Nyanga

Nyanga (Inyanga on old maps) is a small highland town at about 1,680 m, 115 km north of Mutare (Umtali), and the shopping stop for the national park, the trout dams and Mount Nyangani. The hills around it are covered in stone farming terraces built centuries before Cecil Rhodes bought the plateau and pushed out the chiefdom that lived on it. The national park itself goes back to that purchase.

1. 15th to 18th century

   Late Iron Age farmers built stone terraces along the hillside contours around Ziwa, with hill forts, stone enclosures, iron smelting furnaces and pit structures. The settlement dates to the 15th century and was abandoned in the 18th, though the communities who later settled nearby still treated it as an important place. Ziwa became a national monument in 1946. source

2. 1890s

   White settlers started taking up farms on the Inyanga plateau in the early 1890s, at least six of them men from the 1890 Pioneer Column, the British South Africa Company's armed party that occupied Mashonaland. Fruit was probably the main crop. In 1895 the landowners raised money among themselves to build a road down to Umtali, with the government supplying labour, tools and explosives. source

3. 1896 to 1900

   In 1896 Rhodes wrote to his agent McDonald that Inyanga was much finer than described and told him to buy up to 400 square kilometres. He displaced the people living on the land, and the Sakarombe chieftainship, the local ruling house, took refuge in the semi-arid Ruwangwe area. source

4. 1926

   Rhodes bought the land to grow apples and raise sheep, and it came to the country as his bequest. In 1926 it became Rhodes Inyanga National Park, one of the first national parks declared in the country, and his homestead is now the Rhodes Museum and Rhodes Nyanga Hotel. source

5. 1960s

   North of Nyanga, Chief Rekayi Tangwena refused to let Ian Smith's government move his people off their ancestral land. Court judgements in 1967 ordered them evicted for occupying it against the Land Apportionment Act, and even after their homes were destroyed they would not go. Some hid in the hills, others found shelter on Cold Comfort Farm with Guy and Molly Clutton-Brock. source

6. 1975

   After Herbert Chitepo was assassinated in Zambia on 18 March 1975, Robert Mugabe and Edgar Tekere were driven to Nyafaru farm in Tangwena's area, with orders from ZANU for Mugabe to go to Mozambique and lead the struggle. When Rhodesian security cars started arriving, Mugabe was lifted out through a back window, and Chief Tangwena, his brother Peter and Chiripanyi Nyakurita took the two men across the Rwera River into Mozambique. source

7. 2000 onwards

   The land reform that began in 2000 hit the holiday trade hard. Visitor numbers in the Troutbeck hills above town fell sharply, partly because fewer wealthy landowners were left to stay there, and many farms around it were taken over by people calling themselves war veterans. source

Language and people

ChiManyika is the everyday form of Shona around Nyanga, Nyamaropa and Nyatate, though older local dialects still differ from both Manyika and the Zezuru of Harare. Several communities fed into it, among them the Tangwena of Nyamaropa, the Wanyama under Chief Saunyama and the Hwesa along the Gairezi (Kairezi). source

Living shrines

The old stone sites are still in use. The Nyahokwe clan holds ceremonies at Nyahokwe before each rainy season, including rain-making, while saying openly that their ancestors did not build it. Near Ziwa the Sanyangare people of Nyangare village keep a shrine called Rutumba, and some families treat Ziwa and Hamba mountains as sacred. source

Trout

Rainbow trout came to Nyanga in the 1940s from Canada, Australia and Scotland, and Gulliver and Purdon dams have been restocked for the anglers. ZimParks revived the Nyanga trout fishing tournament in 2012 and runs it every October. source