Zvishavane

Zvishavane (Shabani until 1982) is a mining town of about 60,000 people on the road between [Bulawayo](/zimbabwe/bulawayo/) and [Masvingo](/zimbabwe/masvingo/), 97 km west of Masvingo. Asbestos built it, from 1916 until the mine shut in 2004, and platinum and diamonds now keep it going. Two men who shaped the country have roots here: Garfield Todd, the missionary who became Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, and Emmerson Mnangagwa, born in the town in 1942 and president since 2017.

1. 1916

   Shabani Mine opened to supply asbestos during the First World War, and the town grew up as housing for its workers. source

2. 1921 to 1928

   A Village Management Board took charge of the settlement in 1921, but it stayed small until the railway arrived in 1928. A Town Management Board followed in 1930, and municipal status only came in 1968. source

3. 1934 to 1947

   Garfield Todd and his wife Grace, Churches of Christ missionaries from New Zealand, founded Dadaya Mission about 20 km west of the town in 1934. Robert Mugabe taught there after finishing at Kutama in 1945, and it was there that he met Ndabaningi Sithole. source

4. 1942 to 1955

   Emmerson Mnangagwa was born in Shabani on 15 September 1942. After his father was arrested in 1952 in a dispute with a white land officer, the district commissioner told the family to go to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), and they reached Mumbwa by train in 1955. source

5. 1982

   Shabani became Zvishavane in the round of renaming that replaced colonial spellings after independence. The town had 26,758 people that year. source

6. 1990s to 2004

   SMM Holdings, owner of the Shabanie and Mashava mines, belonged to T and N Holdings, and in the mid 1990s, as T and N shed assets, the businessman Mutumwa Mawere bought shares in it. The mines closed in 2004, when the state put the company under reconstruction with an administrator in place of its board. Shabanie alone had employed more than 5,500 workers, and they lost their jobs. source

7. 2011

   Seven years after the takeover the Shabanie workers had not been paid for two years and their compound had had no electricity for a year over an unpaid power bill. Mimosa platinum mine, 30 km away, was running its mills around the clock on power imported from Mozambique. source

8. November 2017

   Mnangagwa took office as president on 24 November 2017, after the army moved against Robert Mugabe. From 1980 to 1988 he had been Minister of State for National Security, in charge of the CIO (the Central Intelligence Organisation) during Gukurahundi, when the army's Fifth Brigade killed thousands of Ndebele civilians in Matabeleland between 1983 and 1987. His part in it is disputed and he denies involvement. source

People and language

Zvishavane is Karanga country. The Karanga are the southern branch of the Shona, the largest language group in Zimbabwe. In Mberengwa (Belingwe), the district on the town's southern border, Karanga and Ndebele are the main languages, and many schools and clinics there are run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church. source

Football

Football is the town's other industry. FC Platinum, known as Mimosa Football Club until January 2011, plays at the 15,000 seat Mandava Stadium and has won the Premier Soccer League four times. source

Water harvesting

Zephaniah Phiri spent more than 50 years on what he called water planting on his farm near Zvishavane: stone terraces, silt traps, roof gutters and a sealed underground reservoir that catch the runoff from a ruware (a rocky mound) above the fields. A good rainy season gave him enough stored water for two years of drought, farmers came from across the region and around the world to see it, and in 1988 Oxfam put up the first money for his Zvishavane Water Project. source

Mission schools

Dadaya Mission School is tied up with the start of African nationalism in the country. Sithole and Todd were the two main antagonists in the 1947 student strike there, and its pupils included the minister Cephas Msipa and the first ambassador to Nigeria, Kingsley Dube. source