Subdivisions of Zimbabwe: provinces, provincial cities and districts

Mashonaland, Matabeleland and the other provinces

The province names keep the two halves of the colonial map. Under Company rule in the 1890s the country had just two provinces, Matabeleland in the west and Mashonaland in the east; Rhodesia later had seven, among them Mashonaland North and South and Victoria, the province now called Masvingo (Wikipedia, Provinces of Zimbabwe).

In the 1980s the two Mashonaland provinces were redrawn as three, Central, East and West, and in 1997 Bulawayo and Harare were made provinces of their own. That gives the ten units of today: five carry Mashonaland or Matabeleland in their name, three more are Manicaland, Masvingo and Midlands.

Most districts are named after their main town, as Mutare, Gweru or Hwange. Some names point further back. Masvingo, the district and the provincial capital, was called Fort Victoria until 1982 and then briefly Nyanda, after a nearby mountain (Wikipedia, Masvingo), and Wedza is also spelt Hwedza in current lists.

What changed at district level

ISO 3166-2 codes only the ten first-level units, and it has not changed the entry since the standard appeared. The district level has moved more. The list counts 57 districts. Since then Gokwe has been divided into a northern and a southern district, Bulilimamangwe into Bulilima and Mangwe, and new districts such as Mbire and Uzumba-Maramba-Pfungwe have been formed; Wikipedia gives the total as 64.

Three provinces are run from a town that is not their largest. Matabeleland North is administered from Lupane while its largest town is Victoria Falls; Matabeleland South has its capital at Gwanda and its largest town at Beitbridge; Mashonaland West is governed from Chinhoyi, though Kadoma is larger. In Manicaland, Mashonaland Central and Midlands one town is both, Mutare, Bindura and Gweru.