For a variety of reasons the extent, number and severity of Ndebele raids upon the Shona-speaking peoples have been greatly exaggerated in the past. Moreover most studies of the Ndebele have failed to take into account the fact that the Ndebele conquered an already well-established Shona state with an economy linked with the Indian Ocean trade. This article seeks to show that the bulk of Ndebele raiding before 1873 was a response to both the political and military threat of the Changamire Rozvi dynasty and to the economic needs of the state that had been taken over. Even so, Ndebele raids were limited in extent and duration, and the two decades after 1873 saw a steady revival of Shona strength. In spite of Ndebele raids aimed at preventing this process, the independent Shona strengthened themselves by re-arming and ‘alliances’, and were able to take part in the eventual overthrow of the Ndebele kingdom.This article is a condensed version of a paper presented at the History Workshop, Gaborone, September 1973.
There was a basic similarity between the way in which Rhodesian colonial historians looked at the central Shona chimurenga (rising) of 1896 and T. O. Ranger's seminal Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896–7: both thought in terms of a pre-planned conspiracy led by religious authorities and a simultaneous outbreak on a given signal. Ranger' reconstruction of the organization of the chimurenga, however, depended partly upon the misreading and misquotation of the sources. In fact, the rising was neither pre-planned nor simultaneous. In the second quarter of 1896 limited resistance to European rule was being carried on in separate, unconnected outbreaks and some communities were thinking of starting a full-scale hondo (war); the threat of famine caused by locusts led certain central Shona leaders to contact the religious leader Mkwati in the Ndebele area, then in revolt against the Europeans, in search of locust medicine. News of European defeats transmitted by these contacts led to a full hondo in the Umfuli valley, which triggered a ‘ripple effect’ in which Shona communities resisted or collaborated as the news reached them. The element of religious leadership was limited and the element of central pre-planning non-existent. This makes the success and commitment of the local Shona communities all the more impressive, even though it was a traditionalist rather than a proto-nationalist rising.
The rising of the Ndebele and southwestern and central Shona people against colonial rule in the 1890s has become one of the classic cases of such resistance. Yet, since the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980, very little fresh research has been carried out on the subject. This paper re-examines the role of Shona religious authorities in the rising, especially that of the medium of the Nehanda spirit of the Mazowe valley in the central Shona area. In just over a century, the figure of “Mbuya Nehanda” has become the best-known popular symbol of resistance to colonial rule in modern Zimbabwe. She has been commemorated since 1980 in statues, street names, a hospital, posters, songs, novels, and poems, and is soon to be the subject of a full-length feature film. This paper examines the historical basis behind the legend.This legend runs as follows: the historical “Nehanda” was supposed to have been the daughter of the founding ancestor of the Mutapa dynasty, who lived in the fifteenth century. Her ritual incest with her brother Matope gave supernatural sanction to the power of the Mutapa state. After her death, she became a mhondoro spirit, and this spirit possessed a number of mediums (masvikiro, singular svikiro). During periods of possession by the spirit, the svikiro was regarded as speaking with the voice and personality of the original Nehanda and not with her own. In the last part of the nineteenth century one medium, Charwe, was responsible for the organization of resistance to the government of the British South Africa Company and the settlers in the Mazowe valley, and in particular for the killing of H.H. Pollard, Kunyaira, the extremely oppressive Native Commissioner of the area. This resistance began in June 1896, and from then until her capture in late 1897 the Nehanda medium was a major factor in the war. Tried and sentenced to death in March 1898, she refused to convert to Christianity and struggled right up to the moment when she was hanged.
In this paper I have three main objectives. One is to highlight and examine the work of Zimbabwean African historians under colonial rule up to the 1960s. Another is to examine the effect of the work of these historians on the traditions of the Changamire Rozvi, the rulers of the greatest state in Zimbabwe from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The third is to show how Rozvi revival movements arose in the 1950s as a minor feature of the period of African nationalism's mobilization.Although the first history of this country was published as early as 1900, it goes without saying that, in the colonial context, African history was played down and denigrated by most of the white writers on the subject for most of the colonial period. Although there was a strong local white tradition of writing on the minority Ndebele people, the majority Shona-speakers were largely ignored. Apart from a small group of local white antiquarians, whose work is only now undergoing re-evaluation, very little was published before 1960 on the history of the Shona. Yet, despite this general neglect, a small but devoted number of Africans were conscious of their lack of a written history and sought to remedy that lack. They found it a lonely and a difficult task. In a period when African education beyond certain limits was discouraged, they had neither access to proper training nor to primary sources other than traditions. If they were sometimes prone to trust unduly the missionary texts with which they grew up (so that one can read of “King Monomotapa” and “Queen Sheba” borrowing Solomon's Phoenician laborers to build Great Zimbabwe),” one can also read the work of two Duma historians who carefully cited Arabic, Portuguese, and archeological sources in secondary works.
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