Part is fermented anger and part is soulful excitement.
The anger is rooted in the government's neglect of Matabeleland. That western Zimbabwe is poorer is obvious, from the threadbare airport to the barefoot, ragged children in dusty homesteads. To locals, the colonial buildings that make Bulawayo charming symbolise its lack of development since independence. Matabeleland's infrastructure remains that built by Rhodesia. Some, remembering the thousands killed when the Fifth Brigade swept across Matabeleland in a wave of destruction in the early 1980s, call it genocide.