Harare, Zimbabwe’s Fractured Historical Landscape: Local and Global Memories of the Urban Past

As part of a larger project on the history of Harare Zimbabwe, this paper examines the relationship between local landscape and memory with larger national and global projections of Zimbabwean history and identity.  Much investment was made to relate the history of Africans in Harare (formerly Salisbury) and move away from a settler colonial vocabulary of urban history and urban experience. The series of crises in the 2000s made it much more difficult to continue this work given the difficult political environment, the lack of donor interest in urban history and memory projects, and perhaps most detrimentally, the large out-migration of academic and artists during the 2000s who took much of the initiative to reclaim the capital city’s African past. Paradoxically, this has meant in more recent years there has been very little local attempts to preserve key sites that would best serve as monuments to the African history of the city, especially in the historic former townships of Mbare and Highfield. This paper explores current activities to reimagine these local memory sites with the assistance of local scholars and former residents now living in the large Zimbabwean diaspora. The paper will compare the ways in which the white “Rhodesian” diaspora has maintained a pride and memory alive about ‘their” Salisbury as it is remembered pre-1980 Independence, and how this compares to efforts in the recent past to project and protect a memory of "African Salisbury” both inside and outside Zimbabwe. This project speaks to the many divides within Harare today, including racial and class divides and also among those who want to memorialize a “golden period” of township culture, politics, and lived experiences, versus those who still live in these spaces and often have little connection to this past given the flight of former residents. T