ON Sunday June 1 Bulawayo celebrates 120 years as it reflects on the different cultural aspects of the city and its people.
Though there is much to celebrate in terms of the freedom the city now enjoys from colonial bondage, it is sad to note that there is a section of our colonial masters who are celebrating victories they scored against the Ndebele people.
Bulawayo which was declared a city in 1894 remains one of the few if not one city in Zimbabwe with the largest number of colonial names on its northern suburb streets.
It also has the biggest number of colonial replicas in the form of ex-Rhodesian war memorabilia still stored in secret bars in the city centre such as the legion, it is also home to Rhodes’s grave and is the biggest beneficiary of donor funds from Western countries.
Sadly, it is some of these underground colonial organisations who are spearheading the celebrations under the guise of trying to cement relations between the Ndebele and other ethnic groups yet preaching the marginalisation gospel.
So as the city celebrates its 120 years, lest we forget the sacrifices that were made during the war of liberation by thousands of sons and daughters of the soil to liberate this country from those who are still dining with us in the guise of ‘celebrating history’.
It should be remembered that today, the Ndebele speaking people are part of Zimbabwe under a unitary system, which is a creation of modern African nationalism.
They form about 20 percent of the population of Zimbabwe.
The Shona speaking people make up about 80 percent.
Feelings of exclusion and marginalisation among the Ndebele have reinforced a particularistic identity.
However, it is important to note that the initial version of nationalism of the period 1957-1962 was inclusive of both Ndebele and Shona as oppressed Africans.
This has led historians to argue that ethnic groups do not always stand as opponents to the development of a nation and that they sometimes complement efforts at developing an inclusive nation.
Basing historical analysis on ethnic-based societies, clubs and unions formed in Bulawayo, such as the Sons of Mashonaland Cultural Society, the Kalanga Cultural Society and the Matabele Patriotic Society, in this case ethnicity and nationalism positively supported each other in the period 1950-1963.
It was during this period that ethnic associations produced nationalist leaders, and while ethnicity provided the required pre-colonial heroes and monuments the name ‘Zimbabwe’ was adopted by nationalist liberation movements for their imagined postcolonial nation.
Leading nationalist political formations such as the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress (SRANC), the National Democratic Party (NDP) and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) used ethnicity positively to mobilise the African masses.
The ethnic cultural symbols used to this purpose included the traditional leopard skins worn by pre-colonial Shona and Ndebele chiefs and the Nguni hats worn by Ndebele chiefs, which early nationalist leaders like Joshua Nkomo, James Chikerema, George Nyandoro, Jaison Moyo and Leopold Takawira used to wear when addressing mass rallies.
The ‘grand’ nationalist split of 1963 that saw the birth of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) as a splinter party from ZAPU initiated the negative mobilisation of ethnicity that characterised the whole of the liberation struggle period and beyond.
The Ndebele-Kalanga group constituted the largest supporters of ZAPU until its demise in 1987, whereas ZANU was largely supported by the Shona groups.
This evolution of nationalist politics in an ethnically bifurcated form had devastating implications for identities and nation-building within the postcolonial state.
Up to now, the issue of the Ndebele identity in Zimbabwe remains a potential source of national tension in the country.
In 2005, the Vice-President of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Gibson Sibanda now late, was quoted by the Daily Mirror as arguing that there was a need to rebuild the Ndebele state along the lines of the single-tribe nations of Lesotho and Swaziland.
He was quoted as saying, “Ndebeles can only exercise sovereignty through creating their state like Lesotho, which is an independent state in South Africa, and it is not politically wrong to have the State of Matabeleland in Zimbabwe.”
Moderate Ndebele politicians inside the country have also clamoured for a federal state within which Matabeleland would run its own political and economic affairs. All of these sentiments indicate the challenges of nation building in post-colonial Zimbabwe that need to be carefully historicised.
The significant question is what lessons could post-colonial African leaders learn from pre-colonial leaders like Mzilikazi Khumalo, who created the Ndebele state in Zimbabwe?
Today colonialists made the Ndebele suffer from both the perception and the imaginary marginalisation of their past.
That they were once a powerful, independent nation created out of courage, resilience, and sacrifice is quickly losing its significance. However, the imagination, construction, and making of Zimbabwe in 1980 included the insights from Ndebele past.
The late academic Cabinet minister and historian, Stan Mudenge noted:
Present day Zimbabwe, therefore, is not merely a geographical expression created by imperialism during the nineteenth century.
It is a reality that has existed for centuries, with a language, a culture and a ‘world view’ of its own, representing the inner core of the Shona historical experience. Today’s Zimbabwe is, for these reasons, therefore, a successor state.
As successors to all that has gone before, present Zimbabweans have both materially and culturally, much to build and not little to build on.
The resilient Ndebele language, memory and history were incorporated in Zimbabwe, since they constituted a ‘sub-hegemonic’ wave in the midst of Shona ‘hegemony’.
So as we celebrate and wine and dine for the 120 years, it should be remembered that we are one nation bound by aspirations of a country whose ideology are rooted in the liberation struggle.