The history of Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe takes its name from Great Zimbabwe, the stone-walled capital of a kingdom that dominated the gold trade of the southern African plateau in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Its Shona-speaking successors, the Mutapa and Rozvi states, traded and fought with the Portuguese for three hundred years, and in the nineteenth century the Ndebele kingdom established itself in the south-west. Conquered by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company in the 1890s, the country became the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia, whose white minority declared independence in 1965 and fought a long war against African nationalist guerrillas. Independent since 1980, Zimbabwe was ruled for 37 years by Robert Mugabe, whose government carried out the Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland in the 1980s and presided over land seizures and economic collapse after 2000, until the army removed him in 2017.

The granite hills and plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers have been inhabited since the Early Stone Age. For tens of thousands of years the land belonged to hunter-gatherers, ancestors of or related to the San, who left one of the world's richest collections of rock art. Thousands of painted shelters survive, especially in the Matobo Hills south of Bulawayo, showing hunters, dancers and animals.

Bantu-speaking farmers arrived from around the third to fifth centuries CE, as part of the Bantu expansion, bringing iron tools, pottery, crops such as sorghum and millet, and cattle. By the tenth century communities in the south-west, known as the Leopard's Kopje culture, were keeping large herds and trading ivory and gold towards the Indian Ocean, where Muslim merchants of the Swahili coast bought them at Sofala and Kilwa.

The first state of the region grew at the meeting of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers, just over the modern border in South Africa. Around 1220 its rulers moved to the top of Mapungubwe Hill, separating themselves from commoners living below, a sign of the emergence of sacred kingship. Their graves contained gold ornaments, including a famous small gold rhinoceros. Mapungubwe declined in the later thirteenth century, perhaps because of a drier climate and shifting trade routes, and power passed north to the plateau.

Great Zimbabwe, near modern Masvingo, was settled from about the eleventh century and became the capital of a kingdom from the thirteenth. Its builders, ancestors of the Shona, used carefully shaped granite blocks without mortar to raise walls up to eleven metres high. The Hill Complex on a granite outcrop was probably the earliest royal centre, and the Great Enclosure below, with its curving wall and solid conical tower, was built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Hundreds of smaller zimbabwes, houses of stone, are scattered across the plateau, the seats of provincial chiefs.

The Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe drew its wealth from cattle, from tribute and from control of the gold and ivory trade to the coast. Excavations have found Chinese porcelain, Persian pottery, glass beads, a coin minted at Kilwa and carved soapstone birds, now a national emblem. The city may have housed ten to twenty thousand people at its height. It was largely abandoned by the fifteenth century, probably because the surrounding land was exhausted and trade had moved north to the Zambezi valley. When Europeans saw the ruins in the late nineteenth century, many refused to believe that Africans had built them and attributed them to Phoenicians or the Queen of Sheba. Rhodesian governments encouraged such theories, though archaeologists had established the site's African origin by the 1950s.

According to Shona tradition, in the early fifteenth century a ruler named Mutota led followers from the south to the northern edge of the plateau and conquered the Zambezi borderlands, and his son Matope extended the kingdom; historians think these traditions may compress events of several generations. The kings took the title Mwenemutapa, lord of the conquered lands, which the Portuguese rendered as Monomotapa and applied to the whole state. The Mutapa controlled the gold fields of the north and the trade route to the coast along the Zambezi.

The Portuguese Empire captured Sofala in 1505 and set out to reach the source of the gold. In 1561 the Jesuit Gonçalo da Silveira baptised the Mutapa ruler, but was strangled at court shortly afterwards on the king's orders. A large Portuguese expedition sent up the Zambezi in 1571 to avenge him and seize the mines was ruined by disease. Portuguese traders nevertheless set up markets on the plateau, and Afro-Portuguese estate holders built private domains in the Zambezi valley in what is now Mozambique. In the early seventeenth century the Portuguese intervened in Mutapa civil wars, and in 1629 the ruler Mavhura, installed with their help, became a vassal of the Portuguese crown. The kingdom recovered some independence under Mukombwe in the later seventeenth century, but it shrank to the Zambezi valley in the eighteenth and finally disintegrated into rival principalities. In the south-west, the Torwa kingdom of Butua succeeded Great Zimbabwe as the main power from the fifteenth century, with its capital at Khami near modern Bulawayo, whose terraced stone platforms decorated with chevron and chequered patterns are, like Great Zimbabwe, a World Heritage site. In the late seventeenth century a ruler of Shona origin, Changamire Dombo, built a powerful army in the north-east. He defeated a Portuguese force in Maungwe around 1683, took over Butua, and in 1693 destroyed the Portuguese market town of Dambarare, killing its inhabitants and driving the traders off the plateau. In 1695 his forces expelled them from Manyika too.

Dombo's successors, the Rozvi Changamires, ruled much of the plateau for the next century and a half from stone-walled capitals such as Danangombe. They allowed Portuguese trade only at Zumbo on the Zambezi. A long drought from 1795 to 1800 set off civil wars, and in the 1830s the state was overrun by Nguni-speaking armies fleeing the wars of the Mfecane in the south.

The Mfecane was linked to the rise of the Zulu Kingdom under Shaka. One of Shaka's commanders, Mzilikazi of the Khumalo, broke with him around 1823 and led his followers onto the highveld of the Transvaal, building a powerful kingdom. After defeats by Boer trekkers and the Zulu in 1837, he moved north across the Limpopo, and by about 1840 his people had settled in the south-west of modern Zimbabwe, where they defeated the last Rozvi ruler, Chirisamhuru.

Mzilikazi organised the Ndebele state around military regiments, settled in regimental towns, that absorbed captured Sotho, Tswana, Kalanga and Shona people, so that the kingdom became ethnically mixed while speaking an Nguni language. Its capital was at Bulawayo. The Ndebele raided Shona communities for cattle and captives and collected tribute from many Shona chiefs, though others remained independent. Mzilikazi died in 1868 and was succeeded by his son Lobengula, who faced a growing stream of European prospectors.

In 1888 Lobengula agreed to the Rudd Concession, which gave agents of Cecil Rhodes, the mining magnate and later prime minister of the Cape Colony, exclusive mineral rights in his lands in return for rifles and a monthly payment. Lobengula later repudiated it, but Rhodes used it to obtain a royal charter for his British South Africa Company in 1889, in the midst of the Scramble for Africa. In 1890 the Company's Pioneer Column of settlers and police skirted the Ndebele heartland and raised the British flag at Fort Salisbury, the future Harare, on 12 September. In 1893 the Company provoked war with the Ndebele, whose regiments were cut down by Maxim guns; Bulawayo was taken and Lobengula died in flight early in 1894. The territory was named Rhodesia after Rhodes.

Settlers seized land and cattle, and the Company imposed hut taxes and forced labour. In March 1896 the Ndebele rose in revolt, followed in June by many Shona communities, inspired in part by spirit mediums such as Nehanda and Kaguvi. The risings, remembered as the First Chimurenga, killed about a tenth of the settlers before they were crushed by 1897 with great brutality, including the dynamiting of caves where Shona people had taken refuge. Nehanda and Kaguvi were hanged in 1898.

When the Company's charter ran out, settlers voted in a referendum in 1922 against joining South Africa, and in 1923 Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony within the British Empire, with a parliament elected almost entirely by whites. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 divided the land by race, reserving about half, including the best farmland, for a white population of about fifty thousand, and confining the African majority of over a million to reserves. After the Second World War a tobacco boom drew a surge of white immigrants.

In 1953 Britain created the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, joining the colony to Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, and Nyasaland, now Malawi. African nationalism grew, from the City Youth League and the African National Congress of 1957 to the Zimbabwe African People's Union, founded by Joshua Nkomo in 1961. In 1963 a group including Ndabaningi Sithole and Robert Mugabe broke away to form the Zimbabwe African National Union. The Federation was dissolved at the end of 1963, and as its partners moved towards independence under majority rule, Southern Rhodesia's white electorate swung behind the hardline Rhodesian Front.

Britain refused independence without progress towards majority rule, and on 11 November 1965 the prime minister, Ian Smith, issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence, while professing loyalty to Elizabeth II. Britain declared the act illegal and the United Nations imposed its first ever mandatory economic sanctions, but South Africa and Portuguese Mozambique kept Rhodesia supplied. Rhodesia proclaimed itself a republic in 1970, but no state recognised it.

The armed struggle, which Zimbabweans call the Second Chimurenga, began in earnest with a clash at Chinhoyi on 28 April 1966. ZANU's army, ZANLA, was backed by China and operated from Tanzania and later Mozambique, while ZAPU's ZIPRA, supported by the Soviet Union, was based in Zambia, making the conflict part of the Cold War. The war intensified from December 1972, and after Mozambique's independence in 1975 ZANLA guerrillas, led politically by Mugabe, infiltrated across the long eastern border. Rhodesian forces moved rural people into protected villages and raided guerrilla and refugee camps in neighbouring countries, killing hundreds of people at Nyadzonia in Mozambique in 1976 and at Chimoio in 1977. Guerrillas killed white farmers, missionaries and Africans they regarded as collaborators, and ZIPRA shot down two civilian airliners. About 20,000 to 30,000 people died in the war.

In 1978 Smith reached an internal settlement with moderate African leaders, and in 1979 Bishop Abel Muzorewa became prime minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia, but the war continued. Under pressure from South Africa, the front-line states and the new government of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, all parties met at Lancaster House in London, and on 21 December 1979 signed an agreement for a ceasefire, a new constitution and elections. Britain briefly resumed direct rule. In the election of February 1980 ZANU-PF won 57 of the 80 seats elected by African voters, and on 18 April 1980 Zimbabwe became independent, with Mugabe as prime minister and Canaan Banana as president, in one of the last chapters of the decolonisation of Africa.

Mugabe began by calling for reconciliation, kept white farmers and civil servants in place, and expanded schooling and clinics rapidly. But tensions between ZANU and ZAPU, and between their armies, persisted. After arms caches were found on ZAPU-owned properties in 1982, Nkomo was dismissed from the cabinet, and some former ZIPRA fighters deserted and became armed dissidents in Matabeleland.

In January 1983 the government sent the army's Fifth Brigade, trained by instructors from North Korea and answerable directly to the prime minister, into Matabeleland North and later Matabeleland South and the Midlands. In the operation known as Gukurahundi, a Shona term for the early rain that washes away the chaff, soldiers beat, tortured and publicly executed civilians, often after forcing villagers to sing ZANU songs, burned homesteads and imposed a food blockade during a drought. The victims were overwhelmingly Ndebele-speaking and Kalanga civilians and perceived ZAPU supporters, not armed dissidents. A broad consensus of scholars and human rights investigators puts the dead at 20,000 or more, and the killings are widely described as a genocide. The violence ended with the Unity Accord of 22 December 1987, under which ZAPU merged into ZANU-PF, and Mugabe became executive president. No one was prosecuted, official inquiry reports were never published, and Mugabe called it only "a moment of madness".

In the 1990s structural adjustment cut public spending and jobs, large unbudgeted payments to war veterans in 1997 caused the currency to crash, and Zimbabwe sent troops to the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1998. Trade unionists led by Morgan Tsvangirai founded the Movement for Democratic Change in 1999, and in February 2000 voters rejected a government-backed constitution. Within weeks war veterans and ZANU-PF supporters began occupying white-owned farms, and the government's fast-track land reform took most of the roughly 4,000 large commercial farms, often violently, redistributing them to black farmers and, disproportionately, to the politically connected. Land ownership had remained grossly unequal since independence, but the manner of the seizures, together with drought, led to a collapse of commercial agriculture and repeated food shortages.

Zimbabwe left the Commonwealth in 2003. In 2005 Operation Murambatsvina demolished urban settlements and markets, leaving about 700,000 people without homes or livelihoods according to the United Nations. Hyperinflation peaked in 2008 at one of the highest rates ever recorded, millions emigrated, chiefly to South Africa, and a cholera epidemic killed thousands. Tsvangirai led the first round of the presidential election of March 2008, but withdrew from the run-off after a campaign of killings and beatings of his supporters. Regional mediation produced a unity government in 2009 with Tsvangirai as prime minister, and the adoption of the US dollar stabilised the economy. A new constitution was approved in 2013, and ZANU-PF won that year's elections.

Rivalry over the succession split ZANU-PF between supporters of the vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a veteran of the liberation war who had been minister of state security during the Gukurahundi, and a faction around Mugabe's wife Grace. When Mugabe dismissed Mnangagwa in November 2017, the army took control of Harare on 15 November, and as parliament began impeachment proceedings Mugabe resigned on 21 November. Mnangagwa became president and won the disputed election of 2018, after which soldiers shot dead six protesters in Harare. Mugabe died in Singapore in September 2019.

Mnangagwa promised a new start, but repression of critics continued and the economy suffered from currency instability, a new gold-backed currency, the Zimbabwe Gold, being introduced in April 2024. He was re-elected in August 2023 with 52.6 per cent of the vote in a poll that observers said fell short of local and international standards, and his opponent Nelson Chamisa rejected the result. Having said in 2024 that he would step down in 2028, Mnangagwa saw ZANU-PF adopt a resolution in October 2025 to keep him in office until 2030. In 2026 parliament passed a constitutional amendment, signed into law on 7 July, that replaces direct popular election of the president with election by parliament and lengthens presidential and parliamentary terms from five to seven years. The government presented it as a reform for stability, while opposition parties and civil society argued that it erodes the 2013 constitution and that such changes require a referendum.