Malanje

Malanje grew from a Portuguese trading post established on the plateau in the nineteenth century, at the point where caravan routes from the interior met the roads down to the coast. The country around it had been the heartland of Ndongo, the Kimbundu kingdom whose ruler's title, ngola, gave Angola its name, and the rock fortress of Pungo Andongo to the south-west had been a royal stronghold until Portuguese forces took it in 1671.

The colonial town took its modern shape in the twentieth century, laid out with wide avenues and gardens as an administrative centre for a farming province of coffee, cotton, cassava and maize, much of it worked under forced labour. The railway from Luanda reached the city in 1909, making it the inland terminus of the line and the collecting point for produce leaving for the coast. In January 1961, cotton growers in the Baixa de Cassanje lowlands east of the city rose against forced cultivation and were crushed by the colonial army, an event now commemorated nationally on 4 January.

The civil war hit the province hard. The city was partly destroyed in the fighting, production of cotton, coffee and maize collapsed, and much of the surrounding countryside was mined and depopulated. Since the peace of 2002 the railway and the highway to Luanda have been rebuilt, the station reopened, farms have returned to the plateau and the city has become the base for visitors to Kalandula and Pungo Andongo.

Malanje is Kimbundu country, and the language is heard in the markets and villages alongside the Portuguese of school and office. Queen Njinga, who fought and negotiated with the Portuguese in the seventeenth century, is a figure of local pride as much as national symbolism, and stories attached to Pungo Andongo — the marks in the rock explained as her footprints — belong to the province's sense of itself.

Most families are Catholic or Protestant and combine churchgoing with respect for ancestors and for local healers, an arrangement few see as a contradiction. Music follows the national pattern of semba, kizomba and kuduro, with rural styles and drumming at weddings, funerals and harvest celebrations, and church choirs are a serious business on the plateau.

The war is close to the surface here in a way it is not on the coast. Older residents lived through the war years, and the reconstruction of the station, the avenues and the roads is talked about as a visible measure of what has changed. Hospitality is expected and returned: visitors are offered food and drink, greetings are exchanged at length before business, and the provincial pace is markedly slower and more formal than Luanda's.

About 455,000 people live in the city and some 507,000 in the wider municipality (2014 census), making it the main urban centre of the interior north-east. Provincial government, schools, the hospital, the market and the railway provide most formal employment, and a large share of households also farm, growing cassava, maize, beans, sweet potatoes and vegetables on plots around the town.

The province supplies produce to Luanda, and lorries loaded with beans, fruit and sacks of cassava flour leave daily for the coast; the planted area on the plateau has grown again since the war. Coffee and cotton, once the colonial mainstays, are now minor crops. Tourism is small but growing, concentrated on the falls and the rocks and on the hotels and drivers who serve them.

Days start early and end at dusk, with many districts relying on generators when the grid fails. Water supply, road conditions in the rains and the cost of goods trucked in from the coast are the recurring complaints, and young people commonly leave for Luanda to study or find work, returning for family occasions and holidays.

Cooking on the plateau is built on funge, the smooth porridge made from cassava flour and eaten with the hand, served with whatever the stew is that day. Kizaka, cassava leaves pounded and cooked slowly with groundnuts or palm oil, is a daily green; beans in red palm oil, fresh river fish from the Lucala and Kwanza, and dried or salted fish brought up from the coast fill out the rest.

Calulu, fish or meat stewed with dried fish, greens, tomato, okra and palm oil, and muamba de galinha, chicken in palm oil with okra and garlic, are the dishes for family meals and feast days. Grilled goat and chicken with jindungo chilli are the standards at roadside stalls, and in the woodland beyond the farms mushrooms, wild greens and caterpillars are gathered in season and sold at the market.

Fruit is abundant — mango, banana, papaya, pineapple and avocado — and Malanje's farms send beans, sweet potatoes and vegetables to the capital. To drink, kissângua, a lightly fermented drink made from sprouted maize, is made at home, palm wine appears where the palms grow, and beer brewed in Luanda is sold everywhere. Coffee from the province's old plantations still turns up in small quantities.