Harare

Harare (Salisbury until 1982) is where Rhodes's Pioneer Column stopped on 12 September 1890 and where the spirit medium Nehanda was hanged eight years later for resisting it. Most visitors land, change money and leave for the parks within a day. Give it a bit longer and the capital explains the rest of the country: the stone sculpture, the townships where the liberation parties were founded, the North Korean-designed Heroes Acre on the edge of town, and the 1894 market hall that is a market again.

1. 12 and 13 September 1890

   Lobengula, the Ndebele king, had signed the Rudd Concession in 1888, which gave Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company mining rights in Mashonaland (the country of the Shona people) but not the right to settle it. Rhodes settled it anyway. The Pioneer Column, 200 volunteers, 180 civilian colonists and 62 wagons, left Macloutsie in Bechuanaland on 28 June 1890 and halted on 12 September about 15 km short of Mount Hampden, its intended end point, on a marshy meadow beside a rocky hill (the Kopje). The Union Flag went up on 13 September at what became Fort Salisbury, named after the British prime minister, and on 1 October the Pioneer Corps was disbanded and each man took his promised 3,000 acres and 15 mining claims. source

2. 1896 to 1898

   In June 1896 the Ndebele and Shona rose against settler taxes and labour demands, and in October the spirit mediums (people through whom an ancestral spirit is believed to speak) Kaguvi and Nehanda brought Mashonaland in. The best remembered is Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana, born near Chishawasha outside Salisbury around 1840. This rising is now called the First Chimurenga, chimurenga being the Shona word for a fight for freedom; the 1970s war was the Second. Nehanda was captured in 1897, convicted of ordering the killing of Native Commissioner Henry Pollard, and hanged in Salisbury on 27 April 1898. Her statue went up in May 2021 where Julius Nyerere Way meets Samora Machel Avenue. source

3. 1897 to 1935

   Captain Thomas Ross laid out the first town plan with 2,548 stands, small ones around Pioneer Street under the Kopje and larger ones in the Avenues, and the drained Causeway swamp took the government buildings. Salisbury became a municipality in 1897 with W E Fairbridge as first elected mayor, the railway arrived from Beira in 1899 and the link to Bulawayo and South Africa was finished in 1902, held up by the Anglo-Boer War. In 1923 the Company's rule ended and Salisbury became capital of the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia; it was declared a city in 1935. source

4. 11 November 1965

   At 11 in the morning, during the Armistice Day two minutes' silence, Prime Minister Ian Smith signed the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Salisbury, and at 1.15 pm he told the country in a twenty-minute broadcast that the moment had come for Rhodesia. Britain called it illegal and imposed sanctions the same day, the UN followed, and press censorship ran until April 1968. source

5. 1976 to 1982

   Salisbury was segregated by race until 1976 and its layout still shows it: the better-off northern suburbs, the old industrial south where most Africans lived, and the high-density townships to the south-west. Salisbury stayed the capital at independence in 1980, and on 18 April 1982 the city was renamed Harare after Neharawa, a Shona chief (a hereditary ruler of a district under customary law) whose village stood near the Kopje and whose nickname meant he who does not sleep. Until then the name Harari had belonged to the township that became Mbare. source

6. 1980 to 1987

   In October 1980 Mugabe's new government signed an agreement with North Korea to train a new army brigade. The Fifth Brigade, trained from August 1981 to September 1982, was sent into Matabeleland North in January 1983 to deal with dissidents and killed civilians instead, then moved on to Matabeleland South and parts of the Midlands. The campaign is known as Gukurahundi, roughly the early rain that washes away the chaff. The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace documented at least 2,000 to 2,750 deaths and thought the true figure could be 8,000; the broad view among scholars is 20,000 or more. It ended with the Unity Accord of 22 December 1987, which folded Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU into ZANU-PF, and in July 2024 the government began village hearings led by chiefs. source

7. 2008 to 2009

   Cholera broke out in Chitungwiza, the satellite town on Harare's southern edge, on 20 August 2008, and on 1 December the city's piped water stopped altogether because the chlorine had run out. By the time the Ministry of Health declared it over in July 2009 there had been 98,596 cases and 4,369 deaths, the largest cholera outbreak Zimbabwe has recorded, made worse by hyperinflation and the shortages that came with it. source

8. November 2017

   Armoured vehicles were seen on Harare's roads on 14 November 2017 and that evening soldiers took over the state broadcaster ZBC. At about 5 am on the 15th Major General Sibusiso Moyo read a statement on ZBC saying the army was targeting criminals around Robert Mugabe and that he and his family were safe; gunfire was heard near his house in Borrowdale. On 18 November large, peaceful crowds marched through Harare and other towns in support of the army, and at 6 pm on 21 November the Speaker read his resignation letter to a joint sitting of Parliament that had met to impeach him. Emmerson Mnangagwa was sworn in as president three days later. source

People

The 2022 census counted 1,849,617 people in Harare Urban District and 2,427,231 in Harare Province, which also takes in Chitungwiza (371,246) and Epworth (206,368). Out of 15,178,957 nationally, that is about one Zimbabwean in six. source

Language

The Shona spoken around Harare is Zezuru, the dialect of central and eastern Mashonaland, and standard Shona is based on it. Zimbabwe has 16 official languages. Mangwanani is the Shona for morning, and the start of a greeting worth learning. source

Stone sculpture

Zimbabwe's stone sculpture started at the National Gallery. Frank McEwen, who had studied art history in Paris and run a workshop for untrained artists in Toulon in 1939, was chosen to direct the new gallery in Salisbury, where staff had to be former policemen; one of them, the cleaner Thomas Mukarobgwa, became one of its artists. Within a year his Workshop School had moved from painting to carving soapstone, serpentinite and verdite. Their work went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968 and the Musée Rodin in Paris in 1971, and McEwen resigned in 1973 to live on a boat in the Bahamas. source

Chimurenga music

Thomas Mapfumo, born in Marondera in 1945, joined the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band in 1972, the band that began moving the patterns of the mbira (the thumb piano played at ancestral ceremonies) onto electric guitar. Rhodesia held him without charge for about three months in 1979. He played the 1980 celebration concert that also featured Bob Marley, recorded the album Corruption at Shed Studios in Harare in 1989, and moved to Eugene, Oregon in the late 1990s. He came home for a Homecoming Bira at Glamis Arena on 28 April 2018, his first visit since 2005 and five months after Mugabe fell. source

Sadza

Lunch in Harare is sadza, a stiff white maize porridge eaten with the right hand, rolled into a ball and dipped into the relish: beef or goat stew, muriwo (leafy greens), derere (okra), dried kapenta fish, sugar beans or, in season, madora (mopane worms). Before maize arrived it was made from finger millet, and the yellow maize handed out in famine years is still called Kenya. source