The land around Kasungu is what locals call sand veld, thin soils that hold neither nutrients nor rain well. In 2004 a tribal chief put a number on the problem: more than 250,000 people in the district owned no land at all. Tobacco fills the gap. It is the only cash crop grown in any serious quantity, and Xinhua News Agency once called the area Malawi's tobacco heartland, which is true in an economic sense and a demographic sense and a political sense. When the price is good, the district eats. When global cigarette markets shift, the district does not. Maize fields thread between the tobacco sheds, but subsistence farming on sand veld is always one dry season away from hunger. In 2002, official estimates put famine deaths above 100 here. Kasungu was the worst-affected part of Malawi. Three years later, when a second famine struck 4.2 million people nationwide, relief efforts concentrated here again.

Kasungu District Hospital has 179 beds and a staff that has long been described as insufficient for the demand. Its paediatric ward holds thirteen beds and sometimes receives more than a hundred children at a time, patients laid on the floor when cots run out. Supplies of antiretroviral drugs run short. Nurses work rotations that would break apprentice surgeons elsewhere. And yet the hospital is also where the quiet work of keeping a district alive happens every day. UNICEF's Hamburg office has sent grants to train community caregivers. A parish church near Peterborough, England began a partnership here in 2001; its members have since travelled to Kasungu repeatedly to build a new church, a fish farm, and a maize mill. These are not dramatic interventions. They are the slow steady accumulations by which places like Kasungu stitch themselves together, one visiting delegation, one mill, one classroom at a time.

Eight kilometers from Kasungu, surrounded by savanna, sits Kamuzu Academy. Hastings Banda founded it in the 1980s as a deliberate act of cultural ambition. Banda had been Malawi's first president, an autocrat whose personal history included medical training at universities in the United States and Scotland, and he wanted Malawian children to have access to the kind of classical education he believed had made him. The academy offers Latin and Greek. Students wear uniforms. The Nyasa Times once called it highly regarded and Eton in the bush. In January 2008 it hosted the African Junior Chess Championships, the boards set out under a sky that had almost no light pollution. The place is controversial; critics have always asked whether a country where children sleep on hospital floors should be pouring resources into a selective boarding school. Banda's answer was essentially: yes, exactly because of that.

Kasungu has always been a stronghold of the Malawi Congress Party, the party Banda built and ran. That political weight has made the town visible in national debates in ways its size would not otherwise command. In June 2003, five Malawians suspected by American authorities of al-Qaeda connections were arrested and transferred to U.S. custody, provoking riots here between local Muslims and police. One demonstrator was treated for serious gunshot wounds. A cholera outbreak in 2004 and 2005 reached Kasungu too, though the district recorded only eight cases. Chichewa is the dominant language in the streets and markets. The guesthouses are modest, the bars are cheerful, and whatever the guidebooks say about attractions, the town has the unstudied dignity of a place that is not trying to be anywhere but itself.