ABSTRACT
At the conclusion of the colonial era in Rhodesia in 1978 the city of Salisbury (now Harare) was the capital of a self-governing British colony that had unilaterally claimed independence in 1965. It was a modern city with a population of some 610,000 people of whom 78.6 per cent were African, 19.3 per cent white and 2.1 per cent Asian and coloured. Its structure embodied the economic, political, social and cultural asymmetry inherent in settler colonial society. The urban social formation was in large measure the outcome of processes which interrelated race and economic class in a colonial capitalist and mixed political economy. Productive forces were largely in white and foreign private ownership; Africans had experienced severe containment in their access to and control over the means of production and had been excluded from effective political influence and authority (Stoneman and Davies 1981).
