Kalemie

Kalemie began as Albertville, a military post founded on 30 December 1891 by Captain Alphonse Jacques' anti-slavery expedition, financed by the Belgian Anti-Slavery Society, on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika. Its purpose was strategic: the lake was the route by which Swahili-Arab traders from Zanzibar had reached the eastern Congo, and a post here staked a claim to the shore. The first site lay about 15 kilometres south of the Lukuga and was abandoned after the slave traders left; the name passed to the post of M'Toa north of the river, where the town stands today and grew as a lake port and administrative centre.

During the First World War the lake became a theatre of the campaign against German East Africa. Belgian and British forces operated from Albertville against German vessels on Tanganyika in 1915 and 1916, and artillery pieces from that campaign have survived as monuments in the town. The railway reached Albertville in 1915 and the port was built the following year, linking the copper region to the lake steamers and on to Kigoma and the Tanganyikan railway to the Indian Ocean — a link in the long-imagined routes across the continent.

The town was renamed Kalemie in 1971 during Mobutu's authenticity campaign. Its railway, port and industries declined with the rest of the country's infrastructure, and the wars from the late 1990s brought occupation by rebel forces and heavy disruption. Communal violence between Twa and Luba communities in 2016 and 2017 drove many thousands into camps around the town. Kalemie became the capital of the new Tanganyika province when Katanga was divided in 2015.

Kalemie belongs as much to the lake world as to Katanga. Swahili is spoken here in a form close to that of the Tanzanian shore, and the town's trading links run east across the water to Kigoma as readily as west to Kabalo and Lubumbashi. Boats bring rice, sugar, cloth and manufactured goods in one direction and fish and passengers in the other, and families are often spread across both shores.

The province is home to Luba and Tabwa communities, to Bembe and Hemba people along the lake, and to Twa forest communities inland, whose relations with their Luba neighbours broke down badly in the middle of the last decade. The Hemba and Tabwa are known for sculpture — ancestor figures and masks that are well represented in museum collections abroad — and Luba traditions of carving and oral history reach into this part of the province.

Catholic and Protestant churches are central to the town, and a Muslim community has existed along the lake since the days of the Zanzibar trade. Football, church choirs and youth associations organise much of social life, and United Nations peacekeeping has long been part of the town's fabric. Evenings are quiet by the standards of the mining cities: bars near the market and along the lakefront, music from speakers on the beach, and an early start for anyone going out on the water.

Kalemie is a small provincial capital whose numbers move with the arrival and departure of displaced families from the countryside, and camps have stood on the edge of the town for years. The built-up area is small, low and spread between the lakeshore, the market and the slopes behind, and much of the housing is self-built.

Fishing is the backbone of the local economy. Crews go out at night with lamps to catch the small fish the lake is known for, and the catch is sold fresh or dried on racks along the shore for sale far inland. Trade through the port, small-scale farming of cassava, maize and beans, palm oil, and work for aid organisations and provincial government make up most of the rest. The town's own manufactures include cement, food products and textiles.

Electricity and water are unreliable, the roads inland are rough, and the railway and lake services are irregular, which keeps the price of everything brought in high. Daily routines follow the lake and the sun: boats in at dawn, the market busiest in the morning, a slow hot afternoon, and lamps and generators in the evening. Displacement, food insecurity and outbreaks of cholera are recurring concerns for provincial and humanitarian authorities.

Fish dominates the table in Kalemie. Lake Tanganyika supplies both large fish such as Nile perch and the small pelagic species dried by the sackful along the beach: ndakala, tiny dried fish cooked into sauces with tomato, onion and palm oil, and larger fish grilled whole over charcoal or simmered in a stew. Drying racks and smoking fires are part of the shoreline landscape.

The staple is ugali, a stiff dough of cassava or maize flour eaten by hand, and cassava appears in every form — as flour, boiled as a root, and as leaves pounded and cooked slowly with palm oil or groundnut into the stew known across the country as sombe or pondu. Rice is more common here than on the plateau, brought in by boat from across the lake, and beans, sweet potatoes, plantains and maize fill out the plate. Mangoes, papayas and sugarcane are sold at the roadside in season.

Grilled goat and chicken with fried plantain or chips are the treat at the bars near the market. Bottled Congolese lager is drunk in the town, home-brewed maize and cassava beers in the villages, and strong sweet tea through the day, a habit shared with the Swahili coast that the lake traders came from.