Matabeleland North

Matabeleland North is the country the Ndebele kingdom made its home, where Cecil Rhodes's agents got the king's seal on the concession they used to take the land, then took it by Maxim gun, and where the last king fled north after his regiments wiped out the patrol sent to catch him. It is also the province of Victoria Falls, Hwange's elephants and the Tonga who lost their river to Lake Kariba, and of the killings of the 1980s that the government is still trying to find words for.

1. Stone Age to the 1800s

   Stone Age foragers left tools across what is now Hwange National Park and cut engravings of animal hoofprints into sandstone shelter walls, with a few small rock paintings in the park's north-west. Iron Age farmers later built stone-walled settlements in the same country, among them Bumbusi, a national monument since 1946 whose main structures date from the 18th and 19th centuries and were built by the Nambya, who trace themselves back to Great Zimbabwe. source

2. 1838 to 1859

   Mzilikazi, forced out of Shaka's Zulu kingdom with his followers in 1823, led his people across the Limpopo and in 1838 settled the land that took their name, Matabeleland. The land already held Kalanga and San communities; Tsholotsho keeps its San name, meaning head of an elephant. In 1859 Mzilikazi let Robert Moffat of the London Missionary Society build a station at Inyathi, the first mission and first permanent white settlement in the country, because he wanted them as go-betweens with the traders from the south, not as preachers. source

3. 1870 to 1891

   Lobengula became king in 1870 after a short succession struggle and ruled from his royal kraal at Bulawayo. On 30 October 1888 he put his elephant seal to the Rudd Concession, granting Cecil Rhodes's agents mining rights in return for rifles and a monthly stipend. He spent the next year trying to undo it, sending envoys to Queen Victoria at Windsor, while Rhodes used it to win a royal charter for the British South Africa Company in October 1889 and send the Pioneer Column into Mashonaland in 1890. A rival concession the king gave the Hamburg businessman Eduard Lippert in 1891 was simply bought by Rhodes as well. source

4. 1893 to 1894

   The company invaded in October 1893 with about 700 men and five Maxim guns, the first time Britain used the weapon in war. The Ndebele army attacked the column near the Shangani on 25 October and at Bembesi on 1 November and lost around 4,000 men to the guns. Lobengula and his people burned Bulawayo as they fled north, and Leander Starr Jameson rode into the ruins on 3 November. On 4 December, at Pupu north of the Shangani, about 50 km west of Lupane, the king's Imbizo regiment under Mtshana Khumalo surrounded Major Allan Wilson's patrol and killed all 34 men who had stayed with him. Lobengula died of smallpox in January 1894. source

5. 1896 to 1897

   In March 1896, with Jameson's forces away on the Jameson Raid, the Ndebele rose against company rule, urged on by the Mlimo, the spiritual leader who blamed the settlers for drought, locusts and rinderpest. Within a week 141 settlers in Matabeleland were dead and Bulawayo was in a laager, with Lozikeyi, a senior queen of Lobengula, among those who made sure the regiments had ammunition. Relief columns broke the siege in late May, the American scout Frederick Burnham shot the Mlimo in a cave in the Matobo Hills, and soon after Rhodes walked unarmed into the Ndebele stronghold and made peace. The Shona rising in the east ran on into 1897. source

6. 1928 to 1963

   Wankie Game Reserve was proclaimed in 1928 on Kalahari sand and became a national park in 1961; most of it has no rivers, so the pans that make it work in the dry season are kept full by pumping. On the Zambezi, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland built the Kariba dam between 1955 and 1959. The lake forced about 57,000 Tonga off their land, and Binga town was built mostly to rehouse them. Operation Noah rescued some 6,000 large animals from the rising water. source

7. 1967 to 1974

   In August 1967 a joint force of 79 ZIPRA and Umkhonto we Sizwe fighters, among them the Luthuli Detachment, crossed the Zambezi about 20 km east of Victoria Falls and fought Rhodesian forces from a base in the Wankie Game Reserve until early September, one of the opening campaigns of the liberation war. On 6 June 1972 explosions in the Wankie No. 2 colliery killed about 427 miners, still the worst mine accident in Zimbabwe's history; the bodies were left underground. Matabeleland was split into North and South in 1974. source

8. 1983 to 1987

   In January 1983 the Fifth Brigade, trained by North Korea and answering to Prime Minister Robert Mugabe's office rather than the army, began the campaign known as Gukurahundi in Matabeleland North, then spread it to Matabeleland South and parts of the Midlands. Ndebele and Kalanga civilians were beaten, shot and, in Tsholotsho and Lupane, burned alive in their huts; in March 1983 at least 55 young people were shot on the banks of the Cewale River in Lupane district. Estimates of the dead run from the Catholic commission's documented minimum of about 2,000 to the 20,000 or more that scholars cite. The Unity Accord of 22 December 1987 ended it without any accounting. A government programme of village hearings and exhumations started in 2024, and survivors and activists distrust it. source

Languages

Ndebele (isiNdebele), a Nguni language closely related to Zulu, is the language of the province and of Bulawayo. Around it sit the older languages of the north-west: Kalanga, Tonga around Binga and the Zambezi, and Nambya around Hwange, which gave the town and the park their name from a king called Sawanga, later Hwange. All four are among Zimbabwe's 16 official languages under the 2013 constitution. English does the signs and the paperwork. source

The Tonga and Nyaminyami

The Tonga of Binga district lost their homeland to Lake Kariba in the late 1950s. Nyaminyami, the river god with a snake's body and a fish's head, is said to live in the Kariba gorge, separated from his wife by the dam wall; the floods that wrecked the half-built dam in 1957 and the next rainy season were put down to his anger. Carved Nyaminyami walking sticks and pendants are what tourists carry home from the Zambezi. Binga also has a name for cannabis, smoked there by tradition since before colonial times and used as a medicine. source

Bulawayo, City of Kings

Bulawayo's central streets were laid out wide enough for an ox wagon to turn, which is why the city centre still feels so open. Ndebele speakers call it koNtuthu ziyathunqa, smoke arising, after the steam and smoke from the coal power station's cooling towers, and City of Kings after Mzilikazi and Lobengula; suburbs carry the names of royals, a regiment and an induna, among them Lobengula, Mzilikazi, Njube and Sizinda. It was the country's industrial hub and has been losing companies to Harare and skilled people to South Africa for years. source

Cattle country

Matabeleland North sits on the edge of the Kalahari Basin and is too dry for most crops; rural families often cannot grow enough maize to feed themselves, and ranching has done better than farming. A substation of the Matopos Research Station at Esikhoveni in Tsholotsho breeds the indigenous Nkone (Nguni) cattle, and herders there talk of ukulagisa, taking the cattle out to the good grazing lands to fatten. Even so, 83 percent of the province's employed people are farmers. source