Mzuzu

Mzuzu is a young city on old ground. The plateau above the lake was Tumbuka country long before the town existed, and the Ngoni settled the Mzimba highlands to the south-west in the nineteenth century. The mission at Livingstonia and its schools shaped the whole region's education, but the site of Mzuzu itself carried nothing more than scattered villages until the colonial period.

The town grew up around a road junction, where the routes to the lake, to Karonga and to Lilongwe met, and the settlement that formed there acquired workshops, offices and a market. That junction made it. As the Northern Region's administration was built up, Mzuzu became the natural place for it, and after independence in 1964 it grew quickly as the region's headquarters, market and staging post.

Mzuzu is now the third largest city in Malawi by population, after Lilongwe and Blantyre, and has grown quickly, drawing people from Mzimba, Rumphi, Nkhata Bay and Karonga. The founding of Mzuzu University in 1997, which admitted its first students two years later, gave it a second role as the north's centre of higher education. Its modern history has been one of steady expansion under difficult conditions: tarmac stops at the city's edge in places, and its fortunes track the state of the M1, the coffee price and the national economy.

Mzuzu is the cultural capital of the north in the plain sense that everyone from the north passes through it. Chitumbuka is heard everywhere and is a point of pride: it was removed from schools and broadcasting under Hastings Banda's one-language policy and returned with multiparty politics in 1994, and the city's radio, churches and market talk in it daily. Ngoni from Mzimba, Tonga from the lakeshore and Ngonde from Karonga all have communities here.

Church life is strong and publicly visible, with the Presbyterian tradition of Livingstonia alongside Catholic, Anglican and Pentecostal congregations; choirs practise in the evenings and Sunday clothes are worn with care. Vimbuza, the Tumbuka healing dance recognised by UNESCO, belongs to the surrounding villages rather than the city centre, but drumming and dance mark weddings, funerals and chiefs' ceremonies here too.

The university gives the city a student culture of debate, music and football that few other Malawian towns have outside the capital. Northerners have a long reputation in Malawi for schooling and for working away from home, and Mzuzu families are used to relatives in Lilongwe, Blantyre and South Africa. Manners are formal and unhurried: greetings first, titles used, and business conducted politely and at length.

About 220,000 people lived in Mzuzu at the 2018 census, making it Malawi's third largest city and by far the largest place in the north. Most live in dense residential townships on the city's edges and walk or take minibuses to the centre and the market. The day starts early, with produce arriving from Mzimba and the lakeshore before dawn, and slows sharply after dark.

The economy is trade, services and government: the market and shops, banks, the regional hospital, schools, the university, aid and church organisations, and the transport business built on the bus depot. Coffee from the surrounding hills is bought, processed and exported through the city, tobacco and timber from the Viphya plantations pass through, and small workshops make furniture, tinware and building materials.

Daily life is shaped by shortages that are national rather than local: fuel queues, foreign-exchange scarcity that empties shop shelves of imports, power cuts that send small businesses onto generators, and a kwacha that keeps losing value. Water and electricity supplies are uneven in the townships. Many young people leave to study or work elsewhere, and the money they send back is a visible part of the city's income.

Mzuzu eats the food of the northern highlands. Nsima, the stiff maize porridge, is the staple, eaten by hand with ndiwo, a relish of beans, pumpkin or cassava leaves, greens in groundnut sauce, or a little meat. Cassava comes up from the lakeshore districts, and kondowole, the stretchy cassava-flour version of nsima eaten with fish, appears in households with roots at Nkhata Bay.

Fish is the treat: chambo tilapia and the small dried usipa are carried up the escarpment from the lake each day and sold in the market and cooked at canteens around town. Rice from the Karonga plain, beans, sweet potatoes, pumpkins and Irish potatoes from the cool highlands fill out meals, and roadside sellers offer roasted maize, boiled cassava, mandasi dough buns, samosas and chips throughout the day.

The city's own product is coffee. Smallholders in the hills around Mzuzu and in the Misuku hills further north grow coffee that is processed and marketed through the city, and it appears in cafés in the centre alongside strong sweet tea, which remains the everyday drink. Thobwa, the lightly fermented maize or millet drink, is sold in the market; chibuku sorghum beer is drunk in the townships; and bottled lager, Malawian gin and imported soft drinks fill the bars around the centre.