Shona people

The Shona are a Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa. They make up the majority of the population of Zimbabwe, at least 70 per cent by common estimates, and also live in Mozambique, South Africa and a worldwide diaspora. Their ancestors built Great Zimbabwe and a series of powerful states on the Zimbabwe plateau, and in the past outsiders sometimes called them the Karanga.

The Shona are usually grouped by the main clusters of their language: the Korekore in the north of Zimbabwe, the Zezuru in the centre, the Manyika in the east around Mutare and across into Mozambique, the Ndau in the south-east, the Karanga around Masvingo and the Kalanga in the south-west. One estimate puts the total Shona population at about 22.6 million. Their language, chiShona, is spoken by more than 14 million people in its broader definition. A standard written form was developed from the 1920s, when the Rhodesian administration asked the South African linguist Clement Doke to advise on it, and was fixed in the 1950s. The first novel in Shona, Solomon Mutswairo's Feso, appeared in 1957, and hundreds of novels and collections of stories and poetry have followed.

Shona speakers are part of the long movement of Bantu-speaking peoples across central and southern Africa. In the 11th century Karanga groups formed kingdoms on the Zimbabwe plateau. Great Zimbabwe, near modern Masvingo, was settled from around 1000 AD and became the capital of the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe from the 13th century; its builders were ancestors of the Shona. Building went on there until the 15th century, and the city was abandoned in the 16th or 17th. Later states included Butua under the Torwa dynasty, the Mutapa Empire, whose gold reached Swahili, Arab and other traders on the coast, and the Rozvi Empire. These states earned much of their income from exporting gold and copper. Succession from brother to brother often led to civil wars, which the Portuguese exploited from the 16th century.

In the 1830s the Ndebele destroyed the weakened Rozvi state, and the Portuguese gradually pressed in on Mutapa. Later in the century the British South Africa Company's Pioneer Column set up the colony that became Rhodesia, and the First Matabele War that followed led to the full annexation of Mashonaland. In Portuguese Mozambique, colonial forces fought the remnants of Mutapa until 1911.

Shona communities have traditionally farmed for their own needs, growing sorghum, beans and groundnuts, and later maize, which largely replaced sorghum. Cattle and goats are kept as a reserve against drought. The staple food is sadza, a thick porridge made from maize or sorghum. Homesteads are made of round houses, each with its own use, set around a cleared yard. Clans and sub-clans are identified by mitupo, emblems usually named after animals, which help to define kinship and guide marriage.

Traditional Shona religion centres on Mwari, the creator, who is approached through prayer and through ancestral spirits, the dzavadzimu, who link the living and God; the all-night bira ceremony calls on the spirits for guidance. Colonial officials and anthropologists often dismissed these beliefs in favour of Christianity. Today an estimated 60 to 80 per cent of Shona people are Christians, while older beliefs remain widespread. The mbira, a keyed instrument played at both religious and secular gatherings, has become something like a national instrument of Zimbabwe, and Shona stone sculpture, revived from the 1940s and sold to collectors from the 1950s, is exhibited in museums around the world. Shona migrants who went to Kenya as missionaries in the 1960s have descendants who were recognised in 2021 as one of Kenya's official ethnic groups.

Our maps draw a territory labelled Shona in 1878, 1880 and 1900; the outline is approximate, and the map years are not dates in Shona history. Much of the drawn area lies in present-day Mozambique and Zambia rather than in the Zimbabwean heartland where most Shona live today.