Mudumu National Park

Puku ghosts, a cheetah called Mudumu and elephants at the river

On paper, Mudumu is not where it is. The notice that created the park, AG 18 of 1 March 1990, is dated three weeks before independence, and the boundary it describes takes in a string of villages. Nobody was going to move them. So the cutline was graded somewhere else, and the ministry’s own management plan, thirty years on, admits that the park on the ground differs “dramatically” from the park in the Gazette and that the legal wording has never been corrected. The same notice puts the western edge in the middle of the Kwando. The actual border with Botswana follows the deepest channel.

Mafwe and Mayeyi families used this ground until 1945, when tsetse fly pushed people off the low-lying parts. After that much of it was a traditional hunting area, and it stayed one until 1987, when the Mafwe Traditional Authority signed an agreement to have it proclaimed. Lianshulu Lodge was already on the riverbank when the proclamation came, which is how it got a site no planner would hand out now. In 1992 the lodge built Lizauli Traditional Village and handed it to the community to run a year later.

The antelope that are not on the list any more

Older ministry staff remember the odd puku here in the 1980s. Nobody has recorded one for twenty years or more and the species is presumed extinct in Namibia. Oribi went the same way: the last report from this ground is a single sighting by the warden Jo Tagg in the early 1990s. The independence war did for much of the rest, between the South African military plundering game and villagers hunting for the pot. Helge Denker, writing in The Namibian in 2014, gives 1991 as the year the last giraffe in the eastern Caprivi was seen. Blue wildebeest and eland were already gone.

What you see today is partly a restocking job. Between 1999 and 2013 more than 2,200 animals were trucked into the Zambezi Region. One load, in September 2005, was sixteen wildebeest caught on a game farm south of Etosha. By July 2009 zebra caught in Mudumu were going the other way, to conservancies in the Kavango. Buffalo are the big recovery: fewer than a thousand were counted across Mudumu and Nkasa Rupara in the 1980s, and 6,000 or more in 2009 and again in 2017. Roan are the quiet success. The ministry calls Mudumu their stronghold in this corner of the country, with at least 300 to 400 animals, and a couple of hundred sable alongside them.

Afternoons on the Kwando

The elephants are a dry-season event, July to October, when they have to drink at the river. A camper at Nakatwa in late August 2024 woke to dozens of them walking to the water within a few hundred metres, and more than twenty were drinking below site 1. Another, there for a week in September 2014, wrote of thousands crossing the river right past the camps. One forum regular says the afternoon is the time to be at the water. Lodge guests on the boat describe elephants in and out of the river too. The 2019 aerial survey put roughly 3,500 elephants in the Kwando zone around the two parks, though they come and go. Some walk out through the state forest to Sioma Ngwezi in Zambia.

Expert Africa keeps a tally of what its travellers see from Lianshulu. It is a small sample, so read it as a hint: everyone saw hippo, most saw elephant, about two thirds saw giraffe and roan, a third saw sitatunga, under a third saw lion, and nobody saw leopard or wild dog. Sitatunga is the one to ask the boat guides about. A guest who stayed four nights in February 2020 saw them three times.

Lions you hear, and a cheetah that left

Campers hear far more than they see. One, who spent five nights at site 4, wrote in 2026 of lion and leopard very close in the dark, with the spoor there next day to prove it. Predator numbers are low and the research says why. Lise Hanssen, whose Kwando Carnivore Project started work in 2010, estimated about a hundred spotted hyaenas in the whole Zambezi Region in 2014. Her collars showed one clan of five to eight using the western half of Mudumu, and she thought trophy hunting in the conservancies next door was probably upsetting clans inside the park. Hyaena came off most local quotas that year. Lions had it worse. Farmers in the region killed twenty between 2012 and 2014 after losing nearly 200 cattle, and one pride fell from fifteen animals to three.

A profile in a 2008 conservation yearbook describes Matambo Singwangwa, then the Khwe ranger at Ngenda, who started with the ministry as a labourer in 1990. He had been shot at by UNITA and once woke to find a black mamba in his tent. He was the first person to get the ministry’s Welwitschia Award.

Then there is Mudumu the cheetah. Three males, probably brothers, were first picked up in Nkasa Rupara and named Rupara, Nkasa and Mudumu by the project. In March 2020 the coalition crossed the Kwando and took ten days to reach the Okavango Delta. Only two were identified there that May. Mudumu had disappeared somewhere on the way.

After dark, and off the tar

Driving here at night is a bad idea. One evening in October 2017 a bakkie carrying builders from the police station at Sangwali hit an elephant inside the park at about nine o’clock. Two men and the elephant died. In daylight it is sand that gets people. The 2024 camper who counted those elephants went exploring the plains across the tar road from the river and was stuck for seven hours, until help arrived on a John Deere tractor.

That camper also grumbled that an anti-poaching patrol setting fishing nets scared the game off the bank. People who write about Nakatwa keep coming back to how empty it is. One camper at site 3 thought the Caprivi felt more remote than Moremi and hardly saw another vehicle. Both lodges shut in 2010 and did not reopen until 2012.