Istwa Nou

By the early centuries CE the country around the Upemba depression, where the Lualaba River runs through southern Congo, had become a serious industrial district. It produced iron, iron goods and salt, and shipped them north along the Lualaba and the Lomami into the trading networks of the central Congo basin. Then the region added a second metal. Ironworking Bantu communities living to the south, at the edge of the basin, sat on top of the copper deposits of southern Congo and northern Zambia, the ground later called the Copper Belt, and they worked out copper smelting for themselves. Nobody taught them. Copper then moved out in both directions, north up the rivers of the Congo basin and south through the Zambezi. Three commodities, iron, salt and copper, produced with African technique and carried on African rivers, supplied a continental market. The system was working while Rome still stood, and no standard account of the ancient world mentions it.