Zimbabwe
Capital: Harare · Southern Africa
Named for Great Zimbabwe's 'houses of stone', capital of a medieval gold-trading empire, and home to Shona mbira music and Ndebele royal heritage.
Ethnic communities
- ShonaBuilders of Great Zimbabwe; mbira dzavadzimu spirit music
- Ndebele (amaNdebele)Mzilikazi's 19th-century kingdom at Bulawayo
- Tonga & KalangaZambezi and southwestern cultures
More communities of Zimbabwe
- Shona (Zezuru, Karanga, Manyika) · Great Zimbabwe's nation (full profile)
- Kalanga · Southwestern nation of Mwali shrine heritage
- Tonga (BaTonga) · Zambezi valley's displaced river people
- Venda (VhaVenda) · Limpopo-border sacred-site communities
- Shangaan (Tsonga) · Lowveld hunters of the southeast
- Nambya · Hwange-region kingdom of stone-ruin heirs
- Ndau · Eastern highlands' spirit-healing culture
- Korekore · Northern Shona of Mutapa's old marches
- Barwe & Hwesa · Eastern border chiefdoms of rain fame
- Doma (VaDoma) · Zambezi valley's last forager families
- Tshwa San · Western sandveld first-people descendants
- Sotho & Tswana-linked villages · Southern border communities
- Mfengu-descended folk · Cape-origin families of the colonial era
Languages
Major languages: Shona, Sindebele, English, Tonga, Kalanga
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Great Zimbabwe
- • Mutapa Empire
- • Rozvi Empire
- • Ndebele Kingdom
Heritage sites
- • Great Zimbabwe
- • Khami Ruins
- • Matobo Hills rock art
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Zimbabwe
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Politics & liberation1917–1999
Joshua Nkomo
Liberation
Founder of ZAPU and one of the two principal leaders of the liberation war, known as Father Zimbabwe.
- Sportb. 1983
Kirsty Coventry
Swimming and sports governance
Zimbabwe's most decorated Olympian with seven medals, elected in March 2025 as the first woman and first African president of the International Olympic Committee.
- Politics & liberationc. 1840–1898
Mbuya Nehanda
Spiritual and armed resistance
Spirit medium who helped lead the first Chimurenga against British South Africa Company rule. Executed in 1898; her prophecy that her bones would rise became a rallying cry of the liberation war.
- Music & the arts1952–2019
Oliver Mtukudzi
Tuku music
Sixty-odd albums of Tuku music, including Todii, which broke the silence around AIDS across southern Africa.
- Science, business & activismb. 1965
Tererai Trent
Education activism
Married at about 14 with almost no schooling, she buried her written goals in a tin, earned a doctorate and now builds rural schools in Zimbabwe.
- Music & the artsb. 1945
Thomas Mapfumo
Chimurenga music
Translated the mbira into electric guitar and sang the liberation war into being, then turned the same music on the government that followed.
- Music & the artsb. 1959
Tsitsi Dangarembga
Literature and film
Nervous Conditions was the first novel in English published by a Black Zimbabwean woman. She was later arrested while protesting peacefully in Harare.
Deep-dive community profiles
Hlengwe
The people of the south-eastern lowveld — Tsonga-speaking farmers and hunters of the dry Save and Limpopo country, moved off their land twice for a national park and a sugar estate, and split across three borders.
Open deep profile →Kalanga
The builders' descendants — a people whose ancestors raised the stone walls of Khami and Great Zimbabwe's successor states, whose Mwali shrine at Njelele is still consulted for rain by two countries, and whose language is taught in neither.
Open deep profile →Ndau
The people of the Mozambique-Zimbabwe borderlands — Shona-speaking communities who were conquered by the Gaza Nguni, whose spirit mediums are feared across two countries for the potency of ndau possession, and who supplied the fighters of Mozambique's civil war on both sides.
Open deep profile →Ndebele
Two proud branches of one Nguni root: Mzilikazi's amaNdebele kingdom at Bulawayo — the Zulu-descended state that ruled western Zimbabwe — and the Southern Ndebele of South Africa, whose electric geometric house-painting and beadwork became a global visual language.
Open deep profile →Nyungwe
The people of Tete — Zambezi valley farmers and traders at the old Portuguese river port, heirs to the chikunda slave-soldier tradition, and now the community sitting on top of one of the world's largest coking coal deposits.
Open deep profile →Sena
The people of the lower Zambezi — cultivators of the flood plain who lived under the prazo estates of Portuguese-African warlords, supplied the labour for the Zambezi bridge and the sugar estates, and now farm between a dam upstream and cyclones from the sea.
Open deep profile →Shona
Builders of Great Zimbabwe — the largest ancient stone city south of the Sahara — heirs of the Mutapa gold trade, and keepers of the mbira dzavadzimu, whose interlocking music calls the ancestors home.
Open deep profile →Tonga (Batonga)
The Zambezi-valley people uprooted by Kariba Dam — matrilineal farmers and fishers famed for the budima and ngoma buntibe dance-orchestras, the Nyaminyami river-serpent, and a resilient culture that survived one of Africa's great forced resettlements.
Open deep profile →Tsonga (Vatsonga)
The people of the Limpopo lowveld and the Mozambican coast — whose xibelani skirt-dance shakes across three countries, whose timbila-adjacent music and marimba traditions travelled with migrant labour, and whose Gaza history spans an ocean and a mountain range.
Open deep profile →Tswa (Vatswa)
Farmers and cashew growers of Inhambane's interior, the westernmost of the Tsonga-related peoples, whose men worked South Africa's gold mines for a century and whose remittances built the province.
Open deep profile →VaDoma
The people of the Zambezi escarpment — hunter-gatherers of the Kanyemba region who resisted settlement longest in Zimbabwe, and who are known worldwide for a hereditary foot condition that outsiders have made into their entire identity.
Open deep profile →Venda (Vhavenda)
The people of the misted Soutpansberg — guardians of Lake Fundudzi's python god, dancers of the domba snake-initiation, heirs of stone-walled Dzata, whose sacred forests and matriarch-guarded drums kept the mysteries of the far north.
Open deep profile →