Zimbabwe

From the great medieval stone city of the Shona, through the Mutapa and Rozvi states, the Ndebele kingdom, British colonisation as Southern Rhodesia, and a long liberation war to independence in 1980.

Zimbabwe takes its name from Great Zimbabwe, the largest medieval stone city in sub-Saharan Africa, built by ancestors of the Shona between roughly the 11th and 15th centuries and grown rich on a gold trade that reached the Swahili coast and the Indian Ocean world. Great Zimbabwe's decline was followed by the Mutapa empire and the Rozvi and Torwa states, whose dry-stone tradition survives at Khami. In the nineteenth century the Ndebele kingdom of Mzilikazi and his son Lobengula dominated the south-west, until Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company secured the Rudd Concession in 1888, sent the Pioneer Column north in 1890, and seized the country, which became the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia. Early African resistance in the risings of 1896–97 — remembered as the First Chimurenga — was crushed, opening decades of white-minority rule. In 1965 Ian Smith's government issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence; the liberation war, the Second Chimurenga, was waged by ZANU under Robert Mugabe and ZAPU under Joshua Nkomo until the Lancaster House Agreement of December 1979 paved the way to internationally recognised independence on 18 April 1980. The decades since have been marked by the Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland in the 1980s, the chaotic fast-track land reform and economic collapse of the 2000s, and the removal of Mugabe in 2017.