Touring Mbare Township (Part One)

Mention the name Mbare to an upper-middle class resident of Harare, and the reaction you get will inevitably be one of, “Why would you ever want to go there?” It’s got a reputation, and it’s not a good one.

Garikayi “Oscar” Makuyah hopes to change that. He used to live and work in Johannesburg, leading bike trips into some of the city’s townships and destigmatizing areas known for high levels of crime and poverty. He recently returned to Harare and is looking to do the same for his home city. It’s an uphill climb, but the view from the top could change the way people live in the long-neglected neighborhoods.

Mbare is the oldest township in the country. It was founded in 1907 as the English settlement of Salisbury began to expand. As the growing city industrialized, men from the rural areas and as far afield as Mozambique, Zambia, and Malawi began to settle in the quickly expanding suburb of Hariri, a name that the capital later took for its own upon independence. The Rhodesian government built male-only hostels in the 1940s to accommodate the growing population and corral their labor force. These still stand, their brick and concrete exteriors chipped and cracked, their windows missing, broken, or rimed with dirt. People crowd around the doors and open landings, taking refuge on cool concrete shaded from the midday sun.

Mbare still houses one of the country’s largest produce markets, a reminder that locals used to provide most of the city’s fresh vegetables long before white farmers dominated the agricultural landscape. The local flea market is the biggest in the city, selling second-hand clothing and other goods. Its name in Shona, Mupedzanmho, means “the finisher of all problems.” It’s the last, best stop for all your fashion needs. More importantly, the market is a hive of activity, potentially generating millions in the informal sector. “It’s a multimillion dollar environment,” says Oscar. “But no one knows, as everything is liquid. It’s just cash flowing in and out.”

The township was founded on the edge of town, lying next to the cemetery, the abattoir, and the sewage works. The cemetery is still there, graves dating from the 1890s still stand, though their occupants are unknown, the copper markers stolen for scrap long ago. The untended plots uncover the history of a city divided by race. The English, Indian, and Jewish graves are segregated into their respective neighborhoods, while the Africans occupy an empty field. “They couldn’t afford gravestones then, so it’s basically one mass grave. They just buried people on top of one another,” Oscar told me. “You can see how big the cemetery is, and then you think about how many more Africans there were. Who knows how many are buried there.”

A view of Pioneer Cemetery.

The plot of land where Africans buried their dead.

Rhodesia was still a member of the Commonwealth during the World Wars. The graves of the fallen have their own designated space, but even in death, race segregates the soldiers. White soldiers are buried hundreds of meters away from the blacks and the coloreds. The latters’ shared space is subdivided as well, blacks on one side, coloreds on the other. Comrades in arms separated by the melanin in their skin. The soldiers’ graves are the only ones that have been maintained. The Commonwealth pays for their upkeep. All throughout the rest of the cemetery, weeds choke the cracked and broken tombstones, plastic and trash blown from the township litter the pathways, and it is clear that some of the mausoleums are used by the homeless for shelter from the elements. In Harare, the ancestors are neglected.

The Sacrificial Cross - A Memorial to Commonwealth Soldiers

WWI Dead. Notice the separation between British South African and Native

Turning from death, Oscar and I visited the Mai Musodzi Community Center.

Mai Musodzi was an African feminist in the early 20^th Century. If there’s ever a woman who deserves more attention, it is one of the pioneer black feminists fighting both patriarchy and racism in one of theBritish Empire’s white settler colonies. She believed in women’s empowerment through what today would be considered “income generating activities.” She organized sewing and knitting classes as well as training for nurses to work for the Red Cross. She pushed for women-run maternity wards in the city as well as registered marriages to protect women’s rights within a relationship.

These were especially important goals in Mbare. The township was never conceived as anything more than a worker’s ghetto, a place to house men to labor in the factories and other value added industries serving a burgeoning agricultural sector. As women moved to the urban areas following husbands and fathers, the Rhodesian government realized that it could use this migration to their advantage, employing women as nurses, domestics, and other professions commonly devalued as “women’s work.”

Today, Mai Musodzi’s name still graces the community center, which is now mostly used for weddings and other large functions. Out back, however, it also houses the Shukokai Karate Club.

Behind this door...lies another door.

We were met by Glover Musariri, a stocky but powerfully built man in his early forties. He is the leader of the karate club and has been practicing his art for more than thirty years. “I was three or four, and I really liked the movies of Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee.” At the age of nine, he joined the club and trained in the Shukokai style under a white instructor who now lives in Durban.

This dude.

He has about thirty to forty students, but his star pupil Brian Kupara is his pride and joy. At the age of 26, he has traveled throughout the region, earning twelve gold medals from various competitions. Glover used our presence to kick him around a little, ostensibly showing us several techniques while giving his pupil a bit of a hard time.

I’ve met kids playing at karate all over Africa, but I've never met one who took it past play. I have to admit; even I spent many summers ‘practicing karate’ with the neighborhood kids, which essentially entailed beating the crap out of one another for hours on end. To actually commit to the discipline and continue to practice for years after was outside our realm. If Bruce Lee ever knew the affect he had on kids around Africa, or even on this one man, I’m sure he would have sprung for a goodwill tour across the continent.

Who could resist? Also, hey ladies...

This is the first of a two-part entry on Mbare. The township has a life of its own that is virtually unknown to the majority of Zimbabweans. It has its own characters, its own history, its own culture. More than anything, I wanted to experience more of this culture – to visit one of the hostels, to drink at the local bars known colloquially as shabeens.

I got my wish, but that’s more for next time.

The City in Spring

It’s spring in the Southern Hemisphere. While leaves are turning and falling in North America and Europe, flowers are blooming and the days are growing hotter in Zimbabwe. The two go together, the flowers taking the sting out of the September sun.

The rains won’t come for another month, but the days are growing hotter. This means temperatures regularly above 32 degrees Celsius (or hovering in the low nineties for those of you in the States who have yet to switch over to international standards). It is, in short, hot, and it doesn't help matters that power cuts regularly eliminate any hope of relief.

It’s nothing like the deserts of West Africa, where the sun hit the earth like a hammer striking an anvil, beating you into submission like a piece of pig iron, but then the Sahara doesn't have hundred of leafy jacarandas to shelter under to escape the heat.

The jacarandas aren't native. In fact, they are a vestige of colonialism, imported from Central and South America as ornamentals in an otherwise colorless landscape. They've been criticized by environmentalists and agronomists in the country, for some good reasons: they’re non-native, they require too much water, they squeeze out other indigenous vegetation.

No doubt that these are legitimate arguments, however the trees have become somewhat iconic to cities like Harare and Bulawayo. Their wide, leafy boughs shade many streets in the Harare’s upper class neighborhoods, and at the moment, their lilac-colored flowers have infused the city with beauty and whimsy. Jacarandas line Leopold Takawira Street, one of the main arteries from the city center into the northern suburbs. In a strong wind, thousands of delicate trumpet-shaped flowers stream like rain from their branches, littering the ground with a thick layer of violet-blue petals. They cover streets and sidewalks like a thin layer of snow, and you can’t help but smile at the beauty of it.

The trees have been around long enough that several local anecdotes regarding the jacaranda govern life here.

“We used to say in school that if you hadn't started studying for exams by the time the pods broke on the jacaranda tree, there was no hope. You were done for.”

“These trees have their own uniform, you see? We at school all have our own colors for the uniform, and so does the jacaranda. Green leaves, purple flowers, brown trunk, white roots.” When this mechanic was a kid, they used to say that if the jacaranda was wearing its uniform that the students didn't have to wear theirs. I assume it had to do with the timing of school holidays, but I couldn't quite understand his meaning.

The jacarandas aren't the only sign of spring, however. Pink, red, and violet bougainvillea creep over garden walls and climb up streetlights. Bold golden trumpet vines have exploded in parks and gardens all over the city, and in some private houses, red and white roses remind one of England’s imperial legacy. Despite thirty years of majority rule, proper British tea gardens with their quiet fountains, winding paths, and impressive blooms still remain in isolated pockets around the city and the country. Perhaps they hold out hope for the return of monarchy, lonely little outposts besieged on all sides by the encroaching African bush.

Seen from the air, Harare might exhibit a polka dot motif – purple, yellow, and red crushes of color against a green and brown background. From the street, the wealthier neighborhoods, with their irrigation systems and private gardeners, look like something out of Dr. Seuss. One wouldn't be surprised to meet the Lorax, begging people to leave his trees alone.

Ultimately, the trees may have to go. The Ministry of Environment recently pushed for the removal of the jacaranda, citing its intensive thirst for water and its alien status in the region’s ecosystem. For now, however, the tree will most likely remain, if not for its beauty than for its utility. “It’s a good shade tree,” a security guard told me, “and it grows fast. Even in the rural areas, they like this tree. It provides wood for the fire and for building.”

Personally, I can’t imagine this city without its stately jacarandas. In just a few days of spring, the trees have captured my imagination, reminding me of Washington DC’s cherry trees, a gift from the Japanese, or the London plane, itself a hybrid of American and Turkish origin. They may not be indigenous, but they've left their mark, and I hope they stay.

Passes? We Don't Need No Stinking Passes!

I hate to start it with a quote, but when it's Hemingway, you get a little lee-way. Hemingway once said, about cycling,

"It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of the country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle."

He wasn't half wrong, and in the past few days, I've learned this lesson through some very intense experiences with this stunning landscape.

In the previous five days of cycling, I have gone up and then down, or down and then up two mountain and ten river passes. Eleven if you count the Gouritsrivier, which we really should, because it looks like this:

See those cliffs? Fuck those cliffs.

So what have I learned from these beautiful, but beastly, roads?

Well, for one, the two are not created equal. Even if they're the same length and climb and descend the same distance, river passes are far preferable to mountain passes. I was due to stay with a host from Warm Showers who, I discovered after about ten kilometers, lived just off of "Seven Passes Road."

Dear Lord, I'd just spent the last three days battling with Tradouw, Cloete's, and du Plessis Passes on the back road from Barrydale to Herbertsdale. This would kill me.

Not at all, it turns out. It was actually one of the best days of riding I'd had yet. Unlike the mountain passes in the semi-desert of the Klein Karoo, the seven passes of the namesake road (actually eight: Black River, Kaaimansgat, Silver River, Touw River, Hoogekraal, Karatara, Homtini, and Phantom Pass) all dove down into valleys or gorges, completely shaded, cool, and wet. Moreover, they were amazing! Bombing down winding roads at 40 km/hr is just a ton of fun, and when you're doing about 100km per day, a mental boost, having fun on the bike, is one of the best ways to power you through a ride.

Mountain passes, on the other hand, give little indication of the terror that awaits. You hit the base of the pass, check the sign (Tradouw Pass - 14km), and start to climb. And climb. And CLIMB. AND HOLY FUCKING HELL WHEN WILL THIS EVER END?!

Okay, it looks like I'm almost, OH WHERE THE FUCK DID THAT COME FROM?!

Mountains hide mountains that hide even greater mountains. Worse, what seems like the end of the climb is often just a level stage that gives you just enough breathing room to curse your ancestors and all the stupidity that ever took you on this trip before HITTING YOU WITH ANOTHER MOUNTAIN.

When you've finally overcome the pass, and you're on your way down, you're too exhausted to really enjoy it. You've sweated it out, often under the full blaze of a noonday sun (I seem to be hitting mountain passes right in the middle of the day), and now you have this amazing view...and all you want to do is roll into the ditch and die.

But you can't, because you're clipped into the pedals, and you've still barely learned to unclip in high traffic areas. So even if you died, your body would just carry on down the hill, strapped to the bike, flopping about like some wacky, Weekend at Bernie's set piece.

Where was I? Ah yes, passes.

The longer I'm on the bike, the more existential the ride seems to get. Hit a river pass, and everything is golden on the way down. Even when you hit the climb, the energy you've built up and the fun you've had make the challenge a lot more manageable. The difficulties faced as a result of a hard uphill climb, on the other hand, can strip you of your ability to truly enjoy the great things in life (like getting a wicked downhill ride).

So you have to attack the hills. Seriously, it's the only way to get through it. Attack the most challenging parts that life (or landscape) throws your way, then pause to enjoy it once you've overcome it. Don't forget to stop and take a look from the top, but then carry on. You have many more miles to go.