Mugabe admits that Bulawayo was Zimbabwe's industrial hub (back in Rhodesia)

 

 

( President Mugabe in his own words)

 

"But for industry, companies look at the companies. Bulawayo was made the industrial city tichiri vana vadiki isusu. When we grew up, Bulawayo was the talk of our city which was the industrial, where employment was available much more than other cities.

Harare was to be the administrative capital. But pakazouya Federation in 1953, December although it lasted only for 10 years December 1963 it was dead. So, but it drew now much more investment into Salisbury and Salisbury started having industrial, industrial, industrialization on a larger scale than Bulawayo because this was also the federal capital apart being the territorial capital. And then started having skyscrapers here and none in Bulawayo. The first one was Livingstone House. Mamwe akazouya much later before you were born, I am sure. Some skyscrapers are much older than you are, shame! You should have been born much earlier, makanonokerei? Okay that’s Harare, that’s how it grew and outstripped Bulawayo.

I am saying so because by the fact of my employment and fact that my father stayed in Bulawayo for 10 years and was employed there as a teacher first at Empandeni a year, then Hope Fountain outside Bulawayo, 10 miles therefrom. If you don’t know what miles are, don’t ask me I am British. (Laughter) 10 miles out of Bulawayo, I was there, and I hopped to South Africa to Fort Hare from there. So I have that Bulawayo culture in me. It was a very nice city and very beautiful. I went there when I was a bachelor and that means quite a lot (laughter). So now when I look at it, it’s like a dying city, it was vivacious, full of life, social life I didn’t know Harare until I returned from Ghana actually to join politics then I started knowing ma streets and suburbs and even the suburbs we did not know very well because the whites didn’t want you to move into the suburbs unless you were servants and were working as domestic servants for them or they would ask, the police “ini wena funa lapa?”

Anyway, Bulawayo is like a dead city now, we must enliven it. We must bring back that capacity which it had, industrial capacity it had and do much more and bring back even that employment capability which it had. So we talk about it, but this is not just because I stayed but also because it really grew into a capital not just of the industries of our industries, our industrial capital but it was also our railway capital, ndiko kwakaiswa headquarters, also you have it much closer to Botswana, much closer to South Africa, but Harare grew in faster strides and kwakazouya Soweto to keep the natives away from the closeness of the city.
Harare was getting too congested. Highfield, Chitungwiza, what did I say? Soweto oh! Oh!  That was to be our Soweto and Chitungwiza and I think the population of Chitungwiza now is much more than some of the smaller cities. Smaller countries in Africa. The life there, the people couldn’t drive the whole way into the main part of the city for employment. Industrialization could have started, we tried to do a few things there, earlier on during the first 10 years for our independence, 20 years for our independence, a few companies were established, but that was not enough, much more could have been done"
(This was part of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe's speech on his vision of the country thanks to online news sources)