In a city ground to a halt, the nasty past remains present

Ivisited Bulawayo in January for the first time in many years. It is perhaps because I was so out of touch with the city that it took me by surprise. It has been a long while since I’ve been to a place that has reeled back in time; things that used to be there were not.

One is bank lending: when the formal economy has disappeared, there is no way to guess whether debtors can service their loans. And so debt markets collapse. Houses in the city’s suburbs are bought with cash. I met an estate agent whose greatest concern was orchestrating the moment of sale; how does one safely transport $150,000 across town?

Then there is municipal infrastructure. In the street where I stayed a team of workers came one morning to give a pedestrian crossing a fresh coat of paint. But the crossing itself was crumbling, and the potholes in the street were deep and wide. The fresh paint seemed an exercise in absurdity, an effort at dark humour.

Some things the state does not neglect, though, such as collecting revenue and spying. Revenue collection requires some ingenuity; in an economy that is largely informal, income and sales taxes are scant. In lieu of this, the state takes 2% of every mobile money and digital transaction, a measure that drives an economy already too informal deeper into cash.

There are other ways to collect money. Car radios draw an annual fee of $150. Motorists pay it because the alternative is to bribe police officers at the city’s ubiquitous roadblocks instead of paying a fine.

In the countryside, stray cattle are taken to a holding facility where the state keeps them, without feeding them, for a price of $10 per head per day. There is a drought in Matabeleland. Those who raise animals are struggling. This measure seems cynical in the extreme.

As for spying, my impressions are anecdotal. At the place I stayed, a man came around every day to check the guest register. The agency for whom he works must have a lot of personnel if it can afford to do such granular work. Each state has its priorities.

But my strongest impressions arose from visiting the past. The deceptively named Natural Science Museum has a large section on modern history. It is exactly as the Rhodesians left it. A collection of beautiful tapestries depicts the signal episodes of conquest. A diorama shows the famous scene of Cecil Rhodes negotiating with rebel indunas to end the 1896 war. The scene is as colonial propaganda had it, the indunas armed to the teeth, the brave Rhodes and his men unarmed.

The pride of the city’s Railway Museum is the Pullman coach made for Rhodes, with its ivory and marble and teakpanelled walls. There is also a relic of a mine-proof coach the Rhodesian state built during the bush war. The museum’s signage is exactly as it always was. It explains that the Ndebele state was savage and marauding, the Shonas impotent and weak.

Rhodes apparently came in and saved the day, bringing stability and relief. As he showed us around, our guide pointed out that Zimbabwe did not have a working passenger train anymore, his irony buried behind his deadpan face.

The juxtaposition between the museums and their surrounds seemed an integral part of what they had come to mean. Opposite the National Science Museum was Centenary Park, once the city’s central gathering spot. One can just make out, through the dying grass, disused putt-putt course and rusted jungle gym, that it was once lovely and proud.

There seemed to me a great irony in all of this. Economies that grow at 5% a year are forever building over the past. Their treasures must be actively preserved. But in a city that has been stopped in its tracks, the past remains. There is nothing new to push it aside. It just grows older and creakier, and also a whole lot weirder.

Bulawayo was like a hallucination, a sorry present spliced onto a frozen past; a muddle of different times.