Kalulu means hare in the Lamba language, and somewhere along the small river that waters this corner of the Zambian Copperbelt, enough hares were once running through the grass that a name stuck. The river became Kalulushi. The town, built deliberately and with military precision in 1953 as a company town for copper and cobalt miners, took the river's name and made it a postal address. Seventy-plus years later, the mine shafts that paid for Kalulushi's street grid are mostly silent, but the town still counts 170,701 residents in its 2022 census, and a Catholic university and two health colleges have replaced the mining companies as its organizing institutions.
Kalulushi was established in 1953 as a planned company town for workers at the nearby Chibuluma copper and cobalt mine. For five years, it operated as a private settlement, its houses, roads, and services owned by the mining companies. In 1958, it became a public town. The geometry tells the story. Straight streets, uniform block sizes, standardized housing, all the ergonomics of a camp that expected its workers to come from somewhere else and form a new community on demand. The town sits 14 kilometers west of Kitwe, the Copperbelt's largest city and the nearest rail station, at an altitude of 1,260 meters on the Zambian plateau. In its early decades Kalulushi housed the main offices of Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines, which made it, briefly, the administrative hub for one of the most important industries on the continent.
The story of Kalulushi in the last thirty years is the story of what happens when the industry a town was built for begins to contract. Two Shaft closed in the 1990s. Seven Shaft followed in 2005. Economic activity in the town and surrounding district declined severely with those closures. What remained is a cluster of operations that have kept smaller extraction programs alive. Chambishi Metals is now the city's largest employer. NFC Africa Mining, Chibuluma Mines, the Chambishi Copper Smelter, Kagem Mining and Gemcanton Mining Services also run in or near the town. Kagem in particular is worth noting. It is one of the largest emerald mines in the world, and the green stones that come out of its pits are traded internationally with a prestige Copperbelt copper has never matched.
West of the town lies the Chati Forest Reserve, where large plantations of eucalyptus and tropical pine were established to supply timber for the mining industry. Mines need pit props, roof supports, and roundwood, and the copper country's native miombo woodland could not produce what was needed on the schedule the industry demanded. The plantations solved that problem with imported species. The eucalyptus trees grow fast and straight, and their ribboned gray-white bark peels in long strips that cover the forest floor. The wood also supplies ZESCO, the state electricity utility, for utility poles. It is an industrial forest, not a wild one, but it is a forest nonetheless, and its edges give Kalulushi a surprisingly green backdrop for a town whose purpose was, from the start, underground.
In April 2008, Zambia Catholic University opened its doors on President Avenue, a private institution run by the Zambia Episcopal Conference. It now offers degrees in education, development studies, business administration, economics, banking and finance, accountancy, human resource management, and business information technology. For a town that spent its first half-century training workers in skills that are now worth less than they were, the university represents a deliberate rebalancing toward professions that do not rise and fall with copper prices. Two other institutions round out the town's post-secondary footprint. Kalulushi College of Nursing, opened in 2017, trains about 500 students on Tigwilizane Street. Chibuluma College of Health Sciences sits on twelve hectares along the road to the Chibuluma Mine, offering accommodation and a multi-purpose sports court. Nursing and health sciences are, for an ex-mining town, a practical bet.
The name at the heart of the town is almost a small joke. Kalulu is the hare, the trickster figure who appears in Lamba and other regional folklore as a clever survivor, small against bigger creatures but usually winning by wit. The locals who named the Kalulushi River were honoring both the visible abundance of hares along its banks and the kind of creature those hares were. In Lamba stories, kalulu outsmarts lions and elephants. In the story of this town, the name has turned out to be quietly appropriate. Kalulushi was built to serve the biggest beasts in Zambia's industrial economy. When those beasts stumbled, the town adapted, and it is still here, smaller than its peak and leaner than its plan, persisting with the stubborn intelligence of its namesake.
Kalulushi sits at 12.85 degrees South, 28.09 degrees East in Copperbelt Province, Zambia, at 1,260 meters elevation, 14 kilometers west of Kitwe. From 4,000 to 7,000 feet above ground, the town's planned grid stands out against the surrounding miombo woodland and the large rectangular blocks of eucalyptus and pine plantation in the Chati Forest Reserve. Nearby airports include Ndola Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe International (FLND) and Kitwe Southdowns (FLSO). Dry-season flying from May through October generally offers clear, low-humidity air.