Colonial Style

It is interesting to see what an imprint a colonial power can leave on it’s colonies. I am not planning to go into deep political analysis here, even if that also is very interesting, there are others who are far better suited for that than I. What I am thinking of here are those small everyday things that somehow gives a place it’s character.

Despite all the efforts to get rid of the colonial past and British influence as a result of Mugabe’s fixation with Britain and especially Tony Blair (& co) as the root of all evil that has inflicted the country, there are still a lot of British remnants. I am surprised how many extremely British sounding street names there are in Harare. Of course the most important streets in the city centre have names like: Robert Mugabe Road, Julius Nyerere Way and Samora Machel Avenue, but apart from that most streets have really British names, such as: King George Road, Sussex Road, Buckingham Rd. and Montgomery Avenue and there are boroughs with names as Belgravia and Marlborough. Other British “left overs” are of course oddeties like the left side traffic, the annoying three prong plugs and sockets and an odd interest for strange sports like cricket. A good thing is that you can always get a cup of decent tea, with sugar and milk!

This weekend however almost got an overdose of “britishness”. It started on Sunday morning when I was at the sports club for my tennis lession. I thought I heard bagpipes, but thought that can not be, not there, nine o’clock on a Sunday morning! But indeed! When I went to the car I saw three men, two in kilts, playing bagpipe and drums at the parking lot. It felt a bit surreal.

In the afternoon I went to the horse races at Borrowdale Park. Ok, it was not the Ascot, but with some amount of imagination you could see the hats and the jackets! There I chatted to an old man, who said he had been going to the races since the opening in 1957. And some of the people I meet at the Harare Hash on Monday was also rather interesting... Sometimes it feels like going back in time.