British South Africa Company in the context of "Mashonaland"

Harare (/həˈrɑːreɪ/ hə-RAR-ay), formerly known as Salisbury, is the capital and largest city of Zimbabwe. The city proper has an area of 982.3 km (379.3 sq mi), a population of 1,849,600 as of the 2022 census, and an estimated 2,487,209 people in its metropolitan province. The city is situated in north-eastern Zimbabwe in the country's Mashonaland region. Harare Metropolitan Province incorporates the city and the municipalities of Chitungwiza, Epworth and Ruwa. The city sits on a plateau at an elevation of 1,483 metres (4,865 feet) above sea level, and its climate falls into the subtropical highland category.

The city was founded in 1890 by the Pioneer Column, a small military force of the British South Africa Company, and was named Fort Salisbury after the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. Company administrators demarcated the city and ran it until Southern Rhodesia achieved responsible government in 1923. Salisbury was thereafter the seat of the Southern Rhodesian (later Rhodesian) government and, between 1953 and 1963, the capital of the Central African Federation. It retained the name Salisbury until 1982 when it was renamed Harare on the second anniversary of Zimbabwe's independence from the United Kingdom. The national parliament moved out of Harare upon completion of the New Parliament of Zimbabwe in Mount Hampden in April 2022.

Zambia, officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country located in Southeast Africa. It is bordered to the north by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania to the north-east, Malawi to the east, Mozambique to the southeast, Zimbabwe and Botswana to the south, Namibia to the southwest, and Angola to the west. The capital city of Zambia is Lusaka, located in the south-central part of Zambia. The population is concentrated mainly around Lusaka in the south and the Copperbelt Province to the north, the core economic hubs of the country.

Originally inhabited by Khoisan peoples, the region was affected by the Bantu expansion of the thirteenth century. Following European expeditions in the eighteenth century, Britain colonised the region, forming the British protectorates of Barotziland–North-Western Rhodesia and North-Eastern Rhodesia towards the end of the nineteenth century. These were merged in 1911 to form Northern Rhodesia. For most of the colonial period, Zambia was governed by an administration appointed from London with the advice of the British South Africa Company.

Northern Rhodesia was a British protectorate in Southern Africa, now the independent country of Zambia. It was formed in 1911 by amalgamating the two earlier protectorates of Barotziland-North-Western Rhodesia and North-Eastern Rhodesia. It was initially administered, as were the two earlier protectorates, by the British South Africa Company (BSAC), a chartered company, on behalf of the British Government. From 1924, it was administered by the British Government as a protectorate, under similar conditions to other British-administered protectorates, and the special provisions required when it was administered by BSAC were terminated.

Although under the BSAC charter it had features of a charter colony, the BSAC's treaties with local rulers, and British legislation, gave it the status of a protectorate. The territory attracted a relatively small number of European settlers, but from the time they first secured political representation, they agitated for white minority rule, either as a separate entity or associated with Southern Rhodesia and possibly Nyasaland. The mineral wealth of Northern Rhodesia made full amalgamation attractive to Southern Rhodesian politicians, but the British Government preferred a looser association to include Nyasaland. This was intended to protect Africans in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland from discriminatory Southern Rhodesian laws. The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland formed in 1953 was intensely unpopular among the vast African majority and its formation hastened calls for majority rule. As a result of this pressure, the country became independent in 1964 as Zambia.

The Pioneer Column was a force raised by Cecil Rhodes and his British South Africa Company in 1890 and used in his efforts to annex the territory of Mashonaland, later part of Zimbabwe (once Southern Rhodesia).

Southern Rhodesia was a self-governing British Crown colony in Southern Africa, established in 1923 and consisting of British South Africa Company (BSAC) territories lying south of the Zambezi River. The region was informally known as South Zambesia until Britain annexed it at the behest of the British South Africa Company. The colony was then renamed for that company’s founder, Cecil Rhodes. The bounding territories were Bechuanaland (Botswana), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Portuguese Mozambique (Mozambique) and the Transvaal Republic (for two brief periods known as the British Transvaal Colony; from 1910, the Union of South Africa and, from 1961, the Republic of South Africa). Since 1980, the colony's territory is the independent nation of Zimbabwe.

This southern region, known for its extensive gold reserves, was first purchased by the BSAC's Pioneer Column on the strength of a mineral concession extracted from its Matabele king, Lobengula, and various majority Mashona vassal chiefs in 1890. Though parts of the territory were laid-claim-to by the Bechuana and Portugal, its first people, the "Bushmen" (or Sān or Khoisan), had possessed it for countless centuries beforehand and had continued to inhabit the region. Following the colony's unilateral dissolution in 1970 by the Republic of Rhodesia government, the Colony of Southern Rhodesia was re-established in 1979 as the successor state to the Republic of Zimbabwe Rhodesia which, in-turn, was the predecessor state of the Republic of Zimbabwe. Its only true geographical borders were the rivers Zambezi and Limpopo, its other boundaries being (more or less) arbitrary, and merging imperceptibly with the peoples and domains of earlier chiefdoms of pre-colonial times.

The British South Africa Company's administration of what became Rhodesia was chartered in 1889 by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, and began with the Pioneer Column's march north-east to Mashonaland in 1890. Empowered by its charter to acquire, govern and develop the area north of the Transvaal in southern Africa, the Company, headed by Cecil Rhodes, raised its own armed forces and carved out a huge bloc of territory through treaties, concessions and occasional military action, most prominently overcoming the Matabele army in the First and Second Matabele Wars of the 1890s. By the turn of the century, Rhodes's Company held a vast, land-locked country, bisected by the Zambezi river. It officially named this land Rhodesia in 1895, and ran it until the early 1920s.

The area south of the Zambezi became Southern Rhodesia, while that to the north became North-Western and North-Eastern Rhodesia, which were joined in 1911 to form Northern Rhodesia. Within Northern Rhodesia, there was a separate Kingdom called Barotseland which later became a British protectorate alongside other territories under the British sphere of influence. Each territory was administered separately, with an administrator heading each territorial legislature. In Southern Rhodesia, which attracted the most white immigrants and developed fastest, a legislative council was established in 1898. This comprised a blend of Company-nominated officials and elected members, with the numbers of each fluctuating over time.

Mount Hampden is the parliamentary seat of Zimbabwe. It is in Mashonaland West Province about eighteen kilometers from the main capital, Harare. It was the original destination of the Pioneer Column of the British South Africa Company; however, the Column eventually settled to the south, in present day Harare. Mount Hampden was named after English politician John Hampden by the hunter and explorer Frederick Courteney Selous.

Bulawayo (/bʊləˈwɑːjoʊ/, /-ˈweɪoʊ/; Northern Ndebele: Bulawayo) is the second largest city in Zimbabwe, and the largest city in the country's Matabeleland region. The city's population is disputed; the 2022 census listed it at 665,940, while the Bulawayo City Council claimed it to be about 1.2 million. Bulawayo covers an area of 546 square kilometres (211 square miles) in the western part of the country, along the Matsheumhlope River. Along with the capital Harare, Bulawayo is one of two cities in Zimbabwe that are also provinces.

Bulawayo was founded by a group led by Gundwane Ndiweni around 1840 as the kraal of Mzilikazi, the Ndebele king and was known as Gibixhegu. His son, Lobengula, succeeded him in the 1860s, and changed the name to koBulawayo and ruled from Bulawayo until 1893, when the settlement was captured by British South Africa Company soldiers during the First Matabele War. That year, the first white settlers arrived and rebuilt the town. The town was besieged by Ndebele warriors during the Second Matabele War. Bulawayo attained municipality status in 1897, and city status in 1943.

Cecil John Rhodes (/ˈsɛsəl ˈroʊdz/ SES-əl ROHDZ; 5 July 1853 – 26 March 1902) was a British mining magnate and politician in southern Africa who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. He and his British South Africa Company founded the southern African territory of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), which the company named after him in 1895. He also devoted much effort to realising his vision of a Cape to Cairo Railway through British territory. Rhodes set up the Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate.

The son of a vicar, Rhodes was born in Netteswell House, Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire. Due to his ill-health, at age sixteen he was sent to South Africa by his family in the hopes the climate might improve his health. At eighteen, he entered the diamond trade at Kimberley in 1871 and with funding from Rothschild & Co, began to systematically buy out and consolidate diamond mines. Over the next two decades, he gained a near-complete monopoly of the world diamond market. In 1888, he founded the diamond company De Beers, which retains its prominence into the 21st century.