The long story

The history of Matobo National Park

People have lived among these granite hills for at least half a million years, painted their walls for thirteen thousand, and prayed at their shrines for longer than anyone has written anything down. The national park, founded in 1926, is the most recent layer.

If you only want the answer

The Matobo Hills hold one of the longest human records in southern Africa: occupation for at least 500,000 years, rock art at least 13,000 years old, and the Mwari shrines that still draw pilgrims every August. The park was created in 1926 as Rhodes Matopos National Park, Rhodes having been buried on World's View in 1902, and the hills were inscribed by UNESCO in 2003.

Hunters, painters and farmers

UNESCO describes an almost uninterrupted association between people and this landscape over the past 100,000 years, and occupation reaching back at least 500,000. The caves kept the evidence. Nswatugi was excavated in 1932 and again in 1975, with Late Stone Age deposits dated to between 4,500 and 8,000 years ago. Pomongwe was dug between 1960 and 1962 and again in 1979, and a paper published in 2025 was still studying its small stone tools. Bambata was first examined in 1918 and excavated again in 1929, turning up scrapers and polished pottery.

The painters left more than 3,000 registered sites across the hills. Giraffe, kudu, eland, zebra and human figures recur. The record also shows the slow shift from foraging to farming that UNESCO singles out as one of the reasons the hills were listed.

A sacred landscape, still in use

The Mwari, or Mwali, religion is centred on these hills, and UNESCO calls it the most powerful oracular tradition in southern Africa. Its shrines are marked by nothing more than a wooden palisade, beyond which people may not go without permission from the ancestral spirits, consulted through a custodian and the elders. Njelele, outside the park, is the best known, associated with rain-making.

The annual pilgrimage in August draws more than a thousand pilgrims over about three weeks. Malindidzimu, the hill later called World's View, was itself a sacred hill before any colonial burial. Mzilikazi, founder of the Ndebele state, lies in a cave grave north-east of the park.

1902: a grave on Malindidzimu

Cecil John Rhodes died on 26 March 1902 and was buried on the summit of Malindidzimu. Leander Starr Jameson was buried beside him in 1917 and Charles Coghlan in 1927. The Shangani Memorial, designed by Herbert Baker with bronze panels by John Tweed, was unveiled nearby on 5 July 1904 and holds the remains of members of the Shangani Patrol, killed at the Shangani River in December 1893.

The grave has been contested for decades. Calls for exhumation date back to the 1980s; in 2012 war veterans blamed the remains for drought and NMMZ rejected exhumation, and the debate returned in 2023. Many people living around the hills oppose exhumation because the site brings in visitors and income.

1926: Rhodes Matopos National Park

The park was created in 1926 as Rhodes Matopos National Park, from Rhodes' bequest. Its shape has changed since. Southern and eastern sections were later set aside for settlement, and the park was extended northwards when the World's View and Hazelside farms were added.

The creation of the park also meant that people living on the land were moved off it. That eviction is part of the local history, and it is examined in a 2018 paper by Hubbard in Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites.

Looking after the art, and getting it wrong

In the 1920s someone decided to preserve the paintings at Pomongwe by coating them in linseed oil. The oil darkened and the panels have never recovered, which is why every guide will ask you not to touch, wet or chalk a painting. A site museum and interpretive centre opened at Pomongwe on 1 July 1994.

Sixty years of counting eagles

In 1959 and 1960 a ranger recorded 37 black eagle eyries in the hills. A formal survey began in 1963, reaching 68 sites by the end of 1964, and it has run every year since. 2023 was its sixtieth consecutive year, which the Matobo Conservation Society describes as the longest-running eagle study in the world. A parallel count of the hyrax the eagles live on ran for decades and stopped in 2019.

2003: World Heritage

UNESCO inscribed the Matobo Hills on 5 July 2003, at the 27th session of the World Heritage Committee, as a cultural landscape of 205,000 hectares with a 105,000 hectare buffer zone. The property covers the national park and parts of the Matobo and Umzingwane districts, including communal land and commercial farms.

What you can see of the history today

The painted caves at Nswatugi, Pomongwe and Bambata inside the park, on the NMMZ ticket.
The site museum at Pomongwe, with the damaged panels that taught everyone what not to do.
World's View, with the graves, the Shangani Memorial and a small gallery on Rhodes' life.
The wider landscape outside the park, including Silozwane and Inanke, reached through the local community.
The Njelele shrine and Mzilikazi's grave are places of worship and a royal grave, visited only with the custodians' or the community's permission.