HomeOld_PostsWest’s tribal crusade in Zim

West’s tribal crusade in Zim

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THE Patriot early this year published an article titled ‘Peace begins with tribal inclusiveness’ by Munhamu Pekeshe where he unpacked the importance of unity, especially among the Ndebele and their fellow tribesmen, the Shona.
He emphasised that Unity Day should remind us of the pain of disunity and must be a celebration of the hurdles we overcame in the journey to unity.
There have been numerous incidences of ‘divisions’ between the Shona and Ndebele spawned by regime change architects who have been trying to divide the people along tribal lines.
These architects have gone on to form tribal groupings who fight against their fellow tribesmen like the Mthwakazi Joint Youth Resolution who are on a rampage in Matabeleland South Province.
For example, one Stanley Raphael Khumalo has declared himself the new Ndebele King, acting alone without the due processes or consent of his people.
And the ‘king’ plans to take over the Bulawayo State House as well as change the national flag, replacing it with his ‘Mthwakazi nation flag’.
His acts are driven not by the desire to serve his people, but he is being sponsored by the West that has since colonisation played on the perceived differences between the Shona and Ndebele.
Despite many of the ‘Ndebeles’ having their descendants among the Shona, the Western hand has made it its mission to emphasise differences that in reality do not exist.
In fact, evidence from across disciplines show that contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are a fairly recent invention in historical terms as well as being a socio-political construct.
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’.
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 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, the schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them have become fixed in the collective psyche of Africa and the modern states of the continent are now stuck with them.
Missionaries played a significant role in creating these fissures among Africans as they were the chief architects of ethno-linguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation.
Sadly, these maps have remained intact and have continued to influence African research scholarship.
Tribal identities in Zimbabwe developed through language mapping by missionaries and ‘educators’.
Missionaries in the country made distinctions among the Shona dialects and between the Shona and Ndebele languages.
There were seven missionary societies operating in various areas throughout the country.
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.
For example, the Manyika had been a small group of people under Chief Mutasa, but simply because of its speakers’ proximity to two of the earliest mission churches, the Manyika language was expanded through the mission schools and finally came to denote a much larger group.
Moreover, the words ‘Korekore’ and ‘Zezuru’ were regional nicknames for northerners and highlanders respectively and not meant to describe any ethnic differences.
And the term ‘Kalanga’ was simply a corrupted version of ‘Karanga’, which was originally synonymous with Shona.
However, common Shona did have the effect of stressing the dissimilarities between the Shona and Ndebele languages, which were declared as the only ‘two official indigenous languages’ of Zimbabwe.
Scholars argue through this act, there was no recognition of the commonalities between the languages or cultures .
One example of this lack of consideration can be seen in the popular Zimbabwean television dramas.
When a local drama in Shona was introduced in 1983, a similar one was started in Ndebele.
The scripts show evidence of code switching from Shona to English and from Ndebele to English, but none between the indigenous languages themselves.
While the influence of English on both Shona and Ndebele is unquestionable, pretending that there is completely no mixing of, or switching between the two indigenous languages is unrealistic.
The late Terence Ranger argues with the movement toward standard Shona, a Shona identity was created and re-inforced in schools through the productions of written histories and accounts of African customs.
Moreover, the emphasis on differentiating between Ndebele and Shona spurred stereotypes surrounding these ‘tribes’.
Indeed, the education system entrenched the belief that the Ndebele were a militaristic and well disciplined ‘race’ in constant conflict with the docile Shona ‘race’ in the pre-colonial period.
Thus, the written and regionalised languages of missionaries established Zimbabwe’s tribal map.
These tribal identities were monikers by whites that were re-inforced as real identities through the education system.

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