Zimbabwe

On Zimbabwe’s northern border the Zambezi plunges over Victoria Falls into a basalt gorge, throwing up a column of spray seen from far away. Downstream, a dam finished in the late 1950s holds back Lake Kariba. The country’s heart is the Highveld, a cool plateau falling to the Limpopo valley in the south and rising in the east to the Nyanga and Chimanimani mountains. Granite domes crowd the Matobo Hills.

Great Zimbabwe, a city of dry-stone walls built from the eleventh century, was the seat of a Shona state that traded gold to the Swahili coast, and the modern country is named after it. In the 1840s Mzilikazi led the Ndebele north into the south-west. Settlers sent by Cecil Rhodes’s chartered company arrived in 1890, and the territory took his name as Rhodesia. Its white minority government declared independence from Britain in 1965, and after a long guerrilla war Zimbabwe became independent in April 1980.

Shona speakers form the majority and Ndebele speakers predominate around Bulawayo; most people are Christians who also honour the ancestors. The mbira, a thumb piano of metal keys on a wooden board, accompanies spirit ceremonies and the chimurenga songs of Thomas Mapfumo, and sculptors carve serpentine into figures sold far beyond Africa. Sadza, stiff maize meal eaten by hand, is the base of most main meals. Tobacco, auctioned on the floors of Harare, is the great cash crop, platinum comes from the Great Dyke, and the lowveld grows sugar cane.