Essential French phrases

Hello, and 'how's it going?'. Katanga's lingua franca is Swahili, not Lingala — arriving with mbote and sango nini marks you instantly as someone who has only been to Kinshasa.

Thank you, and thank you very much. Katanga Swahili — Kingwana — is its own dialect, so a Kenyan or Tanzanian will find it familiar but not identical. Nobody minds; the effort registers.

Welcome — and also 'come in', 'help yourself', 'you're welcome'. The reply to asante. One of the words that does the most work per syllable in this city.

Brother, sir, madam. Address people by one of these before you ask them anything. Skipping straight to the question is the commonest way a newcomer makes an interaction harder than it needed to be.

Okay, agreed, fine, understood. The all-purpose closer for a negotiation, a set of directions or a conversation you would like to end politely.

White person or obvious foreigner — Katanga's Swahili equivalent of Kinshasa's mundele. Descriptive rather than hostile, and a reliable signal that a price has just been reconsidered.

Sorry — in the sense of commiseration rather than apology. Someone drops something, has bad news, is unwell: 'pole sana'. Also 'pole pole', slowly, gently, which is advice as often as it is a description.

Stiff maize meal — the Katanga staple, eaten with sombe (cassava leaves) or beans or fish. Kinshasa eats cassava fufu and chikwangue; Katanga eats bukari, exactly like Zambia over the border. The food map here runs south, not west.

Pounded cassava leaves stewed with palm oil and often groundnut — the same dish Kinshasa calls pondu or saka-saka, under a Swahili name. Ordering it by the right name is a small but noticed thing.

Lion in Swahili, and the beer brewed in Lubumbashi that is a genuine local institution. 'Simba baridi' — a cold Simba — is the correct order at any nganda in the city.

An artisanal miner, digging copper and cobalt ore by hand outside the industrial concessions. Perhaps the single most important word in Katanga's economy, and the subject of most of the international scrutiny the province receives.

The slag heap. Specifically THE slag heap — the black mountain of Gécamines smelter waste that dominates the Lubumbashi skyline and is the city's most recognisable object. Directions are given relative to it.

The border post into Zambia, and by extension the whole export economy. When someone says the queue at Kasumbalesa is bad, they are telling you something about copper prices, truck logistics and probably the price of your groceries.