Z is for Zimbabwe

Fast Facts

• Named for: Dzimba-dza-mabwe, houses of stone.
• Capital: Harare
• Long/Lat: 17.5 S/31.0 E about 20 hours, 13,000 miles east of Castro Valley.
• Population: 17.2 million, 260 Castro Valleys
• Size: 150,000 sq mi, 8000 Castro Valleys
• Avg temp in April: 75 F/24 C
• Median household income: $1,700 annually
• Ethnicity: 99.6% Black African
• Main industries: Platinum, tourism, trade (with South Africa)

We made it! It’s the end of the month and the end of the alphabet. There are only two countries that start with Z (Zanzibar is not a country–keep on learning!). Ironically, those two countries are next to each other. But Zimbabwe is just a little bit older than Zambia, at least in terms of human development, and I found its origin stories a trifle more compelling. Half a million years old is nothing to sneeze at.

Zimbabwe has continually reinvented itself, although that has been one of the through-lines uncovered for many of these A-Z Small Countries. Even the indigenous people are made up of many different people, who have swept in and out, looking for promising things to eat or trade. Empires, kingdoms, usurpers, rebels, leaders in prosperity and strife, new independence which is hard to hold on to: these are the themes of Zimbabwe. Good times attract more strife. Lather, rinse, repeat. All part of the Great Wheel and the long story.

Half a million years ago, humans were tool users. They had figured out how to create fire on demand and fashion stone tools i.e., the Stone Age. These people, who left their imprint on Zimbabwe, were Homo erectus shifting into Homo sapiens, the humans who would go on to invent cloth, bread, and accounting. That was last year’s challenge, but the point is that this far back, humans-to-be had not really migrated out of Africa yet.

These 500,000-year-old humans had migrated south from their origins in the Great Rift Valley that encompasses Kenya, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. They went all the way to South Africa, which is rife with evidence of settlements. But some stayed in the Matobo Hills in Zimbabwe. There are rock paintings such as Nswatugi, as well as tools and other evidence of human habitation from 500,000 years forward.

The country today is landlocked, criss-crossed with rivers across its great plateau. There are some mountains near the border, desert to the south, and the famous Victoria Falls on the northwestern border with that other “Z.” The people who left their art on the walls were the San, although it was the Bantu-speakers who flourished and expanded from Central and Western Africa across much of the south.

Europe experienced a Dark Ages in the 800-1200 C.E. time frame, but for much Africa and Asia, the light was growing brighter. Arab empires grew, but so did those in Africa. The South-Central African Kingdom of Mapungwe was noted by Arab traders in the 13th century, and as the Shona peoples expanded and built further, they built further. There was a legendary city of stone, Great Zimbabwe (which means houses of stone). The Portuguese labeled it Monomotapa on the map, describing a large circle of traders in an African empire of the south. The stone city held perhaps 18,000 people behind its walls and represent some of the oldest ruins in Southern Africa.

They had gold, ivory, and copper which they could trade for glass and cloth from the north. From 1450 to 1760, it was renamed the Kingdom or Empire of Mutapa. Under other circumstances, we would know these names like we know Philip and Medici and the Tudors.

The Portuguese navigators had that papal license to everything east, according to the Treaty of Tordesillas. They took their high-tech ships around Africa, “discovering” resources. The Kingdom of Zimbabwe was abandoned by the 17th century, moved inland or elsewhere; the subsequent Rowzi Empire fought off the Portuguese and Europeans for a time. The Zulus fought back against the Dutch, who also came looking to put down a foothold. Then, eventually the British.

Europeans saw the scramble for Africa as a fight among European powers, all armed with gunpowder-based weapons. The Africans already there were an afterthought. As the British moved into South Africa, along came Cecil Rhodes.

Rhodes came from Herfordshire but was sent to South Africa to improve his health. On lands there, he “discovered” diamonds then bought mines with the proceeds to discover more. Eventually, he discovered enough to become governor of the Cape Colony, and to further add land to the north and west. The land was named Rhodesia for him in 1895. The people weren’t passive; there was resistance and rebellion, repeated wars. But the Shona and Zulu peoples didn’t have the weapons.

In 1922, the British allowed Rhodesia to vote for self-governance, but this was not Black Africans. White Africans voted to give themselves land and to restrict what Blacks could own and how they could vote. A second infamous name was put in charge: Ian Smith.

Smith and his white supremacist Rhodesian Front party governed the country for 15 years, 1964-1979. Rhodesia was wealthy, beautiful, abundant in natural resources, and strong in trade, all benefits distributed exclusively to the latest set of usurpers and colonizers.

After a series of rebellions, international economic sanctions, and increasing pressure from within and without, the British took Rhodesia back, ousted Smith, and allowed the people to elect new leaders. The leader of the rebels, who had been pushing for justice and better conditions for the Blacks of the country, was Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe became prime minister in 1980. Part of his stance was to redistribute land that had been taken from Blacks; part was to replace European names with African ones, including the country’s name of Zimbabwe, which hearkened back to the ancient Kingdom with its magnificent stronghold from centuries past. However, those who opposed Mugabe were imprisoned and executed as he engaged in a systematic campaign of genocide from 1983-1986, partly carried about by hired North Korean mercenaries.

Initially, under Mugabe, the average Black citizen’s life improved. His Marxist ideal and cozying up to socialist and communist leaders was intensely criticized, but his early economic policies righted the balance of disenfranchisement from the Rhodesian Front policies. However, he also fought any dissenters, and civil wars broke out repeatedly. As time went on, a new problem emerged as part of Zimbabwe’s system. Mugabe wouldn’t leave. Like the Rhodesians before him, and the British, Portuguese, Zulu, Bantu, and Shona peoples at one time or another, he created rules to keep himself in power.

In 2017, Mugabe’s armies and ministers had finally had enough; they turned him out of office with drawn rifles in a coup. Things improved for a while, but the new leader was his vice president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who now himself is trying to rig elections and exploit the country’s resources. In 2023, Mnangagwa signed over 20% of the Zimbabwe forests to a Saudi carbon offset conglomerate, Blue Carbon. The Saudis want to own carbon offsets for their oil produciton. Now, even the pure air of Zimbabwe is mortgaged out to wealthy outsiders.

Thus, the long story of Zimbabwe has been a parade of pride in one of the most ancient cultures, but one which has had a constant stream of interlopers and intruders. The people will have to continue to bounce back. They surely will, with half a million years of experience at it already.

So we come to the end of another A-Z challenge. These always starts like a sprint but turns to a marathon. I hope I have kept us all engaged enough, since I am sure you are now filled to the brim with facts, positions, and topographies. I learned a lot while I wrote these, too! Thanks to those of you who wrote me such wonderful comments (and wrote great A-Z posts of your own). Here’s to continuing the journey to unearth “fact facts”–i.e., the real ones, not the social media ones–long into the future!