Zimbabwe is a member of the United Nations (UN), the African Union, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the South African Development Community (SADC). Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth of Nations for a year after the flawed presidential election of March 2002 and left of its own accord in December 2003.
Remains of early hominids have been found in Zimbabwe. About 50,000 years ago the plateau area between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers was inhabited by Khoisan-speaking peoples, the ancestors of the modern San of the Kalahari who left many cave paintings in Zimbabwe, some dating back 30,000 years. About 2,000 years ago, Bantu-speaking peoples began crossing the Zambezi, moving into the plateau area. These Iron Age people included the ancestors of the Shona, who were the main occupants of Zimbabwe until the 1830s, when the Ndebele (descended from Iron Age people who had continued further south) moved into the country during the troubles of the mfecane.
The development of states from about the early 10th century ad, appears to be linked to the establishment of trading contacts with Mu slim merchants on the Mozambique coast, who offered to exchange glass beads and cloth for gold, ivory, and copper (which initially had no economic value to the Shona). The first of the trading states was Mapungubwe, centred near the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe rivers. It traded initially mainly in ivory; a gold trade was first developed from panning for stream deposits. Gold-mining began probably during the 11th century, and there are today more than 4,000 pre-colonial working gold sites in modern Zimbabwe.
A Great Zimbabwe
The trading state which was based at Great Zimbabwe began to develop in the 11th century, taking over from Mapungubwe in the 13th, and reaching its peak in the 14th—when it extended from Botswana to the coast of Mozambique. The state produced cotton cloth, and smelted and manufactured gold, copper, and iron. Great Zimbabwe, whose monumental ruins can still be seen near the River Mutirikwe in the south-east, became a city of some 10,000 people. It ceased to be the centre of the Zimbabwe state and culture in the mid-15th century, possibly because it had outgrown the ability of the surrounding countryside to support such a large settlement.
New Shona states, such as that of the Torwa, the Mutapa, and the Changamire, succeeded the Zimbabwe state. At the beginning of the 14th century the large centralized state, later known as the Mwene Mutapa Empire, came into being. After a rapid territorial expansion in the 15th century, this polity split, and the southern kingdom of Changamire was established.
