About the park

The history of Liwonde

Name: Liwonde National Park
Address: Malawi

Liwonde's floodplain looks timeless from a boat, and almost none of it is. This stretch of the Shire was Yao farmland, then a corridor of the East African slave trade, then a park that displaced its own villages, then a snared-out ruin. What visitors see today was rebuilt, animal by animal, in less than a decade. Here is the documented story, with the uncomfortable parts left in.

If you only want the answer

The upper Shire valley was settled by the Yao from about the 1830s and sat on the caravan routes that carried ivory and enslaved people to the coast until the British campaigns of the 1890s. Malawi gazetted Liwonde as a national park in 1973 and relocated the people farming inside it. Two underfunded decades followed, in which snaring and illegal fishing hollowed the park out while Mvuu, the lone tourism operation, kept it on the map. Since African Parks took over in August 2015 the park has been fenced, de-snared and restocked, and its famous translocations, elephants out, cheetahs, lions and wild dogs in, have made it the engine of Malawi's wildlife recovery.

Yao country first

The park sits on the upper Shire, the short, slow stretch of river that leaves Lake Malawi, pools into Lake Malombe and then runs south past the town of Liwonde. From about the 1830s this valley became Yao country. The Yao moved in from the east, from what is now northern Mozambique, and built an economy the river made easy: farming the floodplain, fishing Lake Malombe and the Shire, and trading. Long before anyone drew a park boundary, this was settled, worked land.

The park carries a Yao name. It is named for Liwonde, the chief whose area this was, and the town on the river crossing carries the same name. Tourism accounts often add that Chief Liwonde fought to protect the area's woodland and wildlife, which would make him the park's first conservationist. We could not trace that claim to a documented source, so treat it as unverified. What is certain is that the name on the gate is the name of a Yao chief, not a colonial officer, which is rarer among African parks than it should be.

The caravan road

The upper Shire's nineteenth century was shaped by the worst trade in the region's history. Yao chiefs became the dominant middlemen between the interior and the Swahili-Arab merchants of the coast, exchanging ivory and enslaved people for cloth, guns and beads, with the routes running from the southern end of Lake Malawi east toward Kilwa. The crossings at the lake's outlet and along the upper Shire, the same water visitors now drift down at sunset, sat directly on that geography. When David Livingstone's second Zambezi expedition came up the Shire in 1859, this traffic was part of what he found, and his reports helped make the region a target of British abolitionist attention.

The trade ended by force. In the 1890s the new British administration under Harry Johnston fought a series of campaigns against the Yao chiefs of the lake and upper Shire, and by 1893 Johnston claimed effective control of the Makanjila territory on the lakeshore. The suppression of the caravan trade was also a colonial conquest, and the two facts do not cancel each other out. The trade's most visible legacy today is religious: Yao chiefs had adopted Islam through their coastal trading partners from the 1870s onward, and the districts around the park, Machinga and Mangochi, remain centres of Malawian Islam. The mosques you pass on the drive in are part of this history too.

1973: a park with people in it

Malawi gazetted Liwonde National Park in 1973, a compact 548 square kilometres with the Shire as its spine. The land inside the boundary was not empty. It was farmed, largely for subsistence, with cotton, maize, tobacco and rice as the main crops, and fishing was a mainstay along the river. When the park was created, the people living inside it were required to move to communities on the boundary.

That is about as much as the accessible record says, and the thinness is itself worth being honest about. For some parks on this network, historians have reconstructed evictions family by family. For Liwonde we have the fact of relocation and one measurable consequence: the villages pressed against the park edge carry unusually high population densities, because the boundary communities absorbed the people the park displaced. Anyone selling you a story of untouched wilderness here is selling you the removal too. The park's dense, farmed perimeter is the other half of its founding.

The lean decades

For its first four decades Liwonde belonged to Malawi's Department of National Parks and Wildlife, one of the poorest wildlife agencies on the continent, responsible for a park with a 129 kilometre perimeter, no fence and some of the region's densest rural settlement against the line. The results were what that arithmetic predicts. Wire snares set for bushmeat killed indiscriminately, illegal fishing worked the river, and elephants raided crops while people cut wood and grazed livestock inside the boundary. Human-wildlife conflict ran in both directions, and people and elephants died of it.

The losses compounded quietly. Cheetahs disappeared from Malawi entirely, lions vanished from Liwonde for roughly twenty years, and by the 2010s the poaching had turned commercial: around 50 elephants were killed between 2014 and 2017. This is the period that produced the numbers the restoration is measured against, the tens of thousands of snares later pulled out of 548 square kilometres. None of this was exceptional wickedness. It was an unfenced park full of protein next to some of the poorest, most crowded farmland in southern Africa, with almost nobody paid to hold the line.

Mvuu keeps the lights on

One thread ran unbroken through the decline. Central African Wilderness Safaris, a Malawian operator founded in 1987, ran the park's only significant tourism operation on a bend of the Shire, with Mvuu Lodge established in 1995 alongside the older Mvuu Camp. Mvuu means hippo in the local languages, and the boat safari among the hippo pods was, and remains, the park's signature.

The importance of that presence is easy to miss. Through the leanest years, Mvuu meant that Liwonde stayed on safari itineraries, that some revenue and employment flowed to the park and its neighbours, and that there were consistent eyes on the river. Parks that lose their tourism entirely tend to disappear from budgets and consciences alike. When the rescue finally came, it came to a park that still had a functioning camp, trained guides and a reputation worth saving, and that is part of why the turnaround here moved as fast as it did.

2015: the takeover, the snares and the fence

In August 2015 African Parks assumed management of Liwonde in partnership with the DNPW, the same model already running at Majete. The first job was not glamorous: rangers pulled snares by the thousand, with counts ranging from around 18,000 to 23,000 in the first two years to more than 40,000 removed since 2015 on the park's own figures. The second job was the fence. Enclosing the 129 kilometre perimeter cost about 1.6 million US dollars and took roughly 18 months, and in 2018 the adjacent Mangochi Forest Reserve was added to the mandate, growing the managed area by 60 percent to about 903 square kilometres.

A fence is a compromise, and it is worth being clear-eyed about what this one means. Conservation orthodoxy prefers open systems, but orthodoxy assumes space, and Liwonde has none: a small park, hard boundaries and dense farmland on every side. The fence took crop-raiding elephants out of villagers' fields and snare-setters out of the park, and both casualty lists dropped. The price is that Liwonde is now a managed island whose animal populations must be balanced by hand. That is not a flaw in the plan. For a park this small beside this many people, it is the plan.

The translocations: a park that exports its recovery

Managing an island means moving animals, and Liwonde became world-famous for it. In the 500 Elephants operation, run in June to August of 2016 and 2017, African Parks moved roughly 500 elephants from Liwonde and Majete to restock Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve, one of the largest elephant translocations ever attempted, with a further 34 sent from Liwonde to Nyika. In 2022 another 263 went to Kasungu National Park. Liwonde still holds around 600 elephants, the same as before, because the point was never to empty the park. It was to turn a poaching casualty into the source population for the rest of Malawi.

The predators came the other way. Seven cheetahs arrived from South Africa in May 2017, the first wild cheetahs in Malawi in about twenty years. Lions followed in early 2018, ending an absence of roughly two decades; sources split between nine and ten founders, and African Parks' account has them drawn from South Africa and Majete. Wild dogs completed the set in 2021, when 14 were translocated from South Africa and Mozambique into Liwonde and Majete combined. One dating note: Wikipedia records a first pack of eight wild dogs arriving in July 2020, while African Parks' materials date the reintroduction to 2021, so treat the exact first-arrival date as unverified. Either way, a park that had lost every big predator got all of them back within four years, and the fuller wildlife picture is on our wildlife page.

What you can see of this history today

Take the boat first, because the river is the whole story in one frame. The Shire that carries you past the hippos is the water the Yao settled, the corridor the caravans used and the reason a park exists here at all. Mvuu, on its same bend, is the operation that kept Liwonde alive through the lean years, and its bar is a fair place to reflect on that.

The fence is the modern history made visible. Drive any boundary road and you will see farmland running to within metres of the wire, village roofs beyond it, and game inside. That single view explains the evictions of 1973, the conflict of the lean decades and the logic of everything African Parks has done since 2015. Liwonde does not do the illusion of endless wilderness, and it is more interesting for it.

And notice what the herds tell you. Most of Liwonde's elephants carry no memory of the worst years, but several hundred of their relatives now live in Nkhotakota, Nyika and Kasungu, and the calm breeding herds you watch at the river are the surplus-producing machine that sent them there. In most parks the history is what was lost. In Liwonde, unusually, you are looking at what was shipped out to start the story again somewhere else.