Great Zimbabwe

Far from Bulawayo, roughly 300 km to the east by road, near Masvingo. · From 11th–15th century

Also known as Dzimba dza mabwe, Great Zimbabwe Ruins.

The great stone city of the Zimbabwe plateau, centre of a powerful state in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; it gave the country its name. A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986.

The country is named after this place. Zimbabwe is usually explained as coming from the Shona dzimba dza mabwe, “houses of stone.” It is the largest of the stone-built towns of the Zimbabwe plateau. At its height, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was the centre of a state that traded gold and ivory with the East African coast and, through the coast, with the Indian Ocean world.

Why it is here

Great Zimbabwe is a long way from Bulawayo, roughly 300 km east by road, near Masvingo. We include it for two reasons.

First, it is the elder relative of Khami, just outside Bulawayo. As Great Zimbabwe’s power waned in the fifteenth century, the Torwa state rose in the south-west and built Khami in the same tradition. Its stonework is different, built as terraces rather than enclosing walls, but it clearly comes from the same culture. You cannot fully understand one without the other.

Second, three photographs of Great Zimbabwe have been in this collection for twenty years, filed by mistake among the pictures of Solusi University. Now they have their own page.

What the photographs show

Only three photographs. Their captions were lost along with their filing, so we do not yet know which parts of the site they show, or who took them.

What we don’t know yet

We would like more photographs of Great Zimbabwe taken by Bulawayo families on the long drive east: school tours, holidays, the Great Enclosure and the Hill Complex across the decades.

3 photographs of Great Zimbabwe →