The Belgian Congo started with four provinces and a lot of local autonomy. In 1933 the colonial authorities reorganised everything into six provinces, each named after its capital, and pulled power back toward Brussels. Katanga became Elisabethville Province, after its southeastern capital. The number of districts in the entire colony was reduced to fifteen. Within Elisabethville Province, administrators drew Lualaba District in the west, and Tanganika and Haut-Katanga districts in the east. For two decades that structure held. Then, in the mid-1950s, the map was redrawn again. Lualaba shrank. Its northern reaches became a new district: Haut-Lomami. Its eastern edge was handed to Luapula-Moero.

By the late 1950s Haut-Lomami District stretched across 163,300 square kilometres of the Katangan plateau - about a third of the whole province. A 1955-57 administrative map shows it bounded by Lulua and Kabinda districts to the north, Tanganika to the northeast, Luapula-Moero to the southeast, Lualaba to the south, and Portuguese-held Angola to the west. This was miombo country: dry upland woodland broken by dambos, crossed by the headwaters of the Lomami and Lualaba rivers, populated by Luba and Songye communities who had lived with these waters long before a Belgian clerk ever sketched a boundary line. The district was an administrative convenience laid over a landscape that had its own older geography.

On 30 June 1960 the Congo became independent. Eleven days later, on 11 July, Katanga seceded as a breakaway state under Moise Tshombe, backed by mining interests that wanted the region's copper outside national control. Fighting dragged on for two and a half years. In November 1961 national forces reconquered the northern portion and renamed it Nord-Katanga. On 21 January 1963 the rest of Katanga was brought back under Kinshasa's control and divided into the provinces of Lualaba and Katanga Oriental. Then, on 28 December 1966, the three pieces were stitched back together into a single Katanga again. Haut-Lomami District, through all of this, kept a kind of shadow existence on the maps - the name waiting for its moment.

That moment came almost a half-century later. In 2015, as part of a constitutional reform that finally implemented the 2006 decentralisation plan, the DRC broke its eleven huge provinces into twenty-six smaller ones. Haut-Lomami District became Haut-Lomami Province - one administrative layer promoted, after sixty years of being a district, to sovereignty over its own affairs. The town of Kamina, a railway junction and former colonial garrison at the district's heart, was elevated to provincial capital. For most residents the practical change was modest. For the map, though, it was the first time in a century that the name on the land matched the name used by the people living on it. In a part of Africa where borders have usually been handed down from far away, that kind of correction is not a small thing.