By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
THE colonial scene during my early childhood was characterised by the absence of role models of African national political leadership and the proliferation of African stooges and collaborators with settlerism and imperialism.
Moise Tshombe, of what is now the DRC, was viewed as the classic African stooge. So, to us, as children hungry for leadership models, the emergence and revelation of nationalist leaders, like Kenneth David Kaunda, Joshua Nkomo, Ndabaningi Sithole, Herbert Wiltshire Chitepo, Hastings Kamuzu Banda and Julius Nyerere, was like a dream.
Kwame Nkrumah loomed large but he was much further away than Kaunda, Banda and Nyerere.
I grew up during the second phase of the pungwe, which can be dated around 1959-1965, when this modification of the dariro for popular conscientisation was being transformed from mostly its entertainment function to its early political function under the guise of makwaya and makisimisi (choirs for youth entertainment during Christmas holidays).
The early nationalists saw the Christmas holidays as a strategic occasion because this was the only time that the peasants who remained in the Rhodesian version of the Bantustan; the students coming back home from boarding schools; and the workers coming back home from Rhodesian colonial industries at the time of the annual shutdown, all would meet in rural villages for the holidays.
This homecoming was a strategic occasion to discuss stories of how the African was experiencing settler-oppression and brainwashing in different locations; the so-called Tribal Trust Land, the missionary boarding school or township school, the African ghetto (township/location) and the colonial farm and factory.
When, in 1963, the British decided to dissolve the so-called Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland as a result of African demands for independence, Zambia and Malawi became independent African States allowing African leadership to emerge out of colonial shadows and become clearer, even to us who remained under white rule in Southern Rhodesia that one third of the dissolved Federation which was not allowed to fall under African rule.
In the clearer revelation of Kaunda, Banda and Nyerere, our African nationalist leaders also became clearer because, as children, we could not help realise that what our local leaders were being arrested and detained for was exactly what Kaunda, Banda and Nyerere had just achieved.
In the order of their revelation to us, the first were Nkrumah, Kaunda, Banda, Nyerere, Nkomo and Sithole. Kaunda and Nyerere later served as a bridge to introducing us to Herbert Chitepo, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, Augustino Neto, Sam Nujoma and Samora Machel.
The communication mechanism by which these leaders were introduced to peasants was complicated.
It was a relay system whereby those who could listen to international radio broadcasts and read the then Daily News, before it was banned, would summarise those stories which seemed critical for the moment. The summaries would appear as snippets in the pungwe songs. So makisimisi became the disguised Chindau outlets, the reinvented pungwe where current affairs, political education and fantasy were mixed and conveyed eloquently.
Kune nyika mhiriyo
Dzasunhurika
Kune nyika mhiriyo
Dzasunhurika
Hurumende dzaneta
Ngevana vevhu
Hurumende dzaneta
Ngevana vevhu
Kune nyika mhiriyo
Dzasunhurika
Kune nyika mhiriyo
Dzasunhurika
Kaunda wabhonga
Nevana venhu
Kaunda wabhonga
Nevana venhu
Kune nyika mhiriyo
Dzasunhurika
Kune nyika mhiriyo
Dzasunhurika
Kaunda wabhonga
Ari Lusaka*
Roughly the English translation would go like:
There are lands (countries)
Across the border
who have broken free
of the settlerist yoke
Imperial and settler-regimes
have given up standing in the
way of Africans demands for freedom.
There are lands (countries)
Across the border
who have broken free
of the colonial yoke in the wake of Kenneth Kaunda’s
revolutionary roar for freedom now!
Kaunda was projected as a lion making irresistible demands in the face of intransigent whites.
His Afro-hairstyle, safari suits and sari-like wrap-up fabrics (zvizambia) caught the imagination of millions. He was also always viewed as the closest disciple of Nkrumah in his accommodation of liberation movements exiled by settler-regimes in Angola, South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
When the African government of Malawi decided to compromise with the South African regime, the Chindau pungwes in Chimanimani were quick to register the concern in a song from which I still remember just three lines:
Mwareka ngenyi
Kukoka Kaunda?
Banda waramba
Why don’t you invite Kaunda, to help us? Banda has refused. But in fact Banda had not really refused to help nationalist movements from other countries.
He was trying to figure out how his government would tactically survive the powers of the apartheid regime in South Africa and the fascist Kaetano regime’s colonial extension in Mozambique.
Both regimes were strongly supported by successive US administrations; the Nixon administration being the most sympathetic to such regimes.
Another song mentioning Kaunda was a response to the role of the new Zambian nation as a publishing and propaganda hub for liberation movements.
Zambia published many books, newspapers and pamphlets on behalf of liberation movements which were routinely banned in Angola, South Africa and Rhodesia.
So the song about publishing went as follows:
Waidhinde maphepha ndi Kaunda
Waidhinde maphepha ndi Nkomo
Waidhinde maphepha Sithole, Ndabaningi
Refrain
Joinai ZAPU
Joinai ZAPU
Yazadze nyika.
This was an oral tribute to Zambian journalism and publishing under the early leadership of Kaunda.
Another early Chindau pungwe song created a scenario where African leaders to the North, led by Kaunda, would demand the release from prison and detention of nationalist leaders of Zimbabwe led by Nkomo; and Nkomo would take his rightful place among them at regional and world fora:
Makwaya imwe
Pakupera pegore rino
VaNkomo vachauya
Kubve kwevakasungwa
Vakagadzwa ndi Kaunda
Kuzotore chigaro chavo
Chevakagadzwa ndi Kaunda
Kubve kwevakasungwa
In other words, in these early pungwe songs, the leaders of Zimbabwe in colonial prisons or detention were seen as being freed and inaugurated by leaders of those African countries who got their independence before them. Kaunda was in the forefront of these early leaders, according to the popular imagination then.
As Julie Frederikse explained in None But Ourselves: Masses Versus Media in the Making of Zimbabwe, the pungwe system was so powerful that it made pan-African leaders household heroes to peasants who could not read or write.
The reinvented pungwe of 1959-1965 brought pan-Africanism and global current affairs to peasant households through the instrument of impromptu Chindau compositions which were not copyrighted because they were collective and communal.
Makisimisi of that period were the best example of global affairs at the local level, simultaneously making Nkrumah and Nehanda household subjects, even among the illiterate and semi-literate.
Through these pungwes, we experienced a living pan-African culture and consciousness.
The main binding and driving motivation was the universal African desire to reclaim African stolen land.
The drift to the pungwe and makisimisi was a homecoming ahead of the war of liberation.
It helped rejuvenate Chindau as a dialect of Shona by incorporating the most current issues of interest to Africans cross the whole continent of Africa and beyond.
Those trained only in white law and white history may view the idea of coming home to African living history as mere nostalgia. But homecoming is about land, space and the future.
As David C Korten observed in the Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism:
“The culture of human society is much like what physical scientists call a field… A field is a universal force that permeates space and exerts influence over matter… Fields are by definition invisible and may be detected and measured only by their material effects. Similarly, cultures are the invisible organising fields of societies. Though cultures permeate our social spaces, they are visible only in the observed behaviour [tsika, mhiko, minanzi, madetembo, miteuro ne zvirango] of the individuals who share their values and prescriptions. They are as essential to any explanation of the coherent function of a society as electromagnetic and gravitational fields are to explaining the organisation of matter.”
Contrary to the doctrine of escape from unhu/ubuntu which many donors and NGOs have taught our youths as part of illegal regime change, the recovery and redemption of unhu/ubuntu is tied to the reclaimed and redeemed soil.
“When a cultural field emerges as a consensual expression of the shared experience, values and aspirations of members of a society, it serves as a deeply democratic mechanism for achieving social coherence.”
*The songs cited here were transcribed from oral accounts by the author and first published in Between Two Nationalisms: A Study in Liberal Activism and Western Domination, Zimbabwe 1920 to 1980, PhD Dissertation, Temple University, 1986. Philadelphia, USA.