Military history of Zimbabwe
The military history of Zimbabwe chronicles a vast time period and complex events from the dawn of history until the present time. It covers invasions of native peoples of Africa, encroachment by Europeans, and civil conflict.
Early history
San and invasion by ironworking cultures
Stone Age evidence indicates that the San people, now living mostly in the Kalahari Desert, are the ancestors of this region's original inhabitants, almost 3,000 years ago. There are also remnants of several ironworking cultures dating back to AD 300. Little is known of the early ironworkers, but it is believed that they put pressure on the San and gradually took over the land.Shona rule
Around the 4th century the Bantu-speaking Shona arrived from the north and both the San and the early ironworkers were driven out. By the 15th century, the Shona had established a strong empire, known as the Munhumutapa Empire, with its capital at the ancient city of Zimbabwe -- Great Zimbabwe. This empire ruled territory now falling within the modern states of Zimbabwe and Mozambique, but the empire was split by the end of the 15th century with southern part becoming the Urozwi Empire.The Portuguese began their attempts to subdue the Shona states as early as 1505 but were confined to the coast until 1513. The empire finally collapsed in 1629 and later became the rozvi empire. Remnants of the government established another Mutapa kingdom in Mozambique sometimes called Karanga, who reigned in the region until 1902.
Mfecane
Mfecane, also known as the Difaqane or Lifaqane, is an African expression which means something like "the crushing" or "scattering". It describes a period of widespread chaos and disturbance in southern Africa during the period between 1815 and about 1835 which resulted from the rise to power of Shaka, the Zulu king and military leader who conquered the Nguni peoples between the Tugela and Pongola rivers in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and created a militaristic kingdom in the region. The Mfecane also led to the formation and consolidation of other groups – such as the Ndebele Kingdom, the Mfengu and the Makololo – and the creation of states such as the modern Lesotho.In 1817, Mzilikazi arrived at the Kalanga and Lozwi regions were by Mzilikazi, originally a lieutenant of Zulu King Shaka who was pushed from his own territories to the west by the Zulu armies. After a brief alliance with the Transvaal Ndebele, Mzilikazi became leader of the Ndebele people. Many of the kalanga, and Lozwi people were incorporated and the rest were either made satellite territories who paid taxes to the Ndebele Kingdom. He called his new nation Mthwakazi, a name derived from the original settlers the San people called aba Mzilikazi's invasion of the Transvaal was one part of a vast series of inter-related wars, forced migrations and famines that indigenous people and later historians came to call the Mfecane. In the Transvaal, the Mfecane severely weakened and disrupted the towns and villages of the Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms, their political systems and economies, making them very weak, and easy to colonize by the European settlers who would shortly arrive from the south.
As Ndebele moved into Transvaal, the remnants of the Bavenda retreated north to the Waterberg and Zoutpansberg, while Mzilikazi made his chief kraal north of the Magaliesberg mountains near present-day Pretoria, with an important military outpost to guard trade routes to the north at Mosega, not far from the site of the modern town of Zeerust. From about 1827 until about 1836, Mzilikazi dominated the southwestern Transvaal. Before that time the region between the Vaal and Limpopo was scarcely known to Europeans, but in 1829, Mzilikazi was visited at Mosega by Robert Moffat, and between that date and 1836 a few British traders and explorers visited the country and made known its principal features.
Boer confrontations
In the 1830s and 1840s, white descendants of Dutch pioneers, collectively known as voortrekkers or trekboers, departed Cape Colony with hundreds of their dependents to escape British rule. This exodus, in what came to be called the Great Trek, often pitted the migrant settlers against local forces and resulted in the formation of short-lived Boer republics. Between 1835 and 1838, the trekkers began crossing the Vaal River and skirmishing with Ndebele regiments. On 16 October 1836, a Boer column under Hendrik Potgieter was attacked by a Ndebele force numbering some 5,000. They succeeded in seizing Potgieter's livestock, but were unable to penetrate his laager. One of the Tswana chiefs, Moroko, later convinced Potgieter to pull his wagons back to the safety of Thaba-Nchu - where his men could seek food and protection. In January 1837, over a hundred Boers and around sixty Tswana returned with a vengeance. Led by Potgieter and Gerrit Maritz, they raided Mzilikazi's settlement at Mosega and drove him across the Limpopo River. Prominent voortrekkers immediately claimed the territory which Mzilikazi had forfeited, and later arrivals continued to push deeper into the Transvaal.Voortrekker parties harassed Mzilikazi as late as 1851, but the following year burghers of the South African Republic finally negotiated a lasting peace. However, gold was discovered near Mthwakazi in 1867 and Europe's colonial powers became increasingly interested in the region. Mzilikazi died in 1868, near Bulawayo. His son, Lobengula, granted several concessions to European traders, including the 1888 Rudd treaty giving Cape imperialist Cecil Rhodes exclusive mineral rights in much of the lands east of Matabeleland. Gold was already known to exist in nearby Mashonaland, so with the Rudd concession Rhodes obtained a royal charter to form the British South Africa Company in 1889.
Pioneer Column
In 1890, Rhodes sent a group of settlers, known as the Pioneer Column, into Mashonaland. The 400+ man Pioneer Column was guided by the explorer and big game hunter Frederick Selous and was officially designated the British South Africa Company Police accompanied by about 100 Bechuanaland Border Police. When they reached Harari Hill, they founded Fort Salisbury. Rhodes had been distributing land to the settlers even before the royal charter, but the charter legitimized his further actions with the British government. By 1891 an Order-in-Council declared Matabeleland, Mashonaland, and Bechuanaland a British protectorate. By 1892, the number of men in the force had decreased and the BSACP was replaced by a number of volunteer forces - the Mashonaland Horse, the Mashonaland Mounted Police and the Mashonaland Constabulary, and later additions of Salisbury Horse, Victoria Rangers, and Raaf's Rangers. The BSACP was later renamed the British South Africa Police and this force stayed together for much of the 20th century.Rhodes had a vested interest in the continued expansion of white settlements in the region, so now with the cover of a legal mandate, he used a brutal attack by Ndebele against the Shona near Fort Victoria in 1893 as a pretense for attacking the kingdom of Lobengula.
First Matabele War
The first battle in the war occurred on 5 November 1893 when a British laager was attacked by the Matabele on open ground a few miles from the Impembisi River. The laager consisted of 670 British soldiers, 400 of whom were mounted along with a small force of native allies fought off the Imbezu and Ingubu regiments computed by Sir John Willoughby to number 1,700 warriors in all. The laager had with it a small artillery of five Maxim gun, two seven-pounders, one Gardner gun, and one Hotchkiss. The Maxim guns took center stage and decimated the native force. Other African regiments were in the immediate vicinity, estimated at 5,000 men, however this force never took part in the fighting.Lobengula had 80,000 spearmen and 20,000 riflemen, against fewer than 700 soldiers of the British South Africa Police, but the Ndebele warriors were no match against the British Maxim guns. Leander Starr Jameson immediately sent his troops to Bulawayo to try to capture Lobengula, but the king escaped and left Bulawayo in ruins behind him. The group of white settlers was sent to find Lobengula along the Shangani river, which they did, but nearly all members of this patrol were killed in battle on the Shangani river in Matabeleland in 1893. The incident achieved a lasting, prominent place in Rhodesian colonial history as the Shangani Patrol and is roughly the British equivalent to Custer's Last Stand. But this was no victory for the Ndebele. Under somewhat mysterious circumstances, King Lobengula died in January 1894, and within a few short months the British South Africa Company controlled most of the Matabeleland and white settlers continued to arrive.
Jameson Raid
The Jameson Raid was a raid on Paul Kruger's Transvaal Republic carried out by Leander Starr Jameson and his Rhodesian and Bechuanaland policemen over the New Year weekend of 1895–96. It was intended to trigger an uprising by the primarily British expatriate workers in the Transvaal but failed to do so. The raid was ineffective and no uprising took place, but it did much to bring about the Second Boer War and the Second Matabele War.Second Matabele War
The Second Matabele War—or the First Chimurenga, as it is often called in modern Zimbabwe—comprised revolts against British South Africa Company rule by the Ndebele and Shona peoples during 1896 and 1897.According to UNESCO General History of Africa - VII Africa under Colonial Domination 1880-1935, the "Chimurenga, as the Shona termed their form of armed resistance, began in March 1896 in Matabeleland and June in Mashonaland. The first casualty was an African policeman employed by the British South Africa Company, killed 20 March. The first attack upon Europeans occurred in the town of Essexvale on 22 March, when seven Europeans and two Africans were killed.... Within a week, 130 Europeans had been killed in Matabeleland. Africans were armed with Martini-Henry rifles, Lee Metfords, elephant guns, muskets and blunderbusses, as well as with the traditional spears, axes, knobkerries and bows and arrows".
Mlimo, the Ndebele spiritual/religious leader, is credited with fomenting much of the anger that led to this confrontation. He convinced the Ndebele and Shona that the white settlers were responsible for the drought, locust plagues and the cattle disease rinderpest ravaging the country at the time. Mlimo's call to battle was well timed. Only a few months earlier, the British South Africa Company's Administrator General for Matabeleland, Leander Starr Jameson, had sent most of his troops and armaments to fight the Transvaal Republic in the Jameson Raid. This left the country's defences in disarray. The Ndebele began their revolt in March 1896, and in June 1896 they were joined by the Shona.
The British South Africa Company immediately sent troops to suppress the Ndebele and the Shona, but it took months for the British to relieve their major colonial fortifications under siege by native warriors. Mlimo was eventually assassinated in his temple in Matobo Hills by the American scout Frederick Russell Burnham. Upon learning of the death of Mlimo, Cecil Rhodes boldly walked unarmed into the native's stronghold and persuaded the impi to lay down their arms. The war thus ended in October 1897.