Mutapa Empire

About the year 850 A.D. the people called the proto-Vakaranga left the shores of Lake Tanganyika and crossed the Zambezi. They passed through the Tonga communities living in the region of Hurungwe Mountain and settled over a large area south of the Mupfure River. There they founded a state called Guruuswa, which stretched towards the places we now call Bulawayo and Masvingo.

About 1440 A.D. the ruler of this kingdom, the Prince Mutota, became desperately short of salt. Having learnt from an envoy that salt was plentiful further north, in Hurungwe and Sipolilo, he marched in that direction with his family and people and crushed the small, weak communities of the Tavara and Tonga, some of whom had to flee to the other side of the Zambezi.

Mutota finally settled in the Dande, between the Angwa and Musengezi Rivers. The Tavara, broken by the new invasion, gave to Mutota a name which you will all recognise. They called him Mwene Mutapa, the master of ravaged lands or the master-pillager. Mutota's followers, who spoke Chikaranga, liked the word and added it to their own language as Nemutapa, which is only one of its many forms.

But the keen word-sense of the Tavara did not stop there. For the people who came into the Dande with Mutota, they coined the phrase Makorekore, because they swept over the land like a swarm of locusts.

Mutota established his court on the western bank of the Utete River, near a hill called Chitako-Changonya. There he built a large and solid oval stone fort, a dzimbabwe, the ruins of which can still be seen. Mutota is buried in a shrine at the top of Chitako-Changonya.

His successor Matope seems not to have liked living in the Lomagundi district, and moved his court from the Utete to the Biri River, just on the other side of the Mozambique border. Perhaps he thought that this was a better place from which to extend his empire, which, when he died, stretched to the shores of the Indian Ocean.

A usurper called Changamire took the throne for four years, but suffered the fate of most of his kind in about 1490, when Chikuyo Chisamarengu murdered him. Chikuyo had a more favorable opinion of Lomagundi than Matope the empire-builder and came back to the ancestral home on the Utete, the old hub of the kingdom.

There he died in about 1530. But before he died, he may have met the Portuguese traveler, Antonio Fernandes. Fernandes was a "degredado", an outcast who, as a punishment for some unknown crime, was put on a ship bound for Sofala on the East African coast.

He could neither read nor write, and we should know nothing about him if it were not for a clerk called Gaspar Veloso. Veloso took down what Fernandes had to say about his two attempts (made about 1513) to discover where all the gold came from that flowed into Sofala.

Very few of the names mentioned by Veloso fit in with the ones we use today and the most important of all, the fortress called Embire, may have been the Utete dzimbabwe or the other one which had been built by Matope in Portuguese East Africa. Certainly the words Biri and Embire are very similar.

The story now moves forward about forty years, to the year 1561. The ruler at this time was Nogomo Mupunzagutu. He, like Chikuyo, lived on the left bank of the Utete. In January, he met a Portuguese missionary of noble blood called Goncalo da Silveira. Silveira had come to Mozambique from Goa in 1560, full of the zeal of the Jesuits.

After traveling up the Zambezi to Tete, he struck overland through the Darwin district, where the Queen of Sheba is supposed to have loaded her camels with gold, and at last got to the Mwene Mutapa's court. Nogomo offered him cattle and gold and women, but Silveira sent them all back. He wanted only to convert the king to Christianity. And this he did. By the end of the month, Nogomo had allowed Silveira to baptise him.

Then the troubles began. Muslim traders at the court were extremely jealous of the Jesuits, not only because they were of a different faith, but because their own influence with the Mwene Mutapa was bound to decline if he became a Christian. They therefore began a campaign of lies against Silveira. They spread dark rumours about the bad effect of sprinkling holy water.

Nogomo, not yet free from the superstitions of his tribe, quickly revoked his new faith and, on 16 March 1561, had Silveira strangled and thrown into a pond at the junction of the Musengezi and Utete Rivers.

After Silveira's death, the Jesuits left the country and did not return until 1607. A military force set sail from Lisbon about ten years later to punish the Mwene Mutapa. Francisco Barreto led a party of soldiers up the Zambezi. He failed completely. He had plenty of arms and ammunition and his men were undoubtedly brave, but they could not fight two enemies at once.

What killed Barreto and most of his troops and horses was not the assegai or the poisoned arrow, but disease. The tsetse fly got the horses and malaria the men. But where the sword failed, more peaceful methods succeeded. Trading posts, churches, mining settlements grew up in the Mwene Mutapa's kingdom and finally in the early seventeenth century he gave all the gold in his dominions to the King of Portugal.

What Silveira had tried and failed to do was done by the Dominicans, who converted several of Nogomo's descendants with less tragic results.

When the earliest hunters and travelers from south of the Limpopo came into Mashonaland in the 1860s they found, not a powerful, centralized kingdom of warlike people, but a mild, industrious, disunited and more or less peaceable folk with no soldier class or military tradition.

The glories of the sixteenth century had long since faded. Mzilikazi, the despot of Matabeleland, in some sense Mwene Mutapa's heir, discouraged white penetration for fear that hunters would sell firearms to the Mashona.

Jan Viljoen, Piet Jacob and Henry Hartley came as far as the Mupfure river in 1865, but they valued their hunting rights too highly to go any further. It was on this trip that Hartley saw the pits and shafts which he suspected were ancient gold workings.

A couple of years later he came back with the German geologist, Carl Mauch, to confirm the discovery and the gold rush began. In 1868 a book appeared in London with the title To Ophir Direct, which gives a fair idea of the Old Testament visions which hypnotised the early prospectors.

Frederick Courtney Selous the hunter landed at Algoa Bay in 1871. On 24 November 1877, he reached the mouth of the Munyati River just at the western entrance to Kariba Gorge. He actually stood on the north bank and threw stones across.

He thought that "the breadth of the Zambezi, where it runs through the narrow gorge of Kariba, in many places cannot be more than sixty yards, narrower than at any other place I had yet seen. It seems to have worn a deep channel through the hard rock, through which it rushes with a strong current, full of whirlpools and eddies.

After getting clear of the gorge, Selous crossed from the north bank on 29 November 1877, at a little island and walked for a short distance along the opposite side. About twelve miles from the Kafue he went over to Cassoko Island, where the Portuguese had a post.

Christmas Day, 1877, Selous' stores ran out. On his way back to the Falls, both he and his companion fell ill.

By May of the next year, Selous was fit again and revisited Matabele country with the idea of joining a group of hunters in Mashonaland. He came back to Lomagundi's on 25 October for corn. He noticed, like everyone else, that

in the mountains about here, extensive excavations have been made, but whether for gold or iron we could not learn.

The corn he got cost more than usual and on the return trip crocodiles ate three of his dogs. Nevertheless, he was back again in 1880, for a journey into the tsetse fly country north of the Mupfure. Again he visited Lomagundi, whom he described as

a petty Mashona chief holding his life and property at the caprice of the Matabele chief, Lobengula

In contrast to the dirty and slovenly people he found on the north bank of the Zambezi in 1877, Lomagundi's people seemed

very industrious, cultivating great quantities of sorghum, mealies, groundnuts and a few sweet potatoes; they had any amount of vegetable food and lots of beer.

He saw cotton being woven and Lomagundi himself, courteous as ever, offered to accompany Selous.

The old chief wore a broad-brimmed straw hat and a gaily-coloured Portuguese cloth bound round his loins and hanging to the ground all round him like a skirt: over his left shoulder he carried a strong, 10-bore muzzle loading rifle, a present, so he told me, from Lobengula, and in his right hand a battle-axe made, handle and blade, entirely of native Mashona iron

When the chief appeared in all this finery, his people began an "infernal and monotonous tom-toming" which got on Selous' nerves. He came yet again to Lomagundi in June 1882. After a few weeks of shooting he came into a desolate country.

All that portion of the country, he said, had, at no very distant date, been thickly populated, whilst large patches of thick forest had been cleared for the cultivation of maize, sweet potatoes, etc. Every cluster of rocks had been the site of a Mashona village, many of which had not long been deserted.

But the ever-present fear of invasion by the cruel and bloodthirsty Matabele had caused the natives of this rich and fertile tract of country to desert the home of their forefathers and retreat towards the east and north.

In 1878 he had passed through the country of Chaminuka, between the Mupfure and Manyame rivers, and found more evidence of the harsh power of the Matabele. Chaminuka for several years enjoyed immunity from Matabele attack and his people grew fairly rich and prosperous.

Early in 1883, however, Lobengula ordered Chaminuka to be killed while he was on his way to pay homage at Bulawayo. His people fled beyond the Mazowe River but his young wife, a Matabele girl, was captured and taken back to Matabeleland.

She managed to run away and Selous found her living among Lomagundi's people in Mashonaland. A sad little story, but by no means unique in those years of Matabele dominance.

In 1887, Selous made his last visit to Lomagundi before the occupation. It was then that he found the Chinhoyi caves.

Baboons and bats used the caves as a ready-made home. The caves got the name Chirorodziwa or "pool of the Falls" when Zwangendaba came through the district with his Angoni in the 1830s.

He was running away from Shaka and on his arrival in Lomagundi the people rushed for safety to the caves and, in their hurry, many of them fell over the edge and were either killed on the rocks or drowned.

For many years the cave was unoccupied. In fact it was not until the appearance of the Matabele that any natives lived in the vicinity. Then one Chinhoyi built his village there and successfully resisted all attacks of the Matabele.

Chinhoyi lived at the cave until the arrival of the Europeans who, in 1912, destroyed some of the stalactites by shooting them down with rifles.

THE PORTUGUESE SOURCES

Diogo de Alcacova wrote a much fuller account of the communities of the hinterland, where the successors to the Mwene Mutapa, the Changamire, were raising impressive structures such as Khami and Nalatali. His report on the African chiefdoms inland centred, naturally, on their connections with the gold trade.

He wrote of the one who claimed overlordship of Karanga lands and their gold, the Mwene Mutapa, his zimbabwe or capital, and of the 12 year old power struggle between the Mwene Mutapa and the Changamire.

The word changamire might be derived from the word changamir from changa (Shona for "a worthless person") whose mother was a woman of lowly status, and amir, a title suggested by Moorish traders after the first changamir's successful campaigns

In the 16th century, the Portuguese employed expendable human resources called degrados, men condemned in Portugal for various crimes and offered freedom in return for undertaking dangerous missions abroad on behalf of the state.

The degrado agent we know most about was Antonio Fernandes, a ship's carpenter with a gift for languages and an uncanny rapport with strangers.

He noted such items as

The first king who borders with Sofala is called Mycamdira and there is nothing to be had in his land save supplies and ivory. The king of Embya ... has nothing save banditry ... Ynhacoue ... is the captain-major of the king of Monomotapa and ... in his lands they hold fairs on Mondays, called Sembaza fairs where the Moors sell all their merchandise ... The only coin is gold by weight. The king of Mazowe... has much gold in his land and he who mines it pays him half.

The Monomatapa lived at times in his Zimbabwe of thatched timber buildings, surrounded by a dry stone wall, but had another capital 6 days' journey away, where some of his wives were kept under guard.

Every year, as a test of allegiance, all fires in the kingdom were extinguished except the Mwene Mutapa's, and subordinate rulers were ordered to receive New Fire from his hearth. Anyone refusing risked annihilation at the hands of the army.

At his capital, tribute arrived, borne by long caravans of porters who were never allowed to see the ruler. The Mwene Mutapa were following a long tradition of seclusion, strongly hinted by the design of Great Zimbabwe with its well screened passages.

Dress and weapons showed a blend of indigenous fashion and Muslim influence: to the animal skins with tails swirling excitingly in the dances were added dyed cotton fabrics.

The Mwene Mutapa, however, for fear of harmful magic, continued to wear cloth woven in Africa itself.

Dos Santos, vicar of Sofala at the end of the 16th century mentions the Karanga love of metaphor and notes the whistling sounds in their language, but goes much further than this, incorporating Karanga words into his narrative which enable us to identify the people he describes as the ancestors of the modern Shona-speakers.

The Mwene Mutapa ruled from his royal village close to Mount Fura (Mt Darwin), and in his gold-producing areas the Portuguese had established three trade fairs.

His badge of office was the ndoro shell, he carried three rods of authority (tsvimbo), each of his envoys was called a mutumwa and he referred to his northern river boundary as the 'Empando' or Divider (mupanda).

His authority was often challenged by the Mongas, fierce warriors of the Zambezi valley, who fought in the "head and horns of the ox" formation (later made famous by Shaka).

When the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean, the Mwene Mutapa's kingdom was already in the process of fission. Santos described the eastern segment of the old hegemony, under the rule of Kiteve whose customs probably reflect closely those of the Mwene Mutapa.

Every September this ruler took his chiefs into the mountains of Manica for ceremonies to ensure the welfare of the community. (The timing suggests rain making rituals). He concealed his face behind a beadwork mask (the "hidden king" again) and the whole company leapt around (kupembera) until one became possessed by a mudzimu (ancestral spirit).

Inland also the coming of the Portuguese disrupted the existing pattern of trade and hastened the eclipse of the Zimbabwe culture. The collusion between the Mwene Mutapa and the Portuguese in the late 16th and 17th centuries sharpened the rivalry with the Changamire of the south to the point of war which in the late 17th century swept the Portuguese settlers off the plateau.

In this, the Portuguese influence was at times to intensify internecine strife in Karangaland, but it would be untrue to conclude that the Portuguese arrival caused it, for the Mwene Mutapa-Changamire conflict was 12 years old when Alcacova was writing in 1506.

The Portuguese era also brought from Brazil, at some time in the 16th century, a crop which rapidly became the most important staple cereal in sub-Saharan Africa: maize.

The Mutapa empire was finally conquered in 1629 by the Portuguese and never recovered. Remnants of the government established another Mutapa kingdom in Mozambique sometimes called Karanga. The Karanga kings styled themselves the Mambo and reigned in the region until 1902.

The Monomatapa of the 1st Mutapa state:

• Nyatsimba Mutota (c.1430 - c.1450)
• Matope Nyanhehwe Nebedza (c.1450 - c.1480)
• Mavhura Mabwe (1480)
• Mukombero Nyahuma (1480 - c.1490)
• Changamire (1490 - 1494)
• Kakuyo Komunyaka (1494 - c.1530)
• Neshangwe Munembire (c.1530 - c.1550)
• Chivere Nyasoro (c.1550 - 1560)
• Chisamhuru Negomo Mupunzagutu (1560 - 1589)
• Gatsi Rusere (1589 - 1623)
• Nyambo Kapararidze (1623 - 1629)

The Monomatapa of the 2nd Mutapa state:

• Chimbwanda Matombo (1634-1698)
• Kangara II (1803 - 1804)
• Mutiwapangome (1804 - 1806)
• Mutiwaora (1806)
• Chipfumba (1806 - 1807)
• Nyasoro (1807 - 1828)
• Chimininyambo or Kandeya II (1828 - 1830)
• Dzeka (1830 - 1849)
• Kataruza (1849 - 1868)
• Kandeya III (1868-1870)
• Dzuda (1870-1887)