Online Reporter
Mabasa Sasa
Herald Correspondent
Zimbabwe’s cityscapes have spent decades chasing what we too often confuse with “modernity”: soulless office blocks with imported glass; malls that look the same from Borrowdale to Bulawayo; and gated communities whose walls grow higher as the sense of community shrinks.
Somewhere along the road, our cities forgot something far more valuable than contemporary architectural aesthetics and fads: they forgot our own story.
Selling land and trends started to overshadow selling meaning.
It is against this background that the emergence of Liberation City must be understood. It is not simply another tourism project. It is a delayed, but necessary, correction to a long national oversight.
A year-end feature by a private newspaper described Liberation City as Harare’s fastest-rising tourism attraction. That is no exaggeration. Tellingly, the recognition comes from a publication that has one can say has traditionally overlooked positive developments while amplifying missteps. So when even the sceptics begin to take notice, it is because a story has become too big to ignore.
At roughly the same time that Forbes Magazine named Zimbabwe the world’s top tourism destination for 2025, Liberation City was quietly staking its claim as the capital’s most compelling stop. This has not been achieved with billboards or jingles.
There are several reasons why the rise of Liberation City is so remarkable.
To begin with, the Institute of African Knowledge (INSTAK) led by Ambassador Kwame Muzavazi has converted what was once a dumpsite into a destination. For decades, Harare residents complained about the pollution emanating from that piece of land. It was a scar on the city’s geography and a mockery of its pretensions to being the sunshine city.
Today, instead of mountains of rubbish, beautiful structures are rising into the sky. Instead of the stench of waste, the mouth-watering aromas of African cuisine tantalise the senses.
The transformation is not just environmental; it is psychological. It reminds us that we can be as magnificent as we can imagine.
Another noteworthy thing is that INSTAK has not waited for perfection. The Museum of African Liberation and other aspects of Liberation City are still taking shape, but visitors are already flocking there.
School children arrive in busloads, armed with notebooks and curiosity. Ordinary Zimbabweans stream through the gates. Delegations from across the world schedule the destination into their programmes whenever they visit Zimbabwe. And Heads of State and Government walk its grounds. It is rare for a site in mid-construction to draw such traffic.
That alone signals that something significant is unfolding, something that has tapped into a deeper national consciousness.
Part of the attraction lies in the concept itself.
Liberation City is not selling nostalgia; it is packaging the African historical and contemporary experience. The Museum, Heritage Village and Liberation Mall are being erected alongside an African-themed Amusement Park, an Animal Park, a five-star hotel and world-class Presidential Villas.
This is not a monument; it is an ecosystem — tourism, culture, leisure, learning and diplomacy thriving in one evolving space.
One does not simply visit Liberation City. It is experienced. You learn. You meet. You eat. You play. You leave with more than photographs — you leave reborn.
For too long, Harare has existed as a transit city in the tourism economy — a place people pass through on the way to Victoria Falls, Hwange or Great Zimbabwe. Liberation City is challenging and changing that hierarchy. It is giving the capital its own tourism personality: heritage-based, educational, experiential.
And the timing could not be better. By the time Zimbabwe hosts the African union Mid-Year Summit in 2027, Liberation City will not be an idea being explained, but a product being consumed. Africa will gather in a Zimbabwe that is not merely hosting a meeting but is showcasing a glorious past and a hopeful future.
This momentum is not happening by accident. The political will behind the project, led by President Mnangagwa and his Government, has been the fuel oiling the idea. Beyond moral and financial backing, the President’s appointment of former Foreign Affairs Minister, Ambassador Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, as special envoy of the Museum of African Liberation has given the project tremendous international mileage.
The result has been a surge in international partnerships with INSTAK, as the world increasingly recognises the market value of African history when it is professionally curated and confidently presented. It is a reminder that heritage is not a sentimental asset; it is indeed an economic one.
The Institute of African Knowledge has set itself a bold target: to make Liberation City Zimbabwe’s leading domestic tourism destination by 2030. Judging by the foot traffic already finding its way there, that target may prove conservative.
Harare is quietly reinventing itself, and it is doing so not by copying other cities, but by finally taking itself seriously.
From dumpsite to destination, Liberation City is teaching us that tourism does not begin with concrete, but with conviction — the conviction that our story, properly told, is worth travelling for.
