Bulawayo forms the axis of a well-planned road and rail network to the North, South, East and West. Bulawayo lies in the vast, often flat, yet immensely attractive surroundings of Matabeleland, the focal point of much of Zimbabwe's romance and early History. The name Bulawayo means, in Ndebele, "Place of Slaughter" , a reference, it is thought, to the fierce succession battles that took place in the late 19th Century. These culminated in the accession of one Zimbabwe's key figures of pre-colonial history, King Lobengula in 1870. His reign , peppered with heavy doses of heroism, betrayal and death, reads like mythology or grand opera: an era which came to a close 1894, with Lobengula's death, and Ndebele collapse before the relentless Northwards advance of the British South Africa Company. Arriving in Bulawayo is like jumping back fifty years. Closer to the set for an old movie than a modern African city, the town stood in for late 1950's Johannesburg in the shooting of " A World Apart", the film about South African anti-apartheid activist Ruth First. The town has several tourist attractions, in Centenary Park, the Museum of Natural History is the finest in Central Africa. The art gallery has some excellent Ndebele craftwork and the Mzilikazi