People & Culture

Before there was a name for this plateau between the Zambezi and the Limpopo, there were painters. In the granite hills of the Matobo, San hunter-gatherers left rock art now dated to as much as thirteen thousand years old, among the densest concentrations of San painting in Africa, with more than three thousand sites recorded across the hills alone. The San were still there when Bantu-speaking farmers arrived from the north, crossing the Zambezi around the start of the first millennium and, by the ninth century, established as ironworking, cattle-keeping communities whose settlements, arranged around cattle byres, grain stores and a royal court, became the seedbed for the kingdoms that followed. The first of those kingdoms rose just south of Zimbabwe's modern border, at Mapungubwe on the Limpopo, southern Africa's earliest known state with a class-based social order, prospering between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries on cattle, ivory and gold moving toward the Indian Ocean. When rainfall declined after 1300 and the land could no longer support its population, Mapungubwe's people dispersed, and its trade networks and class structures moved north onto the plateau. There, at a site the Shona called dzimba dza mabwe, great stone houses, a new capital rose. Great Zimbabwe peaked between roughly 1200 and 1450, its builders raising the Great Enclosure's walls, eleven metres high in places, from over a million cut granite blocks fitted without mortar. From here the Shona state that controlled the site drew gold and ivory from across the plateau and moved it east to the coast, where Swahili merchants at Kilwa and its outpost Sofala shipped it on to Arabia, India and China, and excavations have turned up Chinese celadon, Persian Gulf beads and Congolese copper as proof of how far that trade reached. Among the ruins, nineteenth-century excavators found eight soapstone birds, carved eagles that became the national emblem, appearing on the flag and coat of arms and giving independent Zimbabwe both its name and its symbol. That authorship was denied for most of a century. The German explorer Karl Mauch, who reached the ruins in 1871, decided they must be connected to the Queen of Sheba or some lost white civilisation, and Cecil Rhodes's colonial administration embraced the idea readily, unwilling to credit Africans with building it, reading Arab coins and Persian pottery on site as proof of foreign builders rather than as evidence of trade. Professional archaeology said otherwise from early on, and by the 1930s excavators including Gertrude Caton Thompson had concluded that the site was entirely African and medieval, yet white-ruled Rhodesia spent the 1960s and 1970s suppressing that conclusion because the ruins had become a symbol of African nationalism. The record has not moved since. Great Zimbabwe was built by the ancestors of the Shona people, and the colonial theories claiming otherwise were racially motivated fabrications rather than honest error. Great Zimbabwe's decline from the mid-fifteenth century is less settled, with historians pointing to some mix of a gold trade shifting north, exhausted resources and drought, though a once popular overpopulation theory has since been challenged. What is clear is where power went next. One successor group built Khami near Bulawayo, capital of the Torwa state from around 1450 until the Rozvi burned it in the 1680s, and its ruins, also a UNESCO site, still hold European and Chinese trade goods. Further north, a state the Portuguese wrote down as Monomotapa expanded along the Zambezi from the mid-fifteenth century, trading gold and ivory with Swahili and then, from the 1560s, Portuguese merchants, who eventually conquered Mutapa territory by around 1633. The Rozvi state that destroyed Khami, founded by Changamire Dombo in the 1680s, pushed the Portuguese out of the Zambezi valley and dominated the plateau until fragmenting in the early nineteenth century. Into that fragmenting landscape came the Ndebele. Mzilikazi kaMashobane, an Nguni commander who broke with the Zulu king Shaka in 1823, led his followers north through the Mfecane, first to the Transvaal and then, pursued by Boer commandos, into what is now southwestern Zimbabwe, settling there by 1840. His son Lobengula, who took power in 1870, built his own capital and named it Bulawayo, after his father's former seat. It was Lobengula who, in October 1888, signed the Rudd Concession, granting mining rights across Matabeleland and Mashonaland to agents acting for Cecil Rhodes. The version read to him in his own language promised limited prospecting rights, while the English document his negotiators actually held gave Rhodes's syndicate the right to take whatever action it judged necessary to extract the minerals, a discrepancy at least one translator understood and let stand. When Lobengula grasped what had been signed he protested to Queen Victoria and tried to disavow it, but the concession had already done its work, becoming the basis for the royal charter granted to Rhodes's British South Africa Company in 1889, and for the Pioneer Column that crossed into Mashonaland in 1890 and founded Fort Salisbury, marking the start of white rule. That rule did not go unresisted. In 1896 Ndebele and Shona rose against the company in the First Chimurenga, a rebellion given spiritual direction by mediums including Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana and Sekuru Kaguvi. The uprising held into 1897 before running out of supplies and being put down, and both mediums were captured and hanged in 1898. Settler rule then entrenched itself in law through the Land Apportionment Act of 1930, which reserved the best farmland for white ownership and forced African families off land held for generations onto marginal reserves far from roads and railways. When Britain moved toward independence for its African colonies on the basis of majority rule, Rhodesia's white minority government under Ian Smith refused those terms and, on 11 November 1965, unilaterally declared independence rather than accept them. The declaration drew United Nations condemnation and sanctions, and from 1964 an armed resistance hardened into guerrilla war, the Second Chimurenga, fought through the 1970s between Rhodesian forces and two liberation armies, ZANLA based in Mozambique and ZIPRA based in Zambia. The war ground toward stalemate until the parties sat down at Lancaster House in London in 1979 and agreed a ceasefire, a new constitution and elections under British supervision. Zimbabwe became independent on 18 April 1980. Independence did not bring peace to Matabeleland. Between 1983 and 1987 an army brigade trained in North Korea carried out a campaign of killing, torture and disappearance across Ndebele-speaking Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands, an episode known as Gukurahundi. Two government inquiries, the Dumbutshena and Chihambakwe commissions, took testimony at the time but their findings were never published. A report in 1997 by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and the Legal Resources Foundation put likely deaths at a minimum in the thousands and as many as twenty thousand or more, and the higher figure is most often cited today, though it remains an estimate rather than a settled count, since the official inquiries that might have produced one were never released. The land question behind the 1930 Act was never fully resolved at Lancaster House, which protected existing white farm titles for a decade, and it returned with force in 2000, when the government backed and in places led fast-track occupations of white-owned farms, formalised the next year as national policy. Supporters frame it as overdue redistribution, breaking up a pattern that had left a small number of white farmers holding most of the best land at independence. Critics point to the wreckage that followed, with commercial farm output falling to a fraction of pre-2000 levels within a few years. Both readings describe the same land and reach opposite verdicts on what was done to it. What that whole run of history left standing is what a visitor actually walks into. Great Zimbabwe still stands above Masvingo, its walls unmortared and the Great Enclosure intact enough to read as the seat of a state that traded gold for Chinese porcelain. Khami's terraced platforms lie quieter outside Bulawayo. In the Matobo Hills, granite domes hold both the San paintings and, at the summit called World's View, the grave Cecil Rhodes chose for himself. The Zambezi still drops over Victoria Falls, Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, on a Zimbabwean bank that gives the widest views of the falls of either side. Hwange holds the country's largest elephant herds on ground that was Nambya hunting territory before it became a colonial game reserve, and Mana Pools lets visitors walk among lion, elephant and buffalo without a marked trail, though never without a licensed, armed professional guide. The Eastern Highlands at Nyanga, Bvumba and Chimanimani offer cool granite peaks far from the lowveld, and Bulawayo and Harare still carry the shape of the histories that founded them, Lobengula's capital and Rhodes's fort. None of this asks to be photographed carelessly. Zimbabwean law criminalises photographing government buildings, uniformed personnel, checkpoints and other designated sites without written permission, and enforcement has been unpredictable enough that visitors keep cameras for game parks and heritage sites rather than for streets and roadblocks. At Great Zimbabwe and in the Matobo Hills, some sites remain living shrines rather than museum pieces, and Njelele, the Mwari rain shrine outside the park's western boundary, is still approached by pilgrims under long-standing rules of conduct, with other active shrine sites best treated the same way, observed from outside rather than entered uninvited. Gukurahundi and the land reforms of 2000 are not settled history here but live grievance and live politics, worth raising only once some trust has been built.