Africa
Highlights - Essential Info - Itineraries - History
As far back as the 11th Century, the Shona were trading with Arabs who traveled along the Indian Ocean coast with the monsoon winds. From the mighty fortress of Great Zimbabwe gold and ivory were traded for glass, cloth and other items from the East. Great Zimbabwe became the capital of a hugely wealthy and powerful society that is hard to imagine in Africa today. Over the following centuries, other European explorers such as the Portuguese came in search of great wealth, but it was the British under the leadership of Cecil Rhodes with his British South Africa Company that finally arrived in Mashonaland in 1895 with a Royal Charter to ‘...promulgate laws and carry on any lawful trade’.
Little gold was ever found in the country so land was instead appropriated for farming purposes and, within the next twenty years, over 20,000 settlers had arrived in the newly named Southern Rhodesia. During the first half of the 20th Century the Shona and Ndebele tribes joined forces to try and reclaim their lost lands, and paved the way for an uprise in nationalism.
In 1964 Ian Smith unilaterally declared the country independent and the black political parties turned to guerilla warfare to achieve their aims. War and political infighting continued intermittently throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s until 1980 when Robert Mugabe won the general election and was sworn in as President of Zimbabwe. The country had one of the most widely diversified economies in Africa consisting mainly of industry, mining and agriculture and these sectors together with tourism contributed as the country’s principal foreign exchange earners. However in the last decade President Mugabe’s attempts to stay in power have brought widespread abuse of not only his own people, but of the electoral system and also of the economy leading to rampant inflation, poverty and general hardship.
