Sumbawanga

Sumbawanga stands on the Ufipa plateau, a highland lifted between two arms of the rift valley: Lake Tanganyika to the west and Lake Rukwa to the east. The plateau averages about 1,700 metres, and its highest point, Mbizi, rises to 2,490 metres at the escarpment edge north-east of the town.

This is the country of the Fipa, whose ironworking tradition has been unusually well recorded — by travellers, missionaries, ethnographers and archaeologists. Archaeologists recognise a sequence of furnaces here: small globular ones known as katukutu, dated to roughly 1550–1800, and later the tall malungu shaft furnaces, two to four metres high, often built into termite mounds. Smelting from ore continued until the 1950s, and slag heaps still mark old working sites.

In the 1840s the plateau was reached by the Ngoni under Zwangendaba, at the end of a migration of more than a thousand miles from southern Africa; he died near Ufipa around 1848, and his followers then divided. In the colonial period the Germans established a post at Bismarckburg, today's Kasanga, on the Lake Tanganyika shore, where the ruins of its fort still stand.

The town's name is often translated from Kifipa as throw away your witchcraft — a warning, the story goes, not to bring spiritual practices from elsewhere. The Fipa remain the region's main people, alongside the Nyiha, Mambwe and Lungu.

Down on the Zambian border, the Kalambo River plunges over the edge of the plateau in a single uninterrupted drop of 235 metres — one of the highest single-drop waterfalls in Africa — before running into Lake Tanganyika. The site above the falls is one of the most important in African archaeology, and has been on the UNESCO Tentative List since 2009. In 2023 researchers reported in Nature that waterlogged sediments on the Zambian bank had preserved two logs deliberately notched and joined at least 476,000 years ago — the earliest known wooden structure made by human ancestors anywhere.

East of the plateau, Lake Rukwa has no outlet, and its alkaline waters rise and fall with the rains: it was about 48 kilometres long in 1929 and about 128 kilometres ten years later.