This week Cain Mathema in his book Why the West and its MDC stooges want Zimbabwe’s Defence and Security Forces reformed, says King Lobhengula was the king of the whole country in spite of the fact that his close supervision or contact with different chiefs in the country diminished the farther one moved away from the centre of his power in Bulawayo

By Cain Mathema

LET us remember that when it came to ruling and controlling the black people, the British and their Rhodesian proxies were excellent liars, and they still are.
In any case, even those close to the king but remained behind were obviously sworn to the secrecy about the king’s whereabouts and they, therefore, could have created all sorts of stories to the white man in order to protect the king.
But then the whites always treated blacks as foolish children who opened their hearts to any white man they came across.
The king and his followers would have been foolish and childish to have let the whites know about the king’s whereabouts.
What the British and their Rhodesian proxies also want us to believe is that the king was so desperate that he had to commit suicide, implying that was a cowardly act, an act of abandoning his people, leaving them at the mercy of white people who had committed genocide.
The Tonga people assisted the king and his party cross the Zambezi River and find a new home somewhere across the river, and preferably as far away from the river as was possible.
That is why somewhere in the Eastern Province of Zambia or western parts of Malawi is a very logical place for him to have chosen; after all, that part of the country had, and still has, Nguni people too, all the way from Zululand too, these people were his cousins.
For reasons of dividing and ruling the people along tribal lines, the British and their Rhodesian proxies and stooges have always tried to portray this war of liberation as a Ndebele-only war, meaning it was “only the Ndebele people” who rose against the British in 1893, implying the Shona people were not involved.
The point, however, is that this was a national war from at least two angles.
The first one being that King Lobhengula was the king of the whole country in spite of the fact that his close supervision or contact with different chiefs in the country diminished the farther one moved away from the centre of his power in Bulawayo, and in spite of the fact that some of the chiefs in fact did not pay tribute to the king, in kind or just in the simple form of showing allegiance to the king and no other authority in the form of personal homage visits by the chiefs themselves or their emissaries.
Let us also remember that even other neighbouring kings like King Khama I, King Ngungunyana of the Shangani in Mozambique and King Lewanika of south western Zambia recognised King Lobhengula as king of the geographic area that ended up being Zimbabwe, and also that the British colonialists and racists and their missionaries too recognised King Lobhengula as the country’s legal political authority.
Secondly, let us not forget that most of the Ndebele people (over sixty percent of them) were actually predominantly Shona by the 1860s (Matshazi, 2008); many Ndebele regiments were in fact predominantly made up of Shona young men, and some of the regiments, like eMpandeni, were commanded by Shona commanders.
And we should not forget that King Mzilikazi left intact the religion (the spirit of the people therefore) that he found here, with its lines of communication right across the country left as they had been for centuries before from priest to priest, village to village and district to district, with the king himself annually offering a herd of black cattle to the priests at the Matopo Hills, the centre of worship, which it still is today.
And the kings never did anything without consulting the priests first, therefore even before the 1893 war was embarked upon, the king had consulted the priests first at the Matopo Hills; even the religions of the Tonga people and other peoples were never touched; some even say that King Lobhengula himself, in his younger days, had been trained in the local religion by the priests at the Matopo Hills, and that the priests were in fact also heavily involved in his selection as the one to succeed his father because of that training, the priests were obviously consulted over the issue of installing a new king after the death of King Mzilikazi in 1868.
Therefore, the 1893 war was a national war of liberation as it was led by the king himself; in fact, it was the first war of liberation against the British in the country.
And we should never forget that the issue of dividing us along tribal lines in order for them to rule us was a strategy the British consciously designed and implemented among us, that is why when they invaded the country in 1890 they told the Shona people that they, the British, had come here to liberate them from “Ndebele tyranny and savagery”.
Yet the first land and livestock grabbed by the British in the country were in what we now call Mashonaland, and the first chiefs and people to be massacred by the British for resisting British colonialism were in Mashonaland, not in what we now call Matabeleland.
The second war waged by the people against British colonialism and racism took place between 1896 and 1897.
Again this war involved all our tribes although it did not have one national, central leader, political or religious, or one central military command even.
The political leaders of the 1896-97 war were the princes and chiefs who were the military commanders at the same time, whilst the priests were in charge of the religious, the spiritual side, of the resistance and were also part of the intelligence personnel used during the war.