Playing Bach to hippopotamuses

Michael Bullivant tells Petroc Trelawny how he became Bulawayo’s chief musical impresario

For an extraordinary month in 1953, Bulawayo became the epicentre of culture in the southern hemisphere. In celebration of the centenary of the colonialist and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, the Royal Opera House and Sadlers Wells Ballet took up residence. Sir John Gielgud staged and starred in a production of Richard II. The musical programme was left to the Hallé Orchestra, who flew in from Manchester with their music director Sir John Barbirolli and gave 14 concerts. A corrugated-iron aircraft hanger was temporarily named ‘The Theatre Royal’; it even boasted a royal box from where the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret witnessed an anniversary gala featuring more than 300 visiting performers.

Along with umpiring a cricket match and visiting Rhodes’s grave, Barbirolli was called upon to lay the foundation stone of the nascent Rhodesian Academy of Music. And somehow, after nearly six decades of political upheaval and economic crisis, the academy still functions as a place of musical learning. It lacks a brass faculty right now, but students can study singing, piano, flute and violin. It owns 20 pianos, including two full-size Steinway concert grands, and hundreds pack the main hall for regular video screenings of great operas and ballets.

The Academy’s director is a jovial 62-year-old originally from Boston in Lincolnshire. After Cambridge, Michael Bullivant taught history at a series of English prep schools. Seeking adventure, he travelled to South Africa, but found all the good teaching jobs had already been snapped up. Then a friend tipped him off about a temporary post as Latin master at Bulawayo’s Milton School. It was the start of a 30-year career that saw him retire as deputy headmaster.

His arrival in Bulawayo coincided with  the failure of peace talks between Ian Smith’s breakaway Rhodesian government and the African National Congress.