Lubumbashi

Lubumbashi was founded in 1910 as Élisabethville, named after the Belgian queen, when the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga built a copper smelter beside the small Lubumbashi river and the railway arrived from Rhodesia to the south. The site had no town before it; what grew was a company city, laid out on a grid with a European quarter separated by a neutral zone from the African quarters where workers recruited from across Katanga and beyond were housed. Copper, and later cobalt, paid for everything.

By the middle of the century it was the industrial capital of the Belgian Congo, with schools, a cathedral, a university and a smelter whose black slag heap rose over the skyline. Independence in 1960 made it the capital of Moïse Tshombe's secessionist State of Katanga, a breakaway backed by Belgian interests and mercenaries; Patrice Lumumba was flown here and killed in Katanga in January 1961, and United Nations forces fought in and around the city before the secession ended in 1963.

Under Mobutu the city was renamed Lubumbashi in 1966 and the province became Shaba. A university massacre in 1990 became one of the scandals of the late Mobutu years. The state mining company Gécamines, successor to the Union Minière, collapsed in the 1990s, and the city's recovery came instead from a wave of foreign mining investment from the 2000s, mostly Chinese and Western, which has made the surrounding Copperbelt central to the world's supply of cobalt and reshaped Lubumbashi as a business city.

Lubumbashi is the capital of a region with a pronounced sense of itself. Many Katangese see their province as the country's economic engine, an attitude that has produced both political assertiveness and an easy local pride. The city speaks a distinctive Katangese Swahili, laced with French and Luba words and markedly different from the Swahili of the east coast, and it looks south to Zambia and South Africa at least as much as north-west to Kinshasa.

Its best-known cultural export is a school of popular painting that grew up in the city, in which artists recorded colonial rule, forced labour, independence and the mining life in bright, narrative canvases that have since entered museum collections abroad. The Biennale of Lubumbashi is held across the city every two years, showing work by artists from the region, and the university has long been a centre of writing and research on Katanga's history.

Football is close to a civic religion. TP Mazembe, based in Lubumbashi, is among the most successful clubs in African football, and match days colour the whole city. Catholic and Protestant churches, mining company associations and family networks organise much of social life; Sunday is for church and then for visiting; and evenings belong to the terrace bars of Kamalondo and the neighbourhood grills, where Congolese rumba and Zambian and South African music play side by side.

Lubumbashi is the country's second-largest city, its urban area estimated at about 2,584,000 people in 2021, and it continues to spread into the Annexe commune and along the roads out of town. The contrasts are sharp: walled villas and company compounds in the Golf quarter, dense plots in Katuba, Kenya and Ruashi, and new estates on the edge where farmland is being built over.

Mining underpins everything. Industrial operations around the city and along the Copperbelt road produce copper and cobalt, and the country holds the world's greatest cobalt deposits; alongside them tens of thousands of artisanal miners dig by hand, often in dangerous conditions and sometimes including children, a practice that has drawn international scrutiny. Trucking, freight forwarding, banking, trade and the university provide most other formal work, and the city imports much of its manufactured food from Zambia and South Africa.

Days begin early, with minibuses heading for the mines and the markets before dawn and offices working through to the afternoon. Power cuts and water interruptions are routine, and generators are common. The everyday concerns people talk about are the cost of living, the dust and pollution from mining and smelting, disputes over land around the pits, and the gap between the wealth the region produces and the state of its schools, hospitals and roads.

Lubumbashi eats like the southern plateau. The staple is nshima, a stiff maize porridge shaped by hand and dipped into a relish — beans stewed with onion and palm oil, pounded cassava leaves, pumpkin leaves, or a sauce of meat or fish. It is closer to the food of Zambia than to that of the Congo basin, and cassava and sweet potatoes fill out the plate.

Fish arrives dried and fresh: ndakala, the tiny dried fish sold by the cupful in every market, and fish from Lake Tanganyika, Lake Mweru and the Luapula and Lualaba rivers. Goat, beef and chicken are grilled over charcoal at street braziers and bar terraces with chips or fried plantain, and after the first rains caterpillars gathered in the miombo woodland are fried with onion and chilli and sold by the bowl. Mushrooms from the same woodland appear in season.

Lubumbashi brews its own beer: the Simba brewery in the city produces Tembo, the brand drunk on the terraces; home-brewed maize and sorghum beers are made in the villages around the city. Supermarkets stocked with South African and Zambian goods, along with Indian, Lebanese and Chinese restaurants serving the mining community, give the city a more cosmopolitan table than anywhere else in the country outside Kinshasa.