Kalandula Falls

One of Africa’s biggest falls by volume, and almost unvisited

A broad horseshoe on the moderate to high volume Lucala River in Malanje Province, in the northwestern part of Angola, Kalandula is one of the largest waterfalls on the continent by volume, about 360 kilometres inland from Luanda.

Its dimensions come with an unusual caveat, and it is worth passing on rather than hiding. The figure everyone quotes is 344 feet, about 105 metres. The World Waterfall Database publishes that number and then says outright that it remains sceptical of its accuracy, noting that terrain models support it only to an extent. The width, by contrast, is not in dispute: the crest averages around 1,300 feet, and at flood stage it may come close to 2,000.

The names carry the country's recent history. Under Portuguese rule and through the civil war that ran from 1975 to 2002, this was Duque de Braganca Falls, after a Portuguese duke. Once the fighting subsided the original name came back, and the falls are Kalandula again, for the municipality they sit in. A third name, Dianzundu, turns up less often. The spelling shifts between Kalandula and Calandula depending on who is writing, and the World Waterfall Database lists the falls with a status of Confirmed, meaning only that the waterfall has been confirmed to exist while specific details and information may not yet be established. For a waterfall of this size that is a striking admission, and it is the honest position: the place is well known and thinly documented at the same time.

That renaming is the most interesting thing about the place from a distance. A waterfall does not change, but what it is called tracks who is in charge, and the reversion happened as soon as there was peace to do it in. For most of the twentieth century a visitor would have been looking at the same water under a different flag and a different word.