#serenjedistrict

The previous posts in this series have talked about the land above the ground — the streams, the sweet potatoes, the millet and beans, the farming knowledge accumulated across generations. Today we go below it.

Because Serenje District — the district in which Chibale chiefdom sits — is not only an agricultural district. It is a mineral district. And the mineral endowment beneath Serenje's red earth is significant, varied, and in many areas still only beginning to be understood.

What Lies Beneath Serenje District

Zambia's National Critical Minerals Strategy 2024–2028 — the government's comprehensive assessment of what the country's ground contains — identifies eleven priority critical minerals for Zambia's economic future. Serenje District contributes to several of them.

Manganese. The Luapula-Central Province manganese belt — the same formation that the mineral education series has described in detail in the Manganese and Sugilite Series — extends into Serenje District. Manganese is element 25 — the fourth most used metal in the world, essential for steel production and increasingly important as a battery mineral for the electric vehicle revolution. The discovery of sugilite — one of the rarest and most valuable gemstones in the world — within Luapula Province's manganese belt raises the question of whether similar sugilite occurrences exist within Serenje's manganese mineralisation. That question has not yet been fully answered.

Graphite. Zambia's graphite occurrences include deposits in Central Province. Graphite — the carbon mineral that goes into lithium-ion battery anodes — is listed among Zambia's critical minerals precisely because the global battery revolution creates demand for it at a scale that has made battery-grade graphite one of the most commercially significant industrial minerals of the 2020s.

Silica. High-purity silica sand — the raw material for solar panels, for semiconductor manufacturing, and for a range of industrial glass applications — occurs in Serenje District. As Zambia's solar buildout accelerates, the domestic availability of high-purity silica takes on economic significance that it did not have a decade ago.

Gemstones. Serenje District sits in the broader Central Province geological terrane that includes the pegmatite-hosted gemstone occurrences documented across the Zambia Geological Survey Department's critical mineral mapping programme. The same geological processes that produced emeralds in Lufwanyama and morganite in the Irumide Belt — ancient basement rocks, pegmatite intrusions, metasomatic contact zones — are present in the Central Province basement.

The Mailo Solar Project. The 25-megawatt Mailo Solar Power Plant — commissioned in July 2025 as the first merchant solar facility to participate in the Southern Africa Power Pool — was built in Serenje District. This is not a mineral in the ground. It is a mineral story of a different kind — the connection between Zambia's silicon-based solar technology and the silica-rich geology of Central Province. The sun that shines on Serenje District, converted into electricity by solar panels made from purified silicon, is the twenty-first century version of the same relationship between the landscape and the energy it provides that the Lala farming tradition has understood for centuries.

What This Means for Chibale Chiefdom

The mineral wealth of Serenje District does not belong to companies or governments alone. Under Zambia's customary land system — and under the community development agreements that responsible mining companies are required to negotiate with local communities — the people of Chibale chiefdom have rights and interests in any mining or mineral processing development that occurs within or adjacent to their territory.

The lesson of the mineral education series — told across months of posts on copper, cobalt, emeralds, gold, manganese, lithium, and every mineral in between — is the same lesson that applies to Serenje. The ground holds value. The question is who captures it, and how much of it stays in the community whose land it comes from.

Chief Chibale's chiefdom is not only a farming community. It is a community sitting on a geological endowment that the twenty-first century's clean energy and technology economy is creating demand for. The sweet potatoes that feed Lusaka, the beans and millet that sustain the community, the streams that water the fields — these are the wealth that is visible and that the community already knows how to use. The minerals beneath them are the wealth that the community is still learning to understand, to claim, and to benefit from.

This is the final post in the Chibale Chiefdom series. Five posts. One chiefdom. The beginning of a story worth telling in full.

BaLala bonse — chalo chithu, pali umwenshi. 💎🌿🇿🇲