The traditions about Guruhuswa origins seem to convey centuries-old historical processes of migrations across the Zimbabwe Plateau landscapes, with communities searching for vital resources, such as salt, gold, ivory, game, pasture, and water in other regions (Abraham 1962). The traditions gleaned by Abraham (1962) about a movement from Guruhuswa to the Zambezi lowlands in search of salt need to be utilized with caution, as they have been interpreted to mean that Great Zimbabwe was abandoned due to a shortage of the commodity. However, it is not unusual to find salt being traded in the northern, northwestern, and even western Zimbabwe Plateau and areas beyond, such as the Makgadikgadi Pans (Pikirayi 2001). Karanga expansion northwards during the 15th century must have been triggered by the discovery of more lucrative goldfields in the region that they tried to control and that may have affected Great Zimbabwe in terms of population depletion. In other regions such as the southwest, control of the lucrative goldfields seems to have fallen under the Torwa dynasty, which was clearly a rival of the Mutapa State and successor to Great Zimbabwe.

Further contributing to the "silence" of Great Zimbabwe is the rise of another polity in the southwestern regions of the Zimbabwe Plateau. The rise of the Torwa and the State of Butua is another poorly understood development in the 15th and subsequent centuries…but the general assumption until most recently is that they were a direct successor to Great Zimbabwe (Beach 1980; Pikirayi 2001). [...] According to Huffman (2007) it controlled gold and other resources, which affected the wealth that was once channeled through Great Zimbabwe to the Indian Ocean coast. Khami was therefore the capital of the Torwa State, which the Portuguese found wrestling for control of the northern trade routes through the Zambezi Valley. Its destruction in the 1640s by the Portuguese further confirms the dominance of the Torwa in the southwest (Pikirayi 2001).