Juggling with names

Col. Sanders’ finger licking’ Kentucky Fried Chicken has moved its headquarters from Kentucky to Texas.

It has outlets in more than 120 countries, second only to McDonalds, since the colonel started it 80 years ago. Don’t expect it to become known as TFC anytime soon.

In a different era (right) this hometown of mine was quickly changed from Salisbury to Harare.

Alternative street names were put in place too.

But …

These days no-one, not even those who mooted it, use Liberation Legacy Way for Borrowdale Road, a thoroughfare to the upmarket northern suburb of Borrowdale where many of the liberators and politicos now live.

The same goes for Enterprise Road, another main city artery, that only Google Maps acknowledges as Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa Road, named after the current president.

Fife Avenue is still commonly known as Fife Avenue, not the renamed Leonid Breschnev Ave, Rotten Row is still not seen as Abdel Gamal Nasser Rd, Central Avenue is not Ahmed Ben Bella Ave, Park Lane isn’t yet commonly called Jomo Kenyatta Lane. Lomagundi Rd remains in usage, not its newly christened Chairman Mao Boulevard.

How to get directions and get lost in Harare. Go down Breschnev, turn left into Ben Bella, left again into Nasser, keep going until you hit Fidel Castro …

In re-naming accepted in the early days of independence, Robert Mugabe got Manica Road, the longest route through the city. Then-Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda, whom we didn’t like much, got Railway Ave, arguably the shortest and dirtiest of streets named after regional leaders who were helpful in the struggle against colonialism.

Mugabe would have been 101 on his birthday last week, a public holiday called National Youth Day honouring the February 21 Youth Movement he founded long before he was ousted in a bloodless coup in 2017.

There has been a lot of police and military activity on the streets lately amid deepening schisms within Mnangagwa’s ruling ZANU party.

Without an open press, social media has buzzed with speculation that another coup is in the offing, stock up with non-perishable foods, people say, and stay at home if trouble starts, and this one probably wont be bloodless.  The Internet will be cut off for the duration, worsening existing, palpable tensions and swirling rumours.

At a National Youth Day rally in Bulawayo we were urged by the elderly government to let youth help shape the future and get them to resist taking drugs.

Crystal meth, or mutoriro in local vernacular, smoked in a makeshift pipe, often made from the loops of energy saving light bulbs

The young and no-so-young see cheap, bastardised mixtures  as a temporary escape from hardship and poverty. Weed that grows as a weed locally, diluted crystal meth, hallucinogenic cough mixtures and raw alcohol concoctions are touted on the streets every day, free at first until until addiction has set in and users turn to crime and prostitution to pay for more.

How to get lost in the second city of Bulawayo looking for the Selborne Hotel (established a long time ago on Seventh Ave.) Straight up Simon Muzenda Ave, head into Albert Nxele Way, avoid Liberatkion Legacy Ave, find the corner of Leopold Takawira and George Silundika and there it is.

(The reincarnation of old Col. Sanders (left)  was apparently due to preferable financial and taxation regimes in Texas. I am deliberately staying out of the Trump-Musk axis of lunacy for now. Perhaps their global tariff wars won’t affect his finger lickin’ chicken unless there’s consumer resistance during growing anti-US sentiment abroad.)

POST SCRIPT. Thanks to the firmament for good rains, but the downside is that illegal gold panning – including mechanical ripping up of river beds and alluvial soils by the Chinese – has  reduced run-off inflows into many drought-hit dams and reservoirs.