Zimbabwe

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Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe was engaged in trade outside its current borders from at least 1000 bce. By 1100 it was exporting gold eastward through Mozambique to the trading networks of the Indian Ocean to Arabia, India, and beyond. Other exports may have included copper oxide and goods manufactured from copper and iron. It imported food, salt, beads, and jewelry from India, Arabia, Egypt, and beyond.

These trading patterns continued, and trade volumes doubtless increased during the period of Portuguese influence along the coasts adjacent to Zimbabwe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was an era when Portuguese entrepreneurs also established plantations on the territory of the Mutapa and Rozwi kings, across what is now Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Gold and copper ingots continued to flow eastward. Portuguese travelers also bought and sold a variety of goods across the region, thus linking Zimbabwe with the trade of the wider world.

It was only in the late nineteenth century, however, after Sindebele-speaking warriors from South Africa had invaded Zimbabwe and conquered much of the country, that the gentle trade patterns of earlier centuries were altered dramatically. Rather than flowing mostly eastward, toward the coast, Zimbabwe's trading looked south. The Ndebele under Mzilikazi and Lobengula naturally had ties to Zulu in the south, and trade followed. Much of the new trade was in arms and food, plus gold.

White explorers and traders soon entered the region, from the south. In the 1890s, conquest followed. Cecil J. Rhodes's British South Africa Company sponsored a peaceful invasion that was a prelude to combat and war: Gold and other mineral possibilities drew Rhodes and his men, and settlers followed. By 1900 Zimbabwe was subdued, a colonial enterprise had been started, and whites began to grow maize and other crops for export. However, minerals were not at first found in the kinds of quantities and Rhodes and his associates had anticipated.

From 1900 to 1960 Southern Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was known) became a self-administered home of white settlers. Nearly all of the most fertile and best-watered land in the country was alienated from Africans and occupied by white farmers. Tobacco became a major export crop from the 1930s; the country's sandy soils and long dry seasons, followed by a few months (usually) of downpours, were particularly hospitable to such a crop. Through various coercive means, such as a hut-tax policy and land segregation, whites obtained sufficient indigenous labor to make tobacco curing, maize planting and harvesting, sugar growing and cutting, and other agricultural pursuits possible and profitable.

Mineral exports also grew in these same years. Old and new veins of gold were found and exploited, but extensive new deposits of chrome, nickel, platinum, copper, iron ore, and coal were also discovered by prospectors, and developed gradually by large mining firms from South Africa and Britain. Industrial growth, stimulated by World War II, also began contributing to Southern Rhodesia's gross domestic product in the 1950s and after. Textiles, wool fabrics, breakfast foods, soaps, and other consumer goods supplied both a local market and the conjoined territories of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) from 1953, when all three British appendages became part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1953–1964).

Southern Rhodesia's export and import statistics show how rapidly the small, isolated territory grew after World War II. In 1920 Southern Rhodesia exported gold worth 2.4 million pounds and .4 million pounds of maize while importing 1.4 million pounds worth of textile goods and 1.2 million pounds worth of miscellaneous manufactured goods. Ten years later, major total exports were about 4 million pounds, and imports were at the same level. By 1950, however, the value of major exports had increased to 34 million Rhodesian pounds (US $ 91 billion), of which 18 million was in tobacco revenues and about 5 million in minerals. In 1965, the value of exports was over 100 million Rhodesian pounds (US $265 million), of which tobacco accounted for half. By 1990, in Zimbabwe dollars, the value of total exports was about $1.5 billion (roughly US $1 billion), of which tobacco was a third. The totals had fallen by 2000, after the onset of Zimbabwe's economic crisis, to $3.3 billion (given inflation and the great depreciation of the Zimbabwe dollar, worth only US $600 million), of which tobacco accounted for nearly half. In 1990 $1 = 1, in 2000, 1 US $ = 56 Zim dollars.

African nationalism only reached Southern Rhodesia to any substantial degree in the late 1950s. By 1960, with African nations increasingly obtaining their independence from Britain, white Rhodesians, numbering about 250,000 at their peak, backed chauvinist parties of their own and attempted to repress the rise of an indigenous political consciousness. In 1965 whites also unilaterally declared independence from Britain. Until 1980 Rhodesia (as it was then called) attempted ingeniously to war against African insurgents and to evade Western sanctions. Assisted by South Africa and Portugal (until Portuguese Mozambique gained its independence in 1975), Rhodesia constructed an autarkic economic and trade regime. Many of the consumer and military goods that would hitherto have been imported were manufactured locally. Ferrochrome and other exports made their way to world markets despite extensive U. S. and British blockades. Ultimately, Rhodesia succumbed to change and became Zimbabwe because South Africa refused to continue to be the financier and importer and exporter of last resort.

From 1980 to 2004, under the increasingly autocratic rule of President Robert Mugabe (b. 1924), Zimbabwe first prospered from its agricultural and mineral exports and its well-educated and well-trained manpower. Africans during this period came to occupy increasingly dominant roles in the economic infrastructure. Better lands still remained in white hands, despite opportunities and available finance during the 1980s and 1990s with which the government could have purchased white-owned estates.

The successes of Africa's most balanced economy came to an end after 1998 when Mugabe and his cronies sent 11,000 troops into the Democratic Republic of Congo to protect President Laurent Kabila (b.1939) and to gain access to the rents of diamond, cobalt, and copper mines in the Congo. These actions and Mugabe's stepped-up corruption bankrupted the state. Soon, there was little foreign exchange and extensive import shortages. Mugabe lashed out at white farmers, sending thugs to invade their farms and appropriate them for important African politicians. By 2003, after two stolen elections and much oppression, Zimbabwe's once-strong economy was in ruins. Trade was virtually at a standstill, the commercial farming sector in chaos, inflation at 800 percent a year, unemployment at 80 percent, and black and white flight at record levels.

No one knew how and when Zimbabwe's descent into the bowels of economic misery would end, but in 2004 it was clear that Zimbabwe barely functioned as an economy or as a trading partner. One result was spreading hunger and starvation.

SEE ALSO Africa, Labor Taxes (Head Taxes); Africa, Native Lands Acts; Anglo American Corporation; Boycott; DeBeers; Empire, British; Ethnic Groups, Africans; Ethnic Groups, Gujarati; Gold and Silver; Gold Rushes; Imperialism; International Monetary Fund (IMF); Indonesia;Laborers, Coerced;Laborers, Contract;Rhodes, Cecil;Unilever;Wheat and Other Cereal Grains.