All historical information in this section is adapted from Rob Burret and Russell Feldman’s book, Hillside Dams Conservancy. Dates and historical accounts follow the book; traditions and disputed interpretations are identified in the text.
Select any photograph to explore it in detail.
Follow the chapters, or choose an era.
01
Deep time
A landscape shaped by stone and water
Long before the dams, the pools of the Matsheumhlope River made this a place where wildlife and people could find water in a dry region.
The book identifies the dominant rock as syenite: a coarse, reddish igneous rock formed more than 2,172 million years ago. It underlies much of Hillside, producing shallow soils and the boulders that give the landscape its character. In places, older rock enclosed within the syenite forms darker inclusions known as xenoliths.
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The Aloe Garden occupies a valley formed by the erosion of a particularly large xenolith. Parallel markings in the cliff-like walls at its head reveal the contact between the two rock types. The principal tributary of the Matsheumhlope flows through the Conservancy, following a fault line and cutting deep pools.
Evidence of a wetter past appeared in 1915, when work to raise the Upper Dam uncovered a den attributed to ancient hyenas and porcupines. A. E. V. Zeally studied its fossil bones and identified animals including hippopotamus, waterbuck, puku, reedbuck and sitatunga. These finds suggest a landscape once capable of sustaining a much richer community of water-loving animals.
02
Stone Age
The first traces of human life
Stone tools, shelter deposits and rock paintings tell a much older story of people living alongside the river.
Middle Stone Age tools illustrated in the book.
At Gowie’s Pool, just north of the Conservancy, Jesuit fathers and boys from Saint George’s Public School gathered one of the early collections of Zimbabwean Stone Age tools. The book records similar scatters of Middle Stone Age tools across open ground beside the river.
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A small shelter near the Lower Dam was professionally excavated in 1963. Its shallow ash deposit contained small worked stones, mainly white quartz, together with shell beads and small-mammal bones. The book places these Later Stone Age materials within the last 6,000 years.
The people who left these traces were hunter-gatherers. They hunted animals and collected plant foods, and may have occupied Hillside seasonally, moving between this area and the nearby Matobo Hills.
03
Living heritage
Stories written on rock
The paintings in Hillside’s rock shelters express spiritual and cultural meaning, rather than simply recording everyday scenes.
San rock art reproduced in the book. The image is fragile heritage, not an invitation to touch.
The book attributes the paintings to San artists and places them broadly within the last 10,000 years, without assigning a precise date to each surviving image. Natural ochres were crushed into pigment and mixed with a binding material; the book suggests possible binders such as plant sap or egg white. Quills, reeds, feathers and fingers could be used to apply the paint.
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Many of the sites have suffered damage from sunlight and the deterioration of the rock surface, compounded by fires, touching and graffiti. Their survival depends on careful stewardship. Look without touching, leave the rock surface undisturbed, and protect these places for future generations.
04
10th–13th centuries
Farmers, cattle and far-reaching trade
The rocky kopjes preserve traces of farming communities connected to a much wider southern African world.
The Leopard’s Kopje site, with an inset of the grass associated with disturbed settlement ground.
A large settlement at the head of the Aloe Garden, extending towards the Upper Dam, was excavated in the late 1960s. The book associates it with the Leopard’s Kopje Tradition: ancestral Kalanga-speaking communities that flourished in western Zimbabwe and northeastern Botswana from the 10th to the 13th centuries.
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Local chiefdoms were linked through trade and politics to stronger centres in the Shashe–Limpopo basin and, through them, to Indian Ocean trade. Cattle, gold, copper and salt helped sustain political influence and networks of patronage. The book connects this wider regional history to the later Butua/Torwa state and the builders of Khami-type settlements.
At Hillside, ashy refuse mounds contain fragments of decorated pottery, clay figurines, glass and shell beads, and animal bones. Small circular hollows in rock outcrops provide evidence of mineral processing: quartz was ground to release gold for separation by panning. The book also notes Cenchrus ciliaris grass as a marker of previously disturbed village ground.
05
1876–1893
King Lobengula’s place of retreat
In the nineteenth century, this landscape became associated with a royal retreat outside the Ndebele capital, koBulawayo.
Portrait of King Lobengula reproduced in the book.
The book dates the establishment of the village to 1876. It records the name aMatshe-aMhlope, or “white rocks/stone”, a name later associated with the Matsheumhlope River and the modern suburb. The village offered the King a place to rest and receive important visitors away from the routines of the capital.
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The precise location is debated. The book’s authors favour a kopje beside today’s Upper Dam, near marshes and pools associated with the King. Other historians have suggested a site farther east near Moffat and Caithness Roads. Stone walling, thin clay floors and nineteenth-century metal and ceramic pieces are among the traces described at the Conservancy site.
According to the book, Jesuit missionaries received permission to settle in the Ndebele state here, and leading traders negotiated with the King. In later years, thousands of rifles were stored at the village, including weapons obtained through the Rudd Concession. They were removed in 1893 as Lobengula fled north during the British invasion.
The woodland also carries a tradition of royal plant use. The book records a story that Lobengula reserved the area as a personal herbarium, where only selected herbalists and his wives could harvest. This is presented as a tradition, rather than a confirmed boundary or documented planting scheme.
06
1893–1898
From royal landscape to waterworks
Colonial occupation transformed the ownership and use of Hillside, placing the river at the centre of Bulawayo’s early water supply.
Construction of Dam No. 1, the Lower Dam, in 1895.
In late December 1893, Cecil Rhodes, Leander Starr Jameson and settler leaders met Ndebele chiefs beside the Matsheumhlope, probably just outside the Conservancy’s northern boundary. The book describes the imposition of a new colonial order and plans by the British South Africa Company to seize Ndebele cattle.
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The Hillside area was subsequently granted as a farm to Colonel William Napier for his role in the 1893 invasion. Napier and Percy Vipon Weir later established the township that became Hillside suburb. In early 1895, Napier, Weir and Charles Jefferson Clark received a 25-year monopoly to supply public water and electricity, then sold the concession to Willoughby’s Consolidated Company.
Willoughby’s established the Bulawayo Waterworks Company, registered in London with initial share capital of £200,000. Ground was broken on Napier’s Farm on 28 May 1895. Jameson attended the ceremony, which included a salute of 21 dynamite blasts and the laying of a stone.
Engineer J. C. Verey designed three dams, built by contractor C. A. Woodford. Work was slow and was interrupted by the 1896 Umvukela/iMfazo II. Construction staff erected a defensive fortification that was attacked; after the conflict, Ndebele refugees were housed on Napier’s Farm. The three dams were completed by January 1898.
07
1898–1915
Three dams became two
A destructive storm exposed the weaknesses of the first scheme and shaped the two-dam landscape familiar today.
The Upper Dam’s metal pier, photographed in 1912.
As the new reservoirs filled, the company’s Bulawayo representative, John A. “Jack” Spreckley, sent excited reports to London. Then his message of 10 January reported that the dams had washed away. Heavy rain had overwhelmed the two upper dams: their earth fill was inadequately compacted and their spillway capacity insufficient.
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Dam No. 1 survived. Its solid, cemented masonry core withstood the flood, and the strengthened wall forms the core of today’s Lower Dam. By the end of 1898 a new Upper Dam stood on the eroded foundations of Dam No. 2. Dam No. 3 was abandoned; its remains can be exposed when water levels are low.
A metal pier extending from the Upper Dam wall became a favourite photographic subject. In 1915 the wall was raised to increase capacity, and larger pipes carried water towards the Lower Dam and onwards into the town’s supply system.
The book describes settling ponds, filtration and gravity-fed pipes, followed by an intermediate pumping station where the Hillside Bowling Club later stood. Demand still exceeded supply. Wells and mine shafts supplemented the dams, while residents complained about water quality, high charges and the monopoly.
08
1924–1960s
A water source becomes a sanctuary
The transition from municipal water supply to protected landscape gave Hillside a new public purpose.
George Frank Talent, whose memory is honoured in the bird sanctuary’s history.
After a protracted court case, the dams and their water-distribution facilities were sold to Bulawayo Town Council in 1924 for £117,000. Larger sources followed at Khami in 1928 and Lower Ncema in 1943. The dams were eventually decommissioned as the city’s principal supply, although local users continued drawing water for many years.
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The area became the Bulawayo Bird Sanctuary and Nature Reserve. The book describes it as the country’s first bird sanctuary and links its dedication to George Frank Talent, a local bird photographer and recorder active from 1934. He died in a flying accident in Egypt while on service during the Second World War.
In 1942 the reserve was designated National Monument No. 34. A major phase of park development followed in 1959, guided by Professor Robert Harold Compton and championed by R. M. M. Cormack of the City Engineer’s Department. Paths, bridges, stone walls, carparks, toilets and an Upper Dam tearoom were established. Water abstraction was stopped, and recycled water helped maintain dam levels for many years.
The central Aloe Garden was established in the 1960s around a donation of more than 1,500 aloes from archaeologist Cram Cooke. Boating and angling were part of park life; the Bulawayo Angling Society restocked the dams. Later, a larger Lower Dam tearoom replaced the Upper Dam facility after a fire, and the old site became a roofed picnic area.
09
Late 1970s–2007
Opening the gates, renewing the place
The history of recreation at Hillside also includes exclusion, a gradual opening to all residents, and a community response to decline.
Until the late 1970s, the park was reserved for white visitors. The book records that Asian and mixed-race residents could enter only occasionally under special permits. As Independence approached, the dams became a more inclusive place for the wider community.
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In the post-Independence period, reduced funding for municipal parks contributed to neglect. Vegetation became overgrown and crime discouraged visitors. In 2007 three local residents—M. Sibanda, N. Rix and R. S. Burrett—leased the facility from City Council, laying the foundations of the present Conservancy.
The book describes a public-serving organisation run by a volunteer committee, paying an annual lease to Council, employing its own staff and improving both old and new facilities. That renewal forms the bridge between the historic park and the Conservancy visitors know today.
10
1968–2014
Smaller places, shared memories
A memorial trough, a woodland stage and former camping grounds hold their own chapters of Bulawayo’s community history.
Development of the amphitheatre in October 2010.
A concrete drinking trough commemorates Nora Leman Foley, an early resident and dog lover. Presented to the Town Council by the SPCA in 1917, it originally stood outside the Market Building and later City Hall. It moved to the SPCA in the late 1980s and, after accidental damage by a truck, was brought to the Conservancy in 2011.
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The grounds have long hosted Scouts, Guides and other youth groups. A Boy Scout Jamborally in 1968 marked Bulawayo’s 75th year. Church youth organisations, including Adventist Pathfinders, also used the site. In 2014 part of the old camping ground became a community soccer field, supported by Piet and Ineke te Velde.
Below the Upper Dam, a former cycad garden was redeveloped into a natural amphitheatre in 2010 after its plants had been stolen. Seating tiers were cut into the slope and a small stage constructed against the rocky woodland setting. The book records support from the Rotary Club of Bulawayo South and performances funded by the local Alliance Française, as well as later use for weddings, church gatherings and commemorations.
Our shared inheritance
Enjoy it today. Protect it for tomorrow.
Leave archaeological material where you find it. Never touch or mark rock paintings. These stories belong to the landscape—and to generations still to come.
