Luangwa River ago, there was no way out and the Luangwa Rift filled with a Rift Valley Lake called the Madumabisa Lake, which rivalled Lake Malawi in size. The water of the lake overflowed in a river to the south-west, towards what is now the Kalahari, where it combined with the Okavango, Upper Zambezi, Cuando and Kafue rivers, emptying into the Limpopo River and flowing to the Indian Ocean. Several geological events combined to produce the current river systems. Faulting produced another graben just to the south of the Luangwa Rift, and running east-west: the Zambezi Rift Valley and the Chicoa Trough.
Zambezi Arab information. The first European to visit the inland Zambezi river was the Portuguese degredado António Fernandes in 1511 and again in 1513, with the objective of reporting on commercial conditions and activities of the interior of Central Africa. The final report of these explorations revealed the importance of the ports of the upper Zambezi to the local trade system, in particular to East African gold trade. The first exploration of the upper Zambezi was made by David Livingstone in his exploration from Bechuanaland between 1851 and 1853. Two or three years later he descended the Zambezi to its mouth