Southern Rhodesia

n 1853, the year in which Cape of Good Hope issued Africa’s first adhesive postage stamp, the southern border of what we now know as Zimbabwe lay in territory more than 1,000 miles to the north of Cape Town. In those days Zimbabwe included several distinct cultural and language groups with their own natural borders, and with settlements and trading centres spread across an area three times the size of the British Isles. Its native tribes had for centuries subsisted on cattle rearing supported by small-scale enterprises including iron and copper smelting, gold panning, textile weaving and growing food crops. Trade and communications within and between the tribes relied, in those days, on runners and message carriers. When the first Europeans to venture into the almost unknown region that later became Rhodesia felt