According to Karanga oral history, by 1400 one of their chiefs had risen above all his rivals and became king. In 1440, the successor to the throne, King Mutota of the Rozwi, a sub-clan of the larger Karanga nation, had assembled a powerful army. In a decade he had expanded the kingdom into an empire covering almost the whole Zimbabwe plateau. Due to his victories, he was given the title Mwene Mutapa, "master conqueror", and this was the name eventually given to the empire. To the Europeans, Mwene Mutapa became known as the empire of Monomotapa.

The emperor did not have a single capital but moved around his lands as needed. In 1480, one of the provincial leaders, Changmire, revolted and succeeded in making himself emperor. Great Zimbabwe was his capital. Usually only the emperor and his family and bodyguard lived at the capital, but that could still be huge number of people. Most people lived in scattered farming villages. At its peak, Great Zimbabwe covered an area of 25 hectares. Built on top of a kopje, a steep rocky hill, there was a series of fortress-like walls with a complex network of corridors, called the "acropolis" because of its similarity to the hilltop fortresses of ancient Greek cities. Some 70 metres below this, is the temple, a large oval enclosure 100 metres long and 70 wide, with a stone tower ten metres high. In between these two major sites are a number of other smaller stone ruins. The Mwene Mutapa empire eventually was taken back by a member of the Mutota family, but Great Zimbabwe remained as the capital of a smaller, now independent Changmire kingdom. Zimbabwe was inhabited until the city was destroyed during the Zulu Wars in the 1830s.

San and Khoi peoples are now largely driven back into the Kalahari desert by expansion of the Bantu.

In 1488, Bartolomeo Diaz of Portugal sails around the Cape of Good Hope in Southern Africa. He becomes the first European since ancient times to reach the Indian Ocean.