Bulawayo

The city takes its name from koBulawayo, the royal town that Lobengula established as his capital in 1870, on a site south of the present centre. Lobengula was the son of Mzilikazi, who had led the Ndebele north from the upheavals in South Africa in the 1830s and settled in this granite country about 1840. The royal town was the political centre of that kingdom, where envoys, traders and concession-hunters came to negotiate, and where the concession that gave Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company its foothold was signed in 1888.

War followed in 1893. Lobengula burned the royal town and withdrew northwards, dying soon afterwards, and the company's settlers laid out their own town on and near the site, with streets famously wide — the story told locally is that they were built for a span of oxen to turn. The Ndebele rose in 1896, and the fighting ended in talks that Rhodes held in the Matobo Hills to the south. The railway arrived in the 1890s and made Bulawayo the junction of the region's network, and with the railways came engineering works, factories and a large industrial workforce that drew people from across the country and beyond.

Through the twentieth century the city was Rhodesia's industrial centre and a stronghold of trade unionism and nationalist politics; Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU was rooted here. After independence in 1980 the region suffered the Gukurahundi campaign of 1983 to 1987, in which the army's Fifth Brigade killed thousands of civilians in Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands, a period still unresolved publicly. Industry declined sharply from the 1990s as factories closed, and water shortages and economic contraction have marked the decades since, leaving a city with grand infrastructure and a thinner economy.

Bulawayo is the cultural capital of Ndebele Zimbabwe. IsiNdebele, closely related to Zulu, is the language of the street, though Shona, Kalanga and English are all common, and the city's writers, poets and theatre-makers have long given it a reputation for producing work that Harare does not. An arts festival each September, galleries in the centre and a network of small venues keep that going despite the lack of money.

Music is central, and the city's contribution runs from choral and church music through rumba and jazz to the imbube and mbube-style harmony singing associated with this region, and to a lively contemporary hip hop and gospel scene. Dance and drumming traditions of the Ndebele are performed at ceremonies and festivals, and the city has long been a place where township bands and theatre groups train.

Football is followed with unusual intensity. Highlanders, founded in 1926 by grandsons of King Lobengula, carries the city's identity, and its matches against Harare sides fill Barbourfields. Feeling that Matabeleland has been neglected by national governments is widespread and shapes local politics and conversation, with the Gukurahundi remembered in families across the region. Manners are formal and unhurried: greetings first, deference to elders, and a strong emphasis on hospitality and on funerals as community occasions.

About 665,000 people lived in Bulawayo at the 2022 census, making it the second city after Harare, though its population has grown slowly as people have left for South Africa, Botswana and the capital. Most residents live in the western and southern high-density suburbs; the older low-density districts near the centre remain leafy and quiet.

The economy is a shadow of the industrial one. Textile mills, engineering works and the railway workshops that once employed tens of thousands have largely closed or shrunk, and employment now comes from trade, transport, services, schools and hospitals, with a large informal sector of vendors and small workshops. Cross-border trade with South Africa and Botswana is important, and remittances from relatives abroad support many households. Cattle ranching and dry-land farming dominate the country around the city.

Water is the city's defining daily problem: supply dams depend on an erratic rainfall, and rationing schedules that leave suburbs dry for days at a time have been a fact of life for years, with boreholes and stored water in most yards. Power cuts are frequent as well. The day starts early, the centre is busy with commuters and vendors by mid-morning and empties by early evening, and weekends belong to churches, football and family gatherings. For all the strain, the city keeps a reputation for orderliness and for a slower, more courteous pace than Harare.

The staple is isitshwala, the Ndebele name for the stiff maize porridge that Shona speakers call sadza, eaten by hand with a relish. The pairing the city is known for is isitshwala with amasi, thick soured milk, a natural dish for cattle country and a mainstay of Ndebele home cooking. Relishes otherwise mean vegetables such as imifino or covo cooked with tomato and onion, beans, groundnuts, or a stew of beef or goat.

Mopane worms, called amacimbi here, are the regional delicacy: the caterpillars of the emperor moth are harvested from mopane woodland, gutted and dried in the sun or smoked, then fried with onion and tomato and served with isitshwala. They are sold dried by the cupful in the markets, and they matter economically as well as culinarily in the drier districts.

Meat grilled over coals is the food of gatherings, and the city's butchery-grills, where a cut is chosen at the counter and cooked on the spot, are an institution. Inkobe, boiled whole maize, sometimes with beans, is a common snack, and street vendors sell roasted maize cobs, maputi, puffed maize, and boiled groundnuts. Traditional sorghum beer, brewed for ceremonies, and Chibuku, the opaque sorghum-and-maize beer sold in cartons, are the customary drinks, with maheu, a non-alcoholic fermented maize drink, and bottled lager alongside them.