The Year We Came Home: Zimbabwe’s Local Tourism Boom and the Joy of Rediscovering Our Own Country
An unexpected hero has stepped forward in Zimbabwe’s economy: ourselves. In the first quarter of 2026, domestic trips leapt by more than a third to 2.62 million, pouring real money into hotels, shops, buses and townships, and helping push the year’s tourism earnings toward US$1.36 billion. But the numbers are only half the story. The other half is a feeling — Zimbabweans falling back in love with their own country, and discovering, in communities once kept exclusive or invisible, that the wonders were here all along. This is an entry about the economics of that homecoming, and about the joy of it.
First, Let Me Tell You What Local Tourism Was
Before the figures, let me take you back, because to feel why this boom matters you have to remember what tourism meant to an ordinary Zimbabwean family after independence. It rarely wore the name “tourism” at all. It was the long school-holiday road to kumusha — to Buhera, to Mutoko — packed into a vehicle with cousins, the whole of the countryside unrolling past the window, and the welcome of grandparents at the end of it. Visiting our own kin was our first and truest tourism, though no one ever called it that.
It was the annual pilgrimage to the Trade Fair in Bulawayo and the Agricultural Shows in Harare and Mutare — those great noisy fairgrounds of livestock and machinery and candy floss that, for a child, were as dazzling as any wonder of the world. It was the school trip: the day we filed into the Mutare Museum, or climbed up to Cecil Kop, the little nature reserve perched above Mutare. For thousands of Eastern Highlands children who could never dream of a safari lodge, those outings were our first meeting with the great wild — proof that the marvels of our own land were standing right there, two kilometres from town, waiting.
And it was, gloriously, the shopping trip. Let us be honest and fond about it: we Zimbabweans earned our reputation as the shopperholics of the continent. The bus to Francistown, the run down to South Africa, the cultural ritual of the bulk-buy — pantries stocked, blankets and pots and groceries hauled home in great striped bags. And those shopping trips were holidays. Our parents, masters of thrift, killed two birds with one stone: stock the house, and let the children see another city, another country, the wide world just over the border. That was tourism too, even as the money walked out of the country in those striped bags.
The Numbers Behind the Homecoming
Now to what has changed, and it is worth celebrating plainly. In the first quarter of 2026, the number of trips Zimbabweans took within their own country jumped to 2.62 million, up from 1.94 million a year earlier — a rise of about 35%. That is not a small shift; it is a wave. And every one of those trips is money moving through the real economy: a guesthouse booked, a tank of fuel, a meal bought, a craft sold, a bus seat filled.
This local surge sits inside a broader tourism recovery. The authorities project that total tourism receipts will reach about US$1.36 billion in 2026, up from US$1.3 billion, while international arrivals and tourism investment are both climbing strongly. But the deliberate strategy now — and this is the important part — is to put domestic travellers at the very centre, building a home market sturdy enough to hold the industry steady when distant troubles (a war, a fuel shock, a far-off recession) shake the long-haul visitors loose.
From Exclusive to Everyone: the Quiet Democratisation
Here is the deeper shift, and it is the one that moves me most. For too long, tourism in Zimbabwe was understood as something for the elite and the foreigner — the Victoria Falls package, the private safari, the gate with a price most families could never pass. The wonders of our own country were, in effect, rendered exclusive and unaffordable to the very people who lived beside them. A child could grow up an hour from a mountain, a ruin, a waterfall, a cultural centre — and never once be invited in.
That is now changing, on purpose. Through affordability drives, festive-season campaigns and a deliberate push to make Zimbabweans feel that their own country is theirs to enjoy, the gate is being opened. And alongside it has come something even more beautiful: the rise of community-based and cultural tourism, where the destination is not a far-off resort but a living community — its ceremonies, its food, its music, its heritage — inviting visitors in and keeping the earnings at home.
Name the Names: Who Is Leading This
A boom like this has builders, and they deserve to be named — generously, because the work is good.
Wings, Rails and the Climb to 2030
Two engines are about to make this homecoming faster. The first flies. Air Zimbabwe returns to the skies between Harare and London on 1 July 2026, ending a fourteen-year absence — and, just as importantly for us, its revival plan restores domestic and regional wings to Victoria Falls, Kariba, Hwange and Buffalo Range. Cheaper, easier flights inside our own borders could open the whole country to local travellers in a way the long road never could; the optimists believe a revived national carrier could see domestic tourism climb dramatically. The second engine runs on rails — the very railway revival this journal celebrated last entry, with the authorities now designing overland and rail-based holiday packages to carry Zimbabweans affordably from city to wonder.
And the horizon is deliberately grand. As Zimbabwe works toward becoming an upper-middle-income economy by 2030, a larger, more prosperous middle class is emerging — and the tourism industry is preparing to serve them with richer, higher-value experiences, from gastronomy trails to conference tourism to premium heritage journeys. But let us never forget where the foundation was laid: in the humble kumusha road, the school trip, the Agricultural Show, and a child’s first sight of the great wild from the back of a borrowed bus.
The Wonders Were Always Ours
I find such happiness in this story, and I will not pretend otherwise. There is a particular healing in watching a people learn to delight in their own country — to discover that the mountain at Nyanga, the mist of the Vumba, the peaks of Chimanimani, the stones of Great Zimbabwe, the ceremony in the village down the road, were never the property of the foreigner or the rich. They were always ours. We were simply, for too long, told otherwise — by a colonial habit that priced us out of our own beauty, and by hard years that turned every spare dollar toward survival rather than wonder.
And I will say plainly what I believe: Barbara Rwodzi is doing an absolutely fantastic job, and Zimbabwe could not have placed a better person in the role. The awards are real, but the thing I admire most is the instinct beneath them — to push tourism out, to the provinces, to the communities, to the cultures we were once taught to hide, and to insist that an ordinary Zimbabwean and a celebrated foreign guest both belong in the same beautiful country. To stand with the vaTshangana, to carry the expo to Mutare, to make food and heritage into honoured industries — that is not just tourism policy. It is a quiet act of national repair.
So here is my hope, and my charge to all of us. Take the trip. Book the lodge a weekend’s drive away. Carry your children to the museum, the falls, the ruins, the cultural centre. Let them meet the wild and the wonders for themselves. Spend your holiday money in a Zimbabwean village rather than a foreign mall — for once, let the striped bags fill up at home. Because a nation that learns to treasure itself becomes very hard to make ashamed, and very hard to keep poor. We came home this year, in our millions. Let us never leave again. Pamberi nekufamba munyika yedu — forward with travelling our own land.
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