Besides the book list (which includes my top three recommendations), there's a bit of, well, meta to raise. Regional histories of southern Africa were, ironically, in part a product of the battle against apartheid and South African regional interventions. The reorientation of the era after 1980 saw the eclipse of broad southern African histories like Donald Denoon and Balam Nyeko's excellent Southern Africa from 1800 and even J. D. Omer-Cooper's problematically framed (in my opinion) history of southern Africa. Those gave way to more national histories, useful for educators and a rising generation of scholars within those polities. Usually the regional approach reappears but here it really hasn't, not like it ought. There are transnational and connective histories on certain subjects or eras, like the early part of Paul Landau's Popular Politics in the History of South Africa 1400-1948, which make clear the lie that borders represent when people and events have crossed them so freely for most of that era. Instead, we get national histories that do sometimes reach beyond those edges like the Cambridge History (which is crazy British expensive, but if you know anyone at a research school you might get PDFs) and Giliomee/Mbenga's New History of South Africa which is really marvelously done for a textbook. But regional histories, and general texts on regional histories, are scarce on the ground compared to the era before 1994. It's odd. Someone needs to update Curtin/Feierman/Vansina/Thompson's 2000 last edition of Africa: From Earliest Times to Independence, but those sorts of thick references don't make for big textbook sellers.

If there are particular themes I can probably add more. Terry Ranger's now-aged Voices from the Rocks on the Matopos and Muchipara Musemwa's work on water in Zimbabwe are both really excellent discussions with deep historical context.

If you want the precolonial past, particularly Great Zimbabwe and its associated states, Innocent Pikirayi (his recent articles but also his 2001 The Zimbabwe Culture) is my go-to although there are a lot of new voices you can find in the journal Azania if you have a hankering for academic writing. A lot of older research in the 1960s/70s, came from people who spoke little chiShona (or at least weren't first-langauge speakers) so they missed a lot from oral and material historical data. Chimurenga didn't make that any easier for them. The newer generation doesn't have those liabilities.

(thanks to /u/scarlet_sage for letting me know this was here!)

I don't want to discourage additional responses, but our book list section on Africa has a few books covering Zimbabwe, including a few that focus on general, broad scopes of the country's history.

Thank you so much for your comments, I really appreciate it. I grew up in Bulawayo in the 70s with my Dad teaching in Francistown. I m really interested in reading an integral history of the region and look forward to understanding the migration into Southern Africa, the arrival of the settlers, the Church ‘s influence as well as the responses to each other in the region as a whole. I’ve developed this interest through having friends in the region whether by migration or origin, I’m rambling but our similarities our languages our diets are interesting to me. I love Africa and am on a quest to understand where we may be headed as a continent, so as they say ‘to know the future, understand the history ‘Thanks