About the park

The history of Mana Pools

Name: Mana Pools National Park
Address: Zimbabwe

Mana Pools looks like a place history forgot: no fences, no lodges on the skyline, a floodplain the river built and nobody improved. In fact the park exists because of a dam that changed the river, a dam that was never built, and a tsetse fly that kept the valley empty. Here is the documented story.

If you only want the answer

Mana means four in Shona, for the four pools the wandering Zambezi left behind. The tsetse fly kept the valley thinly settled, and the Korekore people who did live here were moved out around the time the game reserve was created in 1963. The Kariba dam upstream, closed in 1958, tamed the annual flood the floodplain was built by. A second dam at Mupata Gorge would have drowned Mana entirely in the early 1980s; the campaign against it produced the Zambezi Society in 1982 and helped carry the park to World Heritage status in 1984. Through it all, Mana has remained the rare African park where visitors are trusted to walk.

Four pools the river abandoned

Mana means four in Shona, and the four pools are the Zambezi's own discarded drafts. Over thousands of years the river has wandered north across its floodplain, and each time it shifted it stranded a loop of old channel behind it. Long Pool, Chine, Chisasiko and Green Pool are those loops, ox-bow lakes lying on river terraces the Zambezi no longer visits but still feeds through the water table and the occasional big flood.

That is the essential thing to understand about Mana Pools before any human enters the story: the entire landscape is river history written in the ground. The terraces, the pools, the deep alluvial soils and the winterthorn forest that grows on them were all built by an annual flood that rose and fell with the rains for as long as anyone measured it. Every chapter that follows is about what people did to that flood, or failed to do to it.

The valley the fly kept empty

The middle Zambezi valley was Korekore country, the northern Shona people whose chiefdoms held the land between the escarpment and the river. But the valley floor was never densely settled, and the reason had six legs. Tsetse fly made cattle keeping impossible and carried sleeping sickness; malaria and seasonal flooding did the rest. People lived in the valley, farmed its margins, fished and hunted, but in numbers the plateau never had to fear. The emptiness that safari brochures now sell as pristine was, in large part, enforced by disease.

The colonial administration fought the fly for decades, with cleared corridors, shot-out game barriers and spraying campaigns, and it dealt with the valley's people more abruptly. Around the creation of the reserve in the early 1960s, the remaining inhabitants of the Mana Pools area were moved out and resettled south of the Zambezi escarpment, part of the same era of removals that emptied the Kariba basin. The record here is thinner than for some other Zimbabwean parks, with no detailed eviction history yet published for Mana itself, and we say so plainly rather than inventing one. What is not in doubt is that the park was empty of villages by design, not by nature.

1958: the river is cut upstream

The biggest event in Mana's history happened more than a hundred kilometres away. In 1958 the wall of the Kariba dam closed across the Zambezi, and the world's largest man-made lake began to fill behind it. The flooding of the Gwembe valley displaced some 57,000 Tonga people, one of the largest forced resettlements in the region's history, and stranded the valley's wildlife on shrinking islands as the water rose.

That rising lake is where Operation Noah belongs, and precision matters here, because the story is often carelessly attached to Mana. Between 1958 and 1964, game department teams led by the ranger Rupert Fothergill rescued more than 6,000 animals from the islands of the filling lake and released them on the mainland, much of it along the southern shore that later became Matusadona National Park. It was a genuine feat, done with small boats, ropes and improvisation. But it happened upstream, at Kariba. Mana Pools was never underwater and no rescued animals needed to be brought here. Mana's connection to the dam is quieter and longer lasting.

Downstream of the wall, the Zambezi stopped behaving like a wild river. The great annual flood that built the Mana floodplain was clipped, and steady turbine releases raised the dry-season flow to many times its natural level. Researchers studying the Mana floodplain have documented the consequence in the trees: the winterthorn forest, the park's signature habitat, is barely regenerating, and the floodplain now carries ranks of old giants with almost no young trees coming up behind them. The cathedral light that photographers cross continents for is, in part, the look of a forest that stopped renewing itself when the river was cut.

Reserve, then park

Formal protection came in stages. Mana Pools was set aside as a non-hunting area and then gazetted as a game reserve in 1963, and on the reorganisation of Zimbabwe's protected lands under the Parks and Wildlife Act, it became a national park in 1975. The neighbouring Sapi and Chewore Safari Areas were designated alongside it, giving the middle valley a protected block far larger than the park alone.

Two things distinguished the new reserve from the start. First, almost nothing was built: a public campsite at Nyamepi on the riverbank, a handful of tracks, and little else, a restraint that has held for sixty years. Second, visitors were allowed to walk, alone and unguided if they chose, from the park's earliest years. That decision, which reads as radical now, seems to have been made casually then, because the open terraces gave long sightlines and there were hardly any visitors to manage. It became the park's identity almost by accident.

Must Mana die: the dam that was not built

Kariba was not supposed to be the last dam. From the 1970s, planners had marked Mupata Gorge, downstream of Mana where the Zambezi narrows against the Zambian hills, as the next hydropower site, and after independence in 1980 the scheme moved toward reality with international funding suddenly available. The arithmetic was brutal: a dam at Mupata would have backed a lake over the middle valley, and the Mana Pools floodplain, the pools, the winterthorn terraces and Nyamepi would have gone under it.

The campaign against the dam became a founding moment for Zimbabwean conservation. The Zambezi Society was formed in 1982 specifically to fight the Mupata scheme, publishing its case under the blunt question, must Mana die. Scientists set out the environmental cost in the technical literature, and the government's attention shifted to the alternative site at Batoka Gorge, upstream of Kariba, where a dam would drown a gorge rather than a floodplain. The Mupata scheme was shelved. It has never been formally buried, and the Zambezi River Authority still lists the gorge among its potential hydropower sites, but no serious attempt to revive it has been made in forty years.

The listing that followed raised the cost of ever trying. In 1984 UNESCO inscribed Mana Pools National Park together with the Sapi and Chewore Safari Areas as a World Heritage Site of 6,766 square kilometres, Zimbabwe's first. A property inscribed for its river-built floodplain is a difficult thing to flood, and that was much of the point.

The war years on the river

The park's first decades were not peaceful. During the liberation war of the 1970s the Zambezi was a frontier between Rhodesian forces and guerrillas crossing from Zambia, the valley became an operational area, and tourism effectively stopped for years. Independence in 1980 reopened the park but not the peace, because the next war on the river was commercial.

Through the 1980s the Zambezi Valley was one of the hardest-fought poaching frontlines in Africa. Armed gangs crossed the river from Zambia at night, and ZimParks rangers, thinly spread over enormous country, met them in repeated armed contacts through the decade. Rangers were killed doing it, and far more poachers were, in a shadow war that rarely made news outside the region. The valley's elephants were among the targets, shot for ivory in an era when the trade was stripping herds across the continent, until the international ivory trade ban of 1989 and harder enforcement slowly took the profit out of the crossings.

Mana's elephants came through the era battered but present, and the park never lost the herds that define it today. The long-running relationship between the floodplain bulls and people on foot, animals that have seen unarmed walkers daily for two generations, is partly a legacy of the fact that inside the park, at least, the shooting was never aimed at them by the people they met.

The park where you walk

Mana's walking culture is its real inheritance, and it grew from geography up. The albida terraces have a high canopy and almost no understorey, so a person on foot can see and be seen at a distance, which makes walking among elephant and buffalo a manageable risk rather than a reckless one. Visitors have walked here since the park opened in 1963, and generations of animals have grown up regarding a human on foot as unremarkable, which is precisely what makes the experience possible now.

Around that accident of vegetation, Zimbabwe built the most demanding professional guide licensing system in Africa, years of apprenticeship and examinations that a candidate can fail indefinitely, and Mana became the stage where that guiding culture performs. The park still permits unguided walking with a permit, an arrangement ZimParks has periodically moved to restrict as visitor numbers and bad behaviour grew, most recently answering the problem with a formal code of conduct in 2023 rather than a ban. Whether the privilege survives the park's growing fame is one of the open questions of its next chapter.

What you can see of this history today

The most eloquent monument is the forest itself. Walk the floodplain and look at the winterthorns: enormous, old and strangely uniform, with almost no saplings anywhere. You are looking at Kariba, sixty years downstream. The forest that the pre-dam floods planted is aging in place, and what replaces it is a question the river can no longer answer on its own.

Nyamepi campsite is the institutional history in miniature. The park's main public camp still sits where the reserve-era camp did, on the bank among the trees, unfenced, with elephants walking through it most days. The absence is the exhibit: no perimeter wire anywhere in 2,196 square kilometres, no lodge towns, and no dam wall at Mupata Gorge. The Zambezi still runs free from Kariba's tailrace to Cahora Bassa, and Mana sits on the finest stretch of it.

And the walking is living history. Set out from Nyamepi at dawn on foot, or behind one of the park's licensed guides, and you are exercising a freedom that dates to 1963 and survives almost nowhere else in big game country. The park's founders permitted it because the land allowed it. Sixty years on, that remains the entire idea of Mana Pools.