Masvingo

Masvingo is where the country's name comes from. The stone city of Great Zimbabwe, 27 km south-east of the provincial capital, flourished from about 1290 to 1450, and for much of the twentieth century Rhodesia's official line was that Africans had not built it. The capital itself began in August 1890 as Fort Victoria, put up by the Pioneer Column of Rhodes's British South Africa Company, and in 1893 its settlers spent three months inside the fort during the war with the Ndebele. Knowing that makes the ruins, the fort towers and the lowveld sugar country read as one story.

1. 4th to 7th century

   Farming people of the Gokomere and Ziwa cultures worked the valley below the Great Zimbabwe hill, mining and smelting iron, long before anyone built in stone. San hunter-gatherers had lived in the area far earlier still. source

2. 11th to 15th century

   Major building at Great Zimbabwe began in the 11th century and went on into the 15th. Around 1300 it replaced Mapungubwe on the Limpopo as the region's trading hub, and excavations have turned up Chinese and Persian porcelain, coins from Arabia and glass beads. Older estimates put the peak population as high as 18,000; a more recent survey says it probably never passed 10,000. source

3. About 1450

   Oral tradition says Nyatsimba Mutota led part of the population north in search of salt to found the Mutapa state, and in the south-west Khami rose as capital of the Butua kingdom. International trade had been falling since the early 15th century, and Great Zimbabwe was probably lived in into the 17th century before it was finally abandoned. source

4. 1890 to 1893

   In 1890 the British South Africa Company's Pioneer Column got its 117 ox-wagons up Providential Pass onto the plateau, and on 14 August C Troop of the police began building the first Fort Victoria 7 km south of today's town. The town moved to its present site early in 1892. On 9 July 1893 Ndebele warriors on a raid against the Shona turned up among the farms east of the fort, and about 200 men, women and children took shelter inside for three months, short of food and often sick, during that year's war. source

5. 1905 to 1970s

   David Randall-MacIver's dig of 1905 to 1906 was the first scientific excavation, and Gertrude Caton Thompson concluded in 1929 that the city was built by Bantu-speaking Africans. Rhodesia's official line in the 1960s and 1970s was still that the builders were not black. Archaeologists who disagreed were censored, and Peter Garlake, the Senior Inspector of Monuments, and Roger Summers of the National Museum left the country over it. source

6. 1936 to 2017

   Gonarezhou, first protected as a game reserve in 1936, became a national park in 1975 and was closed during the Rhodesian bush war and again for much of Mozambique's civil war, reopening in 1994. ZimParks brought in the Frankfurt Zoological Society for financial and technical help in 2007, and in March 2017 the Gonarezhou Conservation Trust, a partnership between the two, took over running the park. source

7. 1980 to 1986

   At independence in 1980 the new country took its name from the ruins and kept the soapstone bird from the Rhodesian flag and coat of arms as its national symbol. UNESCO listed Great Zimbabwe as a World Heritage Site in 1986. source

8. 1998 to 2017

   Work on the Tokwe Mukosi dam began in June 1998 and stalled in 2008. On 4 February 2014 heavy flooding caused a partial failure on its downstream face, and more than 20,000 people were evacuated. The dam was finished in December 2016 and commissioned in May 2017 as the largest inland dam in the country. source

Languages and people

The Karanga, a branch of the Shona, are the majority in the province and Shona is the main language. Chiredzi District has Tsonga communities, Ndebele speakers live along the western edge and the Ndau to the north-east. source

Cattle

Cattle were the measure of wealth at Great Zimbabwe. The elite's power came from managing the city's herd, which was moved with the seasons. source

Sugar country

The lowveld around Triangle is sugar country. Thomas Murray McDougall planted the first cane there in 1931 and it was first processed in 1939. Much of the plantation labour was brought in from Malawi and Zambia, and marriages between those workers and local Karanga and Shangaan families made the mixed population you meet there today. source

Mission art

At Serima Mission Father John Groeber of the Swiss Bethlehem Mission Society, posted there in 1948, taught young primary school boys to draw a face, model it in clay and carve it in wood. Their carvings and paintings now fill the church. The school's best-known artists include Nicholas Mukomberanwa, Joseph Ndandarika and Tapfuma Gutsa. source