THE last article bordered on how the country’s detractors are using some small Ndebele tribal groupings to spread hate mainly targeting their Shona brothers.
This was highlighted a few weeks ago when a Harare-based fast food outlet Chicken Slice inserted an advert in The Chronicle newspaper announcing their arrival in Bulawayo.
Their advert was wrongly spelt in isiNdebele, however, instead of laughing off the grammatical error, these tribal groupings had a field day announcing that their language was deliberately mutilated to suit the Shona speaking people.
They also blamed the wrong spellings on marginalisation of the Ndebeles.
As usual the country’s detractors took this opportunity to sponsor a tribal meeting and a mini demo that was eventually foiled by the security forces.
The ZAPU Europe Secretary for Arts and Culture, Nokuthula Ncube expressed her disgust over the Chicken Slice advert in an online publication Bulawayo News 24.
“Concerns over the atrocious spelling of Ndebele words and the general grammatical mistakes that is contained in various communications coming from supposedly Zimbabwean organisations have been noted,” she said.
“The Zimbabwean Government has been the leading culprit in mutilating the Ndebele language, for example, the national asset such as the Passport contains no fewer than five mistakes.”
Ncube is based in Europe and her sentiments are well understood, as some European countries are pushing for regime change in Zimbabwe through the use of tribal groups of the Ndebele and Shona.
However, it is also interesting to note that the racist regime of Rhodesia was very notorious for mutilating African languages to the extent that wholesale changes and renaming of towns, cities and streets had to be done.
It was a form of subjugation of one race by another and the war of liberation was meant to correct this.
It is therefore unfortunate that in an independent Zimbabwe, one group of people is still giving in to the colonial master’s suggestions that they are marginalised and are forming small tribal groups to fight other tribes with arrogance and disregard of cultures and languages.
I repeat the late academic, minister and national hero, Dr Stan Mudenge’s words that, “Zimbabweans have both materially and cultural much to build and not little.
“Historians and academics claim that regional antagonisms in Zimbabwe date back to the very arrival of the Ndebele in Matabeleland, in the middle of the 19th century.
“They believe that the Ndebele were intensely disliked and feared by the Shona, whose tribes were raided and whose cattle were stolen by the Ndebele.”
However, today the Ndebele language, memory and history were incorporated in Zimbabwe, since they constituted a ‘sub-hegemonic’ wave in the midst of Shona ‘hegemony’.
The Shona-dominated ruling elite in Zimbabwe felt that for purposes of nation-building, Ndebele history had to be remembered – particularly the fact of Ndebele raids on the Shona polities.
Scholars have contradicted the view of the ‘Shona’ and the ‘Ndebele’ existing as dual tribal entities dividing Zimbabwe in the 19th century.
According to these historians, the opposition of the Shona to the Ndebele is, in fact, of very recent origin and most significantly the product of competition for followers and leadership positions among the nationalist parties.
The country’s detractors in the grand plan to unseat President Robert Mugabe saw an opening and fanned tribal tensions between the Ndebele and their Shona brothers by waving the marginalisation trump card where the ‘Ndebele’ were urged to vote for the opposition, MDC, a puppet party for Western countries in the hope of unshackling them from the imagined Shona oppressors.
This strategy has worked as evidenced by the number of all parliamentary urban seats going to the opposition in the last general election.
One of the tragedies of the 1980s was that events served to harden regional differences along tribal and linguistic lines.
While the 1987 Unity Accord has healed the rift, some would contend that Ndebele-speakers have been forced by the country’s detractors to neither forget nor forgive their Shona counterparts.
The catastrophe of fuelled quasi-nationalism is that it can capture the might of the nation state and bring authorised violence down ruthlessly against the people who seem to stand in the way of the nation being united and pure as one body.
It is as if quasi-nationalism’s victims, by being of an opposed quasi-nation, were forced to put themselves outside the nation and feel they are excluded in all national programmes at the expense of their Shona counterparts.
This reality raises a number of relevant questions, which have been taken for granted for too long: How did one qualify to be Ndebele?
The Ndebele language, memory and history were incorporated in Zimbabwe, since they constituted a ‘sub-hegemonic’ wave in the midst of Shona ‘hegemony’.
An important point to note for the so-called Ndebele today is that, the Ndebele state emerged and crystallised around a small Khumalo clan (about 500 Abezansi), and eventually matured into a heterogeneous nation incorporating different ethnic groups of the Shona , BaTonga and Kalangas before its violent destruction by colonial forces in 1893 and 1896.
As noted in the book, The Ndebele Nation. Hegemony, Memory, Historiography by Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, in the Ndebele state it was clear that the pre-colonial structural forms continued to be reproduced as long as the Khumalo leadership exercised control over the primary means of production and over those centralised institutions that underpinned the division of labour.
The approach of the book, therefore, entails a comprehensive re-consideration of Ndebele historical events as the practical embodiments of a more deep-seated structural order.
The book delves deeply into the ideological intricacies of the Ndebele state with a view to teasing logical meaning out of what was sometimes dismissed as autocracy, militarism, superstition or barbarism.
The book addresses very fundamental questions that have direct implications for the broader debates on governance and politics in Africa: How did the Khumalo establish hegemony?
How did they manage to pass their values and ideas on to other members of the Ndebele society?
How successful was the Ndebele ruling elite in making the Khumalo ancestors relevant for the consolidation, legitimacy, and dissemination of ideology?
How did the Ndebele ruling elite manage conflicting interests within the Ndebele society?
What strategies were used to gain support from the people who became part of the new Ndebele nation today?
What was the nature of the relationship between the state and society among the Ndebele?
l To be continued