Centenary Park

Also known as Central Park, The Park, Centenary and Central Parks.

Adjoining city parks on the eastern edge of the centre, together about 45 hectares, home to the Natural History Museum, the theatre, a miniature railway and, in Central Park, the fountain built for the city's 75th anniversary in 1968.

Ask a Bulawayo child of almost any generation where they went on a weekend afternoon, and many will say the park: the miniature train, the aviary, the museum with its elephant, and the great fountain lit up at night.

There are in fact two parks side by side on the eastern edge of the city centre. Centenary Park and Central Park together make up about forty-five hectares of shade, lawn and old trees. Most people, and most photographs, treat them as one.

What is there

• The Natural History Museum stands in Centenary Park, at the corner of Park Road and Leopold Takawira Avenue (once Selborne Avenue), in its round, colosseum-like building. It opened in 1964.
• The Bulawayo Theatre, home of the city’s amateur stage.
• A miniature railway, an aviary, gardens and, nearby, the municipal campsite.
• The fountain. Strictly it stands in Central Park. It was built to mark the city’s 75th birthday in 1968 and is often described as the largest ornamental fountain in the country. That was the same anniversary for which the Dominican Convent girls turned their school into a museum of Bulawayo’s history.

Why “Centenary”?

We are not yet certain which centenary the park is named for. The most likely is the 1953 centenary of Cecil Rhodes’s birth, which Bulawayo marked with the large Central African Rhodes Centenary Exhibition from May to August 1953, but we have not found a source that says so directly. If you know, or have a document that settles it, please tell us.

What the photographs show

The photographs in this set show the park’s lawns and palm trees and, in several views, the fountain. They were taken around 2005. By 2011 the city’s parks department was restoring the lawns around the fountain and drilling boreholes to keep them watered. The photographs in this set show the park before that work.

What we don’t know yet

• Which centenary the name honours, and when the park was laid out.
• Your park: the train, the aviary, Christmas lights, first dates by the fountain. Old photographs of the fountain lit at night would be especially welcome.

13 photographs of Centenary Park →