HomeOld_PostsThe lingering legacy of colonialism: Part One…the situpa as an oppressive, racist...

The lingering legacy of colonialism: Part One…the situpa as an oppressive, racist instrument

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By Dr Michelina Andreucci

HOW many of you still remember the phrases: “Show me your situpa…”, or “Where is your chitikinyani…?” or “Get to the back of the queue…?”
Of late, great emphasis is being placed on reviving the notion of our Africanness, hunhu/ubuntu, in the new Zimbabwean school curriculum that exhorts us to serve the nation dutifully as espoused in the national pledges.
Yet our first and most important national human right – the Zimbabwean birth right and citizenship — still plagues the country, as I recently discovered when I accompanied a friend and colleague, Tonderayi Mutambanengwe, to acquire their child’s birth certificate at Makombe Building.
He served in the war of liberation, based at Mgagao, in Tanzania and other Frontline States during the war of liberation when blood was spilt, life and limb lost, while numerous relationships were severed; never to be restored.
It is common knowledge today that many families were displaced and estranged from the bosoms of familial bonds during those arduous times many endured in order to liberate our motherland — Zimbabwe.
Today, many of Africa’s unshackled peoples’ lives still hinge on the obligatory colonial pieces of paper that were enforced to keep the ‘natives’ out.
The ‘native question’: “How can a small, foreign minority rule over an indigenous majority?” was of major concern for British (and other) colonialists in Africa and elsewhere.
The answer was not only in the relevant mechanisms of past domination in their histories, but to replace their African names with Christian ones to disfranchise them.
At the core was the de-humanisation of the African, including the institutionalisation of negative racial stereo-types.
Today, there are many among us who are trying desperately to reconnect the severed fragile threads to their ancestors, who they really are and what they fought for.
As our history records, the structures of land tenure, though lacking a legal framework to endorse it, had already been long-established in this territory by the ruling white minority settlers by 1923 when they attained a form of ‘self-Government’ from the British authorities, instead of integrating Africans as citizens in the empire.
This was after the British South Africa Company (BSAC), nearing the expiry of the 25-year Royal Charter granted by Queen Victoria, and on the verge of bankruptcy, was only too eager to wash its hands of the administration of the territory.
The resolve by the British on unsanctioned ‘self-Government’ for the colonial masters led to the repression of indigenous Africans.
In January 1925, the ruling white minority, entrenched in their belief that all indigenous people, were in every way inferior to whites, appointed the Carter Commission under Sir Morris Carter, to look into, and make recommendations on how to deal out the land in the colony.
The Land Apportionment Act of 1931 that resulted from the Carter investigations strongly endorsed ‘separate development’; it further contained provisions for the allocation of ‘land rights’ along strict racial lines.
One of the most comprehensive and destructive statute within the Act was the affirmation that all urban areas and cities were to be zoned exclusively for white occupation.
Her Majesty Queen Victoria (later King George V), endorsed ‘Separate development’, which in South Africa became known as ‘apartheid’ that; the ‘natives’ of a territory, space and its resources, develop separately from whites.
Separate development also denied entry into ‘white owned and zoned’ areas of land to all indigenous African people.
In the early 1930s, Godfrey Huggins, the forth Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, was a strong proponent of this race philosophy and a particularly forceful advocate of the Carter Commission’s ‘separate development’.
The Carter Commission devised and recommended the concept of a conservative settlers’ ‘white only city’, which would in time, with sufficient immigration, be wholly white; otherwise it would compromise the white ideal.
However, the economic inter-dependence of the two races (mainly by whites), and especially after the country experienced and accelerated industrialisation between the two major World Wars, made race segregation and separate development outright impossible and unrealistic; even before the Land Apportionment Act had been legislated.
As the urban ‘white’ areas rapidly developed, the indigenous ‘blacks’, who provided cheap labour, could not be denied access to them.
Thus, the careful, pernicious and exhaustive management and control of their movement into and within urban areas, and within the country as a whole, was deemed essential.
Consequently, in 1936, the Natives Registration Act came into being, and has since morphed into the current national identification system, with similar subtle detrimental dictates for the majority of the people.
Every indigenous (black) male of 14-years old or above was required to carry a registration certificate or ‘situpa’.
This served as both, a tax receipt and a contract of service.
In addition to a situpa, every (black) male within the main urban areas of the colony was required to carry either a ‘pass’ to seek employment in town, and/or a certificate of employment as proof.
If he was employed outside the town, he required written permission from his employer or a ‘visiting pass’.
Originally, the system of ‘black registration’ in Southern Rhodesia, as in South Africa, was ostensibly put in place to assist police for purposes of identification; later it was to supply labour and prevent desertion.
In time, it was part of the ‘machinery of segregation’ aimed at limiting and restricting the influx of indigenous people into urban ‘white’ areas.
‘Pass Laws’ became a traditional and persistent instrument for the control of indigenous people throughout the colonial African spectrum.
In time, the mass migration of the indispensible indigenous workers into the ‘white’ cities as ‘cook boys’, ‘garden boys’, ‘nannies’ et al; eventually served to destroy the inherited indigenous traditions and impoverished the rural areas.
These discriminatory practices have in fact been a continuous characteristic of the colonial systems since the dark times of slavery when African people were ‘branded’ as a means of identification and movement control.
The situpa was (and remains), the result of an oppressive and racist instrument designed to keep the indigenous ‘natives’ in check.
Whites were exempt from this lingering, humiliating and time-consuming piece of colonial legislation.
The Rhodesia Bantu Voters Association came about in (1926), to lobby the Government of the day vis-à-vis land availability, schools and education, and for temperance in its application of the ‘pass laws’.
In 1934, the Bantu Congress of Southern Rhodesia was formed to push for better conditions and quality of life for their communities.
It protested several laws, among them the Maize Control Act, the Industrial Conciliation Act, and once again, the Native Registration Act.
Other salient features of British colonial domination were the institutionalised separation of master and servant, and the systematic imposition of the colonisers’ interests on the territory.
This meant that the majority of ‘native’ Africans under the auspices of the British Empire and monarchs did not enjoy the same rights to citizenship as European-born or African-born whites.
This resulted in the majority of indigenous people being confined to the status of ‘second-class’ citizens; or at worst, with no rights or privileges in their land of birth — stateless!
The first form of citizenship was based on the way people lived in ancient Greece.
Greek citizens, who feared being enslaved, developed the concept of citizenship. They were both ruler and ruled, key political and judicial offices were rotated among them, and citizens had the right to speak and vote in the political assembly.
In Western Europe, the understanding of citizenship rose alongside the theory of popular sovereignty; challenging the unrestrained rule of monarchs and emperors.
People progressed from being ‘subjects’ of a king, queen or emperor, to being citizens of a city and later to a nation and for common people to be included in decision making.
Dr Michelina Rudo Andreucci is a Zimbabwean-Italian researcher, industrial design consultant lecturer and specialist hospitality interior decorator. She is a published author in her field. For comments E-mail: linamanucci@gmail.com

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