Who ruled Harare?

Harare, called Salisbury until 1982, stands on the high plateau of north-eastern Zimbabwe, nearly 1,500 metres above sea level, where a cool climate and good farmland attracted European settlers at the end of the 19th century. Unlike many African capitals it has no long precolonial urban history: it was founded as a colonial fort in 1890, and its story is that of white settler rule, African resistance and, from 1980, the capital of an independent Zimbabwe.

The plateau had long been home to Shona-speaking farming communities, part of the cultural world that had produced Great Zimbabwe in the south and, from the 15th century, the Mutapa state further north. Gold mining and trade linked the region to the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean coast. At the time the Europeans arrived, a Shona chief named Neharawa had his village near a rocky hill, the kopje, that would later overlook the colonial town; the modern city takes its name from him.

During the Scramble for Africa, Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company sent an armed Pioneer Column north from Bechuanaland to occupy Mashonaland. On 12 September 1890 it raised the British flag at the site and named its post Fort Salisbury after the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury. The Shona and Ndebele risings of 1896 and 1897 against company rule were crushed. The settlement grew into a town of wide streets planned around the kopje, served from 1899 by a railway to the port of Beira in Mozambique. Africans were confined to separate townships, the first of which, now called Mbare, was known as Harari.

Company rule ended in 1923, and Southern Rhodesia became a British colony that ran its own affairs, within the British Empire, with Salisbury as its seat of government; it was declared a city in 1935. Between 1953 and 1963 it also served the short-lived Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland as its capital, and the city boomed with new office blocks and suburbs. In 1965 the white-minority government of Ian Smith issued a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, which was not recognised internationally. Salisbury was the seat of that regime through the long guerrilla war that followed.

Majority rule came with independence on 18 April 1980, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa, and on the second anniversary of that date Salisbury was renamed Harare. The city expanded quickly as Africans moved freely into what had been segregated suburbs. From around 2000 Zimbabwe's economic crisis hit the capital hard, with hyperinflation peaking in 2008, and in 2005 the government's Operation Murambatsvina demolished informal housing and markets in Harare and other towns, displacing hundreds of thousands of people across the country. In November 2017 the army intervened and Robert Mugabe, who had led the country since independence, resigned. Harare is now the capital of Zimbabwe and its largest city, with more than two million people in the metropolitan province.