Chapter VIII · Southern Africa
Zimbabwe
Plateau
Mutapa · Shona · Rozvi
Southern Africa
The granite plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers gave birth to Great Zimbabwe — a city of dry-stone walls whose scale still astonishes. Built by the Shona people, it controlled trade between the African interior and Swahili coast ports. The Mutapa Empire that followed commanded gold and ivory from the Indian Ocean to the Congo. When colonisers arrived they claimed the ruins must have been built by Phoenicians rather than Africans — a lie archaeology has thoroughly dismantled.
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Key dates
From the archive
Empires and heroes drawn from the Africanpedia catalogue for this region.
