MY Form Two son asked, “Dad, was Joshua Nkomo a Kalanga?”
I replied, “Joshua Nkomo, Father Zimbabwe, like all Kalanga, was Bantu.”
My son felt I was dodging the question.
I told him in the current context of media frenzy on the subject I would need quite some time to explain.
He had the patience.
What follows is an abridged version of the lecture that followed.
In the early 1990s, during my stay in Bulawayo, I went on a tour of Botswana’s prime archaeological sites.
Lasting images of this adventure include climbing Toustwemogala range in Central Botswana and the visit to Domboshava Zimbabwe type site near Francistown.
The former is a famous late Iron Age site attesting to our cattle keeping ancestry as descendants of what archaeologists call the Leopard Kopje culture and ethnologists call Kalanga.
The latter is an off shot of the stone building tradition at Great Zimbabwe.
At the Domboshava site near Francistown I had two Kalanga guides; Joseph Musindo and Linda Choto.
The two guides could easily have been my Bulawayo friends, Noel Chidyagwayi (whose Ndebele identity was Noel Dlamini) and Anna Nyamuziwa (everyone knew her as maSibanda).
That my guides in Francistown were Kalanga and I was Shona was an issue of no more than labels.
Clearly we shared a common history of taming rivers, mountains and granites God had abundantly endowed us with.
The tie between Pekeshe, Musindo/Choto and Dlamini/Sibanda can only be understood in the context of Iron Age archaeology or Bantu history on the Zimbabwe plateau.
Iron Age refers to the period beginning around 2000 years ago when inhabitants life styles, as observed from surviving material culture, changed from stone tool using hunters and gatherers to iron using farmers in most parts of Southern Africa.
Linguistic and ethnographic studies have corroborated archeology to identify this change as signaling arrival of the Bantu in areas previously settled by Khoisan ‘Bushmen’ communities.
Even discounting for cross breeding, Pekeshe (Shona), Musindo/Choto (Kalanga) and Dlamini/Sibanda (Ndebele) clearly share a common Iron Age/Bantu ancestry.
By the end of the first one thousand years of Iron Age/Bantu settlement in Southern Africa we witness another major change in the lifestyles.
These changes included social stratification, hilltop settlements, large cattle herds, trade and complex religion.
Arrival of other Bantu groups cannot be discounted though clearly the Early Iron Age people became the Late Iron Age people, thus the population remained predominantly Bantu.
On the Zimbabwe plateau nothing materially separates the ancestry of today’s Shona from the Bantu people that populated this country in the later centuries of the first millennium AD.
These people have labels like VaZezuru, VaKaranga, VaManyika, VaNdau, VaKorekore, VaNambiya, VaVenda, and VaKalanga.
The term Shona, like most of these labels, has previously been discussed for the confusion that it has caused to Zimbabwean historiography given the recent and problematic origins.
To avoid confusion let’s just assume it has the antiquity of the labelled people.
In archaeology, the most known researched settlement is near Khami Ruins in Bulawayo on and around a kopje called Leopard’s Kopje.
The latter came to refer to all similar archaeological settlements on the Zimbabwe plateau and its surroundings.
Ethnographic studies have also shown that today’s Kalanga material culture has striking resemblance to Leopard’s Kopje material culture.
At Mapungubwe there is direct association between Leopard’s Kopje material and the Zimbabwe stone building tradition.
It is for this reason that Mapungubwe, an off shot of Leopard’s Kopje, has for long been considered the ancestor of Great Zimbabwe.
Recent research has shown that Mapungubwe itself is an off shot of the Leopard’s Kopje settlement on Mapela Hill near the Shashe/Tuli confluence.
Great Zimbabwe itself gave rise to a culture dominated by over 350 stone walled sites in Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Mozambique.
From these pasts the Mutapa and Rozvi states were born.
These are sites linked to the ancestry of people that call themselves Shona today.
In terms of material culture, the Kalanga of today trace their ancestry to these Leopard’s Kopje, Mapela, Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe people.
Traditional religion also ties most Zimbabweans electing Kalanga, Ndebele and Shona labels today.
The complex Mwari religion that flourished at Great Zimbabwe was a unique development among all the southern and eastern African indigenes.
It was the most elaborate way of worshipping and consulting the Supreme Being prior to colonisation.
The God of the Shona/Kalanga, Mwari/Mwali, gave rain in times of drought and advice in times of national crisis.
Mwari was also known as Dzivaguru, Sororenzou, Nyadenga, Muvumbapasi, Musiki, Musikavanhu.
Matonjeni, also known as Mabweadziva, is roughly the landscape we call Matobo/Matopos today.
The Mwari religion has been headquartered in Matonjeni/Matopos for the last 500 years.
Matonjeni consisted of several shrines of which Njelele is the most known and active today.
Njelele is a Mwari shrine located on a hill known by its Kalanga name, Njelele.
Legend has it that the name comes from ancient migratory Njerere birds that signaled the coming of the wet season.
With most of the Matonjeni shrines having become inactive Njelele has emerged in the last four decades as the principal Mwari shrine.
Other shrines in the Matonjeni landscape include Dula, Zhilo, Wirirani and Manyangwa.
Until the late 1960s adherents of the Mwari religion and its Vanyai in Chikomba, Buhera, Gutu, Mberengwa and the Matobo region were oblivious to the Shona/Kalanga distinctions of today.
While Shona is clearly a recent label for Iron Age settlers on the Zimbabwe plateau, which settlers include today’s Kalanga, Kalanga as a language and cultural grouping is of much deeper antiquity.
It is most likely older than old Shona labels like vaKaranga and vaNyai, terms we have proof were in use more than five hundred years ago.
Linguists are convinced Kalanga is the oldest Shona dialect/language.
Kalanga and its many groups/dialects like Lilima, Twamamba and Lozwi are old Shona.
Lozwi was a royalty dialect popularised during the Mutape/Rozvi states periods.
Others see it as a mere geo-description (where the sun sets) of a people in the west/south west whose ancestry gave birth to the Zimbabwe civilisation.
Either way Kalanga is inseparable from Shona/Iron Age/Bantu histories of the Zimbabwe plateau.
So was Joshua Nkomo Kalanga?
He was what he called himself.
He was Father Zimbabwe.
I am Pekeshe of Bantu/Kalanga/Shona ancestry.