Matobo Hills

Outside the city: the hills begin some 30–35 km south of Bulawayo, along the Matopos road.

Also known as Matopos, Matopo Hills, Matobo National Park, Rhodes Matopos National Park, World's View, Malindidzimu.

Granite hill country south of Bulawayo, sacred to many who live there, holding Mzilikazi's grave at Entumbane and Rhodes's grave on Malindidzimu; a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003.

To many people in Bulawayo, “the Matopos” means a Sunday drive: the road south, the balancing rocks, a picnic, the climb to the top of World’s View. All of that is true, but the hills hold much more. People have lived here for tens of thousands of years, and they painted the rock shelters. The Mwari shrines make it one of the most sacred landscapes in southern Africa. Two men who shaped Bulawayo’s history are buried here, and they could hardly be more different.

The land itself

The Matobo Hills are granite: domes, castle kopjes and boulders balanced on one another, shaped by weathering over a very long time. The hills shelter Stone Age sites and a remarkable concentration of rock paintings. When UNESCO inscribed the Matobo Hills as a World Heritage Site in 2003, it recognised both the rock art and the fact that the hills are still a living cultural landscape, with shrines and places still in use.

The name is usually explained as coming from Mzilikazi, who is said to have likened the bare granite domes to the heads of his elders: amatobo, “bald heads.” That explanation is the one most often repeated. If you know another, we would like to hear it.

Sacred places

The hills hold shrines of the Mwari (Mwali) religion, of which Njelele is the best known. They are places where people still come to ask for rain and for help. We mention them only briefly, as their custodians would wish. They are not visitor attractions and we do not photograph them.

Mzilikazi’s grave at Entumbane

Mzilikazi, founder of the Ndebele kingdom, died in September 1868. After long ceremonies he was buried in a granite-walled cave at Entumbane, on the north-eastern edge of the hills, and the entrance was closed with stones. The grave was robbed during the fighting of 1896 and afterwards rebuilt. It is a national monument, kept according to Khumalo custom. Visitors may not enter it, and are asked to take off their hats and keep their voices low. One of Bulawayo’s suburbs, Entumbane, takes its name from this place.

Malindidzimu, “World’s View”

In 1902 Cecil Rhodes was buried on the summit of a whaleback dome called Malindidzimu. One reading gives the name as the “place of benevolent spirits”. The Standard gives the Kalanga meaning as “where the spirits rest.” A long-standing account records that Rhodes came upon the spot while riding through the hills. He called it “a view of the world”, not “World’s View.” His funeral on 10 April 1902 brought coaches, Cape carts, ox-wagons and riders out from Bulawayo along a track improved only weeks before. At the steepest slopes twelve black oxen took over from the mules to pull the gun carriage to the summit.

Beside Rhodes lies Leander Starr Jameson. Nearby stands the Shangani Memorial to Allan Wilson’s patrol, killed in December 1893 during the war that destroyed Lobengula’s kingdom.

Whether Rhodes should remain here has been argued since the 1980s. In 2020 The Standard set out the positions. Some, including a custodian at the Njelele shrine, want the grave removed from a sacred hill. The head of National Museums and Monuments argued for keeping it “to have access to this sad chapter in our history.” A curator at the National Gallery in Bulawayo suggested using the monument to tell the story of colonialism. An 80-year-old Matobo resident disapproved of the burial but feared that exhumation would “risk angering the ancestors.” Others pointed to the visitors the grave brings to people who live by selling crafts. We set these views out without taking a side. The decision belongs to the people of the hills and of Zimbabwe.

What the photographs show

Most of the photographs in this set were taken on the visitors’ path up Malindidzimu: the entrance to the national park, the signs pointing to Rhodes’s grave and World’s View, the climb, the Shangani Memorial with its inscription “To Brave Men”, the graves of Rhodes and Jameson, the boulders around the summit, the view from the top, and the balancing rocks.

That is one way of seeing the Matopos, but it is not the only one. The collection has no photographs of Entumbane, the rock-art shelters, the dams, the farms and villages, or the people who live in the hills. We would like to add them, by people who know these places, on terms they are comfortable with.

What we don’t know yet

• Who took these photographs, and when.
• Your Matopos: family picnics, school camps, growing up in the hills, a grandparent’s stories. Tell us.

37 photographs of Matobo Hills →