 birds, 21 kinds of antelope, with a fraction of the vehicles.
Its scale still demands respect. This is a wilderness the size of a small country with no fuel confirmed inside it, long distances between camps, and a northern sector that spends half the year under water. Plan with those facts, and Kafue gives you Africa with the volume turned down and the wildlife turned up.