Salisbury given new name

Press, 20 April 1982, Page 9

Salisbury given new name

NZPA-Reuter Harare Zimbabwe celebrated its second independence anniversary at the week-end by renaming its capital, Salisbury, with the African name Harare, and a call by its President for minority parties to join hands with the governing Zimbabwe African National Union. The main celebrations in Harare’s Rufaro Stadium were attended by an enthusiastic crowd of 35,000, who listened to President Canaan Banana’s address to the nation, watched the first public drill by the North Korean-trained sth Brigade of the Zimbabwe Army, and

got soaked under a” sudden unseasonable downpour. But in Bulawayo, the country’s second city and stronghold of the minority leader, Joshua Nkomo, whose dismissal from Cabinet has raised political tensions in recent months, the. public reaction to independence day was much more subdued. President Banana, in his speech, confirmed the longawaited change of Salisbury — the name of the British Prime Minister who was in office when the first whites arrived in 1890 — to Harare, a word derived from the Shona Harava or Harawa clan that lived there at the coming of the settlers.