Qualla: Itezhi-Tezhi Dam

Itezhi-Tezhi Dam: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nase, Public domain. The Kafue River has a rhythm older than any engineer. In the rainy season it swells across the wetlands of the Kafue Flats, swamping grasslands until lechwe antelope swim between the trees. Then it recedes, nutrients settle into the soil, and new grass rushes up to feed buffalo, cattle, and people. For centuries, villages moved with this breathing. In the 1970s, that rhythm met concrete. Between 1974 and 1977, a 62-meter dam rose at the Itezhi-Tezhi Gap, a narrow valley the river had spent millennia carving through a range of hills, and one of Africa's great floodplains began to change.

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Image: Nase | Public domain

Itezhi-Tezhi Dam: Why Here

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nase, Public domain. The Kafue River, like most rivers in south-central Africa, is a creature of extremes. In flood it can run at twenty times its dry-season trickle. That is a problem for hydroelectric power, which needs steady flow, and a beautiful gift to the wetlands downstream, which need the op...

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Image: Nase | Public domain

Itezhi-Tezhi Dam: The Flats That Need Floods

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nase, Public domain. Downstream, the Kafue Flats are a wetland designed by water. Grasses, fish, lechwe, sitatunga, and the people who graze cattle and move camps seasonally are all tuned to a March or April inundation that charges the soil with water and nutrients. The dam's designers knew this. The...

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Image: Nase | Public domain

Itezhi-Tezhi Dam: A Second Wall, Forty Years Later

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nase, Public domain. For its first three decades, Itezhi-Tezhi was a regulator only. The water that passed through it ran generators downstream, not here. In 2011, that changed. Construction began on a 120-megawatt power station on the dam itself, a 250-million-dollar project run by Itezhi Tezhi Powe...

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Image: Nase | Public domain

Itezhi-Tezhi Dam: Picture from Space

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nase, Public domain. A pair of NASA satellite images taken one year apart in the middle of the dry season tell the story in a single glance. In the first, the Kafue Flats are brown and dry, a single squiggle of main channel running left to right across the frame. In the second, taken after the 2003 t...

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Image: Nase | Public domain

Itezhi-Tezhi Dam: Standing at the Gap

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nase, Public domain. The town of Itezhi-Tezhi sits on the east side of the wall, a service community that grew up with the dam. West of the dam, the reservoir stretches for kilometers, its calm surface hiding the drowned course of the Kafue. North and south lie the rolling woodlands of Kafue National...

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Image: Nase | Public domain