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
2008 Zimbabwean general election than merely a regional or sub-regional matter, and it was something the U.N. should handle. The Zimbabwean government denounced the U.N. session as "sinister, racist and colonial", and Deputy Information Minister Matonga called it "a sign of desperation by the British and their MDC puppets". According to the MDC candidate for Makoni South, Pishai Muchauraya, ballot papers in wards 29 and 30 of Makoni South, which is strongly pro-MDC, ran out after two hours of voting. Muchauraya said that 300 people had voted by that point, with another 1,000 still waiting. In Chitungwiza, a dormitory town of Harare, clashes occurred