Zakouma is the best story Chad has to tell and one of the best in contemporary African conservation. In the early 2000s this park in south-east Chad was home to about 4.300 elephants; by 2010 only 400 to 450 were left. The slaughter was methodical: armed gangs on horseback, incursions from Sudan, more than a hundred elephants killed in 2006 alone and rangers murdered in ambushes. Zakouma was a couple of seasons away from losing its entire population.
That year the Government of Chad handed management over to the NGO African Parks. What came next (rangers equipped with GPS and encrypted radios, the rapid response unit known as the Mambas, aerial surveillance, satellite collars and, above all, long-term work with the surrounding communities) turned the curve around. Since 2011 there has been virtually no elephant poaching inside the park, the herd started breeding again (127 calves under five years old were counted in early 2018) and today it numbers around 800. Buffalo went from about 220 in 1986 to more than 13.000.
For the traveller, Zakouma is a different kind of safari from East or Southern Africa: no vehicle traffic, no chain lodges, with Sudano-Sahelian savannah landscapes, acacia woodland and floodplains that in March and April concentrate the wildlife at a handful of pools. And with an extra that almost no other African park offers: flocks of red-billed quelea darkening the sky by the million, and black crowned cranes breeding in the wetlands. This guide explains what it costs, how to get there, what you'll see and what precautions it calls for.
Zakouma was declared a national park by presidential decree on 7 May 1963, Chad's first, covering 3.000 km² of Sudano-Sahelian savannah between Sarh and Am Timan. It survived Chad's civil wars as best it could and, once formal democracy arrived, the worst wave of ivory poaching in its history: from about 4.300 elephants in 2002 numbers fell to under 900 in 2005 and to just over 400 in 2010. That year the Chadian state handed management to the NGO African Parks and the park became a worldwide case study: elephant poaching stopped, the population recovered to around 800 animals, and in 2018 and 2023 black rhinos, locally extinct since the 1970s, were reintroduced from South Africa. In 2019 Time magazine named it one of the World's 100 Greatest Places. The relationship between Chad and African Parks went through an open crisis in October 2025 and was put back on track with new co-management agreements signed in July 2026.
Read the full history ↓The Chad of rains, cotton and oil, and of the elephant that came back: Zakouma, the Manda savanna and the last manatees of Léré.
Read the history of The green south and the great parks →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Zakouma sits in a very precise spot on the map of Africa: the strip where the Sahel dissolves into the Sudanian savanna, straddling the Chadian provinces of Guéra and Salamat, between the towns of Sarh and Am Timan. It is a land of two extreme seasons. Between May and October the monsoon rains turn the plains of the Bahr Salamat into a huge wetland, so large that the floodplains of the Bahr Aouk and Salamat together rank among the most extensive Ramsar sites in the world. Between November and April the water recedes, the ground cracks and all life gathers around a handful of permanent pools.
That cycle explains the wildlife. Zakouma's Sudano-Sahelian savanna (thorny scrub, tall grasslands, acacia woodland, doum palms and gallery forest along the seasonal watercourses) supports an animal biomass that almost nowhere else in Central Africa still has. It also explains the human culture around it: Arab herders who move their livestock with the water, settled farmers on the edges, fishers on the flooded plains.
Historically the area served as both a hunting ground and a game reserve for the French colonial administration, which knew it well for its wealth of elephants and antelopes. What was protected in 1963 was not untouched wilderness cut off from people. It was land that people had shared and used for thousands of years, and the new Chadian state decided to shield it from advancing farmland and commercial hunting.
Chad gained independence from France on 11 August 1960. Three years later, on 7 May 1963, a presidential decree made 3,000 square kilometres of savanna in the country's southeast a national park. Zakouma became the first national park in Chadian history and a statement of intent from the young state: the wildlife of the south would be more than a resource to exploit.
The park got modest but real infrastructure. Tinga Lodge opened in 1968. It could host 48 guests near the river and was built for a safari tourism that, at the time, seemed to have a future in Central Africa. Through the 1960s and 1970s Zakouma ran with rangers, tracks and visitors, though never on the scale of the big East African parks.
Then came politics. Chad entered a cycle of civil wars that began in the 1960s with the FROLINAT rebellion and dragged on for almost three decades, with pauses and shifting alliances: the fall of François Tombalbaye in 1975, the factional war, the Libyan intervention, the Hissène Habré regime, and Idriss Déby's rise to power in 1990. In that setting, a national park deep in the interior is the first thing to be abandoned. Zakouma's management fell apart, automatic weapons spread across the whole region and the wildlife was at the mercy of anyone with a rifle.
In the late 1980s the Derby eland, the great antelope that neighbouring Manda National Park had been created to protect, vanished from that park. It was a sign of what was coming. Zakouma's black rhinos were already gone: the country's last wild individuals were seen in 1972.
Zakouma's figures from the 2000s are among the most brutal in modern African conservation. In 2002 the park held some 4,300 savanna elephants, one of the most important populations in Central Africa. By 2005 fewer than 900 were left. By around 2010, between 400 and 450.
The method was well known and systematic. Armed gangs on horseback, many from neighbouring Sudan and linked to the conflicts in Darfur, came in during the dry season, found the herd, surrounded it and opened fire. In 2006 alone, more than a hundred elephants were documented killed. The ivory left along routes across the Sahel bound for Asian markets. The rangers were poorly armed, poorly paid and had no logistical support, so they couldn't fight back. Several were killed in ambushes while praying in the field, and those attacks came to stand for the human cost of poaching in the region.
What happened to Zakouma's elephants was not a local accident but a symptom. Between 2002 and 2011 the global ivory crisis wiped out elephant populations across Central Africa: Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Zakouma, with its concentrated and accessible herd, was a perfect target.
The damage left a mark you can still see. Zakouma's surviving elephants developed an unusual behaviour: instead of splitting into family groups, they stay together almost all the time in one large herd. Researchers read this as a learned defensive response. They also see it as the result of a broken social structure, with few old matriarchs and a birth rate that collapsed for years because the females were too stressed to breed.
In 2010 the Government of Chad signed a delegated management agreement with African Parks, a Johannesburg-based NGO that runs protected areas in partnership with African governments. The agreement came at the worst possible moment, and that is exactly why it became a case study.
The first step was the obvious and expensive one: making protection professional. Rangers were carefully selected and trained, equipped with GPS and encrypted communications, and paid on time. A rapid response unit, the Mambas, could deploy within hours. There was aerial surveillance by light aircraft. Satellite collars on key elephants let the team anticipate the herd's movements and position patrols ahead of it, instead of chasing reports that came in too late. And there was intelligence work on the trafficking networks in the villages and markets.
The second step was less visible and decisive: the relationship with the people around the park. Local jobs in the park, environmental education programmes (including a mobile cinema that travels from village to village), access to water, health support, and a simple idea that is hard to put into practice: that the park should be worth more alive to neighbouring communities than dead to traffickers. Without that work, armed protection alone cannot last.
The results can be measured. Since late 2011 there has been practically no elephant poaching recorded inside the park, and the park itself reports no known incidents since 2016. The herd began to breed again: in early 2018, 127 calves under five years old were counted, a figure that would have sounded like science fiction in 2010. The 2021 census found 636 elephants, and the most recent estimates are around 800.
Elephants weren't the only sign of recovery. Buffalo went from about 220 animals counted in 1986 to more than 13,000. Kordofan giraffes now number over 1,300. That makes Zakouma the main refuge for a subspecies with only about 2,300 left on the planet. The park has 373 recorded bird species, including breeding populations of black crowned crane, which earned it Important Bird Area status from BirdLife International. In 2019 Time magazine named Zakouma one of the World's 100 Greatest Places.
The most ambitious move came in May 2018, when six black rhinos were flown in from South Africa to reintroduce a species that had been locally extinct since the 1970s. Four died in the months that followed. Five more arrived in December 2023. On 25 March 2025 poachers killed two of them. It is a reminder that none of these victories is permanent.
On 6 October 2025, African Parks received an official letter from Chad's Minister of Environment, Fisheries and Sustainable Development, Hassan Bakhit Djamous. It informed the organisation that the government had decided, unilaterally, to end both of its management mandates in the country: the Ennedi Natural and Cultural Reserve and the Greater Zakouma Ecosystem, which includes Zakouma National Park and Siniaka-Minia.
The minister justified the decision by pointing to a resurgence of poaching, a lack of investment in infrastructure and in anti-poaching operations, breaches of key clauses in the agreements, and what he described as a repeatedly disrespectful attitude towards the Government of Chad. African Parks replied that it was seeking to understand the government's position and to find the best way to keep protecting those landscapes. The episode made international headlines because Prince Harry sits on the organisation's board. It also came during a period of public scrutiny of the NGO.
The split lasted eleven days. On 17 October 2025 Minister Djamous and African Parks' CEO Peter Fearnhead signed a joint declaration in N'Djamena. It restored delegated management of Zakouma and Ennedi and committed both sides to negotiating new agreements, with African Parks funding and co-managing the areas in the meantime. On 2 July 2026, again in N'Djamena, the new co-management agreements were signed, covering Zakouma and Siniaka-Minia, the Ennedi Natural and Cultural Reserve and the Aouk-Keïta landscape.
Whatever the institutional ups and downs, Zakouma today is a park that works. It welcomes international visitors every dry season, from 1 December to 15 May according to the current official rate sheet. It has a fixed camp, Tinga Camp, the successor to the 1968 lodge, with standard and superior rooms and a campsite area. There is also a high-end mobile camp, Camp Nomade, which welcomed its first guest in January 2015 and operates from mid-December to mid-April. Tourism income is modest, but it is part of the economic case that keeps the model going.
The wider context, however, is still harsh. The war in Sudan, which broke out in April 2023, has pushed more than 1.3 million Sudanese refugees into eastern Chad and puts pressure on the country's entire eastern border. Western foreign ministries keep severe travel warnings for Chad: the US State Department put it at Level 4 (Do Not Travel) in April 2026. Zakouma survived thirty years of civil war and a decade of ivory slaughter. Its next test is a region where the countries around it are at war.
