Nkasa Rupara National Park

Tarzan, cotton mud and a swamp that dries for a decade

In October 2011 a hunter shot a black-maned lion called Tarzan in Wuparo Conservancy, the community land that runs up to this park’s northern boundary. It was legal. The conservancy had asked the ministry for a male lion on its hunting quota and was paid for the trophy. The trouble was that Wuparo had just gone into business with a tented lodge on the park’s doorstep, and its manager, Simone Micheletti, had a full house at breakfast on the morning four lionesses chased buffalo across the grass in front of it. Micheletti called the committee and the headmen to a meeting. Steve Felton, who reported the row for The Namibian a month later, wrote down how the acting deputy chair, Lameck “Shine” Limbo, put it: “at the end of the day we don’t have a lion”. Wuparo decided to leave lion off the next year’s quota.

Trophy hunters were not what came closest to finishing the lions, though. The killing that followed was done by people who had lost cattle, and it is told on our Mudumu page. The answer started here. In 2013 Lise Hanssen’s Kwando Carnivore Project began its lion work in the conservancies round Nkasa Rupara, where things were worst and lions were taking cattle at night out of makeshift kraals. By 2020 the project had made 170 kraals lion-proof, losses from those kraals had fallen by nine tenths, and from 2015 to 2019 only one or two lions a year were killed in revenge. I’d say the lions here owe a good deal to those kraal walls.

Named for a chief, then for two islands

The park was proclaimed on 1 March 1990, three weeks before independence, as Mamili National Park. Mamili is not a place. It is the title the chiefs of the Mafwe have carried since Kabende Simata, whose reign is dated from 1864. That is the year Makololo rule collapsed, and the Makololo capital, Linyanti, stood where Sangwali village is now. When David Livingstone brought his wagons in on 23 May 1853 the whole town came out to watch, and he put it at six or seven thousand people. (His wade through the reeds to get there is on our Linyanti page.)

The Mamili of 1990 was Boniface Bebi Mamili. After the army raided a secessionist camp in October 1998 he fled to Botswana with the Caprivi rebels, and was later given asylum in Denmark. In 2012 the government renamed the park after its two islands. The spelling never settled: the ministry’s own older brochure prints “Nkasa Lupala”, the lodge still does, and Expert Africa blames the L and the R on the local accent.

Sangwali remembers a different set of visitors. The one-room museum there, four metres by four under marula trees, was built by a local farmer, Linus Limbo Mukwata, in memory of the Helmore and Price mission party that came to grief at Linyanti in 1860. In 1999 he was put in touch with Stella Kilby, a great-great-granddaughter of Holloway and Anne Helmore, and she paid for it. It opened in 2001 and her daughter Petrina came out from Sussex to see it.

Wet for ten years, dry for ten

Every description of this park is true for the years it was written in. The Kwando ran low from 1991 to 2000. The floodplains had dried out completely by 1994 and saw little water again before 2005. Felton, going on what Beavan Munali of IRDNC told him, has 1994 to 1997 as the years the area was full of lions and farmers were losing livestock. Those were exactly the dry years. Then came the 2008/9 flood, and big stretches of the park did not start to drain until 2014.

It has swung back. A member of the 4x4 Community forum who drove in one August wrote in 2018 that there was no water for the first 15 to 20 km. In August 2024 the same man remarked that all the upgraded Rupara camp needed now was some water in its channel. Expert Africa’s staff have seen the lodge’s channel drop very low late in the dry season too. So ask what the river is doing before you believe anyone’s report, this one included.

The ground has its own tricks. The ministry’s old brochure warns of black mud so soft that people call it cotton, and of lightning that sets the earth itself alight, with fires burning under the surface as well as over it.

What the odds really are

Expert Africa keeps a tally of what its travellers see while staying at the lodge, going back to the middle of 2018. Hippo 89%. Elephant 84%. Lion 44%, leopard 19%, sitatunga 6%. And buffalo 56%. This park holds more buffalo than anywhere else in Namibia and nearly half the guests go home without seeing one. Elephant sometimes save you the drive. On one of the company’s own visits a herd of more than twenty walked into camp after breakfast and kept everyone from their rooms.

Self-drivers report less. That forum member’s dry August gave him more than three hours inside for a stray herd of elephant, a few kudu and some warthog, and no other vehicle. A second member, also there in an August, was the only party in the campsite and met nobody in a whole day in the park. Even the ministry’s brochure says you seldom see another tourist, and for a lot of people that is the reason to come.

Rupara rest camp, outside the gate, is unfenced. A Tracks4Africa writer lists elephant and the resident hippos among the camp’s visitors, and a camper who posted in September 2024 about an August night found elephants there on arrival and again after dark.

Pompie Burger, who has written up the birds here for Travel News Namibia and others, says to set out well before sunrise. He reckons the raptors outnumber Mudumu’s almost ten to one. Carmine bee-eaters are a summer bird and the hornbills are commoner in winter. At sunset the painted reed frogs start up first and the pearl-spotted owlets follow. He adds that a lion sounds a lot closer when you are lying in a small tent at the community camp.