Zambezi Region

Count Leo von Caprivi negotiated this strip into German South West Africa under the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890, hunting a trade route east along the Zambezi. Victoria Falls made the river unnavigable downstream and the plan failed, but the corridor remained, and with it Namibia’s one reach to the Zambezi. The 2013 renaming dropped the chancellor’s name in favour of the river itself. The communities here are the Masubia, Mafwe, Mayeyi, Hambukushu and Khwe San, and Silozi, a language of Zambian origin, serves as the common tongue across them.

Close to 6,700 Khwe San live inside Bwabwata National Park, in villages set within its multiple-use zone, a coexistence between a resident community and a state protected area that is rare in the region. Beyond the park boundaries, conservancies including Mayuni, Mashi, Wuparo and Salambala hold the land themselves and lease sites to lodge operators, so tourism income stays with the people living alongside the wildlife. The Hambukushu weave baskets and carry a long-standing reputation as the rainmakers of the Okavango. The Mafwe and Bwabwata living museums teach the bushcraft and tracking skills passed down through these communities.

Mornings on the Kwando’s reed-lined channels turn up hippo, crocodile and Pel’s fishing owl.

Bwabwata, Mudumu and Nkasa Rupara sit at the centre of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, roughly 520,000 square kilometres spanning Namibia, Angola, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Elephants use the corridor to cross four national borders without pause, part of a KAZA-wide population estimated at 227,900 animals, and the herds working the Kwando in the dry months belong to it. Crop losses to migrating elephants are a real cost for farming families along the rivers, and conservancy income from tourism is designed in part to offset it.

Boats matter as much as vehicles here. Mornings on the Kwando’s reed-lined channels turn up hippo, crocodile and Pel’s fishing owl. Reaching them is easier than colonial ambition ever managed, the same corridor now linking the Zambezi Region to Chobe, Victoria Falls and the Okavango by a run of short flights. Katima Mulilo, on the Zambezi, is the regional town and main airport, and light aircraft reach lodge airstrips at Lianshulu and Immelman.