History
The history of Matusadona National Park
Matusadona's story is the story of the lake. Kariba flooded the valley in front of the hills between 1958 and 1963, the new shoreline grew grass that had never existed there, and for two decades the park held one of the most remarkable concentrations of game in Africa. Then the lake settled, the numbers fell, and in 2019 a new kind of management began.
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Matusadona became a non-hunting area in 1958, a game reserve in 1963 and a national park in 1975. The filling of Lake Kariba created its lakeshore grassland and the huge buffalo and lion numbers of the 1980s and 1990s, which later declined. Since November 2019 it has been run by the Matusadona Conservation Trust, a 20-year partnership between African Parks and ZimParks.
A name from the hills
The park takes its name from the Matuzviadonha hills, the escarpment that rises behind the lakeshore to about 1,300 m. The name is usually glossed as 'falling dung' or 'where the dung falls', after the elephant dung that rolls down the slopes. ZimParks and African Parks increasingly spell it Matusadonha, but Matusadona remains the usual form.
The lake arrives
The area was declared a non-hunting area on 7 November 1958, as the Kariba dam was being built across the Zambezi. Between 1958 and 1963 the rising water drowned the valley floor in front of the hills, and the dead trees still standing in the shallows today, the drowned forests that every boat cruise passes, are what is left of that woodland. The area became a game reserve in 1963 and a national park in 1975.
The lake also created something new. On the ground that floods and drains as the water rises and falls, a torpedo grass took hold that had not grown here before the dam. That lakeshore grassland is still the heart of the park's game viewing.
The boom years
The filling of the lake released a flush of nutrients, and the grazers followed the grass. By the late 1990s the management plan records a buffalo population of 4,000 to 5,000 and a lion peak of 138, and Matusadona was known for one of the highest densities of lion in Africa. Visitor numbers peaked at around 8,000 a year, when up to ten lodges and concessions operated around the park.
The plan is clear that this was a one-off product of the new lake, and that the park is not expected to support that prey base again.
The decline
As the lake settled, the numbers fell. Elephants went from 1,300 to 1,400 in 1977 to about 700 by the time of the Great Elephant Census in 2014 and 480 in a 2022 survey. A 2020 survey found just 36 zebra on the valley floor. Lions dropped far below their peak; Wikipedia cites a 2004 estimate of 28 in the area, a figure we could not trace to its study.
Tourism shrank with the wildlife. Several lodges closed, among them Tiger Bay and Kiplings on the Ume River, which the management plan lists as candidates for refurbishment. Before 2019 the park's tourism revenue averaged about $80,000 a year.
African Parks and the trust
In November 2019 African Parks and the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority signed a 20-year agreement to manage Matusadona together through the Matusadona Conservation Trust. It was African Parks' first park in Zimbabwe. The trust's footprint also covers 725 km² of the adjacent Lake Kariba Recreational Park, and its patrols cover more than 30% of the lake.
Since then the park has been restocked in stages: 223 zebra in 2021, some ferried across the lake; six Temminck's ground pangolins in 2024; 50 buffalo, 10 eland and 14 sable in July 2025; and 20 African wild dogs in February 2026, after decades of local extinction. The park designed, built and runs the Tashinga cottages, and it operates the Jenje bush camp and the campsites itself.
Visitors have come back too. The park recorded 5,759 national and 3,044 international visitors in 2023, according to the African Parks annual report as quoted by Zimbabwe Field Guide, and African Parks reports a 56% increase in tourist numbers in 2025, helped by the new cottages.
People of the valley
The park borders the Omay communal land of the Nyaminyami Rural District, under the chiefdoms of Mola, Musambakaruma, Nebiri and Negande, and the park markets the Tonga traditions of the valley as part of its heritage. Kings Camp, a legal gill-net fishing community of 27 permit holders, lies inside the park on the lakeshore north-east of Tashinga, and the trust works with fishing communities on the lake to tackle illegal fishing.