Shona people

The Mutapa-Shona kingdom flourishes in the region of present Zimbabwe from the mid-fifteenth century.

Nyatsimba Mutota's successor, Mwenemutapa Matope, extends this new kingdom into an empire encompassing most of the lands between Tavara and the Indian Ocean.

The Mwenemutapa becomes very wealthy by exploiting copper from Chidzurgwe and ivory from the middle Zambezi.

This expansion weakens the Torwa kingdom, the southern Shona state from which Mutota and his dynasty originate.

Matope's armies overrun the kingdom of the Manyika as well as the coastal kingdoms of Kiteve and Madanda.

By the time the Portuguese arrive on the coast of Mozambique, the Mutapa Kingdom is the premier Shona state in the region.

Mutota raises a strong army, which conquers the Dande area that is Tonga and Tavara.

The religion of the Mutapa kingdom revolves around ritual consultation of spirits and of royal ancestors.

Shrines are maintained within the capital by spirit mediums known as "mhondoros".

The mhondoros also serve as oral historians recording the names and deeds of past kings.

The Mutapa state arises in the fifteenth century from the northward expansion of the Great Zimbabwe tradition, having been founded, according to oral tradition, by a warrior Nyatsimba Mutota from Great Zimbabwe, after he was sent to find new sources of salt in the north.

Prince Mutota finds his salt among the Tavara, a Shona subdivision, who are prominent elephant hunters.

The Tavara are conquered and Mutota’s people establish a kingdom three hundred and fifty kilometers north of Great Zimbabwe at Zvongombe by the Zambezi River.

Portugal's main goal on the Swahili coast is to take control of the spice trade from the Arabs.

At this stage, the Portuguese presence in East Africa serves the purposes of controlling trade within the Indian Ocean and securing the sea routes linking Europe to Asia.

Portuguese naval vessels are very disruptive to the commerce of Portugal's enemies within the western Indian Ocean and are able to demand high tariffs on items transported through the sea due to their strategic control of ports and shipping lanes.

As the Portuguese settle along the East African coast, they make their way into the hinterland as sertanejos (backwoodsmen).

These sertanejos live alongside Swahili traders and even take up service among Shona kings as interpreters and political advisors.

One such sertanejo, António Fernandes, has managed to travel through almost all the Shona kingdoms, including the Mutapa Empire's (Mwenemutapa) metropolitan district, between 1512 and 1516.

The first groups of Voortrekkers move into the southern Highveld, skirting the powerful Lesotho kingdom of Moshoeshoe to the east, and pasture their herds on lands between the Orange River and the Vaal River.

A large group moves farther north to the grasslands beyond the Vaal River into territory where Mzilikazi had recently established a powerful Ndebele state.

Competing for the same resources—pasturelands, water, and game—the Voortrekkers and the Ndebele soon come into conflict.

In 1836 the Voortrekkers fight off an Ndebele attempt to expel them from the Highveld.

In the following year, the northern Voortrekkers ally with the Rolong and the Griqua, who are known for their fighting skills.

This time the northern Voortrekkers succeed n defeating Mzilikazi and forcing him and most of his followers to flee north into present-day Zimbabwe, where he conquers the Shona and establishes a new state.

...Soshangane will establish the Nguni kingdom of Kwa Gaza, which he names after his grandfather, Gaza.

He also gives them his name Amashangana from Soshangane.

Consolidating his kingdom in the highlands of the middle Sabi River, he extends his control over the area between the Komati (Incomati) and the Zambezi rivers, incorporating the local Tsonga and Shona peoples into his kingdom.

The Gaza Kingdom comprises parts of what are now southeastern Zimbabwe, as well as extending from the Save River down to the southern part of Mozambique, covering parts of the current provinces of Sofala, Manica, Inhambane, Gaza and Maputo, and neighboring parts of South Africa.

Other restrictions have followed the pass law.

These include the establishment of special courts to process pass law offenders as rapidly as possible (the basis of segregated courts in the twentieth century), the laying out of special "locations" or ghettos in Kimberley where urban blacks had to live (the basis of municipal segregation practices), and, finally, in 1886 the formation of "closed compounds," fenced and guarded institutions in which all black diamond mine workers have to live for the duration of their labor contracts.

The institutionalization of such discriminatory practices has produced in Kimberley the highest rate of incarceration and the lowest living standards for urban blacks in the Cape Colony.

It also marks a major turnabout in the British administration of law.

The previous official policy that all people irrespective of color be treated equally, while still accepted in legal theory, is now largely ignored in judicial practice.

South Africa's first industrial city has thus developed into a community in which discrimination has become entrenched in the economic and social order, not because of racial antipathies formed on the frontier, but because of the desire for cheap labor.

The final quarter of the nineteenth century in Southern Africa is marked also by the rise of new forms of political and religious organization as blacks struggle to attain some degree of autonomy in a world that is rapidly becoming colonized.

Because the right to vote is based on ownership of property rather than on race in the Cape, blacks can participate in electoral politics, and this they do in increasing numbers in the 1870s and the 1880s,   especially in the towns.

In 1879 Africans in the eastern Cape had formed the Native Educational Association (NEA), the purpose of which is to promote "the improvement and elevation of the native races."

This had been followed by the establishment of the more overtly political Imbumba Yama Nyama (literally, "hard, solid sinew"), formed in 1882 in Port Elizabeth, which seeks to fight for "national rights" for Africans.

John Tengo Jabavu, a mission-educated teacher and vice president of the NEA, had founded his own newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu (Native Opinion) in 1884.

Jabavu uses the newspaper as a forum through which to express African grievances about the pass laws; "location" regulations; the unequal administration of justice; and what are considered "anti-native" laws, such as the one passed in 1887 by the Cape Parliament at Rhodes's behest that had raised the property qualification for voters and had stricken twenty thousand Africans off the rolls.

Through these organizations and newspapers, and others like them established in the late nineteenth century, Africans protest their unequal treatment, pointing out in particular contradictions between the theory and practice of British colonialism.

They call for the eradication of discrimination and for the incorporation of Africans into colonial society on an equal basis with Europeans.

By the end of the nineteenth century, after property qualifications have again been raised in 1892, there are only about eight thousand Africans on the Cape's voting roll.

Africans seek to bypass what they consider the discriminatory practices of the established Christian churches (which often preach to segregated audiences and seldom promote Africans within their ranks) by founding separate organizations of their own.

Starting in 1884 with Nehemiah Tile, a Thembu (Tembu) Methodist preacher from the eastern Cape who had left the Methodists and established the Tembu National Church, Africans build their own churches throughout South Africa.

Many of these churches are termed "Ethiopian" by their founders, on the basis of the biblical prophecy "that Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God," and because for centuries an African-run independent Christian church has existed in Ethiopia.

A strong influence on these churches in the 1890s and the early 1900s is the United States-based African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), which sends missionaries to South Africa and trains many blacks from South Africa at its own institutions in the United States.

Members of these independent churches call not so much for the elimination of racial discrimination and inequality as for an "Africa for the Africans," that is, a country ruled by blacks.