#copperbelt

the name: from the nkonde word "itwi" — meaning "place where the soil is black," a reference to the rich copper ore in the area. the alternative name kitwe-nkana — the city and the mine so intertwined that a hyphen is the most honest description of how they came to be.

the founding: kitwe was founded in 1936, not as a mine site — the mine was at nkana, slightly to its west — but as the supply town a mine economy generates around its edges. the rhodesia railways main line reached the town in 1937. when the railway arrived, kitwe's future as a commercial hub was settled.

the mine and the city: nkana mine township and kitwe were formally integrated in 1961. by then, the copperbelt's urban workers — organised, literate, increasingly politically conscious — were among the most important constituencies in the drive toward independence in 1964. kitwe's workforce was not merely a passive economic actor. it was a political force.

the boom years and the collapse: by the 1980s, kitwe's population had grown from 9,000 people in the 1950s to more than 220,000 — a twenty-fold increase in three decades. then the 1973 global copper price collapse. the ZCCM era left deferred maintenance, reduced formal employment, and an informal economy that grew to fill the gap.

the privatisation and recovery: not linear. the mine-adjacent townships lost company-provided services. the transition was difficult. but the underlying economic logic of kitwe reasserted itself as prices recovered and new mine investment began.

kitwe today: population 661,907 (2022 census), metro area approximately 824,000 in 2025. copperbelt university — more than 11,000 students spanning mining engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, and business.

the economic ecology beyond the mines: the valve and instrumentation supply businesses that serve nkana and nchanga. the engineering contractors maintaining underground ventilation systems. the industrial equipment suppliers, chemical distributors, technical service companies. kitwe is that supply chain's physical home.

the new investment cycle: kobold metals' mingomba in the western forelands to kitwe's northwest. IRH's 366% KCM production surge at chingola — kitwe's neighbour. mopani's 40% output increase at the nkana smelter processing copper since the 1930s.

kitwe is the industrial heart of a country whose copper has shaped the global economy for a century — and whose copper will shape the global clean energy transition for decades to come.

the zambian cities series continues. 🇿🇲🏙

the word lamba means the act of humbling oneself. lambas are generally described as very humble people in nature — and that quality is embedded in the name by which they have been known for centuries.

from the time of the bantu expansion, both the congo's katanga and zambia's copperbelt regions have been called ilamba or lambaland, after the lamba people. the copperbelt is not the copperbelt. it is lambaland. that is its original name. the lamba settled at lake kashiba — the sacred black lake in mpongwe district, whose perfectly circular, dark, and mysterious waters are surrounded by indigenous forest and have been a site of lamba spiritual significance for centuries — and from there the lamba kingdom spread eastward, northward, southward and westward across the plateau.

the lamba have fifteen chiefs in zambia and eight in the katanga province of the DRC. among the DRC chiefs is chief katanga, based in lubumbashi. the name katanga itself comes from this lamba chief. the province whose mineral wealth has shaped the history of central africa takes its name from a lamba chief.

the great river that rises in the DRC near the copperbelt — the river the lamba call lweenge at its source near kipushi — is called ulufubu as it enters the copperbelt, and then becomes the kafue as it flows southward. the kafue river — which the rivers series described as the most economically important river in zambia — begins in lamba country and carries in its name the linguistic trace of its lamba origins.

mining activities in lambaland began long before the europeans arrived — confirmed by the ancient mining sites at bwana mukubwa near ndola. the lamba were smelting and trading copper centuries before frederick russell burnham led the northern territories BSA exploration company expedition in 1895 and determined that major copper deposits existed in the region.

the copper was always there. the lamba always knew.

the people who named the copperbelt before the copper was discovered by anyone outside lambaland. whose paramount chief's name became the name of a DRC province. whose river became the kafue. whose land is now zambia's most industrialised province.

and who are still here.

The paper studies how using ore body-specific bulk density values instead of a single specific gravity (SG = 2.65) improves copper resource estimation at Mopani Copper Mines’ Mufulira site in Zambia.

Using the wax-coated water displacement method (Archimedes’ principle) on 1,263 NQ drill core samples from three stacked quartzite-hosted ore bodies (A, B, C) plus waste, the authors found higher average bulk densities:

A ore body: ~2.76 g/cm³

B ore body: ~2.77 g/cm³

C ore body: ~2.71 g/cm³

These are significantly above the historical 2.65, implying tonnage has been underestimated by about 2.3–4.1%.

Density shows only moderate to weak correlation with copper grade (R² ≈ 0.15–0.30), meaning that lithology, mineralogy, alteration, porosity, and structure also strongly control density and must be considered.

The key recommendations are:

Stop using a single tonnage factor for heterogeneous deposits at Mufulira.

Assign density by geological domain/lithology/alteration, with more density sampling.

Treat density as a primary regionalized variable and interpolate it geostatistically (e.g., Kriging) alongside copper grades in resource models.

the copperbelt was not inhabited before the arrival of the lamba people from the luba and lunda kingdoms. the lamba settled at lake kashiba — a sacred lake in what is now mpongwe district, a body of water so deep it has never been fully plumbed, whose blue-green waters the lamba have regarded as spiritually significant for centuries — and from lake kashiba the lamba kingdom spread eastward, northward, southward, and westward across the plateau that would one day become the most industrialised province in zambia.

the lamba founder is believed to have been a woman — chembo kasako chimbala, the youngest wife of the great king mwata yamvo of the luba-lunda kingdom, who did not accept being part of a polygamous marriage and fled with her son chembo to settle in what is today known as lambaland — ilamba — on the copperbelt. from lake kashiba near ndola, the lamba people spread across the plateau, establishing chiefdoms in the territory that includes what is now ndola, kitwe, luanshya, mufulira, chingola, kalulushi, and chililabombwe.

every major copper mining town on the zambian copperbelt sits on land that was lamba land.

the lamba society is matrilineal. they use slash-and-burn farming methods and historically dwelt in small, dispersed villages — well adapted to the woodland-savanna environment of the copperbelt plateau.

the most extraordinary fact about the lamba: the copper ore had been worked by the local lamba people since the seventeenth century. not a secret that colonial prospectors discovered in the wilderness. a resource that lamba communities had been processing and trading for at least two hundred years before the british south africa company sent its first representative to sign a treaty with a lamba chief.

the lamba smelted copper. they moulded it into ingots. they traded it regionally. most of the deposits discovered by the colonial settlers were found with the assistance of local scouts who had knowledge of the whereabouts of the copper minerals. the chibuluma mine deposits are the only ones in zambia known to have been discovered without information passed on from the local people.

the colonial mining industry that built ndola and kitwe and luanshya and mufulira — the industrial engine of british central africa — was built on lamba land and, at its very beginning, guided by lamba knowledge of where the copper was.

the lamba have 15 chiefs in the zambian copperbelt and 8 in the katanga province of the DRC. senior chief mushili — the endless land or mother earth — is the paramount chief of all lamba in both zambia and the DRC.

the ukusefya pa ng'wena ceremony — held annually in ndola — celebrates the lamba people's history, their relationship to the land, and the continuity of a culture established on this plateau long before the first mine shaft was sunk.

Eight posts have traced the full arc. geology. properties. ore types and processing. economics. history. ZCCM. the value addition gap. today — what zambia is doing about all of it. and what the current moment requires.

What is going right.

copper production in zambia has been recovering. first quantum minerals, with kansanshi and sentinel, has been the most significant driver. the government has shown a more sophisticated understanding of the sector than at any point since independence — renegotiated development agreements, local content requirements, investment in processing infrastructure, engagement with the critical minerals conversation positioning zambia as a responsible and transparent supplier to battery and clean energy supply chains.

these are real achievements. they matter and should be acknowledged.

but the copper series has been honest throughout.

what zambia is doing is not yet equal to the scale of the opportunity the current moment presents.

copper is approaching the most consequential period in its commercial history. the EV transition, the renewable energy buildout, the data centre expansion, the grid modernisation programmes of major economies — creating a demand trajectory that the supply side cannot match. declining ore grades. aging mines. insufficient new discoveries. the countries holding the world's copper reserves are entering a period of strategic leverage they have not previously enjoyed.

zambia holds one of the world's most significant copper endowments. an established mining sector. a skilled workforce. functioning regulatory institutions. a stable enough political environment to support long-term investment. advantages that are not universally available among resource-rich developing countries.

what zambia has not yet done — fully, systematically, with the urgency the moment demands — is translate those advantages into the processing and manufacturing infrastructure downstream of the mine.

the copper wire. the copper rod. the copper components. the battery interconnects. the motor windings. the transformer coils. all of them made from zambian copper. all of them made somewhere else.

closing that gap requires a sustained, coordinated, multi-decade commitment to building downstream processing and manufacturing capability. institutional memory and political continuity across election cycles. and the honest acknowledgement — which the ZCCM chapter provided — that state ownership of the aspiration is not sufficient. the capability must be built, maintained, and operated with the discipline and technical competence the task demands.

zambia is not starting from zero. the foundation — the mines, the smelters, the skills base, the institutional frameworks — is there.

what is required now is the decision to build on it deliberately. ambitiously. with the full understanding of what the current moment offers and how briefly that window may remain open.

the ground built this country. the question of what the ground continues to build — and for whom — is the question every generation of zambians inherits and must answer for itself.

The week is behind us.

Whatever it carried — the decisions, the problems solved and the ones still waiting, the progress and the frustration — it is behind us now.

i am grateful this afternoon for small things and large things equally.

for the cup of tea that started the day. for the lemon that went into it. for the fact that the sun rose this morning over the copperbelt — as it has risen every morning for longer than any human being has been here to see it — and will rise again tomorrow.

for work that is meaningful. for questions worth asking. for people who carry the conversation forward into places i could not carry it alone.

for zambia. for this country that has never stopped surprising me. for its resilience, its warmth, its humour, and its capacity — which i believe in completely — to become everything it has always had the potential to be.

there is a verse i return to often.

psalm 24:1. the earth is the lord's, and everything in it.

everything in it. the copper and the emeralds and the quartz and the gold and the rivers and the plains and the 73 tribes and the 19 million people and the saturday afternoon quiet of a copperbelt neighbourhood when the week has done its work and the weekend opens like a hand.

all of it. his.

and we are here, in it, with the privilege of tending it well.

that is enough to be grateful for.

that is more than enough.