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 Zambezi river proper as the "Cuama River". Nonetheless, already in 1552, Portuguese chronicler João de Barros notes that the same Cuama river was called "Zembere" by the inland people of Monomatapa. The Portuguese Dominican friar João dos Santos, visiting Monomatapa in 1597, reported it as "Zambeze" (Bantu languages frequently shifts between z and r) and inquired into the origins of the name; he was told it was named after a people. Thus the term "Zambezi" is after a people who live by a great lake to the north. The most likely candidates are the "M'biza", or Bisa people (in older