Military history of Zimbabwe
It covers invasions of native peoples of Africa (Shona and Ndebele), encroachment by Europeans (Portuguese, Boer and British settlers), and civil conflict.
Stone Age evidence indicates that the San people, now living mostly in the Kalahari Desert, are the ancestors of this region's original inhabitants, almost 3,000 years ago.
Around the 4th century the Bantu-speaking Shona[1][2] (Gokomere, Sotho-Tswana and related tribes) arrived from the north and both the San and the early ironworkers were driven out.
Mzilikazi's invasion of the Transvaal was one part of a vast series of inter-related wars, forced migrations and famines that indigenous people and later historians came to call the Mfecane.
In the Transvaal, the Mfecane severely weakened and disrupted the towns and villages of the Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms, their political systems and economies, making them very weak, and easy to colonize by the European settlers who would shortly arrive from the south.
In the 1830s and 1840s, white descendants of Dutch pioneers, collectively known as voortrekkers or trekboers, departed Cape Colony with hundreds of their dependents to escape British rule.
This exodus, in what came to be called the Great Trek, often pitted the migrant settlers against local forces and resulted in the formation of short-lived Boer republics.
One of the Tswana chiefs, Moroko, later convinced Potgieter to pull his wagons back to the safety of Thaba-Nchu - where his men could seek food and protection.
Voortrekker parties harassed Mzilikazi as late as 1851, but the following year burghers of the South African Republic finally negotiated a lasting peace.
His son, Lobengula, granted several concessions to European traders, including the 1888 Rudd treaty giving Cape imperialist Cecil Rhodes exclusive mineral rights in much of the lands east of Matabeleland.
Gold was already known to exist in nearby Mashonaland, so with the Rudd concession Rhodes obtained a royal charter to form the British South Africa Company in 1889.
The first battle in the war occurred on 5 November 1893 when a British laager was attacked by the Matabele on open ground a few miles from the Impembisi River.
The laager consisted of 670 British soldiers, 400 of whom were mounted along with a small force of native allies fought off the Imbezu and Ingubu regiments computed by Sir John Willoughby to number 1,700 warriors in all.
Under somewhat mysterious circumstances, King Lobengula died in January 1894, and within a few short months the British South Africa Company controlled most of the Matabeleland and white settlers continued to arrive.
The Second Matabele War—or the First Chimurenga, as it is often called in modern Zimbabwe—comprised revolts against British South Africa Company rule by the Ndebele and Shona peoples during 1896 and 1897.
Africans were armed with Martini-Henry rifles, Lee Metfords, elephant guns, muskets and blunderbusses, as well as with the traditional spears, axes, knobkerries and bows and arrows".
He convinced the Ndebele and Shona that the white settlers (almost 4,000 strong by then) were responsible for the drought, locust plagues and the cattle disease rinderpest ravaging the country at the time.
Upon learning of the death of Mlimo, Cecil Rhodes boldly walked unarmed into the native's stronghold and persuaded the impi to lay down their arms.
It was a three-way conflict between the predominantly white minority government of Ian Smith and the Rhodesian Front and two rival black nationalist movements: the Maoist Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), led by Robert Mugabe, drew its support mostly from the Shona people, while the Marxist Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) of Joshua Nkomo was mostly supported by Ndebele.
The Soviets increased their influence and began to take a more active role in the training and control of the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) guerrillas.
On 12 February 1979 as the war increased even more in intensity, another civilian airliner Air Rhodesia Flight 827 was hit by another shoulder-fired missile; all 59 passengers and crew were killed when the aircraft turned into a huge fireball.
In these operations troopies were required to carry well over 100 lbs of equipment for five to tens days for one patrol and come back and repeat, for weeks, sometimes months.
They were named after British explorer Frederick Courteney Selous (1851–1917), and their motto was pamwe chete, which translated from Shona means "all together", "together only" or "forward together".
The Patriotic Front (PF) was originally formed in 1976 as a political and military alliance between ZAPU and ZANU during the war against white minority rule.
Both movements contributed their respective military forces: ZAPU's military wing was known as Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) which operated mainly from Zambia and somewhat in Angola, and ZANU's guerrillas were known as Zimbabwe National African Liberation Army (ZANLA) which formed in 1965 in Tanzania, but operated mainly from camps around Lusaka, Zambia and later from Mozambique.
Following majority rule elections, the rivalry that had been fermenting between ZAPU and ZANU erupted, with guerrilla activity starting again in the Matabeleland provinces (south-western Zimbabwe).
A peace accord was negotiated and on 30 December 1987 Mugabe became head of state after changing the constitution to usher in his vision of a presidential regime.
The Mugabe administration claims that colonial social and economic structures remained largely intact in the years after the end of Rhodesian rule, with a small minority of white farmers owning the vast majority of the country's arable land (many partys within Zimbabwe question the extent and validity of these assertions, considering twenty years of ZANU-PF rule, the "Willing Buyer-Willing Seller" policy paid for by Britain and the diminished size of Zimbabwe's white population).
The beginning of the "Third Chimurenga" is often attributed to the need to distract Zimbabwean electorate from the poorly conceived war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and deepening economic problems blamed on graft and ineptitude in the ruling party.
