Harare used to be abuzz. Especially compared to the sleepier towns in the region, like Lusaka and Blantyre, for which it used to be something of a Mecca, second only to Johannesburg.
That was in the days when it was called Salisbury. Houseboys, cookboys and gardenboys used to flock there from the hinterland of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland to make money and make names for themselves. If you couldn’t get to Port Elizabeth (where the light-skinned girls drove you wild and taught you how to seduce them with ballroom dancing, swooning them off their feet with your dark-skinned, Malawian ways) you at least had to get as far as Salisbury.
Life just seemed to be faster down there. There were buses and taxis and thriving townships and jacaranda trees in the bungalowed, suburban parts of town. And the fact that the white people here were even more aggressive and arrogant than the ones back home in Chipata and Lilongwe was all part of the high stakes that the scent of this lifestyle made you strive for.
Salisbury was unbelievably arrogant. The fact that it might fall to the ‘barbarians” was inconceivable. When Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland both fell in the early Sixties, to be renamed Zambia and Malawi, and garden boys suddenly became Bantu prime ministers and managers on the copper mines, Southern Rhodesia remained steadfast. Salisbury remained the last outpost of civilisation. It buzzed with a steely, commercially-minded mystique all of its own.
So when the inconceivable finally did happen at the end of the Seventies and Salisbury succumbed to the ever-mounting pressures of a chimurenga that was consuming the fertile countryside, the city, rapidly renamed Harare, was a major prize indeed.
Harare remained a vibrant centre of commerce and industry. It was the only town in the region, outside Johannesburg, that had its own stock exchange. And the stock was lush and large — beef, gold, farm produce, tobacco. Shares flew round from hand to hand, and people kept on getting richer.
It was a logical progression that Harare should become the new centre of preference for the struggle to liberate the last bastion of white privilege in the south of the African continent. If the unimaginable could happen and Harare could fall into the hands of the freedom fighters, it could only be a matter of time before Johannesburg and Pretoria and Port Elizabeth and Cape Town went the same way.
So we turned our backs on Lusaka and Dar es Salaam, loyal to our cause for so many suffering years, and parked our politics definitively in Harare. Other old loyalties were conveniently forgotten. The fact that the African National Congress had a traditional alliance with the Zimbabwe African Peoples’ Union (Zapu) rather than the upstart Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu), which had finally brought the chimurenga chickens home to roost, was conveniently forgotten.
Power, and who controls it, has its own logic. Old friendships become a burden, and are conveniently dropped by the wayside.
It was possible, in those early, heady days of Zimbabwean independence, to imagine that Harare was a slightly smaller version of Johannesburg. Stuff was happening. People were flying in and out. You could swagger down the main drag and have a beery lunch at Meikles hotel and pretend that you were dining out in style at the Carlton Centre.
The illusion was helped along by the fact that the place was packed tight with apartheid spies and military men bent on causing havoc, while attempting, with their paunchy red faces, to keep a low profile. Bombs went off here and there. People were killed. It was the front line of another phase of our struggle. But it was, nevertheless, life in the city, and Southern Africa had nothing to offer that was anything like it.
Yes, it was life in the city. And it still felt like Africa. You could sling your jacket over your shoulder after a hard day at the office and hail a yellow taxi to take you down to the Sheraton hotel for cocktails.
The Sheraton hotel, in those days, rose in its golden splendour like an outsize packet of Benson & Hedges cigarettes from the middle of the savannah, and boasted all the features of modern civilisation —marble floors, a circular bar in the foyer where revolutions and assassinations were boastfully planned, ballrooms, playrooms, dining rooms with chicken curry and sadza, presidential suites, suites for furtive alliances, and plush green lawns that rolled out in their manicured splendour for as far as the eye could see.
We were proud of Harare. It symbolised what we, in our turn, could become — a real city that we could take over, a relatively seamless transition into the 21st century. A place of our own that we had suitably grown into.
All these things have come to pass. Today we swagger into the Johannesburg Country Club and into the Hilton hotel and have breakfast meetings at the Sheraton in Rosebank as though we were to the manner born. We have turned our backs, with relief, on Harare and its relatively quaint, outdated ways. The various stops on the struggle road have served their purpose, and it is time to move on.
We leave behind a series of ghost towns. Lusaka is a crumbling ruin, lurching into an encroaching swamp of its own making.
And Harare, the jewel of our days of fiery commitment, looks like just another small, seedy, provincial town. The taxis have evaporated. The energy has moved on to a more challenging south — the real thing, at last, where there are real cities and real people, with all their violent tendencies, and real opportunities, and really serious fortunes to be made.
I sometimes idly wonder to what degree the fickleness of our revolution has contributed to the rise and fall of other faltering empires to the north — empires that almost made it, but never quite did.
And I also have to wonder what is to become of our own empire of arrogance and greed, once the honeymoon is over.