Kalanga

The Kalanga, or BaKalanga, are a southern Bantu people of the Shashe-Limpopo basin, spread across Matabeleland in Zimbabwe and northern Botswana. They descend from the Leopard's Kopje farming tradition of about 1050, whose stone-walled hilltop villages traded ivory, furs and feathers to the Indian Ocean coast, and they are counted among the builders of Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe and Khami.

When drought emptied Mapungubwe around 1300, power moved first to Great Zimbabwe and then, in the fifteenth century, back west to Khami, heart of the Kalanga kingdom later known as Butua. In the seventeenth century the Rozvi dynasty, rooted in the same country, dominated the mining lands and repelled Portuguese traders from its inland posts, until Changamire Dombo overran Butua in 1683.

Kalanga chiefdoms survived into the nineteenth century, until invasions by the Bangwato and then Mzilikazi's Ndebele in the 1820s and 1830s broke their independence.