Bulawayo 1872

Tshabalala: The Homes They Made

For Lenox Lizwi Mhlanga, the history of Mhlahlandlela includes a furniture shop and the journey to Masuku Primary School.

Writing about his childhood in Bulawayo, he remembers his father working as a furniture-shop manager and renting a shop koThikili in Mpopoma. His mother was a trained nurse. The family later moved to the cooperative housing at Mhlahlandlela, in Tshabalala, where other businesspeople, teachers, nurses and salespeople were also making homes.1

There, he went to Masuku Primary.

It is a small piece of a much larger neighbourhood, but it brings the housing records down to the scale of a family. A scheme on a council plan becomes the place a child leaves in the morning and returns to after school.

Before those remembered school days, the development had gone through several changes.

Historian Maurice Hutton traces its beginnings to plans for housing on Bulawayo’s South West Commonage. A public announcement appeared in December 1959. The proposed rental scheme became Tshabalala; in 1961, financial concerns helped push the council toward home ownership instead.2

The change mattered. Renting and buying place different demands on a household. The possibility of a lasting home came with the need to find the money to secure it. A decision made around a council table would enter family life through what people could afford.

The development also took shape under rules that separated housing by race. Those rules restricted where families could live and formed part of the circumstances in which they sought homes of their own.2

Within Tshabalala, Mhlahlandlela offered a particular way forward. Its cooperative occupied 38 houses and two shops on land bought freehold from the council. A £52,269 loan from the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust helped finance it, and a management committee was selected to administer the estate.2

The numbers are worth keeping. Thirty-eight houses are few enough for the reader to picture a community rather than an anonymous total. The two shops also remind us that a residential place needs everyday services alongside its homes.

E. H. Ashton, Bulawayo’s housing administrator, described the cooperative as an opportunity for residents to gain experience in managing housing and to exercise greater responsibility for their affairs.3

That was an administrator’s view. Mhlanga’s recollection gives us a resident’s: the occupations of the parents around him, the move from Mpopoma and the nearby school. Between the two accounts, the community begins to acquire faces.

The name also carried a wish to remember. According to Hutton’s reading of the municipal records, the advisory boards proposed Tshabalala in memory of a former local chief.2 His identity still needs to be established securely. The record gives us a reason for the choice, while leaving more to discover about the person it honoured.

For people who lived there, the history will also be in details that planning records cannot supply: who helped a family settle, which shop they used, how a particular home changed over the years. Those are questions for residents, rather than gaps a writer should fill by guessing.

Mhlahlandlela’s 38 houses give us one documented starting point. The wider story of Tshabalala belongs to all the households that made a life there.

Did your family make its home in Tshabalala or Mhlahlandlela? What do you remember of moving in, the early shops or the journey to school?

Sources and notes

Footnotes

  1. Lenox Lizwi Mhlanga, “Growing up in Bulawayo: Chronicles of a colourful childhood Part 1,” Chronicle, 15 June 2019. Used for the author’s family recollections and school, not for the article’s introductory chronology of nineteenth-century Bulawayo, which contains errors. No claim is made that his parents founded the cooperative. ↩

  2. Maurice Hutton, Seeing Like a Second City: Contested Development in the African Townships of Late Colonial Bulawayo, Rhodesia, 1949–1977, University of Edinburgh doctoral thesis, title page 2018; corrected PDF includes April 2020 erratum. Repository; PDF. Relevant pp. 125–130 and 153, note 611. The naming passage cites council minutes of 16 November 1960; those original minutes were not independently inspected. Cooperative freehold must not be conflated with the tenure arrangements of the wider housing scheme. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. E. H. Ashton, contemporary housing account reproduced as “Mzilikazi Township,” with prices identified as 1968. An administrator’s account, not a resident survey; its promotional claim of continental uniqueness is not adopted. Its independence from the records underlying later scholarship is not established. ↩

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