Zimbabwe Emoji

🇿🇼 the Zimbabwe flag emoji shows seven horizontal stripes, green, yellow, red, black, red, yellow, green, and a white triangle at the hoist with a red star and a yellow bird inside it. It is encoded as a pair of regional indicator letters, 🇿 and 🇼, for the country code ZW, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters ZW instead; whoever opens your message on a phone still sees the flag. Many people simply say "Zim", and 🇿🇼 is the Zim emoji too.

The flag was first raised at independence on 18 April 1980. Green stands for the land and agriculture, yellow for the country's mineral wealth, red for the blood shed in the liberation war, and black for the heritage of the black majority. The white triangle stands for peace, and the red star behind the bird for the nation's hopes. Where flags don't show, people type the colours as hearts, 💚💛❤️🖤🤍, in bios, usernames and every Independence Day post.

The bird on the flag is the Zimbabwe Bird 🦅. Eight birds carved from soapstone, each standing on top of a pillar, were found at Great Zimbabwe; they are usually taken to be a bird of prey such as the bateleur or the fish eagle. It sits on the flag and the coat of arms, so 🦅🇿🇼 reads as Zimbabwe on its own.

Great Zimbabwe 🪨🧱 gave the country its name. It is a city of granite walls built without mortar between about the 11th and 15th centuries by ancestors of the Shona, near today's Masvingo; its Great Enclosure has walls more than ten metres high and a solid conical tower inside. The name is usually explained from the Shona dzimba dza mabwe, "houses of stone". It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986.

Zimbabwe currency symbol: US$, the ZiG and the old Z$

There is no special Unicode sign for Zimbabwe's money, and the story of why is the story of its currency. The Zimbabwe dollar (Z$), introduced in 1980, was devastated by hyperinflation from 2007 to 2009; a 100 trillion dollar note was issued in January 2009 💵 that is now a collector's item. In 2009 the country switched to foreign money, above all the US dollar, and prices are still very often written US$ with the ordinary dollar sign $.

Since April 2024 the local currency is the ZiG, short for Zimbabwe Gold, with the ISO code ZWG; it is backed by gold and foreign reserves. It is written ZiG before the amount, as in ZiG 50, so the "ZiG symbol" people ask for is just those three letters. In chats 🪙, 💵 and 💰 do the rest, and 💎⛏️ stands for the country's diamonds, gold and platinum mines.

Shona and Ndebele letters: plain Latin, with a past

Zimbabwe recognises 16 official languages in its 2013 constitution. By CLDR estimates about 14 million people speak Shona, about 7 million use English and about 2 million speak Ndebele, out of a population of around 17 million. Shona and Ndebele are both written with the plain Latin alphabet and no accents, so you need nothing special to type them. Shona leans on letter groups instead: sv and zv are "whistled" s and z sounds, as in zvakanaka ("it's good"), bh, dh and mh are breathy sounds, and n' with an apostrophe is the ng of "sing", as in n'anga, a traditional healer. Ndebele, close to Zulu, uses c, q and x for click sounds.

Shona did once have letters of its own. The 1931 standard spelling, drawn up by the linguist Clement Doke, used special letters, among them Ȿ ȿ and ɀ, an s and a z with a swash tail, for the whistled sounds. Typewriters and printers had none of them, and the spelling reforms of the 1950s replaced them with the sv and zv written today. Unicode added the letters later so that old books could be typed: in HTML ȿ is ȿ and ɀ ɀ.

Several of Zimbabwe's other languages do use extra letters: Venda writes ḓ, ḽ, ṅ, ṋ and ṱ with dots, and Tswana ê and ô. Each has its own collection, as do Shona, North Ndebele, Manyika, Ndau, Kalanga, Nyanja and English.

Zimbabwe food emoji: sadza, nyama, muriwo and maputi

The national dish is sadza, a stiff porridge of white maize meal (isitshwala in Ndebele), eaten by hand and shaped into a ball to scoop up the relish. In emoji it is 🌽🍲; with meat it is sadza ne nyama, 🍖🥩, and grilled at a braai it gets 🔥. 🐔🍗 is the free-range village chicken Zimbabweans call road runner, and 🥬 is muriwo, greens such as covo cooked with tomato and onion.

🐛 is a real food here: madora in Shona, amacimbi in Ndebele, the mopane worm, dried and fried until crisp. 🥜 is dovi, peanut butter, stirred into greens and into rice, 🍚, for mupunga une dovi. 🍿 is maputi, popped maize, 🍠 mbambaira, sweet potato, and 🍞🍵 the bread and tea of a Zimbabwean breakfast. To drink there is 🍊🧃 Mazoe orange crush, 🥛 maheu, a thick drink of fermented maize, and 🍺 for Zambezi lager or Chibuku, the sorghum beer sold in the plastic bottles everyone calls scuds.

Victoria Falls, Hwange, Kariba and Matobo in emoji

Victoria Falls on the Zambezi, shared with Zambia, is locally called Mosi-oa-Tunya, "the smoke that thunders": 🌊💦 for the water, 🌫️ for the spray that rises far above it and 🌈 for the rainbows in it. Under a full moon there is even a lunar rainbow, 🌙🌈. Below the falls people bungee jump from the Victoria Falls Bridge 🌉 and raft the gorge 🚣.

Hwange, the largest national park, is famous for its tens of thousands of elephants, so 🐘 is a popular emoji to post with 🇿🇼; add 🦁 🐃 🐆 🦏 for the rest of the Big Five and 🦒 🦓 🦛 🐊 🐒 for the bush and the river. At Mana Pools people paddle the Zambezi in canoes 🛶. Lake Kariba, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, is houseboats ⛵🚤, tigerfish 🎣, kapenta fishing 🐟 and long sunsets 🌅.

In the south, the Matobo Hills stack granite boulders into balancing rocks 🪨 and hide thousands of rock paintings 🎨. In the east the Eastern Highlands, Nyanga, Chimanimani and Mount Nyangani, the highest point, are ⛰️🌄 with tea and coffee estates 🍵☕. 🌳 is the baobab, or the msasa trees that turn red and copper in spring, and 🪻💜 the jacarandas that turn the streets of Harare purple each October.

Music, sport and holidays: emoji Zimbabweans send

The sound of Zimbabwe is the mbira 🎶, metal keys plucked with the thumbs on a wooden board inside a gourd, played with hosho shakers 🪇 and drums 🥁🪘 at all-night bira ceremonies for the ancestors; the art of making and playing it is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. Thomas Mapfumo carried mbira patterns onto the electric guitar 🎸 as chimurenga music, Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi made his own sound loved across Africa, and today's clubs play sungura and Zimdancehall 🎤💃🕺.

The national football team is the Warriors ⚽, the cricket team the Chevrons 🏏, a Test side since 1992, and the rugby team the Sables 🏉. Swimmer Kirsty Coventry 🏊🥇 won Olympic gold in the 200 m backstroke in 2004 and 2008, and in 2025 became the first woman and the first African elected President of the International Olympic Committee.

Independence Day, 18 April, is 🇿🇼🎉🎆. Heroes' Day, on the second Monday of August, honours those who died in the liberation war 🕊️, and Unity Day on 22 December 🤝 marks the 1987 agreement that ended years of conflict between the two main parties. Christmas 🎄 is when city families go home kumusha 🛖, to the rural home, on packed buses and kombis 🚐.