Si Ye Pambili — which way forward?: urban development, culture and politics in Bulawayo

Abstract

The last hundred years’ social history of urban development in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second‐biggest city, has been given special characteristics by the city's closeness to South Africa and by the outcomes of controversies between national governments, the Bulawayo City Council and groups of urban residents over the form urban settlement for Africans should take. Policies before independence fluctuated between attempts at keeping African urban residents ‘temporary’ and underlining their basically rural identities, and modernising efforts at integrating them in town and establishing forms of social control that would discourage them from developing political demands for rights and citizenship equal to those of white urbanites. The culture and politics of Bulawayo's African townships were influenced significantly by initiatives to adapt to or resist such policies, and the article seeks to trace lines of continuity between the way in which people reacted to urban conditions and policies of urbanisation in colonial times and what stand out as important issues of articulation and self‐understanding in what is today called ‘high‐density suburbs’ and provide political culture in Bulawayo with its special liveliness. The revival of an Ndebele nationalism favouring an ‘authenticist’ view of culture is discussed and compared to the more ‘eclecticist’ practices of township community theatre groups.