IN Bulawayo, along the Matopos Road, there is a place called Zonki Izizwe loosely translated to mean ‘All Languages’.
Zonki is a misspelling of Zonke in Ndebele and means ‘all’.
There used to be a bar called Brass Monkey at this place and that is where all white people hung out.
I went there sometime and had the ‘privilege’ of being served by a burly white waiter.
It took me a good two hours before I was served a simple meal of chips and steak although a few white diners who arrived a little later than me were already served.
The white people spoke in low tones and looked at me suspiciously.
The existence of racism is rife in Zimbabwe and although not so visible, we have some isolated places that cater exclusively for whites, just like the Legion Clubs in almost every major town in Zimbabwe, where ex-Rhodesian soldiers and former Selous Scouts still hang out.
In these places, white people reminisce over how they were superior to black people and hope one day they will rule Zimbabwe using regime change architects they are sponsoring through some non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and political parties.
Interestingly, they are also using some local people through tribal politics, especially between the Ndebele and Shona people.
There have been numerous incidences of racism in Zimbabwe, especially on some remnant white establishments where blacks are still called kaffirs or third-class citizens.
In Bulawayo last week, some white nationals were caught on the wrong side of the law after they dismissed some workers for not cleaning up toilets.
These and other unreported incidences are still rife in Zimbabwe where some victims would rather suffer in silence for fear of victimisation or loss of jobs.
Whites are also instrumental in the formation of tribal groupings that fought against their fellow tribesmen like the Mthwakazi Joint Youth Resolution which went on a rampage in Matabeleland South, calling for the removal of non-Ndebele-speaking teachers in schools.
Other numerous incidences were propped up from trivial Ndebele spelling errors on adverts.
There are many other incidences despite the fact that if one traces tribalism, it was started by whites over a century ago as they thought it was an effective way of dividing people.
There is evidence that at least some of the contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are fairly recent inventions in historical terms.
This article offers some evidence from Zimbabwe to show that missionary linguistic politics were an important factor in this process.
The South African linguist, Clement Doke, was brought in to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona.
His Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) shows how the language politics of the Christian denominations, which were also the factions within the umbrella organisation of the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed quite significantly to the creation and promotion of Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika as the main groupings of dialects in the central area which Doke later accommodated in a unified orthography of a unified language that was given the name Shona.
Writing about 60 years later, Terrence Ranger focuses more closely on the Manyika and takes his discussion to the 1940s, but also mentions that the Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately incited tribalism between the Shona and the Ndebele, while at the same time magnifying the differences between the regional divisions of the Shona, which were, in turn, played against one another as constituent clans.
It would appear then that, for the indigenous Africans, the price of Christianity, Western education and a new perception of language unity, was the creation of regional ethnic identities that were at least potentially antagonistic and open to political manipulation.
Through many decades of rather unnecessary intellectual justification and as a result of the collective colonial experience through the churches, schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them, have become fixed in the collective mind of Africa and the modern nation states of the continent now seem to be stuck with them.
Missionaries played a significant role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethno-linguistic maps of African colonies during the early phase of European occupation.
To a large extent, these maps have remained intact and continued to influence African research scholarship.
The case of racism in Zimbabwe closely resembles the study of tribal identities in Zimbabwe developed through language mapping on the part of missionaries and educators.
Missionaries in Zimbabwe made distinctions both among the Shona dialects and between the Shona and Ndebele languages.
There were seven missionary societies operating in various areas throughout the nation.
Each, because of its isolation from the others, had a significant impact on the ‘regionalisation’ of the languages it came across.
This process occurred when the missionaries converted spoken dialects of their subject groups to written form.
Before independence, such identities were imposed upon Zimbabweans through the education system set up by the missionaries and colonial government.
The late Ranger argues that with the movement towards standard Shona, a Shona identity was created and reinforced in schools through the production of written histories and accounts of African customs.
Likewise, Ndebele identity was imparted on children who were taught Ndebele in schools although their parents did not speak the language at home.
Moreover, the emphasis on differentiating between Ndebele and Shona spurred stereotypes surrounding these ‘tribes’.
The widespread historical ‘memory’ of how the Ndebele raided the Shona, is not a product of genuine traditional reminiscence, but is the result of generations of school history lessons.
Indeed, the education system entrenched the belief that the Ndebele were a militaristic and well-disciplined race in constant conflict with the ‘docile’ Shona in the pre-colonial period.
Thus, the written and regionalised languages of missionaries established Zimbabwe’s tribal map.
These tribal identities were more than monikers as they became reinforced as real identities through the education system.
The example of Zimbabwe strengthens the argument that colonialism is a significant cause of racism and tribalism and that a country’s ethnic cleavages is not just a social fact, but a historical product whose origin can be traced.