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The Exchange Building stood at the corner of Bulawayo's Main Street (today Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo Street) and Abercorn Street (today Leopold Takawira Avenue), in the broad gridded heart of the town the British South Africa Company laid out in 1894 on the ashes of King Lobengula's royal kraal. Like the other early commercial blocks of the boom town, it was a verandahed two-storey structure of brick and corrugated iron in the plain Victorian colonial commercial idiom that the Cape and the Rand exported north into Matabeleland; deep shaded verandahs and a corner entrance addressed the dusty, wagon-wide streets that the founders had deliberately made broad enough to turn a full span of oxen. The building was a multi-purpose civic anchor: it housed Bulawayo's first post office and, above, the room in which the town's stock exchange met, while a celebrated basement saloon known as the 'Exchange Bar' occupied the level below (cite: 'Bulawayo buildings that tell a story', Herald/Chronicle, https://www.heraldonline.co.zw/bulawayo-buildings-that-tell-a-story/). The local press recalls that Cecil John Rhodes, founder of the Company and the territory that bore his name, drank in the Exchange Bar beneath the trading floor — a vivid illustration of how closely the mineral speculation conducted upstairs was bound to the imperial project itself.
The Exchange Building was a workaday boom-town commercial structure rather than a monumental bourse, and it carried little of the allegorical sculpture or painted ornament found in the great European exchanges; its decorative interest lay instead in the cast-iron verandah lacework and corner detailing typical of southern African colonial architecture of the 1890s. The principal artistic monument of the precinct stood in the street outside: the 1896–97 Rebellion Memorial, raised in the centre of Main Street to commemorate the settlers killed in the Matabele wars of 1893–94 and the First Umvukela (rising) of 1896, with the names of the fallen cut into bronze plaques set at eye level into the four faces of its base. The plinth originally bore a bronze lion, later replaced by a Gardner gun on a two-wheeled carriage — the very weapon that had seen action at the Battle of Bembesi in 1893 and again in the defence of the Bulawayo laager during the 1896 rising (cite: '1896-7 Rebellion Memorials', Zimbabwe Field Guide, https://zimfieldguide.com/bulawayo/1896-7-rebellion-memorials). A statue of Rhodes himself, sculpted by John Tweed, was erected in Main Street in 1904 and removed in 1981 (cite: 'Statue of Cecil Rhodes, Bulawayo', Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Cecil_Rhodes,_Bulawayo).
Bulawayo was founded as a settler town in November 1893 after Company forces occupied Matabeleland, and was formally laid out in 1894 with the wide, ruler-straight avenues that still define its centre. The Exchange Building sat at the commercial crossroads of this new grid, on Main Street where the post office, banks, hotels and brokers' offices clustered, and where the 1896 Rebellion Memorial was planted in the carriageway as a civic full stop. The town grew with astonishing speed on the promise of gold: the prospect of a 'Second Rand' in Matabeleland drew capital, brokers and fortune-hunters north from Johannesburg and the Cape, and Bulawayo briefly imagined itself the financial capital of a vast new mining region (cite: Bulawayo, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulawayo). The arrival of the railway from the south in 1897 cemented its role as Rhodesia's commercial hub. The building today survives as the 'Exchange Buildings' on Leopold Takawira Avenue, embedded in a remarkably intact ensemble of late-Victorian and Edwardian colonial architecture that has earned Bulawayo recognition as one of the best-preserved colonial townscapes in the region.
Bulawayo's stock exchange was among the very first in what became Southern Rhodesia. Contemporary and historical accounts place its formation in 1894, in the first flush of the Matabeleland mining boom, with the Exchange Building opening in 1896 as Company prospectors and the Pioneer-era settlers pressed inland in search of gold (cite: SEC Zimbabwe, 'History of Stock Exchanges in Zimbabwe', https://seczim.co.zw/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/SECZ-Newspaper-Column-03-August-2020-HISTORY-OF-STOCK-EXCHANGES-IN-ZIMBABWE-SUMMARY-HIGHLIGHTS.pdf). The Bulawayo market became closely linked to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and registered an enormous volume of mining shares during the speculative mania of 1894–95. Sister exchanges sprang up at Gwelo (Gweru) and Umtali (Mutare), the latter also founded in 1896. The boom proved short-lived: when the Matabeleland gold reefs failed to rival the Witwatersrand, the speculative bubble burst, and Zimbabwe's first stock exchange operated for only about six years before closing around 1901–02 (cite: Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwe_Stock_Exchange). Organised securities trading did not return to Bulawayo until 1946, when Alfred Mulock Bentley re-established an exchange in the town; a Salisbury (Harare) floor followed in 1951, and the combined institution became the Rhodesia Stock Exchange and, after independence in 1980, the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (cite: 'A History of the Rhodesian Stock Exchange: The Formative Years, 1946–1952', https://d.lib.msu.edu/juz/771/OBJ/download).
The Bulawayo exchange existed to trade the paper of the Matabeleland gold rush — shares in the mineral and mining companies floated to exploit the reefs that prospectors believed would make Rhodesia a 'Second Rand', many of them associated in the public mind with King Solomon's legendary mines. The market dealt overwhelmingly in mining and exploration scrip, and the leading companies quoted in Bulawayo were also listed on the London and New York stock exchanges, tying the dusty Matabeleland floor directly into the metropolitan capital markets that financed the imperial mining frontier (cite: 'Bulawayo buildings that tell a story', Herald/Chronicle, https://www.heraldonline.co.zw/bulawayo-buildings-that-tell-a-story/). In the frenzy of 1894–95 the exchange and its Johannesburg connections registered shares worth many millions of pounds. When the ore proved thinner and shallower than the Rand's, the speculative edifice collapsed and the share market with it, leaving the Exchange Building to outlive by decades the trading that gave it its name.
Images will be added as the project develops. Photographs by Larry Ng and from research sources.