Great Zimbabwe made this plateau a thirteenth-century trade hub
Landlocked Zimbabwe lies between the Zambezi and Limpopo, bordered by South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, and Mozambique, with Harare as capital. About 17.3 million people (2026 estimate) are mostly Shona and Northern Ndebele; sixteen official languages are led by English, Shona, and Ndebele.
San foragers lived here before Bantu-speaking farmers settled roughly 2,000 years ago. From the eleventh century Shona builders raised Great Zimbabwe, which by the thirteenth century was a major African trading centre and later a launch pad for other plateau kingdoms.
That city gave the country its name. Many sources derive Zimbabwe from the Karanga Shona dzimba-dza-mabwe, houses of stones, spoken by the people still living around the ruins in Masvingo province. The archaeologist Peter Garlake instead proposed a contraction of Zezuru dzimba-hwe, venerated houses, a term for chiefs’ homes or graves.
The colonial names were Southern Rhodesia from 1898, Rhodesia from 1965 and Zimbabwe Rhodesia in 1979, the first two honouring Cecil Rhodes, chief architect of British colonisation, which nationalists rejected. At a 1960 meeting they weighed alternatives such as Matshobana and Monomotapa before adopting Zimbabwe, proposed by Michael Mawema, whose Zimbabwe National Party first used it officially in 1961. Mawema himself briefly wrote Zimbabweland, but by 1962 the shorter form had become the movement’s standard. Robert Mugabe became prime minister at independence in 1980 and president from 1987 under a new presidential system, resigning in 2017 after a coup.
Like many Cold War-era independence names, Zimbabwe is ethnically neutral, although whether a country more than 80 percent Shona is truly a nation state is debated. The constitution recognises sixteen languages but promotes only Shona and English nationally; Shona is widely taught in schools while Ndebele is not, and every head of government so far has been Shona.
Source: Zimbabwe
