By Mashingaidze Gomo

THE rise of nationalism as a background to the armed liberation struggle in Zimbabwe is littered with Patriotic Front formations whose patterns must be religiously studied to inform a more sustainable post-colonial African self-determination or re-organisation.

Today the ruling Party in Zimbabwe is the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) after the merger with PF ZAPU in the December 22 1987 Unity Accord. 

It is the armed effort of ZANU and ZAPU through their respective armies of ZANLA and ZIPRA that liberated Zimbabwe from almost a century of British colonial rule.

As already suggested, the idea of a Patriotic Front is not a recent one. 

It has its roots in the very European ‘Scramble for Africa’ after the 1884 Berlin Conference that laid down the rules for the ‘peaceful’ partitioning of Africa among European nations. 

The violence would be against the Africans and not between European competitors.

Informed by hindsight, it is important to note that the development of an indigenous Patriotic Front is one which those who occupied Zimbabwe anticipated and did not like.

A review of the wording of the Moffat Treaty and Rudd Concession clauses that made Mashonaland part of King Lobengula’s Kingdom were terms of convenience designed to meet terms of the Berlin Conference and not facts on the ground. 

Dr Felix Muchemwa’s re-look at the period in question shows that neither King Lobengula nor his father, King Mzilikazi, had ever been the central authority in Zimbabwe in the manner the Mwenemutapas and Changamires had been before them. 

Following the fall of the Rozvi Empire in the early 1830s, King Mzilikazi had persuaded, but failed to convince, Tohwechipi, son and heir to Chirisamhuru, the last Rozvi chief to anoint him (King Mzilikazi) heir to the Rozvi throne and, ipso facto king of Mashonaland and the extent of Zimbabwe.

King Mzilikazi had died in 1868 and King Lobengula had ascended the Ndebele throne in 1870. 

In 1876, he had suffered defeat at the hands of Chief Mazorodze, while in 1886 and 1887, he suffered more defeats at the hands of Chief Chinengundu Mashayamombe. 

In the interim, an induna he had tried to impose on the Nyandoro people had been killed by the supposed subjects. And all the while, he had come to accept the defiance and independence of Winya (Uwini) right on his doorstep in Gweru, Midlands.

These were facts the British intelligence (missionaries, hunters, prospectors and explorers) were already familiar with when they advised the drafters of the Moffat Treaty and Rudd Concession which King Lobengula could not read. 

They knew that there were vast spaces in Zimbabwe where King Lobengula’s existence was not known. 

Frederick Selous, who provided much of the intelligence and guided the occupation, knew all this.

The British armed occupation of Mashonaland in 1890 circumvented Matabeleland on the logic that the regimented kingdom was better prepared to resist occupation. 

A second and more superficial reason was that the armed occupation of Mashonaland would protect the Shona from the Matabele who preyed on them for grain, livestock, women and children to swell their ranks.

And yet in the end, the ‘purported’ difference between the Matabele ‘raiders’ and the British ‘protectors’ of the Shona turned out to be only superficial. 

Where Ndebele regiments raided and left the survivors on the land, the European ‘protectors’ occupied and enslaved the victims. 

They took the land, the mines and livestock and spared the victims only for labour on the farms and the mines. 

And, where it suited them, they let the raids continue. 

Like the August 1893 Ndebele raid around Fort Victoria (now Masvingo). Journals like Rhodesiana contain white settler-accounts of the massacre in gruesome detail in order to justify the colonial narrative of humanitarian intervention as a motive in the subsequent invasion and occupation of Matabeleland.

Following the massacre, Dr Leander Starr Jameson, who was Cecil Rhodes’s homosexual partner and henchman, wrote thus to Rutherford Harris, who was the BSAC Cape Secretary:

“We have the excuse for a row over murdered women and children now, and getting Matabeleland open would give us a tremendous lift in shares and everything else.” (Palmer, 1977:p.29)

This meant that the invasion of Matabeleland essentially had nothing to do with protecting the Shona from the Ndebele. 

But the rhetoric was good enough to enlist the support of victim Shona chiefs who genuinely sought to take revenge on King Lobengula and ‘justifiably’ expected to recover the livestock, women and children they had previously lost to the raiders.

There was, of course, a tragic irony to it. 

The Shona ‘friendlies’ did not know about the Victoria Agreement signed between the BSAC and the mercenaries before the invasion. 

Every white invader would be entitled to a free farm of 2 540 hectares, as well as 15 reef and five alluvial gold claims anywhere in Matabeleland. 

On top of all that, all loot cattle would be equally shared between the invaders and the BSAC. 

On the other hand, the Shona chiefs from whom the cattle had been raided would get nothing. 

They would lose even those cattle that had survived Ndebele raids. 

They would lose their land. 

Their women would be raped and they would be gang-pressed into forced labour camps.

The Shangani Battle, fought on the march to Bulawayo, tested the humanitarian motives in Jameson’s letter to Harris. 

The Shona volunteers were kept out of the defence laager and bore the worst of the Ndebele dawn assault. 

Caught between the settler-force and the attacking force, the same Shona also suffered heavy casualties from ‘friendly’ settler-fire.

The Shangani Battle was, incidentally, the first time ever the maxim machine gun was used in a colonial occupation battle. 

The maxim gun was the world’s first automatic firearm. 

The probability is high that the very first victim of the maxim machine gun in Zimbabwe was a Shona ‘friendly’ seeking revenge on King Lobengula.

The occupation of Matabeleland completed the occupation of Zimbabwe and marked the beginning of horror for both the Shona and the Ndebele. 

The Ndebele caste system was systematically dismantled. The elite Zansi, who were the originals from Zululand, lost their lordship over everyone else. 

So did the Enhla who had been incorporated along the way. Members of the Matabeleland native police were predominantly recruited from the Amaholi, the lowest caste made up of locals found on the ground as well as those assimilated from raids. 

The settler-administration did so knowing the Amaholi had loathed their position and would in that sense be best suited to gang-press the Zansi and Enhla into forced labour in European mines and farms. 

Native police brutality would be a prominent cause of the First Chimurenga.

On the whole, both tribes were subjected to the inhumanity spelt out by Arnold Toynbee in his Study of History:

“When we, Europeans, call people natives, we take away anything from them; anything that suggests that they are human beings. They are to us like the forest which the Western man fells down. Or, the big game that he shoots down. They have no tenure of land. Their tenure of land is as precarious as that of the animals that they find.”

Within a space of three years, both the Shona and Ndebele victims had realised the futility of remaining divided against a common enemy. 

Their grievances against the settler-enemy were the same. 

For that reason, the First Chimurenga was a national war co-ordinated by Mkwati, the spirit medium of Torwa (also known as Mkwati). 

It was the birth of the very first ‘Patriotic Front.’ 

The birth of a new pattern of history.