Shona

The Shona, historically the Karanga, are the Bantu people of the Zimbabwe plateau, whose ancestors came from the Congo basin at the end of the first millennium. In the eleventh century Karanga forebears began dry-stone building on granite hills, and from the thirteenth century Great Zimbabwe, with its Great Enclosure, was capital of a kingdom fed by cattle and gold trade with the Swahili coast; its sculpture and walls peaked in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries before abandonment in the sixteenth or seventeenth.

Early in the fifteenth century hunter-chief Mutota led a migration north and founded the Mutapa Empire, whose kings controlled the Zambezi goldfields until the Portuguese made them vassals early in the seventeenth century.

About 1683 Changamire Dombo built the Rozvi Empire and drove the Portuguese off the plateau in the 1690s. Droughts after 1795 brought civil war; Nguni invasions of the 1830s shattered the state, and the killing of Changamire Chirisamhuru about 1835 left the plateau divided.