Harare

Harare began on 12 September 1890, when Cecil Rhodes's Pioneer Column halted on the open plateau below a granite hill and raised the British flag at what they named Fort Salisbury, after the British prime minister. The rocky kopje gave the settlement its first shelter and its name for the surrounding district; the town grew on the flat ground to the north-east, laid out in a grid of wide streets designed, like Bulawayo's, for wagon teams. It became a municipality in 1897 and the capital of the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1923.

Rail links to Beira and to the south turned Salisbury into a commercial and administrative centre for a farming economy built on tobacco and maize, and the town filled with offices, banks and the head branches of companies. African residents were confined to townships laid out at a distance from the white suburbs — Mbare, then Highfield — and these became the seedbed of nationalist politics in the 1950s and 1960s, when meetings in Highfield's halls shaped the movements that grew into ZANU and ZAPU. The city was the capital of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland from 1953 to 1963 and of Ian Smith's unrecognised state after 1965, and during the liberation war it was ringed by security measures while fighting continued in the countryside.

Independence was celebrated at Rufaro Stadium in April 1980, and Salisbury was renamed Harare in 1982, after the Shona chief Neharawa. The city expanded quickly as movement controls ended. The economic crises that followed hit it hard: hyperinflation that peaked in 2008, the demolitions of Operation Murambatsvina in 2005, and the succession of currencies since. In November 2017 soldiers and crowds in the streets of Harare brought Robert Mugabe's 37 years in power to an end.

Harare is the country's cultural clearing house. Stone sculpture is the art form most associated with it: a workshop attached to the National Gallery in the late 1950s and 1960s encouraged a generation of Shona carvers working in serpentine and springstone, and their successors still carve in yards and roadside studios around the city, with pieces held in collections abroad.

Music runs through the city's life. The mbira, a thumb piano of metal keys played at ceremonies for the ancestors, underlies the chimurenga music that Thomas Mapfumo built in the townships in the 1970s; sungura, gospel and, since the 2010s, Zimdancehall from Mbare's home studios come out of the kombis and bars. Mbare and Highfield have produced musicians, footballers and politicians in roughly equal measure, and their reputation in the city rests on all three.

Everyday manners follow Shona practice: greetings before any transaction, deference to elders, and a soft clap of the hands in thanks. Church life is strong and highly visible, from Catholic and Methodist congregations to the white-robed apostolic groups who meet in the open on Sunday mornings on patches of ground around the suburbs. English, Shona and a good deal of Ndebele mix on the streets, and Harare's humour about its own difficulties is a recognised local trait. Football is followed closely, with the city's clubs playing at Rufaro and the National Sports Stadium, and cricket has a long base in the northern suburbs.

About 1.8 million people lived in the city at the 2022 census, and about 2.5 million in the surrounding Harare Metropolitan Province, which takes in the satellite town of Chitungwiza to the south — the largest urban concentration in the country. Harare holds the ministries, the parliament, the University of Zimbabwe, the main hospitals, the banks and the newspapers, and much of the formal economy that remains.

That formal economy is small relative to the population, and the informal one is what most households live on: vendors on the pavements, cross-border traders, minibus crews, tuckshops, backyard workshops and money-changers. Salaries are often paid partly in US dollars and partly in ZiG, and prices are quoted in both. Power cuts are a normal part of the week, and generators, solar panels and batteries are widespread in businesses that can afford them; water supply in parts of the city is intermittent, and boreholes are common.

The daily rhythm starts early, with kombis filling from the townships before dawn and the centre busy by seven. The north of the city — Avondale, Mount Pleasant, Borrowdale — has gardens, shopping complexes and private schools; the south and west — Mbare, Highfield, Glen View, Budiriro — are denser and poorer, and the distance between the two is the most obvious fact about Harare. Many families depend on money sent by relatives in South Africa or Britain, and rural homes in the Mashonaland districts remain the place people return to for funerals, holidays and retirement.

Sadza is the centre of almost every meal: stiff white maize-meal porridge, cooked thick, eaten by hand and rolled into a ball to scoop up the relish beside it. Muriwo, greens such as covo or pumpkin leaves cooked with tomato and onion and often peanut butter, is the usual accompaniment, along with beans, matemba or kapenta (small dried fish from Lake Kariba), or a stew of beef, goat or chicken. Free-range village chicken, called road runner, is valued above the commercial kind, and a slower-cooked bird is a mark of a proper meal.

Meat grilled over coals — nyama, usually beef or goat — is the food of weekends and gatherings, sold at braai stands and beer gardens and often bought raw at a butchery counter and cooked on the spot, a way of eating that suits the city's sociability. Mopane worms, dried and fried with onion and tomato, appear in markets in season. Breakfast is bota, a thinner maize porridge with peanut butter or sugar; maputi, puffed maize, and roasted maize cobs are sold at roadsides; freezits, frozen flavoured ice in plastic sleeves, are the children's street snack.

Mbare Musika supplies most of the city's fruit, vegetables and grain, and its surrounding stalls sell cooked food to traders and travellers all day. Drinks run from Chibuku, the opaque sorghum-and-maize beer sold in cartons and known as Shake Shake, to maheu, a non-alcoholic fermented maize drink, bottled lagers brewed in the city's industrial south, and Mazoe orange cordial, named after the citrus valley north of Harare and drunk in almost every household.