Zimbabwe is a landlocked plateau country situated in southern Africa. Officially known as the Republic of Zimbabwe, it is located between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It shares a 125-mile (200-kilometre) border on the south with the Republic of South Africa and is bounded on the southwest and west by Botswana, on the north by Zambia, and on the northeast and east by Mozambique.
The area is characterized by vast outcroppings of Precambrian rock, which is between about570 million and 4 billion years old. The most ancient part of this rock formation, known as the basement complex, covers the greater part of the country. There are also numerous small rounded granite hillocks known locally as kopjes. The basement complex’s schist belts contain the veins and lodes of the majority of the country’s gold, silver, and other commercial mineral deposits.
Zimbabwe, lying north of the Tropic of Capricorn, is completely within the tropics but enjoys subtropical conditions because of its high average elevation. Toward the conclusion of the hot, dry months, which stretch from August to October, monsoon winds that have crossed the Indian Ocean and Mozambique result in severe orographic rainfall when they reach the rampart formed by the eastern highlands. The eastern regions consequently receive the country’s heaviest rainfall and have a more prolonged rainy season (lasting from October into April) than the rest of Zimbabwe. The high altitude of the broad plateau of western Zimbabwe helps to guarantee fine weather there during the cool, dry winter months from May to August.
Zimbabwe’s capital city, Harare, was formerly known as Salisbury, named after Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister at the time of its founding in 1890. The name Harare derives from the Shona Chief Neharawe. The country has 16 official languages: Chewa, Chibarwe, English, Kalanga, “Koisan” (presumably Tsoa), Nambya, Ndau, IsiNdebele, Shangani, Shona, “sign language” (Zimbabwean sign languages), SeSotho, Tonga, Tswana, TshiVenda, IsiXhosa.
Evidence reveals that Zimbabwe has been inhabited since the Stone Age — up to 500,000 years ago. The Bantu civilization of the Shona ruled Zimbabwe between the 11th and 15th centuries.
The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Great Zimbabwe was built between 1100 and 1450 AD. Europeans, when they found the remains of Great Zimbabwe and its surrounding goldmines, refused to accept that indigenous Africans could have created such a city. Great Zimbabwe inspired various literature, including H Rider Haggard’s “King Solomon’s Mines” and “She”, as well as Wilbur Smith’s best-seller “The Sunbird”.
The Victoria Falls, the world’s largest sheet of falling water, is located in Zimbabwe (on the border with Zambia). The falls stretch the whole width of the Zambezi River, are about 1,700 meters broad, and descend roughly 108 meters. David Livingstone, a Scottish adventurer, named them in 1855 after British Queen Victoria. However, they are called by the Kalolo-Lozi people Mosi-oa-Tunya, which translates to ‘the smoke that thunders.’
Zimbabwe was known as Southern Rhodesia after a man named Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes and his British South Africa Company exploited a British mandate to spearhead the colonization of Zimbabwe in the nineteenth century. Following the independence of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) in 1964, Zimbabwe became known unofficially as Rhodesia until 1979.
Zimbabwe achieved majority rule and internationally recognized independence in April 1980 following a long period of colonial rule and a 15-year period of white-dominated minority rule, instituted after the minority regime’s so-called Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965.
The struggle for independence, land, and power runs throughout Zimbabwe’s modern history. When Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, Robert Mugabe’s administration took careful steps to change the management paradigm that had been passed down from the white minority authority.
Prior to independence, white settlers and absentee landlords owned the majority of the country’s greatest farmland. As a result, the nationalist movement became increasingly focused on land ownership, and the Zimbabwe government’s primary preoccupation after independence was to implement land reform in rural regions and initiate large-scale settlements of Black people on former white farms. The Land Tenure Act, a more rigidly segregationist law that replaced the Land Apportionment Act in 1969, was amended in 1977, while the civil war was still ongoing, to allow Blacks to buy white farms and urban property, and residential segregation began to deteriorate significantly after hostilities ended.
Zimbabwe’s economy began to collapse in the 1990s and intensified in the early 2000s. This is due to a number of factors, including land reform, which aimed to accelerate the slow reallocation of farmland from the white minority to Black Zimbabweans, and Mugabe’s contentious 1998 decision to intervene in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s civil war, which cost the Zimbabwean economy hundreds of millions of dollars and resulted in the suspension of international economic aid to Zimbabwe. Later years saw the country’s aid and loans withdrawn in protest of the land reform program, breaches of human and political rights, and Zimbabwe’s inability to repay earlier debts.
Robert Mugabe, who was Zimbabwe’s first president, served for over four decades. He was ultimately removed from power after a coup in 2017 and died in 2019 at the age of 95.
Zimbabwe’s population is predominantly youthful, with more than one-third under the age of 15 and almost one-third aged 15 to 29. Approximately one-third of the population resides in urban areas, mainly in Harare and Bulawayo.
The Zimbabwe flag features a black stripe to signify the ethnic majority, crimson for the carnage during freedom, green for agriculture, yellow for mineral richness, and white for peace and growth. A red star represents socialism, as does a representation of the Zimbabwe bird, which is featured on sculptures in Great Zimbabwe.
