Kasama

The granite hills around Kasama hold rock paintings made by Stone Age hunter-gatherers up to two thousand years ago, and the Mwela site east of the town is one of the largest concentrations of rock art in southern Africa. Farming communities later settled the plateau, and from the eighteenth century the area became the centre of the Bemba kingdom, whose paramount chief, the Chitimukulu, built power through control of ivory, raiding and trade with Swahili-Arab caravans coming inland from the east coast.

The British South Africa Company and the Catholic missionaries of the White Fathers arrived in the 1890s, and Kasama was established as the administrative boma for the surrounding district around the turn of the century, with mission stations founded nearby. During the First World War it was briefly occupied by German forces from East Africa, in the last days of the campaign that ended with the surrender at Abercorn — now Mbala — in November 1918.

The town grew slowly as a government and mission centre. Northern Province became a nationalist stronghold in the 1950s and 1960s, and after independence in 1964 Kasama was confirmed as its capital. The Chinese-built TAZARA railway, opened in the 1970s to carry copper to Dar es Salaam without crossing white-ruled Rhodesia, passes through the town and gave it a station and a share of the freight trade. Since then Kasama has remained what it has long been: the administrative, commercial and educational centre of a large, rural and predominantly farming region.

Kasama is the cultural capital of the Bemba, whose language has spread far beyond the group itself to become the common speech of northern Zambia and the Copperbelt. The Chitimukulu, whose headquarters lie in Mungwi district east of the town, remains an important figure, and the chiefs beneath him control customary land and settle disputes; installation ceremonies and royal observances are followed closely across the province, and the province's Ukusefya Pa Ng'wena is one of Zambia's government-recognised traditional ceremonies, its name recalling Ng'wena, the first capital of the Bemba kingdom.

Bemba tradition recalls the migration of the people eastward from the Luba lands and the founding of the chieftaincy, whose royal clan takes the crocodile, ing'wena, as its totem. Older practices persist in village life, among them chitemene, the system of lopping and burning miombo branches to fertilise millet gardens, and the seasonal round of initiation and marriage rites for which the Bemba are well known.

Catholicism is unusually strong here, the legacy of the White Fathers missions, and mission schools have long given the province an educated class out of proportion to its wealth; other churches have grown alongside. The north is known elsewhere in Zambia for its blunt political talk and its humour, and Kasama's bars, markets and radio stations trade in both. Greetings are formal and unhurried, and respect for elders and chiefs is expected.

Kasama counted about 114,000 people in 2010 and has grown since, while the surrounding district adds many more living in villages and small settlements rather than in the town itself, which remains compact. Residents live mainly in low-rise neighbourhoods of brick houses with gardens behind, and the centre is for trade and offices rather than housing.

The economy is government, farming and trade. Provincial administration, schools, colleges and a hospital employ a large share of the town's salaried workers, while the countryside grows cassava, finger millet, maize, beans and groundnuts, much of it for subsistence. Dried and smoked fish from Bangweulu, Mweru and Lake Tanganyika passes through on its way to the Copperbelt, and traders bring goods north from Lusaka. Honey from the miombo woodland and small-scale timber add income.

The rhythm of the year is set by the rains. Fields are prepared and planted from November, and the wet season makes many roads difficult, which shapes what can be bought and sold; the dry months from May bring travel, ceremonies and building work. Everyday concerns are the price of fertiliser and mealie meal, the state of the roads, and jobs for young people, many of whom leave for the Copperbelt or Lusaka. Power cuts during drought years reach the north as they do the rest of the country.

Northern Zambia is cassava country, and here nshima — ubwali in Bemba — is often made from cassava meal, or from a mixture of cassava and finger millet, rather than the white maize meal used further south. It is eaten by hand with a relish, and in the north the relish is above all fish: fresh or smoked bream and catfish from the lakes and rivers, and small dried fish from Bangweulu and Lake Tanganyika.

Ifisashi, greens simmered in pounded groundnuts, is the everyday vegetable dish, along with pounded cassava leaves, beans and okra. Chikanda, the firm savoury loaf of wild orchid tubers and ground peanuts known as African polony, is a Bemba speciality of this region, sold sliced in markets and bars. Village chicken and goat appear at ceremonies and in the grills around the centre.

The woodland supplies a great deal. The rains bring wild mushrooms, sold in heaps by the roadside, and edible caterpillars, dried and fried with onion and tomato; honey is collected from miombo hives; and flying termites are eaten after the first storms. To drink there is munkoyo, the lightly fermented maize-and-root drink, home-brewed millet beer in the villages, cartons of thick Chibuku in the bars, and bottled Mosi lager with very sweet tea in the mornings.