Zimbabwe

The Shona phrase 'dzimba dza mabwe' means houses of stone, and the abbreviated form 'zimbabwe' referred specifically to the stone enclosures built by the Karanga subgroup of the Shona people beginning around the eleventh century CE. The greatest of these enclosures, known today as Great Zimbabwe, was the capital of a trading empire that connected the African interior to the Indian Ocean coast and, through Arab merchants at Sofala, to the wider medieval world. At its peak between 1200 and 1450 CE, Great Zimbabwe covered nearly 730 hectares and housed an estimated 18,000 people. The walls of the Great Enclosure stand up to eleven meters high and were built without mortar, using granite blocks shaped by alternating heat and cold.

Great Zimbabwe was abandoned by around 1450 CE, probably because the surrounding land could no longer support so large a population. European colonizers who encountered the ruins in the nineteenth century refused to credit their African builders and attributed the walls to ancient Phoenicians or the biblical King Solomon. This fiction, promoted in part by the journalist Richard Nicklin Hall who served as curator of the site from 1902 and published his theories in 1905, was finally refuted by the archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson, whose 1929 excavations produced unambiguous evidence of Shona construction. Her findings were unwelcome to the colonial administration but could not be suppressed.

Cecil Rhodes annexed the territory in 1890 and his British South Africa Company named it Rhodesia. Ian Smith's white minority government issued its Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965 and continued calling the country Rhodesia until 1979. During the liberation war, the Zimbabwe African National Union under Robert Mugabe and the Zimbabwe African People's Union under Joshua Nkomo both used 'Zimbabwe' as the name of the country they fought to create, invoking the precolonial past as a direct rebuttal to the colonial name. The Lancaster House Agreement ended the conflict in December 1979, and Zimbabwe became independent on April 18, 1980.

The Zimbabwe Bird, a soapstone carving found at the Great Zimbabwe site and dated to between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, became the national emblem and appears on the country's flag, coat of arms, and currency. The ruins themselves became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986 and draw visitors and archaeologists from around the world. The name that Mugabe and Nkomo chose for their republic was a Shona phrase describing stone walls built eight centuries earlier. A builders' term for a capital city became, in time, the name of a nation.