Hwange

The coalfield was known to local people and described by European travellers in the 1890s, and the name comes from Hwange, a Nambya chief whose people lived in the area. Mining companies took up concessions at the turn of the century, and the railway pushing north from Bulawayo reached the coalfield in the early 1900s before continuing to Victoria Falls in 1904 — coal and the railway arrived together, each making the other worthwhile. The settlement that grew around the pits was called Wankie, an anglicised form of the chief's name, and it kept that name until it was changed to Hwange in 1982, two years after independence.

For most of the twentieth century the colliery was the country's largest coal producer, supplying the steam locomotives of Rhodesia Railways, the copper mines to the north and later the power stations built beside the mine. Company housing, a hospital, schools and clubs were laid out around the workings in the pattern of a mining town, with the workforce drawn from across the country and from beyond its borders.

The mine also brought the town its worst day. On 6 June 1972 underground explosions at the No. 2 colliery killed 427 men, the deadliest mining disaster in the country's history; the dead came from Rhodesia, Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania and beyond. In later decades the colliery struggled with debt, ageing equipment and irregular wages, while the national park beside it and the power station above it grew into the town's other two reasons for being.

Hwange is Nambya country. The Nambya, who trace their origins to Great Zimbabwe and whose stone-walled ruins connect them to the older states of the plateau, are the historic people of the district, and chiefs and their courts still matter in the rural areas around the town. Ndebele is the wider language of Matabeleland North, Shona is heard everywhere through work and schooling, and English does the formal business, so conversations slide between them.

Because the colliery recruited widely, the town has long been more mixed than the countryside around it — families whose grandparents came from Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique as well as from across Zimbabwe, and a culture built around shift work, the mine club, football teams and church. Sunday is for services, often long ones, and funerals draw large crowds and long journeys home.

Wildlife is part of local identity in a way it is not in most towns: people here live with elephants raiding fields and crossing roads, and the park is both a source of jobs — guides, trackers, rangers, lodge staff — and a source of friction where crops and fences are concerned. The killing of a well-known collared lion from the park in 2015 brought a wave of international attention to the district and to the arguments about trophy hunting on its edges, which are still debated locally.

About 21,000 people were recorded in Hwange at the 2022 census, down from more than 40,000 in the early 1990s, most of them in the high-density suburbs built for the mine and the power station. The colliery and the power station remain the largest employers, with tourism to the national park a distant third, and much of the rest of the town lives by informal trade: vegetable stalls, tuckshops, cross-border goods, transport and repairs.

The rhythm of the day is set by shifts and by the heat. Work and market business start early, the middle of the day empties the streets in the hot months, and the evening brings people out to the bars, the braai stands and the football ground. Water and electricity supply are recurring problems, and power cuts are part of the routine even in the shadow of a power station; the coal dust and the smoke are a long-standing complaint.

Money is a daily calculation. Wages have often been paid late or in part at the colliery, many households depend on relatives working in Bulawayo, South Africa or Botswana, and prices are worked out between the US dollar and the ZiG. Schools, clinics and the mine hospital serve a wide rural area as well as the town itself, and the highway traffic between Bulawayo and Victoria Falls keeps a steady trade in food, fuel and repairs.

Everyday food is Zimbabwean staple cooking. Sadza — thick maize-meal porridge, called isitshwala in Ndebele — is eaten by hand with a relish of covo or rape greens cooked with tomato and onion, beans, or beef or chicken stew. Amasi, thick soured milk, is a favourite pairing in this cattle country, and road-runner, the free-range village chicken, is preferred to broiler birds for a proper meal.

Dried fish is a mainstay in the north-west: kapenta, the small lake fish brought down from Kariba, and matemba, cooked with tomato and onion and eaten with sadza. Mopane worms, the caterpillars of the emperor moth harvested from the mopane woodland that surrounds the town, are dried or smoked and then fried with onion, and sell by the cupful in the market. Maputi, puffed maize, is the standard snack, and roasted maize cobs appear at the roadside in season.

Drinks follow the same pattern as elsewhere in the country: sweet tea in the morning, maheu, the thick non-alcoholic fermented maize drink, through the day, Chibuku sorghum beer from cartons in the beer halls, lager for those who prefer it, and Mazoe orange cordial mixed with water at home. Lodge kitchens on the park road cook a different register altogether, with set menus and braais for guests.