Zimbabwe

F

Defence

In 2004 Zimbabwe’s armed forces totalled about 29,000 personnel, with a paramilitary police force of 21,800 and an air force of 4,000. Some 3,000 Zimbabwean troops were stationed in Mozambique during the civil war there, to keep open Zimbabwe’s important trade corridor along the railway to Beira port. As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the president has total control over the country’s military. Aid comes from the United Kingdom and South Korea. Although Zimbabwe is not in any formal military alliance, it has lent support to the Mozambique government against the RENAMO guerrillas and also backed the United States during operations in Somalia. It has also been involved in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2003, Zimbabwe spent US$105 million (1.7 per cent of its GDP) on defence.

G

International Organizations

Zimbabwe is a member of the United Nations (UN), the African Union, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the South African Development Community (SADC). Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth of Nations for a year after the flawed presidential election of March 2002 and left of its own accord in December 2003.

VI

History

Remains of early hominids have been found in Zimbabwe. About 50,000 years ago the plateau area between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers was inhabited by Khoisan-speaking peoples, the ancestors of the modern San of the Kalahari who left many cave paintings in Zimbabwe, some dating back 30,000 years. About 2,000 years ago, Bantu-speaking peoples began crossing the Zambezi, moving into the plateau area. These Iron Age people included the ancestors of the Shona, who were the main occupants of Zimbabwe until the 1830s, when the Ndebele (descended from Iron Age people who had continued further south) moved into the country during the troubles of the mfecane.

The development of states from about the early 10th century ad, appears to be linked to the establishment of trading contacts with Muslim merchants on the Mozambique coast, who offered to exchange glass beads and cloth for gold, ivory, and copper (which initially had no economic value to the Shona). The first of the trading states was Mapungubwe, centred near the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe rivers. It traded initially mainly in ivory; a gold trade was first developed from panning for stream deposits. Gold-mining began probably during the 11th century, and there are today more than 4,000 pre-colonial working gold sites in modern Zimbabwe.

A

Great Zimbabwe

The trading state which was based at Great Zimbabwe began to develop in the 11th century, taking over from Mapungubwe in the 13th, and reaching its peak in the 14th—when it extended from Botswana to the coast of Mozambique. The state produced cotton cloth, and smelted and manufactured gold, copper, and iron. Great Zimbabwe, whose monumental ruins can still be seen near the River Mutirikwe in the south-east, became a city of some 10,000 people. It ceased to be the centre of the Zimbabwe state and culture in the mid-15th century, possibly because it had outgrown the ability of the surrounding countryside to support such a large settlement.

New Shona states, such as that of the Torwa, the Mutapa, and the Changamire, succeeded the Zimbabwe state. At the beginning of the 14th century the large centralized state, later known as the Mwene Mutapa Empire, came into being. After a rapid territorial expansion in the 15th century, this polity split, and the southern kingdom of Changamire was established.

B

White Settlement

The Portuguese, who gained a toehold on the Mozambique coast shortly after 1500, sent missionaries to Mwene Mutapa, and by 1629 they had reduced the once-powerful empire to a vassal state, though they were forced out by an alliance of Mutapa and Changamire in 1693. Changamire conquered most of the Mutapa Empire at the end of the 17th century.

During the mfecane, the great migrations of the 1830s, the Ngoni, on their march north, destroyed Changamire, and the Ndebele soon after settled in the western part of the country. In 1888 King Lobengula of the Ndebele granted mining rights to the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes, and the following year Rhodes obtained a charter for his British South Africa Company. Subsequent white settlement and encroachment on native lands under company auspices brought warfare with both the Ndebele and the Shona that continued until 1897.