ometime towards the end of the first millennium AD., some prodigious stimulus set the Bantuspeaking people migrating southwards through Africa from a nuclear area around the great lakes. Often the Bantu diaspora slowed down to a mere trickle, sometimes it would halt for long periods, but then the nomadic people would again follow the winding game trails of Africa, always trending south as though driven by some inexorable instinct. The migration only ended near the southern end of the continent when it clashed with Dutch colonists spreading out from the Cape during the eighteenth century. By then the Bantu had colonized nearly all Africa south of the "bulge", an area almost twice the size of the United States.

n favoured areas a Bantu tribe would drop out of the migration and make a permanent home. By AD. 800 the Tonga and Tavara were already settled in the Zambezi valley. The Karanga people, who worshipped a deity named Mwari, soon afterwards settled down a little further south, and set up a shrine to Mwari at a place which later was spoken of as Zimbabwe—the graves of the chiefs— and to it their paramount chief, the Mambo, moved his court.

he Mambo’s power slowly increased; about AD. 1450 he moved with his army to the north and conquered the country right up to the Zambezi. His subjects now began to speak of their chief as the Monomatapa—the master pillager. The second Monomatapa, Matope, became one of the great conquerors of Africa and before he died he ruled an empire which stretched from the Gwai River to the Indian Ocean.

atope died about 1480 having abandoned Zimbabwe to provincial status and made his capital on the slopes of Fura, now renamed Mount Darwin. In spiritual matters the Karanga had developed the Mwari cult into a religion which was able to withstand the successive impacts of Islam and Christianity for many years, while materially they had achieved a cultural level never seen elsewhere in Bantu Africa. The ruins of over a hundred stone building complexes of the Zimbabwe type proclaim the prosperity of their country.