About the park

The history of Chobe National Park

Name: Chobe National Park
Address: Botswana

Chobe's history is a river's history: a people who liken themselves to hippos, a border drawn down the main channel by a treaty in 1890 and argued over in The Hague a century later, and a channel at Savuti that comes and goes on a cycle of decades.

If you only want the answer

The Basubiya settled the Chobe basin around 1750 and still live along both banks. The district was crown land under the Bechuanaland Protectorate; a game reserve was proclaimed in 1960 and became a national park in 1967 or 1968, depending on whether you date the enabling Act or the establishment. In 1999 the International Court of Justice ruled Sedudu Island part of Botswana, and in 2011 Chobe became part of the five-country KAZA conservation area, whose secretariat sits in Kasane.

The river peoples: Basubiya, Makololo and Batawana

The Basubiya, who also call themselves Bekuhane, describe themselves as a riverine people who have lived along the upper Zambezi and its Chobe and Linyanti arms since time immemorial, and liken themselves to hippos and other amphibious animals. The archival history puts their arrival in the Chobe basin itself at around 1750: with the Wayeyi and Hambukushu they came down the middle Zambezi from Lozi country, fearing absorption by the expanding Lozi kingdom. The Wayeyi and Hambukushu moved on into the Okavango, while most Basubiya stayed on the Chobe, living on both banks and paying tribute to the Makololo.

The Makololo built their capital at Linyanti on the Chobe, and that is where the first European written accounts begin. David Livingstone reached the Chobe in 1851, in what he called the country of Sebituane. He recorded that tsetse infested the south bank of the Chobe while the north bank, fifty yards away, held not a single fly, and that his party lost 43 oxen to it on that journey. Traders linked to the Portuguese had reached Linyanti in 1850, and European hunters and traders were active in the region from the 1870s, before the Bechuanaland Protectorate was declared in 1885.

The Batawana, a Tswana people and an offshoot of the Bangwato, had moved into Ngamiland in the late 1700s and early 1800s, where the Makololo at first raided them. In 1912 a Batawana faction under Sekgoma Letsholathebe settled among the Basubiya at Kachikau, claiming Chobe as Tawana hunting and herding land, and the Basubiya resisted. After Sekgoma's death in 1914, and heavy cattle losses to tsetse, most of his followers went back to Ngamiland, but Kachikau, on today's road from the riverfront to Ghoha Gate, became a Tawana-dominated village.

Crown land, tsetse and the road to a reserve

Under the Protectorate, Chobe District was crown land. Provisional boundaries for a proposed game reserve were mapped as early as 1938, in the High Commissioner's Notice No. 33 of that year. A Tsetse Fly Control Unit was set up in the 1940s, and by 1959 it was the largest employer of local labour in neighbouring Ngamiland, with up to 1,000 men.

The wildlife administration grew out of crop protection. An Elephant Control Unit was formed in 1956, became the Game Department in 1961 and was renamed the Department of Wildlife and National Parks in 1964, and the Fauna Conservation Act of 1961 provided for parks and reserves. The riverfront's wildlife already showed the marks of settlement: biologists working between Kasane and Ngoma in the 1960s noted that puku had declined since Frederick Selous hunted along the Chobe, had disappeared from the north bank within the previous forty years, and had been gone from Impalila Island since 1947.

Serondela and the timber era

Serondela, today a picnic site on the riverfront drive west of Chobe Game Lodge, was a saw-mill settlement inside what became the park. A 2010 doctoral thesis built on Botswana National Archives files calls it a collapsed saw-mill settlement whose residents were evicted as the park took shape. The thesis quotes 1975 as the year the park was finally empty of human occupation, but takes that date from a travel website, so treat it as approximate.

When the saw-mill worked and who ran it are not settled in the published record; the 1930s to 1950s you will often read has no archival source behind it. What the archive does preserve is how the change felt locally: on 1 May 1961 a Basubiya sub-chief told the Kasane district council, "First this District was termed Crown Land, now it is called Game Reserve."

When did Chobe become a national park: 1960, 1967 or 1968?

The game reserve came first. The Chobe Game Reserve was established by the High Commissioner's Notice No. 65 of 1960, covering about 15,400 km² with its northern boundary on the Chobe River and its outline drawn to avoid human settlements. The same year it opened to tourist visits, and a trickle of visitors from Rhodesia and South Africa came between 1960 and 1967. In 1961 the Basubiya, Kazungula, Bakalanga (Pandamatenga) and Satau sub-chiefs objected to the reserve's boundaries and restrictions at the Kasane district council.

The national park date depends on the source, and the sources disagree by a year. The archival thesis, citing a 1991 history of Botswana's fauna laws, says the 1967 Act elevated the game reserve to Chobe National Park. Botswana Tourism and the World Database on Protected Areas give 1968 as the year the park was established. The gazette notice itself is not available online, so both dates are in circulation, and the fairest summary is that Chobe became Botswana's first national park in 1967 or 1968, soon after independence.

At independence the park covered 11,030 km², about half of a 22,039 km² district. Botswana Tourism now gives about 11,700 km² and the protected-areas database 11,000 km². The legal boundary is the description in the First Schedule of the Wildlife Conservation and National Parks Act, which starts in the middle of the Chobe River at the edge of Kasane township and returns along the river from Ngoma. The 1967 to 1980 years were hard for tourism: the 1967 Wankie Campaign spilled into the reserve, Rhodesian and South African forces repeatedly crossed into Botswana, and visitor numbers stayed low until about 1980.

Lodges, and a wedding in 1975

Chobe Safari Lodge in Kasane dates itself to 1959 and calls itself the first lodge in northern Botswana. Inside the park, Chobe Game Lodge opened in 1973, by its own timeline Botswana's first luxury safari lodge. Two years later the lodge had its most famous guests. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton remarried there in 1975, their second wedding to each other, an event the lodge still records in its timeline. The lodge joined Chobe Holdings in 1992 and in 2014 launched what it describes as Botswana's first electric safari boat and game vehicle.

The Savuti Channel's recorded flow cycles

The Savuti Channel runs along a fault line and discharges into the Savuti marsh when Linyanti water overflows into it, and it is so flat that a slight change in gradient can alter its course. The result is a channel that flows for years or decades and then dries for as long, independently of local rain. The record below separates what is documented from what is repeated; treat everything before 1957 as uncertain.

Period	What the record says	Source
1851	Operators say Livingstone saw the channel flowing. His Missionary Travels names the Mababe, a marsh and the 'River Sonta', not the Savuti, and the 'dismal swamp' line often quoted is not in it	Livingstone 1857; operator pages
1879 and 1884	Selous found rain-fed vleis on the Mababe flats, which is not evidence of channel flow	Life of Selous (1918)
1880s to 1957	Conflicting: operators say dry for decades; BirdLife's 2001 text says it flowed from the 1880s to 1959	Operators; BirdLife
Late 1950s to about 1980	Flowing; start and end years differ by source (1957, the late 1950s, or 1966 to 1979)	Operators; BirdLife
Early 1980s to 2008	Dry for about 30 years	Operators; consistent across sources
2008 to 2010	Flow resumes and reaches the Savuti marsh by January 2010, matching a regional flood peak	Operators; Remote Sensing 2016
2013 to about 2015	The last major flow	Wilderness senior guide, June 2026
About 2016 to 2025	Drying; one small flow in 2023 that just passed the upper camps	Same
June 2026	Flowing again in the upper channel (satellite image of 8 June 2026); arrival at the marsh inside the park not reported	Same

The Savuti rock paintings in the Gubatsa Hills nearby were first described in print in 1969, in Botswana Notes and Records, which credits an earlier report as the first record; their age and makers have not been established.

Sedudu Island and the International Court of Justice, 1996 to 1999

The border along the Chobe goes back to the 1890 treaty between Britain and Germany, which placed the dividing line in the river's main channel. Around Sedudu Island, which Namibia calls Kasikili, opposite Kasane, the river splits, and Botswana and Namibia disagreed about which channel was the main one. They signed a Special Agreement on 15 February 1996 and notified the International Court of Justice jointly on 29 May 1996.

On 13 December 1999 the Court found that the northern channel is the main channel, on criteria including depth, width, flow, bed profile and navigability, so the boundary follows the line of deepest soundings in that channel and the island, about 3.5 km², is part of Botswana. The Court rejected Namibia's claim to the island by prescription, finding that seasonal farming on it by Masubia people from the Caprivi did not amount to the exercise of state authority. Under the Kasane Communiqué of May 1992, craft from both countries keep unimpeded navigation in the channels around the island.

Today the island is a standard stop on the riverfront cruises, with puku and lechwe on its grass. The Masubia of the Caprivi and the Basubiya of Botswana are the same river people, living on both banks as they did before the border existed.

The elephant debates of the 2010s

Botswana suspended elephant hunting from 2014 to 2020. DWNP's own record, lodged with CITES, notes that hunting reopened in 2019 but in practice in 2021 because of Covid, with an annual quota of 400 elephants in the years either side. Hunting is not permitted in national parks, game reserves or wildlife management areas designated mainly for tourism. In 2019 Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe petitioned CITES, unsuccessfully, for permission to sell ivory stocks and other elephant products.

The numbers behind the debate are contested. Elephants Without Borders says the government justified the decision partly on rapid elephant population growth and human-elephant conflict, and that the survey data reject growth of 2% a year or more between 2010 and 2022; DWNP's figure for northern Botswana from the 2022 survey is about 132,000. Elephants Without Borders reported 56 poached elephant carcasses between October 2023 and February 2024, mostly in concessions west of the park with a few inside it; DWNP reported that the carcasses it investigated from the 2022 survey had their tusks intact and ruled out poaching as the main cause. Chobe is Botswana's only site in the CITES programme for monitoring the illegal killing of elephants.

KAZA: Chobe at the centre of a five-country conservation area

The Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area began with a memorandum of understanding in 2006 and was formally established by a treaty signed by the heads of state of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe in Luanda in August 2011. It spans about 520,000 km² with about three million people, and its secretariat is in Kasane.

The partnership is visible on the ground. The 2022 KAZA survey counted about 227,900 elephants across the five countries. The Kazungula Bridge, opened on 10 May 2021 near the point where Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe meet, got its own joint Botswana-Zambia authority in an agreement signed in Kasane on 23 February 2026.

What you can see of this history today

On the riverfront drive, stop at the Serondela picnic site, where the saw-mill settlement stood, and look across to Sedudu Island from a cruise boat, the island two countries took to The Hague. Chobe Game Lodge, opened in 1973, is still the only permanent lodge on the riverfront inside the park, and Chobe Safari Lodge in Kasane keeps a small museum on the stories of the region.

Drive to Savuti by the Ghoha Gate route and you pass through Kachikau, where the Basubiya and Batawana contested the district in 1912. At Savuti you can see the rock paintings in the Gubatsa Hills, first described in print in 1969, and the channel beside the campsite, a living record of a river that disappears and returns. Ask at the DWNP office there before walking to the paintings.