HomeOld_PostsCreating national identities through family trees

Creating national identities through family trees

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THIS week, my son brought home from school an assignment to develop his family tree.
Filling the boxes on his father’s side was fairly easy.
He got actual names for his grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, great-great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-great-grandfather.
The latter got him excited, Nduna being a name that points to some Ndebele links.
That really got him excited: “So dad we are Ndebele,” he mused.
The mother’s side was more problematic, given distant informants.
We got to his great-grandfather.
But what got him more excited was that he shares an ancestry with Kanda Bongoman and that he probably picked some Portuguese ancestry along the way.
In fact, the Diaspora tendency here has seen his ancestry spread across nationalities like Mozambican, Malawian, Congolese and Zimbabwean.
When I looked at the resultant family tree, I smiled, realising that for all the differences we expend our energies to prove, we are a people linked somewhere in the family tree web.
Unfortunately, we have been schooled to believe in the Shona and the Ndebele and their differences.
A whole industry has grown out of imagining and creating the differences.
Yet Shona is a recently coined term for groups of people with a long history in Zimbabwe.
Recently the term ‘Shona’ has been used as an umbrella term for recent, mainly 19th and 20th centuries ethnic/tribal creations.
The tragedy of all this has been to reduce the ‘Shona’ history of more than 2 000 years into recent history of the umbrella or that of its ‘tribal’ creations.
This Shona term is a collective of other more recent tribal creations like Zezuru and Korekore.
Part of this confusion can be traced to the tragedy of the invention and attempted implementation, by white academics of Shona, of so-called Standard Shona into the school syllabi.
My former history professor recalls this tragedy as the academics were left to ponder on whether ‘mugwagwa’ would now become ‘murwarwa’, taking a cue from the transformation of ‘kugwara’ to ‘kurwara’!
Anger around these linguistic experiments by Professor George Fortune and company helped sow seeds of tribal confusion and mistrust among the so-called Shona family.
That today’s favoured ethnic labels are mere dialect labels is indisputable.
A Muhera, Mhofu/Museyamwa is a Karanga in Masvingo, perhaps a ‘Manyika’ in Buhera, kwaNyashanu and a Zezuru in Chishawasha and a Korekore in Chiweshe.
At Great Zimbabwe, Mutapa was Karanga and today his descendants in Rushinga are Korekore.
It is for this reason that Chief Gutu is Karanga in Masvingo, but Korekore in Musana.
My own maternal uncles are Korekore in Musana and Zezuru in Nhohwe.
During my son’s family tree assignment, I helped him trace our paternal roots to Ushiri in Zvishavane where I am Karanga moving through Gutu (as a Karanga), then Magangara, Chikomba, as a Zezuru and for part of the family to Dorowa/Bocha now where there are Manyika while another branch are now Korekore in Muzarabani.
Shona is an umbrella label for people who have lived in this country for over
2 000 years.
It is safe to appreciate that nothing materially separates the ancestry of today’s Shona from the Bantu people who populated this country in the later centuries of the first millennium AD.
These people today include the Ndebele, vaZezuru, vaKaranga, vaManyika, vaNdau, vaKorekore, vaNambiya, vaVenda and vaKalanga.
“So who are we then?” my son would ask.
We are neither of those but all of them, I would further confuse him.
If we had to search for an ancient ethnic identity for the Shona, we would have to settle for terms like vaNyai, vaKaranga or vaGova.
Some historians contend Nyai is the oldest collective term for most people who lived on the Zimbabwean plateau and later came to be called Karanga/Kalanga or ‘hole’ or Shona or Ndebele.
These Karanga/Kalanga/Shona/Ndebele have over time incorporated other immigrants in the formation of a largely Shona/Ndebele identity block.
Ndebele here refers to the Nyai who took up Ndebele language and customs and today dominate the Ndebele ethnic grouping.
Within the body politic, especially from the 1970s we have seen spirited attempts to further break these broad identities along dialect lines.
Karanga, meaning either ‘children of the junior wife’ or ‘people of the sun’; Kalanga, is an old ethnic label for most Zimbabweans.
The late Edson Zvobgo was right on the mark when he is reputed to have jokingly remarked, with reference to the Unity Accord: “Hakuchina muShona kana muNdewere, tese taamaKaranga!”
We have always been.
Nyai was a ‘Karanga’ term for a ‘client son-in-law’.
This was born out of the kutema ugariri (bonded labour when a person works for his in-laws in lieu of the bride price) marriage arrangement.
In the Mutapa state, the term came to refer to a warrior client class of vatumwa who formed the core of the Mutapa army.
When Changamire Dombo and a Nyai regiment broke up to found the Rozvi state, Nyai came to be used interchangeably with Rozvi.
Nyai was also understood to mean ‘follower’, consistent with client mukuwasha or client warrior concepts.
Historically, vaNyai have also been associated with plateau/highland settlements.
Other subordinate concepts associated with the Nyai include ‘inferiors’, ‘slaves’ and ‘messengers’.
Today we use ‘munyai’ as a marriage intermediary and so by extension, we see munyai/sadombo as a son-in-law, ‘mukuwasha’.
We know that 19th Century Europeans initially referred to part of this country as ‘Banyailand’ before later splitting this to Ndebele state and Mashonaland.
Therefore, any attempt to map Zimbabwean cultural identities must be grounded in historical appreciation of these Nyai/Karanga identities.
Family trees are a good starting point for our children to deepen their understanding of national identities without the albatross of colonially created ethnic labels.
The Shona/Ndebele are one people; Nyai/Karanga.

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