Founded in 1910 as Élisabethville around a copper smelter, Lubumbashi wears its century plainly: art-deco colonial avenues, the UMHK works that bankrolled an empire, and the 1960-63 secession that made Katanga briefly a country.
The Katanga branch of the national museum network on Avenue Mama Yemo holds Luba and Tabwa carvings, Sanga grave goods and copper croisette ingots — the X-shaped currency mined here from the 8th century onward, long before Europeans arrived.
Housed at the old Union Minière du Haut-Katanga works east of the centre, this company collection covers the 1906 concession, the 1911 first smelt, and the wagons and hand-drills of the katanga copper boom that built the city.
Élisabethville's Roman Catholic cathedral, consecrated in 1921 in red brick with a Romanesque campanile, was the mission church of the Benedictines of Katanga and remains the seat of the archdiocese. Interior mosaics date from the 1950s.
The grid laid out in 1910 between the railway and the Lubumbashi river keeps its interwar bungalows with deep verandahs, the old Hôtel de Ville, and shopfronts in Belgian art deco — the European town that a cordon sanitaire once separated from the cité.
The 1910 terminus of the line from Rhodesia that made the city possible — copper out, labour in. The white colonial station block still runs Kolwezi and Kindu services, and the yard holds Belgian-era steam and diesel stock rusting on sidings.
The central square's independence monument marks 30 June 1960 and honours the Katangese who died in the years that followed — a pointed memorial in a province that seceded eleven days after the Congo became independent.
Moïse Tshombe governed the breakaway State of Katanga from these colonnaded 1950s buildings between July 1960 and January 1963, with Belgian advisers upstairs and UN ONUC troops eventually at the gates.
In the Kenya commune cemetery lie civilians, gendarmes and foreign mercenaries killed in the 1961-63 fighting between Katangese forces and UN troops, including casualties of Operations Rumpunch, Morthor and Grandslam.
Laid out in the 1920s as the African township across the tracks from European Élisabethville, Kamalondo keeps its numbered avenues, mission school and the bars where Katangese rumba was played in the 1950s. Still the city's densest quarter.
Founded in 1955 as the Université Officielle du Congo, the first university in the Belgian Congo. Its 1990 student massacre — soldiers killed students on this campus in May — remains one of the defining traumas of the Mobutu years.
Patrice Lumumba was flown to Élisabethville on 17 January 1961, beaten at the Brouwez house, then shot in bush south-west of the city and dissolved in acid. Local guides take visitors to the roadside memorial marking the ground.
Old-quarter drinking hall of the kind that carried Katangese rumba from the 1950s: Simba and Tembo beer, wooden benches, and regulars whose fathers worked at UMHK and remember the secession years first-hand.