By Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu

ZIMBABWE is a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic nation whose communities can trace their historical and linguistic roots to the foot of the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, and even across the Red Sea when a god named Anu and his wife, Eya, ruled the Babylonian skies in the pre-historic era.
The ethnic communities are the BaKalanga (amaKalanga in Nguni dialects) who are believed to belong to the proto-Bantu racial and linguistic group from which what we refer to as Shonas later emerged.
The Bantu group of African people are now found predominantly in a geographical region lying roughly five degrees south of the equator and ending in the Cape in South Africa.
Their origin has been located by some scholars in the Bar al-Ghazal region, not far away from the Bar al-Jebel, east of Kordofan in the Sudan.
They were referred to as the Bantu by the renowned anthropologist Wilhelm Bleek in 1862 because they refer to a person as ‘umuntu, muthu, antu, nhu, munhu, ndru, ndu, anhu’ or something similarly ending with a ‘ntu’, ‘ndu’ or ‘nhu’ sound in their more than 400 dialects.
Research carried out in recent years has, however, established that before the invasion of North Africa by the Arabic Moslemic forces, there were black communities along the Mediterranean coast right across today’s Maghreb and the Sahgreb regions right up to the Red Sea.
Some of those black people called themselves ‘banhu Hillal’, while others referred to themselves as ‘banhu Kutama’.
So, we can certainly refer to Africa as the continent of the Bantu, Batho, Batru.
Africa is a name derived from a region in Libya which the ancient Greeks called ‘Ifrikiya’.
Across the Red Sea in Ancient Babylon, we could at that remote time come across the god Anu, his wife Eya and their angel Gilgamesh causing a disastrous flood referred to as Noah’s flood in the Bible, a Hebraic historical and cultural narration.
The name ‘Anu’ is made up of two Bantu lexical elements: ‘A’ is the equivalent of either ‘mister’ or ‘sir’, two words expressing respect in English, hence ‘amfumo’, ‘achimwene’ in ChiChewa.
The suffix ‘nu’ means person, hence the god’s name ‘Anu’ simply meant ‘respected person’.
‘Nu’ in TjiKalanga means person.
‘Eya’, the name of Anu’s wife means ‘yes’ but in an affirmative interrogative way as when one says in TjiKalanga: “Eya, kati kwaka jalo?” (Yes, is that how it is?).
Black people have been a part of Arabia and the Levant from time immemorial, having been forcefully taken to that region as slaves from various African regions first by Phoenicians, then by the Hellenes, then later by the Romans.
The Arabs enslaved larger numbers of Africans during the Islamisation of various eastern, central, northern and western regions of Africa following the conquest of Egypt by Moslems under the command of one of Mecca’s brilliant generals, Amr Ibn al-As, in 641 AD.
That was much later, however, than the Bantu dispersion period, the era that is relevant to this discussion.
Some of the banu (Hillal, Kutama, and Banhu Sulaym) had been pushed from the littoral regions into the interior, and they in turn pushed other communities southwards, westwards and others eastwards.
According to the highly respected linguist, Professor Christopher Ehret, the Bantu language community expanded into three successive series between BC 600 and BC 400.
The communities were the Lega-Guha who occupied the DRC’s eastern region to the west of the Rift Valley, the second being the Lacustrine Bantu presently found in Rwanda, Burundi, western and southern Uganda, and the third being the Tuli whose descendants are found in a large area in central, eastern and southern Africa.
His conclusion goes on to say that the Tuli later split into two groups, the Pembele and the Pela.
The Pembele group drifted southwards and eastwards to Tanganyika, southern Somalia, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, (especially into the former Transvaal, Natal), Swaziland, Lesotho as well as the northern and eastern Cape Province.
The Pela section moved into the western sector of the southern third region of the African continent.
It is of much interest to note that the two words used by Professor Ehret to denote the two Bantu groups are of TjiKalanga etymological origin.
‘Pembele’ is obviously derived from or associated with ‘pembela’, to dance hysterically or to roam more or less aimlessly, or to cry distressfully but also with a feeling of hidden joy, a feeling of hidden derision.
‘Pela’ is TjiKalanga and it means ‘is finished’ or ‘has ended’.
The word ‘pela’ is also used to mean that a person has died: ‘Wapela, hhakutjina nhu’ (He or she is finished, there is no person any longer).
Those two words may very much occur in other Bantu languages, but the author of this narration is not aware of such tongues.
The TjiKalanga-speaking group had obviously not yet been identified by their language, remnants of which are found in such names as ‘Tanganyika’ (where the land or country originates), ‘Dongola’, a name of a place in Sudan, where it is believed horses were first tamed in Africa.
The word ‘dongola’ in TjiKalanga means to be bare headed as a sign of misery as would have been the case with a Bantu woman whose husband had recently died, a custom that prevailed before the encroachment of Western culture.
Another TjiKalanga word that occurs in Sudan is ‘dula’ or ‘dura’ (depending on the dialect).
That word in both forms (dula and dura) means sorghum (mapfunde, amabele).
In Zimbabwe it means ‘granary’ (isiphala).
‘Dula’ is TjiKalanga (what Professor Clement Doke classified as ‘western Shona’ as distinguished from eastern, southern and central Shona dialects which refer to a granary as ‘dura’.
Talking about the Sudan brings us to a very important historical fact which is that the full name of that now divided country was Bilal al Sudan (The land of Blacks).
We do not know what it was called by the black people themselves.
However, it is most likely that the Pembele group of Bantus were the original inhabitants of the region where modern Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and other great lakes regional states are located.
The Pembele group, particularly, drifted during a period of several centuries.
Some of them crossed the Zambezi River and eventually founded empires such as that of successive Munhumutapas, and kingdoms, two of which were quite important regionally.
One was known as ‘Maravi’ by its own people, the Phiris, in Malawi.
The Phiris belonged to the hyena totem.
The other was the Mapungubgwe – centred kingdom that existed from 1075 AD to 1220AD, and the rulers, according to oral legend, were a Kalanga clan of the Zhou totem.
Zhou is a Kalanga word of the Lilima dialect and means ‘elephant’.
The TjiKalanga language has four dialects: tjiLilima, tjiTalawunda, tjiNyubi, and a dialect that emerged after the overthrow by the Rozvi empire of the Kalanga kingdom.
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist.
For views and comments, email: sgwakuba@gmail.com