ABSTRACT
The territory occupied by Southern Rhodesia forms the north-western half of an uninterrupted area of Bantu-speaking peoples extending from the Kalahari Desert in the north-west to the shores of the Indian Ocean in the south-east, and bounded to north and south respectively by the rivers Zambezi and Limpopo. Evidence assembled to date on the basis of oral tradition, archival material, and the findings of archaeology leads to the provisional conclusion that the nuclear Karanga arrived south of the Zambezi from the vicinity of Lake Tanganyika about a.d. 1325. According to oral tradition the Karanga leader, of clan Soko-Chirongo (Vervet), first assumed control of what is the northern part of Southern Rhodesia, and then gradually extended his authority southwards. Oral tradition is fallible, being based on human memory and distortion, and the longer the historical period involved, the greater the element of fallibility.
