Back to Rhodesia for a visit - Bulawayo

The first post on this blog dealt very sparingly on the two places I grew up in Livingstone and Bulawayo. There are some awesome places in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) that luckily the locals could not screw up. I will take you all on a tour of the country's main centres.

The city of Bulawayo where I completed all my formal education and training was the headquarters to the Rhodesia Railways and very much an industrialised city. Some of the buildings are really awesome and the city known for its very wide streets. Here are a few albums of pics.

Street Scenes (pics)

The second pic here is from the 70's and there was always a black points man on duty in peak traffic (name we gave to cops directing traffic).  Even with these wide roads, many intersections had no traffic signs or traffic lights. The rule was yield to traffic on your right and do not turn in front of oncoming traffic. This served us well as there were only traffic lights every 3rd intersection. We called traffic lights robots.

This was a monument to the fallen of the Matabele Rebellion in our Main Street/Selborne and sported a very old multi barrelled gatling gun.  This monument has since been demolished. Buildings in the pic are the Post Office and post Office Savings Bank.

This was Grey Street and had 3 lanes either side. The main roads all had dips at the intersections for excess storm water drainage so you really could not speed despite the lack of traffic control and wide streets.

This was the road to the suburbs and passed through the centenary park and eventually would take you on the road to South Africa. In the background Ascot Towers.

Bulawayo Buildings (pics)

I'll share a few here.

Bulawayo House

High Court and Grand Hotel

Formerly Asbestos House, now the National Art Gallery

City Hall (plenty more pics) of course was the most well known building and not only served as the HQ for the municipality but was also a venue for entertainment with the two large halls it had. A lot of local and international talent performed here as the main hall was bigger than any theatre we had.

Centenary Park (pics)

Park and Centennial Fountain

The Rhodesian African Rifles marching band performed at the park on Sundays and the miniature train was a blast for the kids.

The park also was the home to our museum.

The links have oodles more pictures from the Bulawayo Facebook Page. All the photo albums can be found at this link. You probably will not find better info on Bulawayo, especially the way it was as it is a collective of folk that lived there in the days when Rhodesia was a country to be proud of.

The Road to Johannesburg

If any of you are interested, I have an eBook I am working on I cover my life up to the exit from the then newly independent Zimbabwe in 1981. It is similar in presentation that it has a lot of pictures

Click any pic for slide show

Chapters 1-2 Chapters 3-4

Using an extract from my book for the text here.

With sadness in my heart, as I approached that dome rock in Bala Bala, I realised, I was never coming back to my beloved home town Bulawayo. I think I may even bawled a bit, even midnight cowboys can cry.

The journey to Beitbridge although exciting was also a very sad day. I knew I was leaving a life, lost in politics and would have to take my pioneering spirit south of the Limpopo.

I cannot remember the name of this dome rock but was on the way to Beitbridge, the border town between Zimbabwe and South Africa. This was at a small town called Bala Bala. There were many such rock outcrops around and one has to wonder how they originated. We have no "recent" volcanoes there and the closest one is Mt Kilimanjaro which is in Tanzania.

Arriving at Beitbridge, the border post was teaming with a lot of folk also on their way out. 9th January was not the normal time for a vacation to SA. There were many cars packed to the brim and roof racks three suitcase layers high. Some folk had their caravans, others trailers. What was common, all of them were really overloaded. My car had essentially a suitcase or two in the boot, my tools and a steel trunk on the back seat, my entire worldly possessions.

I feared a search and seizure as in that trunk was all my army kit, the three unit's colours I had served in, berets, some camo, my ruck sack, harness that held kidney packs etc. I entered the customs office trying to look aloof and cool. When I came to the window, the guy asked me where am I going and how long. I said I had lots of family to visit so would be gone about 3 months. Klunk, klunk; my passport stamped and the pass slip for the border guards. No search and seizure and as I crossed the Limpopo river, I breathed a sigh of relief, I had smuggled my army loot out.

On the South African side, it went a lot quicker, “Welkom to Souf Efrica Mr Krueer” (the way they pronounce my surname in SA, with a silent “g”.

Klunk, klunk; another stamp (the last) on my Zimbabwe/Rhodesia passport ever, boom pass issued. No searches here either. They had a good idea what was happening with the “extended” holiday.

The boom lifted, I released my clutch, pulled away and was on my way to Messina. In the rear view mirror, I saw the last images of that border post.

Baobab tree (unusually with leaves)

Messina is the first town after the border on the SA side. The region is for all intents and purposes desert and rainfall is very sparse, not sure of the age of these trees but they are very old as water here is negligible. The tree bears a fruit like a coconut and when you break it open, inside are round seeds about a 1/4" in dia covered in white powdery cream of tartar. You put this in your mouth and suck them to get the powder off. It is sour and stimulates the saliva glands, seeds get eaten by monkeys and then deposited in excrement where they then take root and start the long growing process.

This area is very arid and hot.

After this comes Louis Trichardt (named after a General of the Anglo-Boer War) and before the long mountain climb you had two tunnels to go through.

On the other side of the mountain you descend to the town of Louis Trichardt.

View of Louis Trichardt from a mountain called Hangklip (Hanging Rock)

From here on you are on the plateau which is much of the highlands of South Africa varying between 3500 to 5000 feet by the time you reach Johannesburg.

The next town is Pietersburg (now renamed Polokwane)

Not much to see here as this starts some of the mining and huge farming areas. In the days of sanctions folk used to find ways of getting forex and come this far to buy goods we could not get. We pretty much did OK and a huge industry sprung up in the then Rhodesia and we started canning our own goods and manufacturing a lot of what we formerly imported. We sustained a 3.5% growth rate over 15 years and that in a time of war and sanctions. Any economist would wet his pants for a growth rate that high these days.

See what the fucking USA globalisation initiatives did?

It has already been said Americans have warped idea of Africa and a lot of folk think I live in squalor or standards lower than the USA. We are not a Banana Republic (yet). South Africa at one time produced over 60% of the world's gold and we are pretty much Americanised in the big Cities and metropolis of Gauteng (Formerly the Witwatersrand) which is where close to 25% the population lives. Pics of Gauteng

The whole province is almost one huge city and demarcations even back in the 80's you are leaving city (name) and 100m along you are entering city (name)

Johannesburg skyline

A story of the tall round building, called Ponte Towers. They were considering making this a prison at one time. It is hollow on the inside and what happened post independence, many black folk moved into the city with the repealed race habitation zoning laws and with them the criminal element from adjoining Soweto also moved in. The prisons in Jhb are just too small these days. The standing joke was that the prison would come with occupants. As pretty as it is, few folk venture into the city at night, all the night spots of the 80's are no more and most relocated to safer areas.

What you don't see from these pics are 10' walls and razor wire with electric fencing incorporated on top of that. The few safe areas are gated communities with armed response patrols.

The roads and infrastructure could not handle the influx and many businesses moved their headquarters out which saw a boom in a relatively new town called Midrand (formerly Halfway House) and houses many HQ offices for folk like Siemens, all the car manufacturers and also the IT industry. It is more or less our version of silicon valley.

Typical structures in Midrand, not many pics as it is mostly a business centre. Property here is frigging expensive but is serviced by two freeways and trains.

Pretoria Skyline from the Union Buildings

Pretoria (now Tswane as the town was formally named after another Boer General) used to be one of the two state capitals of SA. Govt. would migrate between Cape town and Pretoria. Pretoria was the Administrative Capital and Cape Town the Legislative Capital and Bloemfontein the judicial capital.

My cousin was a PA to one of the ministers and she travelled between CT and Pretoria. Pretoria is where all (or most of) the foreign embassys are located. Everyone still calls it Pretoria as most businesses are not about to change all their letterheads to appease some fringe nut with issues from 17+ years ago.

Tswane is really just a name for the municipal district and another huge cluster-fuck of the current government where municipalities were merged, now fuck all gets fixed as it is always the fault of someone in another city. For example, where I stay, we have had no street lights for over a year in our section, cannot even replace a simple light bulb as their cherry picker is broken.

What is happening now, services are being contracted out as the Affirmative Action was just a guise for jobs for mates and they are all fucking incompetent. In the days of white rule, you fixed the cherry picker yourself. Guys filling post of electricians now were electrician's helpers then (not trainees) and do not have the necessary training or qualifications but they have a car and cell phone and housing allowance and all of them drive BMW's. In the old days, not even the town's heads of Dept. drove BMW's. Most of these municipalities are bankrupt b/c of this stupid misappropriation of funds.

When I worked for the Power Utility Eskom, before I left with an AA package, I was one click below management and was next in line of succession. All I ever drove was a Toyota Corolla 1.6l and I don't think it even had an aircon. It was a dedicated pool vehicle and only for official business, I could not use it to go to the mall unless it was on the way home and it stood parked on weekends. I had to use my own car for shop visits or social visits. If one of my subordinates need to go somewhere, they used my vehicle, they all used their own cars to get to the office. I applied for a car allowance and upper management turned down the request and gave me a brand new pool vehicle of their choice. Of course upper management now is mates of mates and so protocol has gone with the proverbial wind.

Sandton Images

Sandton Centre

Sandton is where all the rich folk live and a typical house here looks like this

This is not even very upmarket but is about ZAR3-7M+ Some of the real larney houses are estates and we are talking ZAR25M+ (divide that by 8 for an approx USD price)

Remember we do not earn USD here. My house in my hick town is valued at ZAR850k which I bought furnished for ZAR140k in 2005.

Gauteng has some of the finest highway systems and upgrading started prior to the 2010 Football World Cup and is still in progress. Long time overdue.

Apart from driving on the left hand side, you would not really feel you are in Africa other than the fine sunny weather teh guud lord has blessed us with

The legacy of Johannesburg and the glory years of lotsa gold are the old mine dumps proliferating the landscape.

They did start recycling them for more gold extraction with a view to pumping the waste into disused mines but that stopped as it turned out to be too costly; and that was when gold was about $300/fine ounce. New mines only bring shaft sinking rubble to the surface. The ore is processed underground as many of the mines are deeper than 3500 metres. Only the raw gold ingots (not gold bars) come to the surface these days. The deepest gold mine in SA is about 3.5-4km below the surface. SA is now exporting this expertise to other African countries.

The mine dumps are due to a process called Heap leaching. The crushed ore was drenched with cyanide which dissolves (to ess. ions) the gold and then via a process of using activated carbon to selectively absorb it, or the Merrill-Crowe process where zinc powder is added to cause a precipitation of gold and zinc. The fine product can be either doré (gold-silver bars) or zinc-gold sludge that is then refined elsewhere. (see Wiki article)

The old methods were primitive and the dumps still contain huge amounts of gold than can still be extracted by more modern processes.

So the next time you look at your gold wedding band, chances are very high that the gold came from lil' old South Africa, and probably the diamonds too.

Zimbabwe gold mines have a higher yield per ton but folk are waiting for the antichrist Mugabe to die, and a full democracy before anyone is going to invest there. He was not even born in Zimbabwe IIRC, a foreign fuck who happened to to be in the right place at the wrong time. Even the black folk in Africa hate him. The day he dies there will be parties in the UK, AUS, NZ and in SA. You may even hear a distant roar, don't worry, it is not the rapture, just us Whenwees (term for ex-Rhodesian) celebrating.

You know just one bunker buster and a flight by one of those larney stealth bombers..... hint hint......

Sorry for the injection of political rants but this history also needs to be understood.

Livingstone and Bulawayo

I thought I would share some pics of the Africa I know and have places I have visited on this great continent. (click any pic for slide show)

I was born in Livingstone in 1958. The town named after the David Livingstone that discovered the Victoria Waterfalls. Click links for thumbnails.

Livingstone & Falls from the Zambian side aka Eastern Cataract

More Vic Falls

We left shortly after independence in 1965 and the break up of the Federation of Central Africa which included the now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. This was known back then as Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Bechuanaland respectively.

Livingstone has not changed much in 50 years as it is not really a prosperous region and now mostly focussed on tourism. There is a town either side of the falls in two different countries but back in my day we could cross over with a simple border post which was no more than a boom either side of the bridge.

Getting there by car these days is a bitch as the roads are neglected and with the new 18 wheelers, these roads were never designed for that type of load. Back then the railways did the heavy hauling but that too has all but come to a grinding halt.

The native folk have not really added to the old white built infrastructure and one wonders if politics were different how the lands would be in this era. To put it bluntly, they are rural and not as touristy as the white settlers were. Much of the independence was followed by a mass exflux of whites south as the various countries got their independence. The world press of blacks being oppressed in these lands was BS. They were far better off under white rule than they are now. History speaks for itself. Most of the racist paradigms were an inherited concept from the Brits and their class distinctions where the black folk were paid slave and manual labourers. The region imported semi skilled folk from China and the then Indian continent.

In my days in Livingstone, it was not uncommon to still see them living in typical tribal villages. Our coexistence was peaceful but then we became the battlefields for the US/USSR/China cold war. The end goal was the exploitation of mineral wealth which is very abundant. A self autonomous government was just not in the big game plan. The serfs were not allowed to rebel against Queen and the Brit empire.

Rhodesia declared unilateral independence in 1966 and that is when our war started more or less.

Because the blacks were housed in dedicated townships with strict laws against cohabitation in the white areas, this was a good political ploy to incite the masses to rebel against the settlers. Bear in mind most of us by now were 2nd or third generation born in the lands.

All the countries eventually went black and as such the empire had puppet governments in place. The white fat cat was replaced by a fat black cat and nothing much changed for the masses. they in fact experienced a declining lifestyle as the new leaders like Kaunda and Mugabe really did not have a fucking clue how to run a country (except into the ground) There was no natural evolution of transfer of knowledge and at the time of these upheavals, we were getting to work out our differences, blacks were being educated in separate schools but to the same standard and we all sat the exact same exams. The black schools were no worse than the white ones as far as infrastructure went, but obviously the white schools were better having better teachers and many of them ex pats from the UK.

By the time I was 10-12+, there was no shame of mixing with races in sports and leisure but when it was over, we had to return to our designated race areas or residence. I am sure things would have worked our equitably had we been allowed autonomy.

Sanctions was the trick they tried but was a front. The Japs and Germans quickly filled the void the US and UK left and to this day, we see little US or UK cars here. So some of your US woes as far as your sucky financial situation is partly to do with what transpired in the 60's to 70's and it is only biting you in the ass recently.

Sanctions do not work and is merely a power play that backfires.

A mass exodus in the late 70's and 80's of whites left Zimbabwe with a huge brain drain and development stopped. The lands could be raped with still cheap labour as the development to become useful members to society had been halted in its tracks.

Liberated Africa is not really liberated. We have over 3M black Zimbabweans living in SA now and proving my point, they are better workers both intellectually and skills wise than many of the locals. I met a black engineer in Ghana about 12 years ago that was working for a SA based mining company and if I closed my eyes, I could have been talking to a white Zimbabwean as we had the exact same accent. We were from the same town I grew up in.

Anyway enough politics and BTW for any black Americans reading this, I am not racist.

That sets the background for the next set of pics of Rhodesia.

One of the great achievements of the mid 20th century was Kariba dam (pics)

This tamed the mighty Zambezi river and provided electricity for both Northern and Southern Rhodesia with smaller coal fired power stations. Sadly this too has gone downhill as far as maintenance goes and had to import power from SA till it was stopped for lack of payment. Zimbabwe airlines is grounded and many of their planes impounded for not paying airport fees.

Kariba dam is one of the largest man made lakes in the world (See map) and there was an Operation Noah that was dedicated to rescuing animals as the dam filled up. This was a huge undertaking taking 5 years and rescuing over 6000 animals. This was anything from elephants to snakes. Many perished. There is probably a National Geographic film on this somewhere. If you can find it it is worth a watch.

Bulawayo is the town where I did all my schooling, training and growing up. I was posted to may different towns (we called it going on section) as a trainee and as such got to see quite a bit of the country. I was on the national railways.

Bulawayo street scenes, Bulawayo buildings, Matopos National Park

This pic is dated 1968 and I was 10 when this was taken. The very wide streets was supposed to be legend that a full teamed ox wagon was able to make U turn in them (so they say) The town had the nick name Skies and due to the crystal clear blue skies we had almost every day.

The architecture was very much like what you see in London and built with stone in many cases.

This is also from 1968 and the statue of Cecil John Rhodes (founder and was allegedly also gay) and everywhere his statue was erected, he always faced north (dunno why) This has been removed by the liberators as if that will erase history

This is the Matopos national park and one of the more well known mother and child rock outcrops known as balancing rocks (the YEC folk have no answers how this all happened as this is a result of eons of wind erosion)

This is the best known dam in the park, Maleme dam and is not very big as far as dams go. It served no purpose other than recreation (excluding boating and skiing).

The dam wall is a simple weir but it had magic. Bikers used to ride out on Sundays, folk went and camped out there weekends and fished or simply relaxed, and if you read the comments of ex-Bulawayoens on the link here, you will understand what this puddle meant to us. This dam had crocs in it and finding leopard spoor and droppings in the morning at your camp site was not uncommon. For most of us, this was the real garden of Eden.

This was a common site back then, strip roads. These probably have devolved into dirt roads by now.

Suburbia in Bulawayo around Sept/Oct

 Jacaranda trees Flamboyant trees

City Hall 1968

This was our Centennial fountain. This was where we gathered on New Years eve and went swimming in it, kissing each other a happy new year. How we ever got up to the top pissed was a miracle. The council were kind enough to turn the fountain on at the stroke of midnight.

After that (when the war was not so bad) we then trekked out to watch the sun rise at the burial site of Cecil John Rhodes. (below) 81 was my last sun rise and there were about 1500 folk there almost like a mini Woodstock.

This was living life to the fullest and it did not matter where you lived, what car you drove, what clothes you wore, what church you belonged to (or didn't) etc. We all saw each other as friends and equals.

If you are into steam trains look here

North halt and was about 3 miles from my home.

Bulawayo once boasted the longest station in the world, close to a mile long. With sanctions, these steam trains got a lease on life as we had loads of coal. Bulawayo was also the headquarters for the national railways. That too has all but come to a stand still.

More to come...