Zimbabwe

A country named after a stone city that colonial archaeology refused to credit to Africans. Great Zimbabwe was built between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries by Shona ancestors, with mortarless granite walls enclosing a town of perhaps eighteen thousand people trading gold to the Swahili coast; Rhodesian authorities pressured archaeologists to attribute it to Phoenicians or Arabs, and the evidence against that was suppressed into the 1970s. Cecil Rhodes's company occupied the plateau in 1890 and crushed the risings of 1896 and 1897. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 reserved the best-watered half of the country for a few tens of thousands of whites, creating the grievance that drove everything after. Ian Smith declared independence unilaterally in 1965 rather than accept majority rule, and the rebel state survived sanctions for fourteen years and a guerrilla war for seven before the Lancaster House settlement produced Zimbabwe in April 1980. Robert Mugabe governed for thirty-seven years, beginning with the Gukurahundi massacres of Ndebele civilians in the 1980s. Fast-track land seizures from 2000 collapsed agriculture and hyperinflation reached figures with no useful name. The army removed Mugabe in 2017. Victoria Falls lies on the Zambian border. Harare is the capital. The country has about sixteen million people. Shona and Ndebele are the largest of sixteen official languages. Great Zimbabwe gives the country both its name and the soapstone bird on its flag. The currency was abandoned in 2009 after a hundred-trillion-dollar note was issued. Hwange is its largest national park. The country was among the most literate in Africa at independence and its schools were long a regional draw.

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