South Luangwa Park Where to stay

About the park

The history of South Luangwa

South Luangwa reads like a park that was always going to exist: a big river, no dams, game everywhere. In fact it took a chief who opened his own land to visitors, a ranger who put down his rifle, and the worst ivory crisis in Africa to make it. Here is the documented story.

If you only want the answer

The valley was Kunda country long before it was a park. A game reserve declared in 1904 failed, three more followed on 27 May 1938, and on 15 February 1972 South Luangwa became a national park. In between, in 1950, the ranger Norman Carr and Senior Chief Nsefu opened Northern Rhodesia's first tourist camp on tribal land, with the takings going to the chief's community, and Carr went on to invent the walking safari here. Ivory poaching then emptied much of the valley in the 1970s and 1980s, and the elephants have been recovering ever since.

Kunda country first

The valley floor was never empty land waiting for a park. The people most closely tied to the middle Luangwa are the Kunda, an offshoot of the Bisa who trace their descent from the Luba kingdom of the Congo basin. Their oral tradition tells of a leader named Mambwe bringing them east across the Muchinga Escarpment and down into the valley, a migration usually placed in the nineteenth century, though that dating rests on oral history rather than paper records. They settled mainly along the eastern bank of the river, where their chiefdoms still stand.

The valley shaped the life they built. The tsetse fly made cattle keeping impossible, so the Kunda farmed the river margins, fished and hunted, and became some of the most capable trackers in the region. Their paramount ruler, the Senior Chief Nsefu, governed from the east bank, and that name is about to do a great deal of work in this story. The tsetse, for its part, did the valley a strange favour: by keeping herds and large-scale settlement out, it left the game country intact into the twentieth century.

Three attempts at a park

The first legal line on the map came early and achieved little. In 1904 the colonial administration declared a game reserve on the eastern bank of the Luangwa, but it was barely staffed, barely enforced and quietly lapsed. The valley's real protection remained what it had always been: distance, heat and the fly.

The second attempt held. On 27 May 1938 the administration gazetted three reserves in the valley at once: South Luangwa, North Luangwa and Lukusuzi. Enforcement was thin but the boundaries survived, and on 15 February 1972 Zambian legislation converted the reserves into national parks, giving South Luangwa its present status and, with the addition of adjacent tribal land, its present 9,050 square kilometres.

One honest caveat. At some African parks, gazetting meant mass evictions, and we document that where it happened, as on our Gonarezhou history page. For South Luangwa we have not found records of removals on that scale; settlement inside the reserve boundaries was already sparse, partly because of the tsetse. If better documentation surfaces, this section will change.

The chief and the ranger, 1950

Norman Carr entered the story as a government man with a rifle. Born in 1912 at Chinde in Mozambique, he joined the Northern Rhodesian game department in 1939 as an elephant control officer, shooting crop-raiding elephants on behalf of villagers, then served with the King's African Rifles through the Second World War before returning to the valley as a ranger. Nothing in that record suggests what he did next.

In 1950 Carr petitioned Senior Chief Nsefu to set aside a piece of Kunda tribal land on the east bank as a private game reserve, and built a small thatched camp inside it. Nsefu Camp was the first game-viewing camp open to the public in Northern Rhodesia, and the deal behind it was more radical than the camp: guests came to photograph animals rather than shoot them, and the revenue went to the chief and his community. Wildlife paying its own way for the people who lived beside it was an idea roughly forty years ahead of its time. Sources put the first paying guests in 1950 or 1951 depending on who is counting, which is why our other pages give the founding as 1950 and the first full season as 1951.

The chief's reserve became the Nsefu sector, absorbed into the national park in 1972, and the camp itself is still running, now a declared national monument and the oldest safari camp in Zambia.

Walking out of the vehicle

Carr's second invention grew out of a conviction that vehicles flatten the experience. From the 1960s he took paying guests through the bush on foot, on multi-day wilderness trails walked between simple camps in areas he had scouted himself, such as Chikoko on the west bank. A guide read the ground in front, an armed scout walked alongside, and nobody was offering anything like it elsewhere in Africa. The walking safari as the industry now sells it was worked out here, by trial and a good deal of error.

He was also, by then, a public figure. Carr raised two orphaned lion cubs, Big Boy and Little Boy, returned them fully to the wild, and told the story in his 1962 book Return to the Wild, which gave the Luangwa an international audience decades before the lodges did.

The longer legacy is human. Carr trained the first generation of Zambian walking guides directly, among them Phil Berry, Shaddy Nkhoma and Abraham Banda, and the valley's guiding culture of long apprenticeships and hard examinations descends from those first trainees. Kapani Lodge, the camp he built near Mfuwe as his final base, was opened by President Kenneth Kaunda in 1986. Carr died on 1 April 1997, and every walk that leaves camp this morning, single file, guide in front, armed scout alongside, is walking in his format.

The ivory years

Surveys from the early 1970s estimated around 100,000 elephants in the Luangwa Valley, one of the largest concentrations anywhere in Africa; the commonly cited figure dates to 1973. Treat the precision with suspicion, because counting methods from that era are debated, but nobody disputes what happened next.

Commercial ivory poaching tore through the valley from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s. Across Zambia the elephant population fell from roughly 250,000 to about 18,000 by 1989, and the Luangwa, which held the biggest share, took the heaviest losses. The gangs were better armed than the park's small ranger force for most of two decades, and researchers studying the period describe the valley's elephant herds as reduced by well over half, with some areas losing far more. The 1989 international ban on the ivory trade, and the community scout programmes that followed, finally slowed the killing.

The recovery is real but partial. The 2015 countrywide aerial survey put about 3,300 elephants in the park itself, and the wider Luangwa ecosystem now holds around 14,000, nearly two-thirds of all the elephants left in Zambia. Day-to-day protection runs through Conservation South Luangwa, whose community scouts, detection dogs and wildlife vets work alongside the national parks department. The herds you watch drinking at the river in September descend from the survivors, and guides will tell you the older females are still wary of people on foot. The numbers say they have reason.

The river that got away

None of this history makes sense without the river. The Luangwa is one of the largest unaltered river systems left in southern Africa, with no dams and no significant water extraction along its length. It floods hard in the rains, drops hard in the dry season, and constantly abandons meanders, leaving behind the oxbow lagoons that concentrate game along the banks. The valley's entire safari economy runs on that annual pulse.

It nearly changed. In the 2010s a hydropower dam was proposed at Ndevu Gorge, downstream of the park, a project costed at about 1.26 billion US dollars. Chiefs, downstream communities and WWF campaigned against it, arguing the dam would rewrite the flood cycle the valley depends on, and a petition gathered more than 200,000 signatures. In mid-2019 the Zambian government halted the plans. The Luangwa still runs free, which almost no other river of its size in the region can claim.

What you can see of this history today

Cross the river into the Nsefu sector and you are inside the chief's 1950 reserve, still the quietest and most old-fashioned corner of the park. Nsefu Camp itself takes guests a few months each year, its rondavels protected as a national monument, and staying there puts you in the room where photographic tourism in Zambia began.

The clearest monument is not a building. Book any walking safari in the park and you get Carr's format essentially unchanged: out at dawn, single file, a licensed guide reading the ground and an armed national parks scout as the legal minimum. The walking culture is the history, still operating.

For the Kunda half of the story, sleep in it. Kawaza Village, in the Nsefu chiefdom near the park gateway at Mfuwe, opened to visitors in 1997 as the first community-owned cultural tourism project in the valley. Guests stay in the village, visit the school and the Senior Chief's palace, and eat what the village eats, and the money stays in the chiefdom. That is the deal Carr and Chief Nsefu struck in 1950, still running on its original terms.

Sources