Rukwa

The region is built around the Ufipa plateau, a highland averaging about 1,700 metres between the two arms of the rift valley. Its people, the Fipa, were ironworkers of a sophistication that has been studied for a century: a sequence of furnace types runs from the small globular katukutu, dated to roughly 1550–1800, to the tall malungu shaft furnaces of two to four metres, often built into termite mounds. Smelting from ore continued here into the 1950s.

In the 1840s the Ngoni under Zwangendaba reached the plateau at the end of a migration of more than a thousand miles from southern Africa; he died near Ufipa in about 1848 and his following split, some groups continuing north and east.

The German colonial period left a post at Bismarckburg — today's Kasanga, on Lake Tanganyika — whose fort ruins still stand above the shore. In 2012 the region was reduced to its present shape when Mpanda District was separated to form Katavi Region.

The Fipa remain the region's main people, with the Nyiha, Mambwe and Lungu alongside them, and Ufipa has a settled, agricultural culture with a long history of trade in iron, salt and fish.

At the southern edge of the region the Kalambo River falls over the plateau's rim in a single drop of 235 metres — one of the highest uninterrupted falls in Africa — before running into Lake Tanganyika. The site above the falls is one of the most important in African archaeology and has been on Zambia's UNESCO Tentative List since 2009. In 2023, researchers reported in Nature that waterlogged sediments on the Zambian bank preserved two logs deliberately notched and joined at least 476,000 years ago: the earliest known wooden structure built by human ancestors.

The Lake Tanganyika shore below the plateau — Kasanga, Kipili and the fishing villages between them — is among the least-visited coastlines in the country, with clear water, rocky bays and the old lake-steamer ports.