Salisbury to Harare

Fort Salisbury

In July 1890 a Pioneer Column organised by Cecil Rhodes set out to occupy Mashonaland. It reached the site of Fort Salisbury on 12 September 1890 and halted there, and the next day the British Union Flag was raised.^[1] The column, sent by the British South Africa Company, had been aiming for Mount Hampden, but Colonel Pennefather chose a site by a kopje, a rocky hill, because a stream just south of it gave more reliable water. The fort was named after the third Marquess of Salisbury, then the British prime minister.^[2]

Salisbury became a municipality in 1897 and a city in 1935.^[2] It became the capital of Southern Rhodesia in 1923.^[4] It stayed the seat of the Southern Rhodesian, later Rhodesian, government, and from 1953 to 1963 it was the capital of the Central African Federation.^[2]

Harare

On Sunday 18 April 1982, the second anniversary of independence, the government changed the capital’s name from Salisbury to Harare. President Canaan Banana first called the city Harare, not Salisbury, at an Independence Day rally in Rufaro stadium. UPI reported that the change was part of a nationwide programme to erase reminders of more than 90 years of “white domination”, and that a cabinet committee was working on about 700 new names for villages, towns and streets.^[5][3]

Two days later the mayor, Tirisai Gwata, said the name officially remained Salisbury for now: until the president signed an order under the Urban Councils Act, to be published in the government Gazette, the council had to keep using the old name.^[6] The changes made around the 1982 anniversary are reflected in the Names Alteration Act of 1983.^[7] Salisbury’s post office became Harare Post Office in July 1982.^[8]

Neharawa, and a township

The new name honours Neharawa, a Shona chief.^[3] UPI described him as a Black chief who lived there when the settlers arrived in 1890.^[5] Sources differ on where he lived. The Zimbabwe Field Guide puts Chief Neharawa in the Seke area, says the area was named Harawa after him and that this was later corrupted to Harare, and says a different chief, Mbari, lived on the kopje itself.^[2] The Rhodesian Study Circle says the name came from Neharawa’s village near the kopje, and that his nickname was “he who does not sleep”.^[8]

The name was already in use in the city before 1982. Salisbury’s oldest Black township, set up as the “African Location” after a 1907 ordinance, was renamed Harari African Township in 1946. When the city took the name in 1982, the township was renamed Mbare, after Mbare, a Korekore chief who ruled the area where the pioneers founded Salisbury.^[9] Some sources spell the township’s old name Harare.^[9][8]

Other towns

Salisbury was not the only town renamed. Umtali, in the east on the Mozambique border, became Mutare in April 1982, along with several other towns and cities.^[10] Fort Victoria, Zimbabwe’s oldest town, was briefly renamed Nyanda in 1982. Within a few months it was renamed again, to Masvingo, when it turned out that Nyanda did not translate well between dialects.^[11]