From ‘Sunshine City’ to a Landscape of Disaster

Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city, has now joined the growing list of cities and ‘mega cities’ of the global South, which are now confronted by an ever-growing crisis precipitated by the deficient provision of basic services such as water and housing. Emblematic of these challenges are the cities of Lagos, Nairobi, Kumasi, Mumbai and Cairo. This article examines the mutation of Harare from what was once regarded as one of the most developed post-colonial cities in Africa dubbed the ‘sunshine city’ in local Zimbabwean parlance in the 1980s to a landscape of crisis and disease. The cholera outbreak in Harare towards the last quarter of 2008 extending into the first quarter of 2009 exposed the full magnitude of the city’s decrepit infrastructure. This pestilence laid bare the intricate political and municipal governance issues, the historical city–state tensions, and the impact of rapid urban population growth. Although the article focuses on the contemporary water crisis, it injects into the discourse a historical perspective in order to demonstrate that the recent set of factors which contributed to the occurrence of disease has profound structural origins dating back to the colonial days. The article, however, also emphasizes that postcolonial Harare’s dysfunctional water systems have been worsened by rapid urban population growth and repressive forms of political interventions in city governance.