Harare

Harare is the capital of Zimbabwe, spread across the highveld plateau in the northeast of the country. It took its present name in 1982 from Neharawa, a Shona chief whose people lived around a granite hill at the edge of the early town.

Fort Salisbury was raised on the site in 1890 by the Pioneer Column of Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company and named after Lord Salisbury, then the British prime minister. A railway from the port of Beira in Mozambique reached the town at the end of the 19th century, and a city charter followed in the 1930s. Salisbury was the capital of Southern Rhodesia and, from the 1950s to the 1960s, of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which joined the lands of present-day Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. The University of Zimbabwe began in the same decade as a college with a special relationship to the University of London.

Flue-cured tobacco from farms across Zimbabwe is sold at auction floors in Harare each season, then graded and packed for export. Delta Corporation, based in the city, brews Castle lager and Chibuku, a thick sorghum beer sold across southern Africa. Innscor Africa, also headquartered in Harare, bakes bread under the Bakers Inn name and raises poultry under the Irvine's brand.

The Eastgate Centre, an office and shopping building designed by the architect Mick Pearce, keeps cool without conventional air conditioning through a ventilation system modeled on termite mounds. Frank McEwen, first director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, encouraged local carvers from the late 1950s, and their Shona stone sculpture later reached museums in Europe and North America. Mbare Musika, in the old township of Mbare, is the chief market for produce from the countryside and the starting point of long-distance buses. Since the late 1990s the Harare International Festival of the Arts has brought theater, music and dance from many countries to stages in the city center.