Itezhi-Tezhi

The Kafue valley here is Ila and Tonga country, long used for cattle grazing, fishing and floodplain farming, with villages spread along the river well before any town existed. The wider basin, rich in game, became Kafue National Park in the 1950s, and the south of that park reaches the river at this point.

The town itself is a creation of engineering. Between 1974 and 1977 a dam was built across the Kafue at the Itezhi-Tezhi Gap to store water and regulate the river's flow for the hydroelectric station far downstream in the Kafue Gorge, and the reservoir that filled behind it drowned a stretch of valley and flooded a section of the national park. A township was laid out for the construction workforce and the dam's operating staff, with housing, a clinic and schools, and this remains the core of the settlement.

Since then the town has grown slowly, with fishing on the lake, farming, cattle and a small tourism trade based on the park gate and the lakeshore camps. A hydroelectric power station was added at the dam in 2016, generating electricity at the site rather than only storing water for stations downstream. Itezhi-Tezhi became the centre of its own district, and the improvement of roads towards Mumbwa and Namwala has made it a little less isolated, though it remains a long way from any city.

Life here mixes three strands: the Ila and Tonga farming and cattle-keeping culture of the Kafue valley, the transplanted civil-service culture of a dam township, and the seasonal traffic of the national park. Cattle remain central to status, marriage and savings among rural families in the district, and the herding year shapes the countryside around the town.

Tonga and Ila are the languages of the district, with Nyanja as a common tongue brought by people from elsewhere in Zambia and English in offices, schools and the lodges. The mix of workers who arrived to build and run the dam, from all parts of the country, gave the township a more varied population than most rural places of its size, and churches of many denominations reflect that.

Social life is small-town and outdoors: church on Sunday, football on cleared ground, bars and barbecues at weekends, and fishing as both work and pastime. Wildlife is part of daily existence rather than a spectacle — hippos on the shoreline, elephants crossing roads at night — and households take practical precautions around crops and water that visitors are expected to observe too.

Itezhi-Tezhi is a small town of a few thousand people, the administrative centre of a district that covers a large, thinly settled area of bush, farmland and lakeshore. Its areas are separated by open ground: the old dam township, the newer commercial strip, and the fishing and farming settlements along the water.

Work is fishing on the lake, subsistence and small-scale commercial farming of maize, groundnuts and cattle, employment at the dam and power station, and jobs in government offices, schools and the clinic. Tourism adds seasonal work at the lodges, with guides, drivers and camp staff busiest in the dry months when the park is open and accessible.

The difficulties are those of a remote district: long dirt roads that deteriorate in the rains, unreliable electricity during Zambia's load-shedding despite the generating station nearby, limited medical services, and dependence on a lake whose level swings with drought and with releases for downstream power. Catches have become less predictable, and younger people often leave for Lusaka or the Copperbelt, returning for ceremonies and the farming season.

The lake sets the menu. Bream is the most common fish, fried or grilled and eaten with nshima, the stiff maize porridge taken by hand that is the Zambian staple, and tigerfish and catfish appear alongside it; surplus fish is split and dried in the sun for sale in markets further afield. Small dried fish fried with tomato and onion serve as relish when fresh fish is scarce.

Away from the water the food is that of the Kafue's cattle country: beef and goat stewed slowly, soured milk in farming households, and relishes of pumpkin leaves, rape, okra and beans cooked with pounded groundnuts. Maize is the staple crop, with sweet potatoes, cassava and groundnuts grown alongside it, and wild mushrooms and fruit gathered in the rains.

Market and roadside food is simple: roasted maize in season, fritters, chips, and groundnuts sold in paper twists. The lodges cook wider menus for guests, including braais of beef and lake fish. To drink there is Chibuku sorghum beer in cartons, bottled lager, munkoyo, the lightly fermented maize and root drink, and strong sweet tea with bread in the morning.