Ndola



Ndola is a large city in the Copperbelt of northern Zambia, 10 km from the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. With a population in 2023 of 587,716, Ndola is all about mining. It powered the Zambian economy until the 1970s, then the price of copper crashed while oil prices soared, and Zambia sank under huge debts. The city has diversified into limestone, and from 2005 the price of copper recovered, but with little visible benefit to Ndola.

Understand
The crackings and creakings of plate tectonics brought a rich vein of minerals, principally copper, to lie beneath northern Zambia, with the Katanga finger of the Democratic Republic of Congo extending south to share in this. This was loot for the colonial powers, exploiting dirt-cheap local labour in hazardous conditions for a valuable material whose profits were enjoyed far away - by Belgium for what is now the DRC, and by Britain for Northern Rhodesia which is now Zambia. Independence meant that a local clique clawed the profits away from multi-national companies, but with small benefit to the country at large or to those who sweated in the mines. And to the extent that those countries did benefit, there was resentment at sharing the profits, so separatist movements sprang up using much the same rhetoric that they'd chanted against the colonists.

In Zambia Kenneth Kaunda kept a lid on things, but the Congo conflict spiralled into civil war, with Katanga declaring independence and armed conflict in the Congo engulfing even UN non-combatant peacekeepers. On 18 Sept 1961 Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, flew in to resolve the conflict. His aircraft crashed on approach to Ndola and all on board were killed. The circumstances of this have been pored over as closely as those around the death of JF Kennedy, with multiple conspiracy theories. The key point is that he was inbound, with everything still to play for in the peace talks; so this favours pilot fatigue and simple navigational error.

Talk
English & Lamba is spoken in Ndola.

By bus or car
Ndola is about a 4- to 5-hour drive from Lusaka on a well paved road. Many buses run from Lusaka to Ndola. The most reliable are Power tools Logistics, Juldan Motors, UBZ, which runs lots of buses every day. The bus ride to Kitwe, 58 km away, takes 45 minutes. A bus from Kapiri Mposhi, 121 km away, takes 3 hours.

By train
Operated by Zambia Railways, the once-weekly Zambezi train runs from Livingstone (22 hours) via Lusaka (12 hours). is located norteast of downtown.

Go next
Lusaka or a day trip to Kitwe