EDITOR – IN response to last week’s article by Munhamu Pekeshe, ‘The Shona and Ndebele are Nyai/Karanga’; unless one is seriously into explorative reading, it is quite easy to fall into the trap carefully set up for us by people who might have had a sinister agenda, dividing and conquering the indigenous people based on perceived ethnic differences.
On numerous occasions, I have pointed out the undeniable fact that we never ever categorised ourselves along tribal lines because we had no tribes.
Totems are what distinguished us from each other.
The use of totems acknowledges the fact that any functional society needs different people, but in a way everyone is dependent on others.
This is neatly accomplished by the use of totems because it is an institution that says we are united even if we are different.
As for the new names like Shona, Zezuru and Korekore, by way of example, we need to bear in mind that these are names that tell us nothing about ethnicity.
They only tell us about the place where people live.
They are geographical names.
(i) Shona is a contraction of bantu ‘bentshonalanga’, a Nguni name that means people who dwell in the west.
This was the direction with respect to where the Nguni settled around 1838.
So, we know that there were no people who called themselves Shona before 1838. The name is not indigenous.
(ii) Zezuru simply means the people who dwell in ‘heaven’, which is a fancy way of say people who dwell in high places; pauzuru or phezulu.
The name tells us nothing about ethnicity.
If it does, we might as well argue that the Zezuru of Mashonaland Central and Mashonaland East are indistinguishable from the Zulu of KwaZulu-Natal.
(iii) Korekore is a designation of the people who live in the north.
Of course this is a very relative term because it is geographical.
(iv) We had names before 1838 or 1890.
As a matter of fact, we had our own ancestral names going back to time immemorial.
We called ourselves vanhu/bantu/atu/antu etc.
In Zimbabwe and Mozambique, we were and still are BaKalanga/VaKaranga.
I fully support the Southern Karanga for simply reverting to and assertively claiming back the ancient Karanga name without even the geographical prenomen.
Perhaps they did so because they were outraged by the pejorative colonial name of Mavhitori.
We need to learn from the ‘Karanga’ who discarded their colonial name.
Zezuru, Korekore and Shona are colonial epithets that we need to discard.
Our name awaits reclamation.
We are BaKalanga/VaKaranga.

Black Technocrat