Things to do in Lubumbashi

Landmark · Central Lubumbashi

A black mountain of smelter slag rising straight out of the city — the accumulated waste of a century of copper refining, and by a distance Lubumbashi's most recognisable object. It is the thing you orient by, the thing in every photograph, and a fairly direct statement of what this city has been doing since 1910.

Local tip: It is industrial property and it has been actively reprocessed for residual metal, so this is a look-at rather than a climb-up. The view of it from the western approaches at the end of the dry season, with the light low and the dust up, is the picture.

Culture · City centre

The regional national museum, holding Katanga's archaeology and ethnography — Luba and Chokwe material, the copper-cross currency the region traded in for centuries, and the industrial history of the Union Minière years that made the city.

Local tip: Small and uneven, and worth an hour rather than an afternoon — but the copper-cross collection reframes the entire province. Ask about the Picha biennale while you are there; the contemporary art scene here punches far above the city's profile.

Neighborhood · West of the centre

The low-rise residential grid laid out when this was Élisabethville — wide avenues, deep verandas, walled gardens and jacarandas that go purple around September. It is where most of the mining and diplomatic households live and where the city looks least like the rest of the country.

Local tip: Walk it in the late dry season for the jacarandas. And note what it tells you about the housing market: this quarter is priced by mining-company allowances, so its rents are not the city's rents.

Nature · Kundelungu National Park, north-east of the city

A single unbroken drop off the Kundelungu escarpment, reckoned the tallest waterfall in the DRC, on a high grassland plateau that looks nothing like anyone's mental image of the Congo — closer to Zambia's Nyika than to rainforest.

Local tip: Dry-season only in practice, and a serious 4x4 expedition rather than an outing: go with people who have done it, check the current park access position before setting out, and treat fuel and recovery gear as non-optional.

Food · Kenya, Katuba and the central markets

Katanga eats like Southern Africa: bukari — stiff maize meal — with sombe, beans, dried fish or chicken, rather than the cassava chikwangue of the west. The markets in the townships are where that food economy actually happens, and where the Zambian import trade is most visible.

Local tip: Go early, go with someone, and eat the bukari at the market rather than in a restaurant. If you want to understand why prices moved this month, ask a market trader about Kasumbalesa before you ask an economist.

Nightlife · City centre

Lubumbashi's evening runs on ngandas — open-air bars with grilled meat, plastic chairs and a sound system — and the central avenues are where they cluster. The music is rumba and ndombolo like everywhere in the DRC, but the crowd is talking Swahili and drinking Simba.

Local tip: Nothing starts before nine and the good nights are Thursday to Saturday. Take a driver you know rather than flagging a taxi at 2 a.m., and carry small notes and clean ones.