Zimbabwe was the only country in the world named after a businessman. Cecil Rhodes's company took it with a dubious mining concession and an armed column, crushed a great rising, and handed power to white settlers. When they declared independence on their own in 1965 to block majority rule, it took fifteen years and a war to win the freedom that came on 18 April 1980.
The name Zimbabwe comes from the Shona for "houses of stone". Great Zimbabwe, a city of granite walls built from about the 11th to the 15th century, was the capital of a trading state that sent gold to the Indian Ocean coast. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Rhodesian governments long claimed that Africans could not have built it, a lie that archaeologists disproved.
By the 19th century the Shona lived across the plateau, and in the south-west the Ndebele kingdom, founded by people who had moved north from Zululand in the 1830s, ruled from Bulawayo under King Lobengula.
Cecil Rhodes believed there was a "second Rand" of gold north of the Limpopo. On 30 October 1888 his agent Charles Rudd persuaded Lobengula to sign a concession granting all metals and minerals in his kingdom, in exchange for rifles, ammunition, a steamboat and a monthly payment. Lobengula later said he had been deceived about what he signed, and tried to disown it. Some contemporaries, such as the hunter Frederick Selous, argued that Mashonaland was not even Lobengula's to give.
Rhodes used the concession to win a Royal Charter from Queen Victoria for his British South Africa Company on 29 October 1889. The charter gave a private company the power to build roads and railways, raise a police force, grant land and govern. It was a licence to colonise.
In 1890 the Company raised the Pioneer Column: about 200 settlers, each promised gold claims and a 3,000-acre farm, guarded by around 500 Company police. They set out from Macloutsie in Bechuanaland on 28 June 1890, built forts at Tuli, Victoria and Charter, and on 12 September 1890 reached the site they named Fort Salisbury, today's Harare. In Rhodesia, 12 September was celebrated as Pioneers' Day until 1979.
The "second Rand" never appeared. Instead, the settlers took land and cattle. In 1893 the Company provoked war with the Ndebele, used Maxim guns against Lobengula's regiments and took Bulawayo. Lobengula fled and died. From 1895 the territory was called Rhodesia.
In 1896, after cattle disease, drought, forced labour and land seizures, first the Ndebele and then the Shona rose against the Company. Zimbabweans call it the First Chimurenga, the first war of liberation. Hundreds of settlers were killed. The Company and British troops crushed the risings with great violence, dynamiting caves where people sheltered.
Two Shona spirit mediums, Mbuya Nehanda (Charwe Nyakasikana) and Sekuru Kaguvi (Gumboreshumba), were seen as leaders of the rising. They were tried and hanged in 1898. Nehanda is said to have foretold that her bones would rise again, and she became a symbol of the liberation war seventy years later.
Company rule ended in 1923. In a referendum on 27 October 1922, open in practice to a small, almost entirely white electorate, 59 per cent voted for "responsible government" rather than joining South Africa. From 1 October 1923 Southern Rhodesia was a self-governing British colony. London kept a veto over laws discriminating against Africans but never used it.
The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 divided the land by race, giving the white minority the best farmland and confining Africans to "native reserves" on poorer land. Africans were pushed off their land in the decades that followed. From 1953 to 1963 Southern Rhodesia led the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland with today's Zambia and Malawi, which collapsed when those two moved to independence under African majority rule.
Britain would not grant independence to Southern Rhodesia without progress towards majority rule. The Rhodesian Front government of Ian Smith refused. On 11 November 1965 Smith and his ministers signed a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Britain declared it unconstitutional and illegal and imposed sanctions; the UN Security Council called for sanctions too. But Britain refused to use force against the white Rhodesians, as it had against African rebels elsewhere, and South Africa and Portuguese Mozambique helped the regime survive sanctions.
Rhodesia declared itself a republic in 1970. African nationalist movements, ZANU under Robert Mugabe and ZAPU under Joshua Nkomo, waged a guerrilla war, the Second Chimurenga, from bases in Zambia and Mozambique. Tens of thousands died. In 1979 Smith tried an "internal settlement" under Bishop Abel Muzorewa, called Zimbabwe Rhodesia, but no country recognised it.
On 10 September 1979 Britain brought the Rhodesian groups to a conference at Lancaster House in London. On 21 December 1979 the Lancaster House Agreement was signed. It provided for a ceasefire, a period of British rule under a governor until free elections, and a new constitution with majority rule and protections for the white minority. Lord Soames arrived in Salisbury as governor, and the territory was briefly a British colony again.
Mugabe's ZANU won the elections of February 1980. At a ceremony in Salisbury on 18 April 1980 the Republic of Zimbabwe was proclaimed and Mugabe was sworn in as Prime Minister. Bob Marley sang at the celebrations. Salisbury was renamed Harare two years later.
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Rhodes's statue and legacy are at the centre of an ongoing debate in Oxford. Lancaster House, where the 1979 agreement was signed, stands near St James's Palace in London. The British South Africa Company's papers and the Colonial Office files on Rhodesia are at The National Archives in Kew.
Visit Great Zimbabwe near Masvingo, the Matobo Hills outside Bulawayo where Rhodes chose to be buried on land sacred to the Ndebele, the Natural History Museum and Bulawayo's colonial city centre, and Heroes' Acre in Harare. Victoria Falls is shared with Zambia and easy to visit from either side.
Entrance fees are included in the tour price; tips are not included but are always welcome.
Victoria Falls, Zambia and Zimbabwe:
In London:
The man the country was named after.
Northern Rhodesia, copper and Kaunda.
Where Rhodes made his fortune.
All of Britain's African territories, country by country.
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