Mongu

The Lozi — also called the Barotse — built a kingdom on the Zambezi floodplain from around the seventeenth century, organised around the annual flood, a network of canals dug across the plain, and a king, the Litunga, with capitals on the plain and on its margins. In the 1830s the Makololo, invaders from the south under Sebitwane, conquered the kingdom, leaving behind their language, which became Silozi; the Lozi regained power in 1864.

Mongu itself is a colonial-era town. Paris Evangelical missionaries established stations on and around the plain from the 1880s, and the settlement on the sand ridge grew as a trading and administrative post for Barotseland, whose king Lewanika signed a series of concessions from 1889, granting the British South Africa Company mining rights across the kingdom in 1890. Barotseland kept a distinct status under British rule, and Mongu became its administrative centre, while the royal capitals at Lealui and Limulunga remained the seat of Lozi authority.

The Barotseland Agreement of 1964 folded the territory into independent Zambia with guarantees that were later abrogated, and the question of Barotse autonomy has recurred in provincial politics ever since. Mongu grew slowly, hampered by distance and sand roads, until the tarred highway from Lusaka and, more recently, the causeway west across the plain improved its links. The town is now the province's administrative hub, with a university campus, hospitals and the provincial market for rice, cattle, fish and timber.

Mongu is the urban face of one of Africa's best-known surviving monarchies. The Litunga, his council and the Barotse Royal Establishment hold authority over customary land and ceremony, and respect for royalty is expressed in formal manners — kneeling, clapping and specific forms of address — that outsiders are expected at least to recognise. Silozi, a Sotho language left by the Makololo, is the common tongue, spoken far beyond the Lozi themselves.

The Kuomboka is the great public occasion: the move of the Litunga from the plain to higher ground in the Nalikwanda, a great black-and-white barge with an elephant on its roof, propelled by dozens of paddlers in ceremonial dress, with royal drums, attendant boats and crowds lining the water. Its date is set by the height of the water and the phase of the moon, and the province plans around it once it is announced.

Beyond the ceremonies, the plain shapes the culture: canoe handling, cattle, fishing, and a calendar of movement between wet-season and dry-season villages. Basketry and mat weaving from plain grasses and palm are a Lozi craft of long standing, sold in Mongu's markets. Churches, particularly of the Protestant missions established in the nineteenth century, are central, and Mongu's social life runs to church, football and family gatherings.

About 180,000 people live in Mongu, the province's main town and its administrative capital. It is built on Kalahari sand, and the sand is a daily fact: roads, yards and paths are soft and pale, walking is slow, and vehicles need care away from the tarred streets.

The economy is trade and administration. Provincial and district offices, the hospital, schools and a university campus are the main formal employers, and the markets move rice, cassava, maize, cattle, fish and timber between the plain and the rest of the country. Households on the plain's edge farm, fish and keep cattle, moving with the water: gardens and villages on the plain in the dry season, higher ground when the flood comes.

Western Province is among Zambia's poorer provinces, and Mongu shows it in thin infrastructure, irregular electricity during national load-shedding, and limited work for young people, many of whom leave for Lusaka or the Copperbelt. Better roads have brought traders and goods, and the town is busier than it was, but the rhythm still follows the flood: the harbour thrives when the water is high, and the plain fills with cattle when it falls.

The floodplain feeds Mongu. Rice grown on the plain is a local speciality in a country otherwise built on maize, and it is eaten alongside or instead of nshima, the stiff porridge that remains the staple; in the west that porridge is often made from cassava meal. Fish is the usual relish — bream, tigerfish and catfish from the Zambezi and its channels, fresh in the flood and smoked or sun-dried the rest of the year.

Beef and soured milk reflect the Lozi cattle economy, and relishes of pumpkin leaves, cassava leaves, okra and beans are cooked with groundnuts. Wild foods from the plain and the woodland — mushrooms in the rains, water-lily roots, fruits such as mango and the tart masau — fill out the year. Cassava is eaten boiled and pounded as well as milled, and roadside stalls sell it roasted with groundnuts.

Markets sell the plain's produce in season, and the harbour area smokes fish over low fires. To drink there is munkoyo, the lightly fermented maize and root drink that is especially popular in the west, home-brewed beers, Chibuku sold in cartons, bottled lager, and strong sweet tea taken with bread or fritters in the morning.