Town · Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe
Gwanda
The capital of Matabeleland South, a gold and cattle town on the A6 between Bulawayo and Beitbridge, and the start of the long road to the Tuli Safari Area on the Shashe.
Short answer
Gwanda is in Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe. This page lists 4 places to stay, 6 places to eat and drink and 2 sights. The nearest park with an entry fee on this site is Matobo National Park, about 70 km away, where international adults pay from US$10.
- Places to stay
- 4
- Eat and drink
- 6
- Sights
- 2
- Park fee nearby: Matobo National Park
- US$10 €9about 70 km away
In and around Gwanda
12 places listedWhere to stay in Gwanda 4
- 20.94°S 29.00°EHotelApex Lodge
- 20.94°S 29.00°EHotelGwanda Lodge
- 20.95°S 29.00°EHotelMt Cazalete 1, 2, Posh Hotel
- 20.94°S 29.01°EHotelARK City Lodge
Sights 2
- AccidentAttraction
- Turnoff to Joel NyathiAttraction
Restaurants and cafes 2
- Asima Restaurant, Farm Harvest Fresh ProduceRestaurant
- Chicken Inn Glow/ Cream Inn GlowRestaurant
Bars and pubs 4
- Chill SpotBar
- Ko BenjaminiBar
- Ko Nyathi BarBar
- Phoenix ShisanyamaBar
Gwanda is the capital of Matabeleland South and the one proper town on the A6 between Bulawayo and Beitbridge, 134 km from the city and 197 km short of the bridge. It began in 1900 as a camp for gold prospectors, took its name from Jahunda hill, and still lives off gold and cattle. About 27,000 people live here, at 1,006 m in a dry province on the edge of the Kalahari. For a visitor it is fuel, a bed and the start of the long road to Tuli.
Getting there
From Bulawayo the A6 runs 134 km south-east through Esigodini and Mbalabala. From Beitbridge it is 197 km the other way past West Nicholson. Expect police roadblocks, and drive in daylight: animals on the road, deep potholes and highway robbery, mostly at night. The self-drive guide has the paperwork.
For the Tuli Safari Area, head south on the A6 for 6 km and turn right onto the tarred Guyu road at the Tuli Institute sign. The tar ends at Guyu business centre at 57.5 km, then gravel through Hwali to the parks office at 135 km. Take a 4x4; the Shashe crossing alone is about 600 m of sand.
When to go
May to August. Gwanda gets 299 mm of rain a year and almost none between May and September; July days reach 21.5 °C and nights drop to 9.9 °C. The November to March rains turn the Mzingwane, dry sand most of the year, into a river, and are no time to be on the Tuli gravel. Do that trip in the dry.
What to do
In town, not much: provincial offices, the provincial hospital and the handful of lodges and bars we list. Blanket Mine, 15 km north-west, has dug gold since 1904, and Vubachikwe, 10 km out on the Mtshabezi, sits on workings older than the town.
The real draw is Tuli, 135 km away: 416 km² of basalt country on the Shashe, a safari area since 1975 and the Zimbabwean core of the Greater Mapungubwe transfrontier conservation area since 2006. Elephant, lion, wild dog and black rhino cross freely into Botswana and South Africa. It runs as hunting concessions, with camping at the parks office and a wilderness camp a kilometre north. Fort Tuli is the history: the fort the Pioneer Column built in July 1890, when it crossed the Shashe on 11 July, Boer War trenches of 1899 and a cemetery of 25 graves. The 16 km Tuli Circle drawn around the fort is now the Botswana border.
Good to know
Cash is US dollars in small notes. Almost no fuel station takes cards and fuel runs short, so fill up here. Power cuts are long and water is rationed in places. The Tourism Authority rates Matabeleland South low to no risk for malaria, but its own rule puts high risk below 1,200 m from November to June, and Gwanda sits at 1,006 m. Take advice before you camp at Tuli in those months. The travel essentials guide has the rest.
History and culture
Gwanda is the capital of Matabeleland South and the town most people drive straight through on the A6, 134 km from Bulawayo and 197 km short of the Beitbridge border. It began in 1900 as a gold camp and still lives off gold and cattle, with Blanket Mine and its 1,204 m shaft 15 km west of town. The district around it is Ndebele and Sotho country that saw some 400 schoolchildren leave over the border for the war in January 1977 and was brought to the brink of starvation under a food curfew in 1984. Fill up, eat, and know a little of that before you drive on.
- Stone Age
The oldest traces of people here are Stone Age tools picked up in the Gwalingemba Hills, 52 km south of town. Nobody has built a museum around them. They are simply the evidence that the dry country between the Matobo Hills and the Limpopo has been lived in for a very long time. source
- 1800s
Before the town existed this was the land of the Jahunda, who spoke a dialect of Kalanga. Groups of Babirwa, a Sotho people from the Bobirwa country in Botswana, some travelling with other migrants from the Transvaal, settled what is now the south-west of Gwanda District around Gungwe, Ntalale and Kafusi, and found the Jahunda already there alongside a group of Ndebele, the people Mzilikazi had led north out of the Transvaal. The Babirwa villages are still there. source
- July 1890
The Pioneer Column, the force Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company sent north to occupy Mashonaland, built its first fort in the country at Tuli on the east bank of the Shashe, in what is now the far south-west of Gwanda District, on the spot the hunter Frederick Selous had used as a camp. The same fort was later the jumping-off point for the Jameson Raid into the Transvaal. Tuli today is a police post, its Victorian wooden police station shipped out from Britain, and a bad road. source
- 1900
Gwanda itself was founded in 1900 as a camp of European gold miners and prospectors and took its name from Jahunda, the hill nearby that also names its oldest township. It grew slowly: 4,874 people at the 1982 census, 10,565 in 1992 (a count the town's leaders rejected as too low) and 20,226 in 2012. It is now a municipality of ten wards, and the provincial government sits in the complex on 3rd Avenue between Queen Street and Khartoum Street. source
- 1904
Blanket Mine, 15 km west of town, started producing gold in 1904 and has changed hands with the mining world ever since: the Canadian company Falconbridge took it in 1965, Kinross in 1993, and Caledonia Mining bought it from Kinross in April 2006. Caledonia holds 64 percent today and Zimbabwean shareholders the rest. The mine has produced more than a million ounces of gold in its life. source
- 1974
Rhodesia split Matabeleland into North and South in 1974 and made Gwanda the capital of the new southern province, 54,172 square kilometres of dry cattle country. Beitbridge on the border is the bigger town. Gwanda has the government offices. source
- 30 January 1977
On the evening of 30 January 1977 three guerrillas of ZAPU (Joshua Nkomo's liberation movement) walked into Manama Mission, the Church of Sweden's Lutheran school and hospital about 24 km from the Botswana border, and led away roughly 400 pupils with their teachers and two nurses. The group was walked to the border, trucked to Francistown and flown to Zambia for military training. It is often told as an abduction; other accounts say the students left voluntarily and call it an exodus. The school closed and moved for a time to Bulawayo, Rhodesian forces occupied the mission, the hospital held on until September 1979, and both reopened in 1980 after independence. source
- 1984
In the violence against civilians in Matabeleland and the Midlands in the 1980s, the army's Fifth Brigade, named Gukurahundi (the rain that washes away the chaff), was deployed in Matabeleland South in January 1984. People were taken from their villages to detention camps at Sun Yet Sen and at Bhalagwe in Matobo District, where several thousand were held at a time from January until May 1984 and the dead were thrown down Antelope Mine, and a strict curfew, under which drought relief food was stopped and the stores closed in the third straight year of drought, brought people to the brink of starvation. The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace counts Gwanda among the districts that suffered violence in the 1980s. Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo signed the Unity Accord on 22 December 1987. source
- People
- The 2022 census counted 27,143 people in Gwanda's ten urban wards, 12,770 men and 14,373 women in 8,375 households, and 124,548 more in the 24 rural wards around it. It is a small capital. More than four times as many people live in the villages of the district as in the town. source
- Ndebele and Sotho
- Sotho is spoken in Gwanda and in parts of Beitbridge district. Sesotho is one of the country's 16 official languages on paper. In practice, says Maretha Dube, a Gwanda language researcher who lectured in Sotho at the Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo Polytechnic and launched the Zimbabwe Sotho Development Initiative in December 2022, some secondary schools teach it and some do not, the pupils have no textbooks, it is not yet examined at O level, and trained Sotho-speaking teachers get posted outside Sotho-speaking areas. source
- Chiefs
- Chief Masuku is one of Gwanda District's traditional leaders, and the Marupi chieftainship of the Babirwa traces itself back to a man called Daueatswala, whose people crossed the Shashe from Botswana. In October 2024 Chief Marupi, born Oaheng Nare, died in Harare at 28, one of the youngest chiefs in the province. Chief Bango said a lot of time had gone into grooming him. source
- Show week, August
- The Matabeleland South Agricultural Show is held in Gwanda each August. The 68th edition opened on 20 August 2026 and ran to the Saturday under the theme Unlocking New Opportunities through Collaboration, with the Minister of State for the province due to open it formally and a crop of new exhibitors. source
- Gospel in the stadium
- From its launch in 2015 to its last edition in 2019, Phelandaba Stadium hosted the Gwanda Gospel Music Festival each October, three days from Friday to a Sunday church service, put on by Justice Maphosa, a Gwanda businessman based in South Africa, through his Big Time Strategic Group. Rebecca Malope, Deborah Fraser, Hlengiwe Mhlaba, Takesure Zamar and the late Oliver Mtukudzi all played it. The organisers shelved it in 2021 because of Covid lockdown limits on crowds. source
For American visitors: Thomas Tlou, born in Gwanda on 1 June 1932, took his first degree at Luther College in Iowa from 1962 to 1965, graduating magna cum laude in African history, then studied at Johns Hopkins and the University of Wisconsin at Madison before settling in Botswana. He was Botswana's permanent representative at the United Nations from 1976 to 1980 and the first Motswana vice-chancellor of the University of Botswana, from 1985 to 1998. He wrote History of Botswana with Alec Campbell. source
For American visitors: Mtshabezi Mission belongs to the Brethren in Christ, a church that began among Mennonites near Marietta, Pennsylvania, around 1778 and is still run from Grantham, Pennsylvania, next door to Messiah University. It has about 80,000 members in 1,100 churches across 23 countries. source
Main sights in Gwanda
5- Fort Tuli and the Tuli Circle
Reached from Gwanda through Guyu and Hwali, on the Shashe about 90 km west of Beitbridge. The 1890 fort is gone. What stands is the wooden Victorian police station, moved onto the fort site in the 1970s, and around it the Tuli Circle, a ring 16 km across that the pioneers agreed with local leaders as a no-grazing zone to keep village cattle, and the rinderpest they carried, away from the column's oxen. The Botswana border still follows its rim and the circle now lies inside the Thuli Parks and Wildlife Land. The road in from the Beitbridge side is in very poor condition.
Wikipedia, Tuli, Zimbabwe - Gulubahwe Cave
A rock painting site in Gwanda District gazetted as National Monument number 20 in 1974, one of only two national monuments in the district (the other, Macardon Claims, number 14, is an archaeological site). National Museums and Monuments publishes nothing on what the paintings show or how to reach the cave, and we have no first-hand report, so ask at the provincial offices in Gwanda before setting out.
National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, National Monuments of Zimbabwe - Mtshabezi Mission
The Brethren in Christ station founded in 1906 about 120 km south of Bulawayo by Harvey and Emma Frey from the church's first mission at Matopo, with Henry Steigerwald and Mlobeki Moyo, one of Matopo's first graduates. A brick church was up by 1908, and the girls' school that opened the same year took in girls escaping marriages their parents had arranged. Teacher training ran here from 1956 until the war pushed it to Bulawayo in the 1970s. Today there is a 110-bed hospital with one doctor and the Ekuphileni Bible Institute, moved here from Wanezi in 1968.
Rhodesian Study Circle, Brethren in Christ Church: Mtshabezi Mission - Manama Mission
The Lutheran mission about 24 km from the Botswana border, run by the Church of Sweden from 1938 and by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Zimbabwe since 1963, with a hospital working by 1950 and a secondary school from 1964. It is known across Zimbabwe for the night of 30 January 1977, when some 400 pupils left for the war, and it is the place to go if you want to understand how this district fed the liberation struggle. The school and hospital both reopened in 1980.
Rhodesian Study Circle, Church of Sweden: Manama Mission - Liebig's factory, West Nicholson
The closed Liebig's beef cannery at West Nicholson, once called one of the biggest meat canning plants in Africa. It employed more than 1,000 people, processed hundreds of cattle a day from Matabeleland and the Midlands and exported to Europe, and gave the village free offal and tinned beef. It scaled down and closed in 1996, after foot-and-mouth killed most of the cattle and Europe banned Zimbabwean beef, and the people who worked there have been poor since. It explains the cattle economy you have been driving through.
CITE, Leibigs meat factory: former employees living in abject poverty (29 June 2020)
Did you know?
- Rupiah Banda, fourth president of Zambia from 2008 to 2011, was born at Miko in Gwanda on 19 February 1937 to parents who had come down from Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) to find work. He died at home in Lusaka on 11 March 2022. source
- Work on Blanket's Central Shaft was announced in August 2015 and it was commissioned in March 2021. It goes down 1,204 m, cost about US$67 million against contractor quotes of around US$100 million, lifts 3,000 tonnes a day, and gave the mine a life to 2034. Output in 2019 was about 55,000 ounces. source
- Colleen Bawn, 59 km east on the A6, is named after an Irish girl the prospector who pegged the claim in 1895 had known. The gold mine opened in 1905, but since the Second World War the place has lived on limestone, and the Pretoria Portland Cement works is the reason a village of about 2,500 people is still there. source
- Vubachikwe, 10 km north-west of town on the Mtshabezi River, has been dug for gold commercially since the late 1800s and, the archaeology shows, long before that, both in the river gravels and underground. Forbes and Thompson of Bulawayo have held the lease since 1983, and the village of 2,077 counted in 1982 grew up to house the miners. source
- Gwanda State University, founded in 2012, teaches mining, metallurgical and surveying engineering plus crop and animal science, which is the local economy set out as a prospectus. It has been camped at the former Epoch Mine in Insiza District while its 87 ha campus in Gwanda is built, with a 2.5 ha farm at Filabusi. source
Checked 19 October 2026.
Map of Gwanda
See every place on this map as a list