Kafue National Park

Kafue National Park: History & Culture

Discover Kafue National Park

Kafue National Park is Zambia’s oldest and largest national park, and the second-largest national park in Africa. Despite its size and the density of its wildlife, it remains far less visited than Zambia’s other flagship parks, making it one of Southern Africa’s genuine under-the-radar safari destinations.

Kafue National Park at a glance

• Country: Zambia
• Size: about 22,400 km² (8,600 sq mi)
• Provinces: stretches across North-Western, Central and Southern Provinces
• Named for: the Kafue River, which runs through the park; other key rivers include the Lufupa and Lunga in the north, the Luansanza in the centre and the Musa in the south
• Status: first protected as the Kafue Game Reserve in 1924, declared a national park in the 1950s with the involvement of conservationist Norman Carr, formally gazetted with 17 other Zambian parks in 1972

Landscape: from miombo woodland to the Busanga Plains

Most of Kafue is covered in miombo woodland, a semi-deciduous forest adapted to periodic wildfire, along with evergreen teak and mopane forest. In the far north-west, the Busanga Plains are a seasonally flooded grassland fed by the Lufupa River; for only around five months of the year, once the floodwaters recede, this delta-like system opens up into some of Zambia’s best game viewing.

Wildlife

Predators

Kafue has been managed as a lion conservation unit since 2005, and prides of up to 20 lions are recorded on the Busanga Plains. The park holds Zambia’s largest cheetah population, one of only a few places in the country to see them, and is valued for its healthy population of African wild dog, one of the continent’s most endangered carnivores. Leopard, spotted hyena and crocodile are also present.

Herbivores and numbers

The park supports around 4,800 African bush elephants and 152 recorded mammal species in total, including 21 antelope species such as red lechwe, roan, oribi, Lichtenstein’s hartebeest and defassa waterbuck, plus zebra and buffalo. Kafue is also an Important Bird Area, with 515 recorded bird species, alongside 70 reptile, 58 fish and 36 amphibian species.

South of the river: Itezhi-Tezhi and the Nanzhila Plains

South of the Busanga Plains, a very different part of Kafue centres on Lake Itezhi-Tezhi, a 390 km² reservoir formed by the Itezhi-Tezhi Dam, built on the Kafue River between 1974 and 1977. Elephant, buffalo and hippo gather along its shoreline, and the area is said to hold arguably Zambia’s greatest density of large predators in one place — lion, leopard, cheetah and wild dog all present together. Further south again, the Nanzhila Plains offer a smaller, more varied habitat than Busanga, with their own resident wildlife and a fraction of Busanga’s visitor numbers.

Why Kafue is still uncrowded

Kafue’s sheer size, poor historic road access compared with South Luangwa, and Zambia’s tourism marketing having long focused on Victoria Falls and South Luangwa have kept visitor numbers low relative to the park’s scale and wildlife density. Conservation groups and tour operators increasingly describe it as one of Zambia’s, and Africa’s, best-kept wildlife secrets — a park with Serengeti-scale numbers of large mammals but a fraction of the visitors.

Planning your visit

The Busanga Plains section in the north-west is normally only accessible for around five months a year, in the dry season, once floodwaters recede; exact opening dates vary by year and were not pinned to a single confirmed source, so check current conditions with a Kafue operator before booking. Access to the central Kafue River area (around Chunga and Mukambi) is possible by road from Lusaka, roughly a 4-5 hour drive, without needing a 4×4, while the more remote northern and western sections are typically reached by light aircraft charter.

Why visit Kafue

For a park nearly the size of Wales, with Zambia’s largest cheetah population, strong wild dog numbers, elephant herds in the thousands and 515 recorded bird species, Kafue offers a scale of wilderness that is hard to find elsewhere in Southern Africa — and, for now, without the crowds of the region’s better-known reserves.

Photo by Timothy A. Gonsalves (Tagooty), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.