Getly
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Most Zimbabweans have never been told this.
The first stock exchange in this country opened in Bulawayo in 1896. Not Harare. The Harare trading floor did not exist until 1951, which is fifty-five years later.
It opened because of gold.
After the Pioneer Column arrived in 1890 and the Matabele War ended in 1893, prospectors poured into Matabeleland looking for the mineral wealth that Cecil Rhodes had promised was there. Mining companies needed capital. Investors needed a marketplace to buy and sell stakes in those claims. By 1895 the railway had reached Bulawayo from South Africa, connecting the city directly to Johannesburg and the Cape.
The conditions for an exchange were in place. In 1896, it opened.
A second exchange opened in Mutare the same year. It closed in 1924 when the mineral deposits there proved smaller than hoped. Bulawayo's original exchange eventually closed too, as the gold rush euphoria faded.
But the idea did not die. In January 1946, the Rhodesian Stock Exchange reopened. In Bulawayo. Again. Founded by Alfred Mulock Bentley with around twenty-two practising members, trading by open outcry, prices shouted across a physical floor.
For five years Bulawayo was the only home of Zimbabwe's formal stock exchange. Only in December 1951 did a second trading floor open in Harare, connected to Bulawayo by telephone.
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WHY THIS MATTERS NOW
This is not just history.
The gold that started the first exchange in 1896 is still being mined eighty kilometres north of Bulawayo today, at Caledonia Mining's Bilboes project. Its feasibility study confirmed proven and probable reserves of 1.749 million ounces of gold.
Caledonia is listed on the VFEX, which is a subsidiary of the exchange that grew out of that 1896 Bulawayo floor.
In other words: you can buy shares in the gold that started all of this, on the exchange that gold created, from your phone.
Most Zimbabweans do not know that either.
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I wrote a free guide about how I found my own way into these markets. It covers the difference between the ZSE and the VFEX, how to open a brokerage account here, and the five things I wish I had known before I started.
It is free. No email required. You will find it in my store below.