Lake Tanganyika is one of Africa's great hidden treasures: an endless freshwater sea, the second deepest and second oldest lake in the world, with water so clear that along many shores you can see the bottom, white-sand beaches and colourful underwater life to rival a coral reef. Zambia has its southern tip, in the remote Northern Province, a corner a world away from the tourist routes where time seems to stand still.
The port of Mpulungu, Zambia's only international port, is the gateway to this world. From here you can reach dreamy lodges on the shore, the wild Nsumbu National Park with its hippos and crocodiles, and fishing villages where life revolves around the lake. Tanganyika is famous among fish enthusiasts for its endemic cichlids — hundreds of species found nowhere else on the planet — which makes it a dream destination for snorkelling.
This guide covers the Zambian side of Tanganyika: how to reach this far corner of the country, what to do in Mpulungu and along the shore, where to swim and snorkel, how to visit Nsumbu National Park, and how to combine the lake with the nearby Kalambo Falls. It's a destination for patient, curious travellers, willing to go a long way in exchange for paradise-like water, untouched nature and the satisfaction of seeing one of the world's great lakes with hardly any other tourists.
Lake Tanganyika is ancient: it formed between 9 and 12 million years ago in the Great Rift Valley, making it one of the oldest lakes on Earth and explaining its incredible diversity of endemic cichlid fish. For centuries its shores were home to fishing peoples and served as a route for communication and trade — including, sadly, the 19th-century slave and ivory trade documented by explorers such as Livingstone and Stanley. The port of Mpulungu and the historic MV Liemba ferry, a German First World War warship still in service, bear witness to that history. The full story is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Zambia's far north: the sandy beaches of Lake Tanganyika, one of the deepest and oldest lakes on the planet, and Kalambo Falls, next to one of humanity's key archaeological sites.
Read the history of The remote north →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The story of Lake Tanganyika begins long before that of any human being. The lake formed between 9 and 12 million years ago, when the Great Rift Valley (the vast fracture that runs through Africa from north to south and is slowly splitting the continent apart) opened a deep basin that gradually filled with water. That makes Tanganyika one of the oldest lakes on the planet, surpassed in age only by Lake Baikal in Siberia.
Its age and its enormous depth, about 1,470 metres and the second deepest in the world, explain its most astonishing natural feature: the evolution of hundreds of unique species of cichlid fish. Isolated in the lake for millions of years, these fish diversified in an evolutionary burst comparable to that of the Galápagos Islands, producing shapes and colours found nowhere else. That is why the lake is a natural laboratory famous among biologists all over the world.
Tanganyika also holds a huge share of the planet's liquid fresh water and is the longest freshwater lake in the world, stretching about 670 kilometres from north to south. Its waters, now shared between Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and Zambia, were for millennia a source of life for the peoples who settled on its shores.
For centuries, the shores of Tanganyika were home to fishing and farming peoples. At the southern end, on the side of present-day Zambia, groups such as the Lungu, the Mambwe and the Tabwa settled there, living from fishing in the lake, farming along its banks and trade. The lake was at once a larder, a means of communication and a natural border between peoples and, later, between colonial empires.
Fishing shaped daily life: canoes, nets, knowledge of the winds and currents, and the drying of fish were skills passed down from generation to generation. Many of those traditions are still alive today in the villages along the coast, although fishing for kapenta, a small fish that is key to the economy, became partly industrialised in the 20th century. The lake sustained entire communities and connected them across its enormous distances.
Tanganyika was also part of a network of routes linking the interior of Africa with the Indian Ocean coast. Goods, ideas and people moved across its waters and along its shores. In the 19th century, that role as a great route of communication would have a dark chapter: the slave and ivory trade that devastated the region.
In the 19th century, Tanganyika entered European history through the explorers. In 1858, the British explorers Richard Burton and John Speke became the first Europeans to reach the lake, during their search for the source of the Nile. Years later, in 1871, the journalist Henry Morton Stanley found the famous missionary and explorer David Livingstone at Ujiji, on the shores of Tanganyika, in the well-known episode of 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'.
But behind the explorers' exploits lay a terrible reality. The Tanganyika region was one of the main stages of the slave and ivory trade run by traffickers, many of them linked to Zanzibar. Caravans crossed the lake and its shores carrying ivory and enslaved people towards the Indian Ocean coast. Livingstone devoted his last years to denouncing this trade, and his testimony helped rally public feeling against slavery.
By the end of the century, the area had come under colonial rule: the eastern shore passed to imperial Germany (German East Africa) and the western shore to the Belgian Congo, while the south, present-day Zambia, fell within the British sphere. The lake became a border and a stage for the imperial rivalries that would erupt with the First World War.
One of the most remarkable legacies of that imperial era still sails the lake: the MV Liemba. It was built by the Germans and launched in 1913 as the Graf von Götzen, a warship meant to control Tanganyika during the First World War. In 1916, as the Allies advanced, the Germans scuttled it themselves. Years later it was refloated and repaired, and it has served ever since as a passenger and cargo ferry, making it one of the oldest ships in the world still in operation. Its story partly inspired the novel and film 'The African Queen'.
At the southern end of the lake, the port of Mpulungu grew into Zambia's gateway to Tanganyika and, over time, into the only international port of Zambia, a landlocked country. From Mpulungu, the Liemba and other vessels connect Zambia with Tanzania, the Congo and Burundi, carrying goods, fuel and passengers across the lake's enormous distances.
Mpulungu thus became a commercial and human gateway to the heart of Africa, and the centre of lake fishing on the Zambian side. Its bustling port, its mounds of kapenta drying in the sun and the occasional whistle of the old Liemba are living reminders of Tanganyika's long and eventful history.
Today Lake Tanganyika is still, above all, a source of life for millions of people in the four countries that share its waters. Fishing for kapenta, tilapia, Nile perch and other species supports the economy of the coast, although it faces challenges such as overfishing and the effects of climate change on the lake's waters, which threaten its extraordinary aquatic life.
On the Zambian side, tourism is still in its early days but promising. Nsumbu National Park, on the southwest coast, is going through a recovery of its wildlife, and a handful of lodges along the coast offer the more adventurous traveller the chance to enjoy the beaches, snorkelling among cichlids and the peace of one of the world's great lakes with hardly any tourists. The nearby Kalambo Falls add a first-rate natural and archaeological attraction.
From its geological origins millions of years ago to the fishing villages, the explorers, the tragedy of slavery and the old Liemba that still sails its waters, Tanganyika's history sums up much of the continent's own. For anyone who makes it to its Zambian shore, the lake offers not just an idyllic landscape but the feeling of looking out over one of the oldest, deepest and most life-filled corners of the planet.
