Old Bulawayo

Outside the city, south of the centre beyond Douglasdale, reached by the Criterion Road. Not today's Bulawayo, but the place its name comes from. · From 1870

Also known as Gubulawayo, koBulawayo, KoBulawayo, Lobengula's royal town.

Lobengula's first royal town, founded c. 1870 and burned when the court moved in 1881; reconstructed as a site museum from 1997–98, largely destroyed by bush fire in August 2010.

This site takes its name from this place. In 1872, the story goes, King Lobengula renamed his royal town Bulawayo. The town stood south of the modern city, on ground that is now farmland and bush beyond Douglasdale. Today’s city carries the name, but the first Bulawayo was here.

A king’s town

Mzilikazi, founder of the Ndebele state, died in September 1868. His heir, Nkulumane, could not be found. What happened to him is told differently in different accounts, and some of them are set out side by side on the suburb-names page. The council offered the kingship to another son, Lobengula, who was installed in about 1870.

By Ndebele custom a new king built a new capital. Lobengula left his father’s last town, Mhlahlandlela, and built his own a few kilometres away. It was first called Gibixhegu. Lobengula’s installation was opposed, and his regiments fought and defeated the dissenting Zwangendaba regiment. After that, the town took the name it is remembered by.

Old Bulawayo was a palisaded town about a mile round. It had a great open space for gatherings and parades, and the king’s own enclosure held the royal huts, the huts of his wives and a sacred goat kraal. Close by stood a tree where Lobengula held court, known ever since as the Indaba Tree. The original tree was killed in the 1960s by the strangler fig that stands there now. London Missionary Society missionaries were settled at Hope Fountain from 1870, and Jesuits had a mission nearby from 1879.

The town was not meant to last forever. Ndebele royal towns moved. In 1881, after eleven years, Lobengula moved his capital north to the site where State House stands in the modern city, and the old town was burned. The new capital carried the name with it.

What does “Bulawayo” mean?

The answer depends on who you ask, and the differences are themselves part of the history.

• The birth of Lobengula’s Bulawayo says the name comes from the verb bulala, “to kill”, which also means to oppose or persecute. On this reading Lobengula meant “the place of he who is persecuted”: himself, opposed by rivals for the throne. It adds that he was echoing the first Bulawayo, Shaka’s capital in Zululand.
• Sikobole Ndhlovu, who grew up inside Lobengula’s household as companion to the king’s son Sidojiwe, called it “Kwa Bulawayo — the place of slaughter” when he was recorded in the 1950s.
• Chief Simon Sigola, recorded in 1959, said Lobengula “built the royal kraal Kwabulawayo, naming it after his father’s kraal in Natal.”

All three agree that the name looks back to an older Bulawayo in the south, and that it is built on bulala. They differ on whose suffering, or whose victory, it names. We have not chosen between them.

The reconstruction, and the fire

In 1990 National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe identified the site as worth developing for education and visitors. Work began in 1997. A 2005 account records that a delegation first went to South Africa to study reconstructions of other royal towns: Ondini, Shaka’s kwaBulawayo, and uMgungundlovu. The rebuilding was limited to the royal enclosure. Builders put up a double palisade of mopane timber, the cattle byre, an ox-wagon shed, a European-style house for the king, beehive huts and an interpretive centre whose design echoes the old town. A team from Zululand trained local builders in the old methods.

In August 2010 a bush fire swept through the site. It destroyed the palisade, the huts and the royal house. Only the interpretive centre survived. Restoration has been announced more than once since.

What the photographs show

The photographs in this set were taken around 2005, five years before the fire. They show the reconstructed royal enclosure as it stood: beehive huts inside the king’s enclosure, huts outside it, and the site museum. Many of the structures in them no longer exist. That makes this small set worth more than its size suggests, and it is why we would particularly like to hear from anyone who knew the site, visited it before 2010, or helped build it.

What we don’t know yet

• Who took these photographs, and when exactly. The files carry no dates or names.
• What the site looks like now, and how far restoration has got.
• Family memory. If your family has stories passed down about koBulawayo or the Indaba Tree, we would be honoured to hear them, attributed to you or anonymously, as you prefer.

23 photographs of Old Bulawayo →