About

This site collects the history of Bulawayo and the country around it — its suburbs and schools, its churches and hospitals, the people who shaped it, and photographs of all of it. It has been here since 2003, at the same addresses.

Where the material comes from

Three places. Some of it was written for this site, over twenty years, by whoever knew something worth writing down. Some was sent in by readers — their own memories, their family photographs, a school magazine found in a drawer — and where that is so, the page says whose words they are. And some is older still: newspaper reports, passages from books, the accounts nineteenth-century travellers left behind, reproduced here because they are evidence of how the place was seen at the time. Where a page reproduces someone else's work it names the source.

Much of what is here was written a long time ago and has not been gone over since. That is the ordinary condition of a collection like this one, not a confession — but it does mean that a date, a spelling, or the name of someone in an old photograph may be wrong, and it is worth saying so once, plainly, in the place where someone would come looking.

What gets corrected, and how

If something here is wrong, say so. A correction is published on the page itself with the date it was made — not quietly edited out, because what the page used to say is part of its history too. If a page is found to carry an error that cannot be corrected straight away, it comes down until it can be.

The most useful things anyone sends are the small ones: the year a building opened, the name of a face in a photograph, the correct spelling of a street. Nearly every photograph here is uncaptioned, and somebody out there knows what each one shows.

The older writing

Some pages reproduce writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that describes people in the terms of its own time. It is kept as it was written, and identified, because a collection that tidies its sources stops being evidence of anything. Reproducing a text is not endorsing it.

Photographs of people

There is a quantity of school material here whose copyright and whose consents were never recorded. Buildings, grounds and team photographs are published; named portraits of people who were children when the picture was taken are held back until the person, or their family, agrees. If one has slipped through, tell us and it comes down the same day. The fuller version of this is in the privacy policy.

Contributing

Photographs, documents, memories and corrections are all welcome. The contribution guidelines explain what to tell us about an item and exactly what permission to publish covers — in short: permission to put it on this site, credited to you, and nothing further without asking you again.

Who runs it

The site carries advertising, which pays for the hosting and for digitising the material, and nothing on it is a paid placement. The terms of use and the privacy policy say who publishes it and how to reach them.