The Mutapa State was founded in the fifteenth century, following the sudden fall of Great Zimbabwe.

It was first seen by Swahili and Portuguese traders in the 15th and 16th century, respectively. Located in what is now northern Zimbabwe, south of the Zambezi River, its territory has been greatly overstated by early cartographers and chroniclers, who led historians astray into thinking it extended all the way to the Indian Ocean and the Kalahari Desert.

As early as the sixteenth century, the polity exercised hegemony over the northernmost parts of the Zimbabwe Plateau and the neighboring Zambezi lowlands. Manyika, Barwe, Uteve, and Danda are rumored to have broken away as independent kingdoms. Limiting it to Chidima on the Zambezi by the nineteenth century.

The Portuguese, who arrived on the Zimbabwe Plateau around the turn of the sixteenth century, gathered first-hand and second-hand reports of the Mutapa State. The materials’ emphasis on commerce and judicial intrigue makes them inevitably partial. Many different kinds of knowledge concerning the people who were formerly ruled by the state are transmitted through oral traditions. North of the Zambezi Escarpment, in the Plateau and Dande, archaeologists have been working since the 1980s to locate state-related communities.