Current Time in Kabwe, Zambia

Kabwe is the capital of Central Province in Zambia, standing on the high plateau of the country's interior about a hundred and forty kilometres north of Lusaka. The setting is open miombo woodland and savanna at around twelve hundred metres above sea level, and the altitude gives the town a mild climate with warm days, cool nights, a hot season before the rains and a wet season from November to April.

Roughly two hundred and fifty thousand people live in Kabwe, which occupies a strategic position at the junction of the Great North Road and the railway that runs from the Copperbelt to the south. This central location has made it an important transport and administrative centre, and Zambia Railways maintains its headquarters and main workshops here.

The town owes its existence to mining. Lead and zinc deposits were discovered in 1902, and the settlement that grew around the shaft was known for most of the twentieth century as Broken Hill, after the Australian mining town. For decades the mine was one of the largest lead producers in Africa, and it continued in operation until 1994. Its legacy is a difficult one, since decades of smelting left heavy metal contamination in the surrounding soil, and a series of international and government programmes have since worked on remediation, soil replacement and health screening in the affected townships.

Kabwe holds a remarkable place in the study of human origins. In 1921 miners working the ore body uncovered an ancient human skull, known as the Broken Hill or Kabwe cranium and assigned to Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis. It was the first significant fossil of an early human ever found in Africa and remains one of the most complete specimens of its kind, though it is held in a museum in London and its return has been the subject of long discussion in Zambia.

Nearby is the Mulungushi Rock of Authority, a great granite outcrop where nationalist conventions were held in the years before independence and where the country's political leaders have gathered ever since, making it a symbol of Zambian democracy. In the town centre stands the Big Tree, an enormous fig declared a national monument, under which colonial era meetings and markets took place. The Nsalu and Nachikufu caves with their rock paintings, the Mulungushi and Mita Hills dams and the Lukanga Swamp are all within reach for visitors interested in prehistory, fishing or birdwatching.

Economic activity today includes agriculture, milling, textiles, cement and transport services, and there has been renewed exploration of the old mining area. Buses and minibuses connect Kabwe to Lusaka and the Copperbelt, and the railway carries freight and occasional passenger services.

Mulungushi University, established here in 2008, is the principal institution of higher education, together with nursing, teaching and technical colleges.

Kabwe is important as a crossroads of Zambia, a centre of the country's mining and political history and the site of one of the most significant human fossils ever discovered.