adminResponding to such protests and as a way of emphasising white superiority, the city council drafted a by-law which prohibited “Kaffirs,” “Basuto,” “Hottentots,” “Bushmen” and the like from using pavements. It is recorded that council lawyers advised that all was needed in the by-law was the single designation, “native”. The measure was implemented in 1894. Yvonne Vera, one of the prominent writers described how the black people had to walk around without encroaching on the pavements. Blacks learnt to move through the city with speed, bow their heads down, slide past walls and to walk without making the shadow more pronounced than the body or the body clearer than the shadow.
To commemorate their stormy past and their eventual victory over the Ndebele, whites erected a statue of Cecil John Rhodes at one intersection in Main Street and facing it at another intersection was the Rebellion monument bearing 259 names of whites killed in 1896 and surmounted by a Gardner machine gun which had killed the Ndebele soldiers during the 1893 war. Main Street was regarded as a place to remember the white triumph.
It is estimated that in the early 1900s there were five to six thousand Europeans living in Bulawayo and more or less the same number of black servants and employees also lived within the boundaries of white Bulawayo in terrible compounds for African workers.
Ranger states that colonial Bulawayo was from the beginning a rough town. There was almost nightly violence among whites and until 1897 there was no jail to put the white offenders. African offenders, however, were taken to the Military Reserve where they were tied up to a post in front of the orderly room and whacked with a whip made of raw hippo or rhino hide. Every cut took off a good bit of flesh out of the so-called niggers.
Force was also used to provide for the town’s labour needs. The Native Commissioner and police went out on raids for men. In June 1894, more than 1 000 Africans were brought into Bulawayo from Gwanda. These were registered and given to contractors, private persons and firms with a smaller proportion being retained for government work. Apart from the people that were forced to come and work in Bulawayo, cattle were also rounded up and driven into the bluntly named Loot Kraal in Bulawayo.
This led to the uprising of the Ndebele in 1896 in the last week of March. The Ndebele killed every white person outside Bulawayo and advanced upon the town. The whites in turn descended on nearby Africans and used guns. Eventually all around Bulawayo there were burning villages, fire being a symbol of black/white colonial interaction.
It must be remembered that initially there were three Bulawayos. The first two were established by Lobengula and a third established by Cecil Rhodes. Lobengula’s Bulawayos ended up in flames. Lobengula’s first Bulawayo according to the book Bulawayo Burning 1893-1960, was burnt down as part of the royal custom. Whenever a Ndebele king moved his town the previous one was burnt down. Royal towns were fortified at various places around the king’s house. Medicines could not be allowed to fall into the hands of witches hence everything was burnt when the king moved.
The site of KoBulawayo (Old Bulawayo) which has been restored and rebuilt was abandoned by King Lobengula in 1881 and was set on fire by Induna Magwegwe Fuyane. Everything was set ablaze including the king’s palace, the queens’ huts, and all the buildings in the royal kraal, sheds, coach-houses, stables and wagons.
The second New Bulawayo was burnt twelve years later at the height of the 1893 Matabele War. Lobengula left the town as the white column fought its way from Fort Victoria, now Masvingo. The fire burnt down ivory, valuable hides, horns and skins that Lobengula had accumulated. Fire therefore symbolises the struggles between whites and blacks during that period. Above all, the royal towns of the Ndebele kings were not intended to be permanent. They were moved when a king died or when grass, game or water became exhausted. In reality, towns in Southern Africa including Bulawayo were a colonial creation and whites controlled space, place, movement and residence. Africans who lived in towns suffered at the hands of whites.
Between 1940 and 1950 the black people continued to be marginalised. Black people who lived in the African locations had neither family life nor common cultural background. There were also very few women in the locations and those that were there lived in extremely difficult conditions. White administrators and African men had agreed that a woman’s place was in the rural areas. There was a common belief that urban women were prostitutes and shebeen queens.
In Salisbury (now Harare) the rapid and clumsy implementation of the Native Urban Areas Act meant widespread raids and expulsion of unmarried women. This also spread to Bulawayo. By the 1950s Makokoba filled up with girls and young women from the rural areas who also wanted to search for exciting town life. Others were employed as nannies in homes and as factory workers. This left black people living in crowded conditions in the Old Location with married people with their children and bachelors as well as unattached women sleeping in the same rooms. Though the people blamed the Bulawayo Municipality for such appalling conditions nothing changed.
Gogo Madamu who was interviewed in 2000 described how the black people especially women had lived and suffered during police raids. She described how they used to divide their room with curtains in shared quarters and how she was affected by the police nightly raids on women. One night she had visited her husband and was expecting but was arrested and labelled a prostitute for having stayed and slept in a room meant for male occupants only.
All unmarried women found in male quarters in Makokoba were arrested. It was then that the police raids were stopped and women were allowed to stay in the new townships in Western Commonage.
* Vaidah Mashangwa is the provincial development officer in the Ministry of Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development Bulawayo Metropolitan Province. She can be contacted on 889224/0772111592 or [email protected]
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