Great Zimbabwe, Masvingo & the Midlands

The region is the cradle of the Zimbabwe state. From about the eleventh century, ancestors of the Shona built stone enclosures on the plateau south-east of present Masvingo, and by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Great Zimbabwe was the capital of a state that controlled gold and ivory trade with the Swahili coast; Chinese pottery, Arabian coins and glass beads have been found on the site. It declined in the fifteenth century, and the tradition continued at Khami in the south-west.

European colonists long refused to believe that Africans had built the city, attributing it to Phoenicians or the Queen of Sheba. The first scientific excavations, in 1905–06, began the long work of refuting those theories, which dominated writing on the site through the twentieth century. After independence the country took its name from the site, and the soapstone Zimbabwe Bird found there became the national emblem.

Fort Victoria, now Masvingo, was founded by the Pioneer Column in 1890, one of the first settler towns in the country. Gweru and Kwekwe grew as railway and gold towns, and the Great Dyke gave the Midlands chrome, platinum and asbestos mines. During the Gukurahundi of the 1980s, the Fifth Brigade's campaign also extended to parts of the Midlands. In the lowveld, irrigated sugar estates at Triangle and Hippo Valley, fed by the Mutirikwi dam from 1960, transformed the south-east.

Most of Masvingo Province speaks the Karanga dialect of Shona, and the area around Great Zimbabwe is regarded as a spiritual heartland. In the lowveld live Shangaan (Tsonga) communities, part of a people spread across South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

The Midlands is a meeting ground of Shona and Ndebele, and towns such as Gweru are bilingual; intermarriage and mixed neighbourhoods are common. Gweru is a university city, home to Midlands State University, and has an air force base and the Military Museum.

Religious life is diverse, from Reformed and Catholic missions founded in the colonial era to apostolic churches and ancestral rituals. Mission boarding schools such as Gokomere and Pamushana are among the most respected in the province, and their teachers' colleges draw students from across the south.

Gweru, with about 150,000 people, is the largest town in the region and the capital of the Midlands, and other towns include Kwekwe, Masvingo, Zvishavane and the lowveld town of Chiredzi. Most people live in villages, farming maize and other crops.

Mining drives the Midlands economy: gold around Kwekwe, chrome and platinum along the Great Dyke, and a huge informal sector of small-scale gold miners. The Redcliff steelworks near Kwekwe, once a pillar of industry, closed during the economic crisis of the 2000s. In Masvingo Province, sugar estates in the lowveld and cattle ranches employ many, and Bikita has a lithium mine.

Drought is the recurring hardship in the south, and currency turmoil, from hyperinflation to the ZiG, pushes most trade into US dollars. Many young people work in South Africa, which lies just down the highway from Masvingo.

Sadza from maize is eaten daily with muriwo greens, beans, dried fish or stewed meat, and peanut butter thickens many relishes. Beef is plentiful in ranching country, and rice cooked with peanut butter and sour milk with sadza are familiar dishes here as across Zimbabwe.

The lowveld gives distinctive wild foods. Mopane worms, called madora, are harvested in the mopane woodlands and fried until crisp, and the dry, powdery pulp of baobab fruit is eaten in season.

Maheu, the non-alcoholic fermented maize drink, and home-brewed sorghum beer are central to gatherings and ceremonies, and Chibuku sells widely in the towns.

Great Zimbabwe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Masvingo, is the region's centrepiece. The Hill Complex crowns a granite ridge with walls built around boulders, and below it the Great Enclosure, with walls about 11 metres high and a conical tower, is part of the largest stone structure in precolonial Southern Africa. Soapstone bird carvings found at the site inspired the national emblem.

Next to the ruins, Lake Mutirikwi fills a valley among granite hills, with a recreational park on its northern shore. Far to the south-east, Gonarezhou National Park, part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, protects baobab woodland, large elephant herds and the sandstone Chilojo Cliffs above the Runde River.

In the Midlands, Gweru has Antelope Park and the Military Museum, and Kwekwe has the National Mining Museum, housed in the Paper House, a prefabricated wood-framed building shipped from the United Kingdom in 1894.