Zimbabwe is the name for the highland region between the Zambezi River in the north and the Limpopo River in the south. On the east it is bounded by the Inyanga and Vumga mountain ranges. On the west Zimbabwe is divided from Botswana by an arbitrary political boundary stretching from the region of Victoria Falls southeast to the Maitengwe River and from there along the Shashe River to where it joins the Limpopo.

The aboriginal inhabitants of the area were the San people, more familiarly known as the Bushmen in the more southwesternly parts of Africa. In the fifth century A.D. the ancestors of the Shona people, a branch of Bantu-speaking people who came to dominate eastern and southern Africa. The original homeland of the Bantu people was the area that is now eastern Nigeria. The Shona tribe was the first conquerors of Zimbabwe and their descendants now constitute about 80 percent of the population of Zimbabwe. The San people, although virtually extinct, still survive but in numbers of only a few hundred. The Shona were pastoralists who herded cattle but engaged in some agriculture. They were iron-age people; i.e., they knew how to smelt iron and fashion it into weapons and tools. This contrasts with the natives of the Americas who generally were still stone-age people. Sometime after the eleventh century the Shona built the stone structures (walls and towers) that were called Zimbabwe (stone enclosure) and after which the country is named. By the fifteenth century the Zimbabwe structure was abandoned because the resources in its vicinity had been exhausted.

In the early nineteenth century another group of conquerors came to the region. They were the Ndebele. They were an offshoot of the political turmoil created to the south by the rise of the Zulus under the leadership of Shaka. Shaka was a physical giant of a man who welded the Zulus into a formidable military force. He was an able but ruthless leader given to punishing those groups who did not follow his dictates exactly by mass execution by impalement. A subgroup of the Zulus under the leadership of Mzilikazi fled in the early 1820's from Shaka's kingdom. They acquired wives from among the peoples of the territories they passed through. With their superior military organization they took control of the area in what is now the southwest of Zimbabwe from the Shona. They were known as the Ndebele and the territory they conquerored was Matabeleland. The descendants of these conquerors constitute about fourteen percent of the population of Zimbabwe.

Starting about 1890 another group of conquerors came into the region. They were the British from South Africa. In particular the new conquest was carried out by John Cecil Rhodes of South Africa under the Royal Charter for his company, the British South Africa Company (BSAC). As conquerors go these new conquerors were relatively mild in their domination of the country. Somehow intellectuals seem to think that the new conquerors of the descendants of the old conqerors are supposed to behave as benevolent guardians. Conquerors are conquerors. The British did not treat the Shona and Ndebele as Englishmen, but they did not treat them as badly as the ancestors of the Shona and Ndebele treated their conquests. If the British had wanted to ensure that they would control Zimbabwe forever they would have had to have engaged in genocide. Because the British did not destroy the Shona eventually the Shona came back into control of Zimbabwe. Although it may have seemed an eternity to the people in the region the era of British conquest and control only lasted ninety years from beginning to end. Military weaponry may be decisive in the short run, but in the long run control is just a matter of demographics.