West Nicholson or Tshabezi is a village in the province of Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe. It is located about halfway between Zimbabwe's second largest city, Bulawayo, and the border town to South Africa, Beitbridge, along the main road and rail link to South Africa.
West Nicholson is named after Andy Nicholson, an early prospector who entered the country with the Pioneer Collumn and was responsible for mining exploration in the area.
According to the 1982 Population Census, the village had a population of 1,633. The town hosted a large beef factory, that turned the local cattle into corned beef and biltong, but this is now closed. Once a major gold mining area, the country around West Nicholson is riddled with small workings, the only major mining activity still occurs about four kilometers along the main road towards Bulawayo, the mine being called Jessie Mine owned by F.A. Stewart Pvt Ltd . There is a supermarket and butchery run by Rogers Brothers and Sons. Game and Safari activities are available at Tshabezi Safaris, Tamba, Sondelani and Tod's Guest House. Sporting activities are mainly based on soccer, having two teams namely, Jessie Mine F.C. and West Nicholson United playing in the Zimbabwe Football Association's Division One and Two leagues respectively.
The Mzingwane River runs through the town and a railway run past it, carrying passengers and cargo. There is a turn-off that leads to a secondary school 12 km further on, the J.Z. Moyo Secondary School for Education with Production.
Read more about West Nicholson: Education
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“The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)