Back to Rhodesia for a visit - Salisbury and district.

Salisbury and surrounding areas

Salisbury (now Harare) is the capital of Zimbabwe with a population of 1.6M. It is the largest city and administrative and commercial capital of Zimbabwe and is at an altitude of 4865 feet with a temperate climate. The city is a trade centre for tobacco, maize, cotton, and citrus fruits. Manufactures include textiles, steel, and chemicals, and gold is mined in the area.

It was founded by Cecil John Rhodes, on 12 September 1890 as Fort Salisbury after the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, the then British prime minister, and subsequently became known as Salisbury. It was declared to be a municipality in 1897 and it became a city in 1935. (wiki - edited)

Note: If you read the Wiki, it looks like a Gr. 7 English level of composition. Pretty fucking sad.

Harare was the original name of the segregated black township.

 

Salisbury late 60's and early 70's

City Park (Cecil Square) with Jacaranda trees and Flamboyant trees in Suburbia

I worked here in 1978 for about 6 months.  I was based at Lochinvar station, on section as we called it (practical training in the field).  This was at the time when they fired two RPG7 rockets at the fuel storage dumps; that was some huge fire that took weeks to extinguish. The night life here was great and LeCocdor was the place to go and three clubs in one venue catering for all different music tastes. I spent most of my evenings at the round bar and being a fairly decent darts player (played for drinks) was a way to pass the time in a city where I knew few people. I made quite a few friends there albeit short lived. The Rhodesian attitude was everyone was your friend and only if you screwed up were you ousted. I was here as a guest and was treated as such.

The RLI and SAS army folk frequented the round bar and they were easy to spot, they had short hair.

Our section was pretty big and I got to see some of the country side one seldom sees as a tourist.

The Oasis hotel had good Saturday lunch time scenes and a beer garden and if you were lucky, got invited to a private "open party" (bring your own drinks and meat for BBQ - host supplies the music and fires.)

Lake McIlwaine (pics) is a man-made lake and the fourth largest impoundment in Zimbabwe. It was formed in 1952 by the Hunyanipoort Dam and is situated on the Hunyani River some 37 km south west of Harare

Dam wall

Road to lake

To the west of Salisbury was Mazoe Citrus Estates and famous for the greatest orange crush which is available world wide.

The bottle looks like this;

There are also other flavours available.

Mazoe Dam

 
To the east is a park and has these balancing rocks.

Not quite as spectacular as the Matopos in Bulawayo.

Mermaid Pools

Farming

This is what it was like under the "evil white regime" and all you need do is google phrases and see a country in turmoil and not the prosperous land it could have been; had we been allowed to sort out our differences without external political shit.

With all the land grabs by the Mubagbe baboon cadres and "war veterans" who were all were probably in a father's testicles and a mother's ovaries in the time of the actual war, sadly this utopia will be a long time in restoration after the baboon finally kicks the bucket and law and order is restored.

Pehaps they can take a page out of Zambia's book and invite white farmers back and give them back their now unproductive lands.

Back to Rhodesia for a visit - Umtali and Eastern Highlands

Martins Falls

Many of us ex-Rhodesians left shortly after the bush war from the mid 70's onwards to the mid 80's.  As such the many pages you will find on Facebook are proliferated with memorabilia from this war interspersed with day to day civilian life and memories. This was a time when a fit male aged 18 was conscripted to national service and trained to be a soldier where much of the rest of the world, the youth were free to grow up normally.

We did did not have a normal youth and as such developed a culture of allegiance that has lived on in our diaspora all over the world. Our generation has not many years left to tell this story of betrayal and the way we stood alongside each other, revelling in each day as it could have been our last, in a mine detonation or terrorist ambush.



  

Umtali (renamed Mutare)

Umtali was founded in 1897 as a fort, about 8km from the border with Mozambique, and is just 290km from the Mozambican port of Beira, earning Umtali the title of "Rhodesia's Gateway to the Sea". It is sometimes also called "Gateway to the Eastern Highlands". Zimbabweans refer to it as 'Kumakomoyo' (place of many mountains). There is a border railway station on the railway line from Salisbury (Harare) to Beira with a railways mechanical work shop. (wiki edited)

Umtali in the Manicaland Province, the Eastern Highlands was one of the hot zones of the bush war being the border to Mozambique.

Msasa trees in Spring - Eastern Highlands

I only visited this town once as a youth but it is a beautiful site to behold. I did date two girls from this town.

 

Road to Umtali from Fort Victoria

Umtali street scenes and Flamboyant trees

Umtali Main Street

Troutbeck Inn

Lake and Troutbeck Inn

Chimanimani mountains

Marymount College and mountains

I never got to see too much up close here as we only did the tourista spots we could get to by car.

The area was/is known for the tea plantations and some of the finest tea comes from here (I am biased of course)

Chimanimani Mountains and Melsetter
  

A tad north is the Nyanga National Park

Nyanga (formerly known as Inyanga) is a town in the province of Manicaland, Zimbabwe, located adjacent to Nyanga National Park in the Eastern Highlands about 105 km north of Mutare. 

The highest mountain in Zimbabwe, Mount Nyangani lies about 15 km from the village. Its highest peak rises to 2,600 m above sea level. Nyanga is a popular tourist destination with its trout fishing, golf courses, mountain hikes and holiday resorts.

 

Nyanga National Park, Gairezi Rapids, Nyangombe falls, Leopards Rock hotel

World's View Nyanga

 Vumba Botanical Gardens

 A 100 or so years of colonisation brought western civilisation to the region with agriculture and forestry.  If the white man never came, they would probably still be running around in loin cloths with rudimentary spears. The demise of much of Zimbabwe is testimony to global politics and interrupting the evolution of the black man to become a useful contributor to society. Sadly the evidence speaks for itself with mass exodus of the whites from this once garden of Eden.

A 100 years was not enough to teach them the new world ways.

Acknowledgements for pics Rhodesia Memories various members