Gweru

Gweru (Gwelo until 1982) is the capital of the Midlands, on the A5 between Harare (Salisbury) and Bulawayo. It began in 1894 as a staging post on what had been Lobengula's cattle country, trained 1,810 wartime pilots at Thornhill, hosted the congress where ZANU chose armed struggle in 1964, and was the home base of the Fifth Brigade in the 1980s. Most visitors stop for Antelope Park and the Military Museum; the rest of the story is on the street corners if you know what you are looking at.

1. About 1450 to 1830s

   The earliest people at Danangombe (Dhlo Dhlo), south-west of Gweru towards Shangani, appear to have been the Torwa, whose state was ruled from Khami near Bulawayo and counted Naletale among its outlying centres. Changamire's Rozvi defeated the Torwa at Khami in 1693 and made Danangombe their capital until Nguni groups overran it in the 1830s, during the Mfecane (the wars and migrations that spread out of Zululand). Oral tradition says people still lived there until the late 1880s. source

2. 1894 to 1895

   By the 1890s the site was an Ndebele regimental kraal (a fenced settlement) and an outpost for King Lobengula's cattle east of the Somabhula forest. After the 1893 war on Lobengula, Dr Jameson of the British South Africa Company backed a town here as the stop between Bulawayo and Salisbury. The American scout Frederick Burnham and his brother-in-law Pearl Ingram claimed to have laid it out in 1894; others, the historian Rob Burrett among them, credit the settler Percy Brown. It was nearly called Jamesontown, until the Jameson Raid of 1895 to 1896 ended the idea. R B Nash, who reached Bulawayo in June 1894 and moved on to Gwelo, started a cyclostyled newspaper, The Northern Optimist, that December; the telegraph line arrived on 20 January 1895, and by that year the town had six hotels. source

3. March to December 1896

   News of the Umvukela, the Ndebele rising against Company rule, reached Gwelo by telegraph on 25 March 1896 and the town went into laager, a wagon fort, at the corner of Lobengula Street and 5th Avenue, where the central police station now stands. Captain Gibbs arrived on 29 March with two Maxim guns and found 350 men, 27 women and 22 children inside. The Amaveni regiment fired on his first patrol on 30 March and two days later killed about 20 Shangaan labourers attached to his force; the telegraph was cut on 1 April. Rinderpest killed the cattle, houses near the laager were pulled down for a clear field of fire, and the names of those who died are on the sandstone obelisk outside the Military Museum. source

4. 1898 to 1971

   The first bank opened in 1896 and a stock exchange in 1898, the railway arrived in 1902, the Masonic Lodge went up in 1903, and Gwelo became a municipality on 18 June 1914. It was made a city in October 1971. After independence the spelling became Gweru, in 1982. source

5. 1941 to 1953

   In 1939 a committee picked part of Thornhill farm and the neighbouring Glengarry as an airfield for training Commonwealth aircrew, the first buildings went up in 1941 and training began in March 1942. By the end of the war 1,810 pilots had learned to fly here. The RAF stayed on after 1945, bought the land in 1947 and lowered its ensign for the last time at the final graduation parade on 6 August 1953, after which the Royal Rhodesian Air Force took the base over, started on tarmac runways in 1956 and landed its first jet, a Vampire, on 11 December 1957. In 2017 it was renamed Josiah Tungamirai Air Force Base. source

6. 21 to 24 May 1964

   ZANU, formed in August 1963, held its first congress at Mtapa Hall in Gwelo's oldest suburb. The delegates resolved on armed struggle and elected Ndabaningi Sithole president, Leopold Takawira vice president, Herbert Chitepo national chairman and Robert Mugabe secretary general. Emmerson Mnangagwa, back from military training in China, says he slipped in to attend. Smith's government banned the party later that year. source

7. 25 July 1982

   Ten days after Zimbabwe's new BAe Hawk jets reached Thornhill, saboteurs cut the perimeter wire and put time-delay bombs in the engines. Four of the eight Hawks, eight Hunters and a Cessna were hit. South African special forces were generally assumed responsible, but Mugabe had the Central Intelligence Organisation arrest the senior air force officers who had bought the Hawks, among them the commander Norman Walsh and his deputy Hugh Slatter. Confessions were extracted under torture. After nearly a year, and under international pressure, the men were tried in the Harare High Court and acquitted, rearrested outside the courthouse and released only after several more weeks of pressure. Walsh left the service on 22 May 1983, and Mugabe, who no longer trusted former Rhodesian officers, set about replacing them. source

8. 1983 to 1987

   Gukurahundi is the Shona name (the early rain that washes away the chaff before the spring rains) given to the campaign by the Fifth Brigade, a North Korean-trained unit of the Zimbabwe National Army that reported straight to the Prime Minister's office. It deployed into Matabeleland North on 3 January 1983 and extended its operations to Matabeleland South and parts of the Midlands. Estimates of the dead run from 8,000 to 30,000, mainly Ndebele and Kalanga civilians and people suspected of backing Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU. The killing ended with the Unity Accord of 22 December 1987, when Nkomo's ZAPU was absorbed into ZANU-PF. A commission of inquiry sat in 1983; its report was never made public. source

Who lives here

The 2022 census counted 161,294 people in Gweru Urban District, 86,860 of them women and 74,434 men, in 44,808 households. Gweru Rural District had another 121,712. The whole Midlands province stood at 1,811,905. source

Languages

Gweru sits on the seam between the country's two big language groups. Shona is the everyday language of the city, in its Karanga, Zezuru and Mhari dialects. IsiNdebele takes over in the western parts of the province, where it borders Matabeleland. Tswana, Sotho, Venda and Chewa are all heard in the province too. source

A university town

Midlands State University grew out of Gweru Teachers College, which started enrolling students for University of Zimbabwe degrees in 1998 and became a state university under an Act of 1999. It now has around 31,000 students across nine faculties, with its main campus in the city alongside the TelOne campus for business and law and the Batanai campus for tourism, others in Harare, Mutare (Umtali) and Zvishavane, and residences named after the anti-colonial figures Kaguvi and Nehanda. source

The Swiss diocese

The Catholic Diocese of Gwelo was created in 1955 out of a mission field that the Bethlehem Mission Society, a Swiss order, had worked since its first fathers arrived in October 1938. Its first bishop, Haene, served thirty years, founded an order of African sisters in 1950, and by 1965 the Swiss had opened twenty new missions, Zhombe among them, before the order handed the diocese over in 1977. Part of it was split off as the Diocese of Masvingo in 1999. source