Tsholotsho District: History
The area was a favourite of the elephant herds and had attracted early ivory hunters. The area was occupied by the Bakalanga and San people before Mzilikazi and his Ndebele people arrived here. The name "Tsholotsho" (old spelling "Tjolotjo") being derived from the San word "Tsoro o tso" meaning the head of an elephant. Among the pre-Mzilikazi chiefs of the area were Tategulu, Makulukusa, and Madlangombe. It was part of the Kingdom of Butua and the king or mambo madlimbewu or dlimbewu was based at Khami at the time. Most villages in Tsholotsho have pure Bakalanga names. Later it became part of the Rozvi Empire.
When the Matabele arrived in 1838 they adopted the name "Tsholotsho". Mzilikazi loved the vast grazing land and left it under the watchful eyes of one of his trusted paramount chiefs, Maqhekeni Sithole, when he moved to Matopo to meet up with the rest of the Ndebele group. Chief Gampu Sithole, the great-great-grandson of Maqhekeni is one of the five reigning chiefs today. The area has vast grazing lands there and people in Tsholotsho usually take their cattle for fattening in some of the popular grazing lands and they call it ukulagisa.
The district centre of Tsholotsho is situated about 65 kilometres west of Nyamandlovu in the former Gwayi Tribal Trust land. It has been an administrative centre for the trust land for many years and fell under the jurisdiction of the Native Commissioner for Nyamandlovu who first assumed responsibility in 1909. Prior to this date the area fell under the jurisdiction of the Superintendent of Natives at Bulawayo.
The District Service Centre is linked to Bulawayo and Lupane by tarred roads and Plumtree by a gravel road and other roads lead through very heavy Kalahari sands (itshebetshebe) into the Gwayi Tribal Trust areas and beyond into the forest reserves. The soils around the precincts of the village are regosols derived from Kalahari sands and shallow rocky basalt-derived pockets are to be found in the district. There is a belt of alluvium along the Gwayi river which has led numerous prospectors in the search of minerals and precious and semi-precious stones. An industrial school was founded at Mavela in 1921 by H. S. Keigwin, who also had a hand in establishing a similar institution at Domboshawa in Mashonaland the following year. The original course was designed by E. D. Alvord, who was then an agricultural missionary at Mount Selinda, where he had started instructing African students on similar lines in 1920. The school was moved to Essexvale (Esigodini) between the years 1941 and 1944 and renamed "Esikhoveni Agricultural Institute". It is fitting that Mr. Alvord's son D. L. Alvord should have been appointed the principal of the college.
After the college was transferred to Essexvale, the vacated land was used as an experimental substation of the Matopos Research Station, where the work is primarily concerned with the breeding of indigenous Nkone or 'Nguni' cattle. These animals which originally came from Eswatini and Zululand were brought by the Matabele during their northward migrations in the first half of the 19th century. These cattle are believed to have originated from a shorthorn-sanga cross. The name sanga was applied to the giant horned cattle of Abyssinia. The head and horns form the principal conformational features by which the breed is identified; their most characteristic feature when mature, being the lyre-shape.