Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe, officially the Republic of Zimbabwe, is a landlocked country in Southeast Africa between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers, bordered by South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique, with Harare as its capital and largest city and a population of roughly 17.3 million per 2026 estimates, made up overwhelmingly of the Northern Ndebele and Shona peoples, who together form 95 percent of the population. Beginning in the eleventh century the Shona built the city of Great Zimbabwe, a major African trade center by the thirteenth century, from which the Kingdom of Zimbabwe and later the Mutapa and Rozvi empires arose; the British South Africa Company under Cecil Rhodes conquered the region in 1890 and 1893, and it became the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1923. The white minority government unilaterally declared independence as Rhodesia in 1965, enduring international isolation and a fifteen-year guerrilla war before a peace agreement established de jure sovereignty as Zimbabwe in April 1980. Robert Mugabe led the country from 1980, as prime minister and then, from 1987, as president under an increasingly authoritarian regime responsible for widespread human rights violations, until a 2017 coup forced his resignation after economic collapse and hyperinflation between 1997 and 2008; Emmerson Mnangagwa has served as president since.