Harare small military force of the British South Africa Company, and named Fort Salisbury after the British prime minister Lord Salisbury. Company administrators demarcated the city and ran it until Southern Rhodesia achieved responsible government in 1923. Salisbury was thereafter the seat of the Southern Rhodesian (later Rhodesian) government and, between 1953 and 1963, the capital of the Central African Federation. It retained the name Salisbury until 1982, when it was renamed Harare on the second anniversary of Zimbabwean independence. Harare is Zimbabwe's leading political, financial, commercial, and communications centre, as well as a trade centre for tobacco, maize, cotton, and
2017 Zimbabwean coup d'état dictatorship". The African Union issued a statement in which it refrained from describing the military intervention as a 'coup', but instead said Mugabe's ouster was a legitimate expression of the will of the Zimbabwean people. Foreign embassies, including the American, Canadian, British, and Dutch embassies in Harare, issued warnings to citizens of their countries to stay indoors because of the military activity in the city. A German spokesperson for the Federal Foreign Office told a press conference in Berlin that "We see developments there with concern ... The situation there is confusing and unclear." British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called