Lozi people fishing with traditional baskets on the Liuwa Plain as wildebeest graze across the floodplains of western Zambia.

Liuwa Plain: The Litunga’s Hunting Ground, Its People and Their Cattle

Liuwa Plain is not a wilderness in the textbook sense. It is a royal landscape that has been lived in, hunted over and grazed for centuries, and it is still home to more than 10,000 Lozi people and their cattle. That is exactly what makes it one of the most interesting parks in Africa.

The park covers about 3,369 km² of open grassland in Zambia’s Western Province, on the upper Zambezi floodplain near the Angolan border. The name simply means “plain” in the local Lozi dialect. Flat to the horizon, dotted with palm islands and pans, it floods in the rains and dries to gold by the end of the year. In November it hosts the second-largest wildebeest migration on the continent.

But to understand Liuwa you have to start with the people, not the animals.

Want to see it for yourself? Zamsato spends four nights on Liuwa Plain on its 14-Day Zebra and 19-Day Wildebeest camping safaris. Details are at the end of this article.

The Litunga’s hunting ground

Liuwa was protected by an African king long before it was protected by a government. In the early 1880s, Lubosi Lewanika, Litunga (king) of the Lozi people of Barotseland from 1878 to 1916, declared the plains a royal reserve. That makes Liuwa one of the oldest protected areas on the continent, older than most of the national parks we visit today.

The title Litunga translates roughly as “keeper of the earth”. The plain was the king’s own hunting ground, and access to its game was a royal privilege. Lewanika did not clear the people out to protect it. Instead, he appointed the Lozi living there as guardians of the plain and its wildlife. Custodianship, not exclusion, was the founding idea.

The royal connection is still visible on the ground. Local legend holds that a lone stand of palms near the centre of the park sprang up where the Litunga planted his walking stick and commanded it to grow. The Litunga still leads the Lozi today, and the Barotse Royal Establishment (BRE) remains the traditional authority over the land.

In 1972 the Litunga asked the young Zambian state to take over formal management, and Liuwa was gazetted as a national park. Protection on paper did not stop the decline. Over the following decades poaching stripped the plains: by the early 2000s the lion population had been reduced to a single lioness.

In 2003 the BRE and Zambia’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) invited the conservation non-profit African Parks to help manage the park. Liuwa was African Parks’ very first park. The three-way partnership was renewed in July 2026 for the long term, and now also covers part of the surrounding Upper West Zambezi Game Management Area.

Why people live inside the national park

People live in Liuwa because they were never asked to leave. Their right to be there is older than the park itself, and it was written into the arrangement from the start. Today an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 Lozi live legally within the park boundaries, spread over more than 160 villages.

Three things explain it:

  • The founding deal. Lewanika made his people the guardians of the plain in the 1880s. When the land became a national park in 1972, it happened at the Litunga’s request, not as a seizure, so the residents’ rights stayed in place.
  • Traditional authority still governs the land. The BRE is a full partner in managing the park, with representatives on the African Parks Zambia board. Local area chiefs, the Silalo Indunas, still decide when and where families may fish. Households return each year to the pans allocated to them long ago, now under 14-day park permits.
  • Conservation that pays. The park is the largest employer in the region, and around 97% of its workforce is local. Honey from community beekeepers, dried mangoes and fish-drying facilities give families income tied to a healthy park, not a cleared one.

This is a deliberate model. Many African parks were created by moving people out. Liuwa shows the other way: people keep their homes and their rights, and in return the wildlife is treated as theirs too. As one local Induna put it in an African Parks interview, conservation works because the communities believe the wildlife they live with belongs to them.

It is not friction-free. Predators kill livestock, and families lose income when they do. A Human-Wildlife Mitigation Fund, paid into by the park and by farmers, compensates for losses and supplies solar lights and alarms that keep lions and hyenas away from the kraals at night.

Why cattle graze in the park

Cattle graze in Liuwa because cattle are how the Lozi live, and the flood leaves them nowhere else to go for part of the year. Grazing is one of the traditional rights residents kept when the park was created, alongside fishing and growing crops.

The key is the Zambezi flood. Liuwa sits just west of the Barotse Floodplain, one of Africa’s great wetlands and among the most productive cattle country in Zambia. Roughly 250,000 people and a similar number of cattle live on that floodplain. When the rains come and the Zambezi spills over, herders move their animals to the higher grasslands at the edge of the flood. This seasonal migration is the same rhythm the Litunga follows in the Kuomboka ceremony, when the royal barge leaves the flooded plain for higher ground.

For the families inside Liuwa, cattle are much more than food. They are savings, a measure of status, and part of marriage and family life. Removing them would mean removing the people, which is exactly what the park’s founding arrangement set out not to do.

Wild and domestic grazers have shared these plains for generations. Across most of the Barotse Floodplain, cattle have displaced the wild herbivores; Liuwa is the place where the wild herds held on. Grazing within the park is managed through land-use planning agreed with the community, and the visible result is cattle and wildebeest on the same horizon. It is a working landscape, not an empty one.

Has it worked?

Yes. In just over twenty years of partnership, Liuwa has gone from a poached-out plain to a source of wildlife for other Zambian parks.

  • Wildebeest: the migration now numbers more than 47,000 animals, the second largest in Africa. Herds arrive with the rains around November, trailed by zebra.
  • Spotted hyenas: Liuwa’s true apex predators. Clans of up to 50 hunt wildebeest themselves rather than scavenging, which makes them the defining predator story of the park.
  • Lions: from one survivor, Lady Liuwa, to a breeding population after reintroductions began in 2008. She lived out her life with the pride she helped found and died of natural causes in 2017.
  • Cheetah and wild dog: both are thriving, and cheetah have been tracked moving across the border to Angola.
  • Comebacks and exports: Lichtenstein’s hartebeest returned in 2025 after more than 30 years. Wildebeest and zebra from Liuwa have been translocated to Kafue National Park.
  • Birds: well over 300 species, including the endangered wattled crane.

What this means when you visit

Expect villages, cattle and herders as part of the view. They are not a sign that something has gone wrong; they are the reason Liuwa still exists. A Liuwa safari is as much about this shared landscape as about the animals.

Set your expectations honestly. Liuwa is remote, roads are sandy or impassable in the wet season, and sightings come in waves rather than on a schedule. What you get in return is space, a migration with almost no other vehicles, hyena clans on the hunt, and a conservation story that started with an African king nearly 150 years ago.

Explore Liuwa Plain with Zamsato

Zamsato takes small groups to Liuwa on two of its Under Canvas safaris, both with four nights on the plain. The journey is part of the experience: from Mongu across the Barotse Floodplain to Kalabo, over the Luanginga River on a hand-pulled pontoon, then along sandy tracks into the park.

  • 14-Day Zebra Safari: Lusaka, Kafue National Park, Mongu, four nights in Liuwa, Ngonye Falls at Sioma, and two nights at our own Kalahari Sand Ridge Inn in Livingstone.
  • 19-Day Wildebeest Safari: the full Zebra route, plus four more nights back in Kafue before returning to Lusaka.

In Liuwa we camp at Katoyana Camp on the open grassland, in walk-in canvas tents with running water and hot showers. Game drives focus on what Liuwa does best: wildebeest, spotted hyenas, cheetah, wattled cranes and that endless horizon. Four nights gives you time to wait for the plain to deliver, rather than rushing through.

When to go. We run regular departures on both safaris throughout the season. The best time to visit Liuwa is late October to December, when the first rains arrive and the wildebeest migration moves onto the plain.

This is a camping safari for travellers who value wilderness over luxury, with normal fitness and children from 12 years. If that sounds like you, get in touch and we will help you pick the right departure.

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