By Charles T.M.J. Dube

ZIMBABWE is linguistically 100 percent Bantu.
Glotto chronologists claim all these people spread from West Africa to Central and Southern Africa should have been speaking one language 2 000 years ago.
To those familiar with most of the languages in Southern and Central Africa, the similarities of the cultural terms confirm this assertion. And yet in the case of Zimbabwe, people who call themselves homogeneous tribes, not only share the same vocabulary, but would also conduct a conversation with each other without difficulties.
My own ancestors, who were Swati, got to this country just before the Ndebele. They had both Shona and Ndebele names, even if my own grandfather’s elder brother, who only died after independence, still spoke Zulu and not Ndebele. This was typical of most earlier Nguni immigrants who wanted to hide their identity.
They established good relations with the Rozvi they found in power to an extent where one of our clan names bears our close relationship with them as advisors, Mukumbudzi waMambo (Swati, which in Ndebele could be Umkhumbuzi, or reminder).
I know the Ngaras, whose origins are Swati like me, have such a clan name too, waMambo.
And yet the witches among us have used tribes that don’t exist to attain their selfish ends. I have been victimised as a Ndebele or Karanga.
One other thing I know is that when Tshaka became a problem and my ancestors decided to leave, they were not migrating at random, but joining their kith and kin, who they knew to have taken a more central route while they used the eastern coastal direction.
Legend has it that the first Bantu migrants to this country were led by a ‘voice’. Where the voice settled, they settled and moved when it moved, like the cloud in the Old Testament.
Again, like the Bible story, when they reached the Zambezi, the leader struck the waters with his loin cloth (bhetshu, or dhumbu) and the waters split to give them free passage.
The voice finally settled at the Matopos, eNjelele, and therein lay the centre of the Mwari cult, the sacred place where the Bantu of this land worshipped God.
All pioneer Bantu migrations emanating from Tshaka’s displacement went to the Matopos region first. You can say this of the Sotho and Swati before the Ndebele. The Shangaan (also precursor to the Ndau) under Zwangendaba and eventually Mzilikazi.
Even Cecil John Rhodes knew the importance of the area and left in his will that he be buried there. My own ancestors lived there and only moved to the Midlands running away from possible victimisation by the Ndebele and Shona revolts that occurred between 1893 and 1898.
My own great grandfather assumed the Shona name Muregi, Dzvitizvaro, who did not know any Shona. His brothers had such names as Pavazhira, Ketye and Mabeza.
And yet in all these disturbances the history of, not only this nation, but the now SADC, was being shaped.
All the areas occupied by the Ngunis and mfecane victims in their migrations constitute the present-day SADC. Chigwedere thinks the Lozi are Rozvi.
Lozi is actually a Sotho dialect and they probably called themselves Lozi by virtue of having passed through the Matopos where the Rozvi reigned and hence took their identity from what they considered nationality.
With my knowledge of Sotho I found I could converse freely with them as the difference is just as that between Ndebele and Zulu, Zezuru and Manyika, or Swati and Zulu.
Gen 11:6: And he said, “Now then, these are all one people and they speak one language; this is just the beginning of what they are going to do. Soon they will be able to do anything they want!
Gen 11:7: Let us go down and mix up their language so that they will not understand each other.”
Gen 11:8: So the Lord scattered them all over the earth, and they stopped building the city.
When the world is getting reduced to a village, we cannot be reducing ourselves to amorphous ethnical divides, which are not only ridiculous, but meaningless. When they call me Mapungwane in Chipinge, Mazvimbakupa in Chihota, Mtembo in Matabeleland, Mleya in Beit Bridge or Samaita in Mutare, I still ‘feel’ myself.
The other day I met some 80-year-old nationalist at a friend’s office. He was what you call Zezuru, but the moment I got introduced to him as Dube, he was awash with excitement. “Dube, uri Mbizi, urimwanawangu…”(Dube, you are of the Zebra totem, you are my son). Ndebele, Karanga or Zezuru never crossed his mind I am sure.
I must admit, I feel as much Shona as I feel Ndebele. I am proud of the Shona dialect I speak. At times when some people ask me what exactly I am, I resort to Mukaranga wechiNdevere, and I mean it.
I am identified with the dialect I speak, never mind that my origins are Nguni. I have in the past 10 years been attending a church whose denomination’s epicentre is Mashonaland Central (the colonial government split missionary work to specified geographical locations).
I attend their funerals and weddings and have gotten to know them better. This has completely washed off all the remnants of stereotypes I might have had within me and puts me at a loss as to what goes on in our minds when we get serious about this Karanga-Zezuru-Manyika-Ndebele ranting.
I see good and bad people among ethnic and racial groupings just as I see them across political parties. Is it not ironic that we Africans grope for our differences instead of our similarities.
We even get divided according to who ruled us and fight over that; Anglophone, Portuguese or Francophone Africa.
How do we manage to be divided over how we speak? We even get exploited for that. At the African Union, our members get into factions along the lines of who ruled them or along the lines of which part of Africa they come from.
And yet there is a dominant culture that permeates across all Africa, across all the linguistic/dialect variants.
Our common past and our common future, our common threats and our common enemies should unite us more than the little differences we create for ourselves as obstacles to our homogeneity. It is just a river between and or mountain between us, otherwise we are one people.
Among the Bantu, totems are given more prominence than tribe or language. A person of the same totem is considered closer than a next door neighbour and unites the Bantu more than language or region does.
Regionalism and tribalism is therefore a misnomer and alien to the Bantu and a creation of political manipulators who appeal to such variables and seem to be winning and yet their power source lacks depth as it has no cultural basis.
The totem system unites.
The requirement that marriage be outside one’s own totem line gets us more united as each one becomes the other’s relative.