Linyanti, Selinda and Kwando

Rivers that switch off, and an argument over two lionesses

One evening in 1853, as the light went, the people of a Makololo village on an island in the Chobe saw two men paddle out of the reeds on a pontoon. One was David Livingstone. His Bushmen guides had slipped away in the night, so he and a single companion had taken the little float, a present from two army captains called Codrington and Webb, and gone looking for the river. They forced their way through reeds in water to the knee. He wrote of a saw-edged grass that cut the hands like a razor and of papyrus laced so tight with creeper that the weight of both men could not break it. The only gap had been made by a hippo, and when he stepped into it he went in to the neck. At Moremi’s village they said he had dropped from the clouds and yet arrived riding on a hippopotamus.

The Linyanti he was aiming for was a town, the Makololo capital, and it stood on the far bank where the Namibian village of Sangwali is now (just outside Nkasa Rupara). He reached it on 23 May. The Makololo king Sebetwane had died on 7 July 1851, within weeks of first meeting Livingstone. In 1860 a mission party under Holloway Helmore and Roger Price arrived to set up a station. Between 7 March and 21 April eight of them died, Helmore, his wife Anne, two of their children and the Prices’ baby among them. It was probably malaria, though poison was suspected at the time. Isabella Price died on the journey out that July.

Two channels that run when the ground lets them

The Kwando comes south out of Angola, hits the Linyanti Fault and turns east at close to a right angle. The land is so flat that a small shift along a fault can decide where water goes.

The Savuti Channel leaves the system at Zibadianja Lagoon and falls only 18 metres over roughly 100 km on its way to the Mababe Depression. Livingstone found a “dismal swamp” at its far end in 1851. The channel dried out in the late 1880s, came back in 1957 and drowned the trees that had grown up in the meantime, stopped again in 1982 and returned in 2008. It began to dry once more in 2016. In June 2026 Wilderness reported water pushing into it again.

The Selinda Spillway (also called the Magwegqana) does something stranger: it can fill from both ends. Okavango floodwater creeps up from the south-west and Linyanti water pushes in from the other side. In August 2009 the two met for the first time in 30 years. Then they met earlier each year, in May 2010, March 2011 and by the middle of February in 2012. A long drought in 2016 knocked the levels back. The spillway has filled in floods since, but Zibadianja Lagoon has not recovered so well. Zarafa camp sits beside it on the high side of a fault line, and Expert Africa found its pontoon boat, the HMS Zibadianja, in storage because the water was too low.

Two lionesses, or two healthy prides?

Dereck and Beverly Joubert knew this river long before they ran any of it. Their 1990 film Journey to the Forgotten River followed the animals that walked out of Savuti when the channel died, among them a female hippo that trekked 120 km to reach the Linyanti. In 2006 they took over the Selinda lease, and their telling of what they found has been repeated ever since: one lioness and her cub were all that was left, then two males swam the Kwando from Namibia, and by 2018 there were about a hundred lions. That is the story of their film Birth of a Pride.

The men who held the lease before them do not accept it. Brian Graham, Bryan Kent and Grant Nel of Linyanti Explorations ran Selinda from 1994 to 2005 and answered in Africa Geographic in April 2019. They say they allowed no hunting at all in the zone around their camps, and that two prides, Selinda and Spillway, were raising cubs to independence through those years. I can’t settle it from here.

Where the dogs den and who the lions are

Wild dogs have denned in the Kwando reserve since 1997. In June 2025 the alpha female of Lebala’s pack of eleven had eleven pups, though one adult vanished after lions came through. Up at Lagoon that month a pack of six was seen digging at an aardvark burrow. They denned at the end of June and six pups were out by late July. Lagoon’s lions that winter were the Holi and Mma Mosetlha prides and three males known as the Golden Boys. After bush fires the guides found a brown hyena den near Second Lagoon with signs of cubs.

Where you stay matters. Since mid 2018, 58% of Expert Africa’s travellers at Lagoon have reported wild dog. At DumaTau, down in the Linyanti reserve, it is 14%, on far fewer reports. Everyone there saw lion, and the highlight guests mention is elephants swimming the channel on the evening boat trip. Carmine bee-eaters nest in colonies in the Kwando reserve from the middle of September into early December.

The price of those Kwando dog sightings is the driving. Expert Africa’s own team describe bumping off-road at speed with a mission, and warn that people who want unhurried general game viewing can come away disappointed. Most of its travellers credit the long spells off the road for what they saw. One guest in 2007 complained that the guides worked to their own programme and chased the big stuff.

Campers at the public Linyanti site in Chobe tell it differently. One Tracks4Africa writer spent three hours in low range through beach sand on what he had taken for an hour’s drive. On the 4x4 Community forum two regulars agree there is very litle track once you arrive, so you sit and let things come to you. Lion in the campsite, a leopard walking through and hippos at washing-up time are all on record.