Saurimo

The plateau around Saurimo lay on the southern edge of the Lunda world, in country settled by Chokwe hunters, traders and farmers who expanded widely from the 1830s onwards, dealing in ivory, beeswax and rubber. Portuguese authority arrived late: the district of Lunda was created in 1895 with its capital here, and the town took the name of Henrique de Carvalho, the explorer sent through the Lunda country in 1884. It was raised to city status in 1956 and kept that name until independence.

What shaped the town was diamonds. In 1917 the company Diamang received a vast concession across the Lunda provinces and ran it almost as a private state, building roads, airstrips and company towns, with its headquarters north at Dundo. Henrique de Carvalho became the administrative centre of the southern part of that country, a small settler town of avenues, offices and a church serving the mines and the surrounding farms.

Independence in 1975 brought the Portuguese departure and a change of name to Saurimo. The civil war reached the province hard, and the diamond fields of the Lundas became one of the resources that financed the fighting through the 1990s. Peace in 2002 was followed by a long period of rebuilding: the airport and roads were repaired, the provincial government expanded, and industrial mining expanded at the Catoca pit outside the town, opened in 1992 and in production since 1997. The population climbed as people came from across Angola, and from across the Congolese border, to work in and around the industry.

Saurimo is the urban centre of Chokwe country, and the Chokwe are among the most admired makers of art in Africa. Their carved masks and figures — the mwana pwo mask representing an idealised young woman, and the seated thinking figure known in Portuguese as O Pensador — come from this tradition. Masked dancers appear at the close of mukanda, the boys' initiation school, and storytellers trace geometric figures in the sand to illustrate proverbs. The great museum collection of this work is far to the north at Dundo, but the tradition itself belongs to the villages around Saurimo.

Chokwe and Lunda are spoken in the markets and at home, with Portuguese the language of school, office and church. Catholic and Protestant congregations are central to social life, and older practices around ancestors, healing and initiation continue beside them.

The diamond economy has given the town a mixed, mobile character. People from the coast, from Malanje and the highlands, and from the DR Congo have settled here, and Luanda's music — semba, kizomba and kuduro — plays from the same speakers as Congolese rumba, which crosses the border easily. Football is followed closely, and the long dry-season evenings are spent outdoors.

Saurimo is one of the larger towns of Angola's interior, with a population put at about 590,000 in 2024 and still growing with migration to the mining economy. It is the seat of the Lunda-Sul provincial government, which with the mining companies, the banks, the schools and the hospital provides most of the formal employment.

Everything else is trade and farming. The market is the centre of the town's economy, selling cassava, beans, vegetables and dried fish, and the villages around the town grow cassava, maize and groundnuts on small plots cleared from the miombo woodland. Informal diggers, the garimpeiros, work riverbeds across the province despite repeated crackdowns, and the relationship between industrial mining, informal mining and the authorities shapes much of provincial life.

The day begins early, with market traders and farmers out before the heat, and ends at dusk. Electricity and water supply are uneven, and generators are common in shops and hotels. The wide colonial avenues of the centre give way quickly to unplanned bairros where most people actually live, and the province's remoteness — long road journeys, expensive flights, high prices for anything imported — is the constant background to daily life.

Cassava is the foundation of eating in the Lundas. Funge, a smooth, firm porridge made from cassava flour, is served with almost everything, and kizaka, cassava leaves pounded and cooked slowly with palm oil or groundnuts, is a daily dish. Beans, sweet potatoes and maize fill out the rest of the plate.

Fish that has been salted and sun-dried on the coast is sold in every market and stewed with greens, tomato and palm oil in the style of calulu; river fish from the Chicapa and the other rivers of the province appear fresh. Grilled goat and chicken with piri-piri are the standard of roadside stalls and small restaurants, and in season the woodland provides mushrooms and caterpillars, which are dried and cooked with groundnut sauce — an old Chokwe food that is still sold by the bowl in the market.

Mongozo, a beer the Chokwe brewed from palm nuts before Europeans arrived, is the traditional drink of the Lundas, sometimes alongside home-made spirits; commercial beer is trucked or flown in and is not cheap. Bread, coffee and pastries are the Portuguese legacy, and mangoes, bananas and papayas are abundant and cheap when the season comes round.