Maravi

(NEWZIMBABWE) Sekai Holland: whose history is it anyway?

COMMENT - You would actually have to believe that a disarmament exercise killing at most 20,000 people (and this is an inflated number - the real number is much closer to 10,000 or lower) from a population of 2 million would constitute 'genocide', or even an attempt at it - which is a political charge, not a historic one.

Sekai Holland: whose history is it anyway?
by Lucas Nkomo
05/10/2009 00:00:00

AN INSCRIPTION on a plaque erected by white colonial settlers at the grave of King Mzilikazi reads: “Mzilikazi, son of Mashobana; King of the Matabele – A mountain fell on the 5th of September, 1868; All nations exclaim: Bayethe!”

The inscription pays tribute to Mzilikazi, the young warrior who in distant times defied the mighty Shaka, fled from kwaZulu with a tiny detachment of warriors, and blazed an epic trail through the Southern Africa bushveld -- repelling punitive expeditions by Shaka and his successor Dingane, routing contending tribes, and crowning his epic feat with the establishment of the Ndebele Kingdom with sovereign authority over all peoples between the Zambezi and the Limpopo.

He went on to distinguish himself as a warrior King of Kings by outliving all other Kings of his time.

The choice of the metaphor “a mountain fell”, denoting the death of King Mzilikazi, and the eulogy “all nations exclaim: Bayethe!”, may be contrasted with the recent utterances attributed to Minister Sekai Holland, gratuitously denigrating King Mzilikazi and his followers as a horde of violent cattle rustlers.

The utterances provoked the ire and angst of many with some calling for the minister to step down or be relieved of her duties not only for insulting the Ndebele nation, but also for making utterances that are at odds with the raisons d’être of her Ministerial portfolio of ‘National Healing’.

The outcry and indignation over Minister Sekai Holland’s pejorative remarks is testimony not only to the abiding veneration of King Mzilikazi as the illustrious founding ancestor, but also to the fact that despite the depredations of colonialism and subsequent extermination attempts, the nation he founded over a century and a half ago has not crumbled away but still lives on albeit subsumed within the Zimbabwean post-colony.

A lingering spirit of loyalty to that nation animates its subjects, marked by a commitment to the kind of social contract with their forebears fittingly described by Edmund Burke as one not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.

The cause for concern is that Minister Holland’s utterances are not isolated and King Mzilikazi is not the only Ndebele King to be gratuitously maligned. In August 2005, a legislator, then Zaka West MP Marble Mawere, caused a stir in Parliament when she made utterances to the effect that “the white colonialists stole our land from the time King Lobengula sold our country…”



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Despite protests by other MPs across the political divide, and calls for her to withdraw her claims, Mawere refused to withdraw her comments because, she claimed, they were what her people were taught by the colonialists.

Sporadic utterances aside, King Lobengula and the Ndebele people as a nation are subjected to trenchant disparagement and vilification in a book authored by one Lawrence Vambe titled An ill-fated people: Zimbabwe before and after Rhodes.

The book, first published in 1972 under the African Writers Series, is by and large a history of the author’s vaShawasha tribe as passed on to him by his “tribal elders” during fireside folktales. The author also makes forays into the general historiography of pre-colonial encounters between the Ndebele and the various tribes of the Shona ethnic group.

One needs to read only two chapters of Lawrence Vambe’s book, Chapter 5 and 6, to understand that the utterances of otherwise grown-up women like Minister Holland and Mawere may not be sheer runaway hubris, but expressions of views that form the accumulated sediment of what has been passed on to them as the authentic history of their kinfolk.

In Chapters 5 and 6 of Lawrence Vambe’s book, one constantly finds expressions like “the blood-thirsty Ndebele who were intent on exterminating his people”, and “it is untrue that Lobengula, King of the Ndebele, had this vast country and its people under his control. However military-minded and blood-thirsty the Ndebele were ...”

Vambe tells his readers that King Lobengula’s vision of his domains was modest and was only “enlarged” by European concession-seekers as follows: “To make him (King Lobengula) feel benign and generous, they flattered him and made him feel a much bigger man and a greater king than he really was. Predictably, he, in turn, with characteristic sagacity, combined with vanity and delusions about the grandeur of the Ndebele nation, must have reasoned thus: ‘if they say I am master of Zambesia (as whiteman called it then), then I must be' ..."

Vambe goes on to narrate a story he heard from one Makombe of Mashonganyika village who claimed to have had “personal experience of Ndebele rule”. Vambe stresses the point that Makombe came to the vaShawasha tribe to seek asylum from “his Ndebele-plagued country” and gave this heart-rending account: “The Ndebele, he said, came in and out of his people’s land as they pleased. Usually they arrived at dawn or in misty conditions when their intended victims were least prepared ... As if they were hunting animals, they rushed forward and attacked men, women and children, including domestic animals, using assegais, guns, knives and other lethal weapons.

When they had had enough of this orgy, they embarked on a systematic destruction of huts by battering them and burning them down, until the whole place turned into a spectacle of flames and clouds of smoke and a heart-rending cacophony of the voices of dying men, women and children ...

If they were not satisfied with the results of any attack or found the kraal deserted, they combed the surrounding countryside, searching and prodding every bush, thicket, cave and rocky fastness for signs of human life. This they did by hurling spears and threats, and, if a human voice cried out in pain or fear, more spears rained into the shelter whence the noise came, to the great joy of the warriors who whistled and cheered. It was a savage, jungle-animal relationship because it was completely devoid of any of the finer feelings... which are normally associated with human beings.”

An exhaustive analysis of the historical claims made by Lawrence Vambe’s book is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to point out that there is something fundamentally wrong with any work of history that fails to set African reality within its historical context to the point of claiming that King Mzilikazi came to a place called “Zimbabwe” in the1830s, and that during King Lobengula’s reign there were parts of the Southern Africa landmass called “occupied Zimbabwe” and “free Zimbabwe”.

Such history verges on what Henry James denounced as a futile attempt at “the invention, the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world were non-existent”.

What emerges from the foregoing discussion is what may be termed the history question in Zimbabwe: the contested content and authenticity of what passes for the history or collective memories of each of the various peoples and ethnic groups that were caged by colonial boundaries into one nation-state that became Zimbabwe.

Australian historian Inga Clendinnen in her essay The History Question: who owns the past? posits the view that in a free society, everyone owns the past and the past is a magic pudding belonging to anyone who wants to cut themselves a slice: from legend-manufacturers through novelists looking for ready-made plots, to interest groups out to extend their influence. But she also makes the salient observation that citizens will go on exploiting the past for all manner of private and public enterprises, reputable and disreputable.

In light of the foregoing, are we content with the idea of history being what anyone chooses to believe in or what “tribal elders” chose to pass on during fireside folk tales?

Is a balanced, true, and objective history of the various peoples and ethnic groups within Zimbabwe possible? Or is the past too complicated and too multiple to be told in any single, objective narrative?

Are we content with a view of history as, in the words of novelist Kate Grenville, “just one more place to pillage” by way of a “smash-and-grab raid on history” tactic whereby particular episodes in a people’s history are racked up, striped of their context, and used to further the achievement of parochial political ends?

Echoing George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (he who controls the present, controls the past), Inga Clendinnen once expressed the view that history, in the grand narrative sense, will always belong to the victors, whether the war is between peoples, or classes, or genders, or generations. The victors will create and control the official record, and their point of view will inform the stories which present themselves as the innocent, “objective” descriptions of “what happened”.

A good example of the victors’ official history phenomenon is the complaint by notable political leaders about the current officially-sanctioned history of the liberation struggle. The late Vice President and national hero Joseph Musikavanhu, Minister John Nkomo, and former Minister Dumiso Dabengwa are all on record as having publicly spoken out that what is recorded as the official history of the liberation struggle is not the whole truth as there are omissions and misrepresentations especially on the role played by PF Zapu and its military wing. They each vowed to write their memoirs to correct the imbalances in the official narrative, but Msika died without any indication of having done so.

Practising historians and other intellectuals have a challenge to tackle the contentious history question if we are to avoid conflicts sparked by provocative utterances informed by skewed narratives like Lawrence Vambe’s that amount to no more than what one anthropologist referred to as “a collection of absurd reconstructions, unsupportable hypothesis and conjectures, wild speculations, suppositions, and assumptions, inappropriate analogies, misunderstanding, and misinterpretations, and, in some parts, just plain nonsense.”

Lucas Nkomo is a Zimbabwean advocate based in Sydney, Australia

Labels: HISTORY, SEKAI HOLLAND

posted by MrK @ 5:02 PM