The Mutapa State was founded in the fifteenth century, following the sudden fall of Great Zimbabwe. It was first seen by Swahili and Portuguese traders in the 15th and 16th century, respectively. Early cartographers and chroniclers greatly overstated its territory, which was south of the Zambezi River in what is now northern Zimbabwe, leading historians to believe it extended all the way to the Indian Ocean and the Kalahari Desert.
As early as the sixteenth century, the polity exercised hegemony over the northernmost parts of the Zimbabwe Plateau and the neighboring Zambezi lowlands. Manyika, Barwe, Uteve, and Danda are rumored to have broken away as independent kingdoms. Limiting it to Chidima on the Zambezi by the nineteenth century.
The Portuguese, who arrived on the Zimbabwe Plateau around the turn of the sixteenth century, gathered first-hand and second-hand reports of the Mutapa State. The materials’ emphasis on commerce and judicial intrigue makes them inevitably partial. Oral traditions are a great way to pass on a variety of knowledge about the people who were formerly under state rule. North of the Zambezi Escarpment, in the Plateau and Dande, archaeologists have been working since the 1980s to locate state-related communities.
Migrations from Guruuswa, which is associated with the southern grasslands, are mentioned in oral histories about the founding of the Mutapa polity. The groups on the move went to the Zambezi River’s Dande region in quest of salt. According to legend, the nation’s founders captured and ruled the Tonga and Tavara of the lower Zambezi as well as the Manyika and Barwe to the east. Based on historical records, it appears they first established themselves in the Mukaranga region of the Ruya-Mazowe basin prior to the sixteenth century, at which time they proceeded to conquer and absorb the region’s preexisting chiefdom.
This was necessary to secure the new state’s position in the Indian Ocean commerce network and to maintain control over agricultural land and critical resources, primarily gold and ivory. The fall of Great Zimbabwe in the fifteenth century coincides with the development of the Mutapa State, according to archaeological evidence. After then, stone structures mimicking Great Zimbabwe’s style began popping up in the country’s north. They were the epicenters of a civilization that had moved north from the southern United States. It has been determined that these are palaces.
The growing significance of the Zambezi River in Indian Ocean trade that was formerly routed through Ingombe Illede spurred this. Mount Fura and the Mukaradzi River valley around it saw an influx of inhabitants about the year 1500, perhaps as a result of the presence of new merchants in the region. The Portuguese records call this place Mukaranga, and the locals are referred to as Karanga. When the Portuguese first came at the start of the sixteenth century, they were a part of the Mutapa state.
The Mutapa State royal capitals are called Zimbabwe in Portuguese texts. These courts are characterized as “large” and “of stone and clay,” but their exact locations are left vague. The Portuguese also discovered numerous sizable cities and villages, some of which had a radius of three to five kilometers. The king’s residences were spread out among various buildings and courtyards. About four thousand people called these major cities home. Zimbabweans lived mostly on the Plateau south of the Escarpment before the middle of the seventeenth century, according to archaeological evidence.
Portuguese interference in Mutapa State court politics, civil wars, conquests, and commerce dominated the region’s history beginning in the 15th century. When the Portuguese arrived in Tonga in the year 1570, the locals put up a fierce fight to keep the invaders out. Then the Zimba invaded Maravi, to the north of the Zambezi.
During the years 1600–1624, the Portuguese battled in civil conflicts, including Mutapa Gatsi Rusere, eventually subduing the kingdom, and during the years 1629–1661, they reduced the rulers of the state to pliable puppets. Since the late sixteenth century, trading hubs have been established, with Portuguese and Swahili merchants acting as intermediaries in the trade of Asian goods such as beads, glazed pottery, and textiles for precious metals and ivory.
The state-controlled plateau area appears to have been heavily traveled, with Massapa, Luanze, and Dambarare being the most visited locations. Baranda, which corresponds with the Portuguese trading location of Massapa in the Mukaradzi valley, has yielded artifacts that reveal an indigenous material culture comparable to that of Great Zimbabwe, providing more evidence for the connection between the Mutapa state and Great Zimbabwe.
The Portuguese had a permanent resident here whose job it was to negotiate trade deals and keep tabs on Portuguese travel around the state. The Portuguese government’s meddling in an attempt to subjugate the state led to a decline in commercial activity there.
Early in the seventeenth century, rebels opposed to the Mutapa State’s rule and supported by the Portuguese significantly challenged central authority. Some Portuguese prazo holders in the 1630s were said to have engaged in crime by raising private armies to plunder and enslave locals. There have also been reports of private fortifications.
Continued instability throughout the 1660s hampered trade in the eastern and central regions of the plateau, driving merchants westward in search of fresh opportunities. After a while, these were discarded as well. Additionally, agricultural output dropped as people left the gold-rich regions, and international trade was left unchecked.
The Portuguese prazo holders in the Zambezi region were among the peripheral communities that were urged to rise up as a result. Archaeology has proven that fortifications were built across the state. More than a hundred badly coursed stone fortifications with loopholes (small, square apertures possibly used for peeping or shooting out points) may be found atop hills and mountains in the Ruya-Mazowe area.
These are most likely the fortified hilltops where insurgents hid from the Portuguese and Mutapa. Moreover, the Portuguese reportedly constructed earthworks and timber stockades (chuambos). Disease began wiping out the local population at an alarming rate in the 1680s.
The state’s Portuguese residents were expelled. South of the Zambezi Escarpment, the state had effectively lost power by the late 17th century. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the capital of the Mutapa state moved from its original location in the south to Dande, which is located in the northern part of the Zambezi Escarpment.
The new state’s territory was small. Until the 1850s, it regularly assaulted or seized the Portuguese prazos to the east, between Tete and the lower Mazowe. The rapid successions to power and the ensuing civil wars between rival households showed that the country’s government was unstable. Both Dande and Chidima devolved into smaller, semi-independent polities ruled by a few subrulers.
Its military might and capacity to adapt to changing political conditions allowed it to endure. The Tavara’s Chikara religious cult had significant sway over the conduct of civil warfare. Whether it was for reasons of safety or to escape the intense heat or dryness, capitals were continuously on the move.
Therefore, save during times of war, they only housed court officials, royal spouses, and a garrison of roughly 500 warriors. It was able to put down rebellions, defeat prazo holders, and expand its territory even during the tough years between 1770 and 1830. Despite Ngoni invasions, severe droughts, and growing Portuguese attempts to reoccupy the lower Zambezi, the Mutapa State managed to endure the nineteenth century. After 1860, however, prazo holders from Portugal sent in the Chikunda army to invade the Mutapa state and extract tribute from the local government. The end of the state appears to have occurred in 1884.
