Mpulungu

The southern end of Lake Tanganyika has long been the country of the Lungu and Mambwe, fishing and farming peoples whose villages lined the bays and the rivers running off the escarpment. In the nineteenth century the shore lay on the route of Swahili-Arab caravans trading ivory and slaves between the lake and the Indian Ocean coast, and the lake itself was a highway long before any road reached it.

European missions came in the 1880s and 1890s. The London Missionary Society established a station at Niamkolo, beside the present town, and built the stone church whose ruin still stands; the society also put a steamer on the lake, carried up in pieces from the coast, to serve its stations. The British South Africa Company administered the territory as North-Eastern Rhodesia from the 1890s, with its station on the plateau above at Abercorn, now Mbala, while the lakeshore remained a landing place for boats and goods.

Mpulungu grew into a port between the wars, when a road down from Abercorn, a jetty and a customs warehouse were built in the 1920s and a wharf followed in the 1930s, making it the southern transport terminus of Lake Tanganyika. It mattered more still after Zambian independence in 1964, when the country's landlocked position and the closure of southern routes made a northern outlet valuable. A deep-water harbour was developed to move cargo between Zambia and the lake ports of Tanzania, Burundi and the Congo, and the town became the terminus of the tarred road from Mbala. Fishing grew alongside the cargo trade, and the drying and trucking of small lake fish to the Copperbelt and Lusaka has been the town's economic mainstay ever since.

Mpulungu's culture is a lake culture. Work follows the water: boats going out at dusk with pressure lamps, catches landed at first light, and the drying racks and open ground covered with fish through the middle of the day. The rhythms of the harbour, the seasons of the catch and the weather on a lake that can turn rough very quickly shape how people organise their time.

The town is Lungu and Mambwe in origin, with Bemba serving as the language of trade and schooling and English used officially. Traders from Tanzania, Burundi and the Congo pass through the port, and Swahili is heard on the quayside, giving the place a more mixed, cross-border feel than most Zambian towns of its size. Catholic and Protestant churches, several of them descended from the early mission stations, anchor community life, and choirs, church gatherings and funerals draw in the whole neighbourhood.

Hospitality is practised in the ordinary way of northern Zambia: unhurried greetings, deference to elders and to the chiefs who hold customary land, and shared meals eaten by hand from a common dish. Football is followed closely, with pitches of packed sand beside the water, and the road up the escarpment keeps the town tied to Mbala, where the district offices, the hospital and the museum are.

Mpulungu is a small town and the administrative centre of a district counted at about 154,000 people in 2022, stretching along the lakeshore and up onto the escarpment. It lies low and hot at the foot of the escarpment, well below the plateau towns inland, and daily life is arranged around the cooler ends of the day: markets and the fish trade in the early morning, rest and shade in the afternoon, boats heading out as the light goes.

Fishing and the fish trade employ most people, directly or through the drying, packing and trucking that follow. The harbour handles cement, fuel, timber and containers moving between Zambia and the northern lake ports, and a small industrial fringe of workshops, fuel depots and transport yards has grown around it. Government offices, schools, a hospital and a modest tourism trade in the lakeside lodges make up most of the rest of the formal economy.

The pressures are those of a remote district town: declining catches from the southern lake, irregular electricity during the country's load-shedding, water and sanitation that struggle to keep up with growth, and a long road to the nearest large hospital or college. Young people leave for Kasama, the Copperbelt or Lusaka, though the cross-border trade and the fisheries keep more work here than in most towns of the far north.

Fish is the point of Mpulungu's table. The large lates of Lake Tanganyika, predatory fish found nowhere else, are the prized catch, grilled over charcoal or fried in thick steaks; bream and catfish are everyday alternatives, and all of them are eaten with nshima, the stiff maize or cassava porridge that is Zambia's staple, taken by hand. In this part of the north cassava meal, often mixed with finger millet, is as common as maize.

Kapenta — the small silvery lake fish caught at night under lamps — is both the town's export and its standby, dried in the sun and then fried with tomato and onion into a salty relish. Groundnuts thicken green relishes such as ifisashi, made with pumpkin or cassava leaves, and beans, okra and wild mushrooms gathered in the rains fill out the plate. Chikanda, the dense savoury loaf of ground wild orchid tubers and peanuts sometimes called African polony, is a speciality of the Bemba-speaking north and sold in slices at markets.

Roadside and harbour stalls fry fish with chips, roast maize cobs in season and sell fritters and sweet tea. To drink there is munkoyo, a lightly fermented root and maize drink, home-brewed millet beer, cartons of Chibuku sorghum beer and bottled lager, along with mangoes, bananas and pineapples grown on the warm, well-watered ground near the lake.