Bulawayo 1872

For those at home, and the generations scattered abroad.

Bulawayo City Hall head-on across the lawn: a long colonnade either side of a central clock tower, with pines and palms framing it.

The City Hall across the lawn.

Photographed 14 August 2007 · © bulawayo1872.com

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Everything, A to Z →

  • Stories & history

    Before the picnics: the other life of Hillside Dams

    Lobengula's outlying settlement, a private waterworks company, the night the dams washed away in 1898, and how a failed water scheme became the place Bulawayo goes to walk.

  • Stories & history

    Lady Rodwell: the woman behind Bulawayo's maternity hospital

    Ethel Clarissa Hunter-Rodwell was an actress on the southern African stage before she was a governor's wife. Generations of Bulawayo families know only the name on the hospital.

  • Parks, ruins & landmarks

    Khami

    Stone-walled capital of the Torwa state from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, successor to Great Zimbabwe in the south-west; a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986.

Browse by what it is

There is also the writing — seventy-odd pieces on the city's history and its people — and the photographs, which are most of what is here. What the neighbourhood names mean is written out in Bulawayo's suburb names, A to Z.