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 Falls at , in a distance of about . From this point to the Victoria Falls, the level of the basin is very uniform, dropping only by another in a distance of around . The first of its large tributaries to enter the Zambezi is the Kabompo River in the northwestern province of Zambia. A major advantage of the Kabompo River was irrigation. The savanna through which the river has flowed gives way to a wide floodplain, studded with Borassus fan palms. A little farther south is the confluence with the Lungwebungu River. This is the beginning of the Barotse