Lumwana sits on the T5 Highway, 170 kilometres west of Solwezi and 96 kilometres east of Mwinilunga, in the Copperbelt geology that extends northwest into the Democratic Republic of the Congo. From Lusaka the drive is about 660 kilometres. For most of the twentieth century that distance, and the condition of the roads to cover it, meant that North-Western Province stayed quiet. The copper that mattered was further east, at Kitwe and Chingola. But the Lumwana deposit, though known, was low-grade by Copperbelt standards and waited for technology and commodity prices to catch up with it. In 1999, when Equinox Minerals Limited acquired the site, the calculation finally tipped. Ten years of feasibility studies, financing rounds, and construction followed.

The Lumwana Copper Mine was commissioned in December 2008. Within a few years it was the town's largest employer. By the second quarter of 2013 it carried 1,850 direct employees and 4,400 contractors, and produced cobalt, gold, and uranium alongside its copper. Two years after commissioning, Barrick Gold acquired a 100 percent interest in the operation. The workforce that filled those jobs came from everywhere: local Lunda and Kaonde people whose families had farmed the area for generations, Zambians from other provinces chasing wages in a national economy where formal work is scarce, and expatriate engineers from Australia, Canada, South Africa and China. Company housing, the thousand new homes that reshaped the town's footprint, rose in orderly rows for the workers the mine needed. Other arrivals found their own places, and the unplanned growth around the mine's edges became its own kind of town.

A mining town that doubles its population every decade has to decide whether it wants to be a town or just a mining camp. Lumwana has been trying to be a town. The Lumwana Multi-Facility Economic Zone, approved to cluster manufacturing, agro-processing and tourism around the mine, is one bet on that future. So is the Lumwana Farmers Market, the area's main source of fresh produce. The Lumwana Premier Resort in the Manyama section, within an hour of Solwezi and Kalumbila, caters to visitors and rotation workers. A branch of Investrust Bank handles payroll and small business. The North Western University College of Health and Applied Sciences trains nurses and clinical medicine students, a small institution but locally consequential in a country where health workers are in short supply. A town council holds offices that are largely defined by the mine next door but which must also do ordinary municipal work.

Connectivity is the constant problem and the constant promise. The T5 road is paved all the way to Solwezi, 175 kilometres away. The closest air transport is at Solwezi and Mwinilunga, though two old gravel airstrips within 10 kilometres of town can still handle light aircraft. One of these airstrips, in the northern part of Chief Mukumbi's area, has a history with the Flying Doctor Service, ferrying medical staff to remote villages. A proposed North-West Railway would link Chingola through Lumwana to the Benguela Railway in Angola, threading Zambian copper to the Atlantic coast. In September 2013 the government announced plans to advertise the project to investors; the railway remains on the drawing board. What is not theoretical is the steady stream of trucks that already leaves Lumwana with concentrate, heading east through the Copperbelt and south through Zambia to export terminals in Durban and Dar es Salaam. A village to a town, and a town already folded into global supply chains.