Introduction

Since the defeat of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) in the Constitutional Referendum in February 2002, President Robert decided to retreat into hard line nativist and emotional nationalist paradigm underpinned by a consistent bashing of colonial history on the one hand and glorification and romanticization of nationalist and the liberation war history on the other. Every negative development in the country was blamed squarely on the colonial legacy including the shortage of basic commodities and the general crisis engulfing Zimbabwe at the moment. At the international level, ZANU-PF and Robert Mugabe tirelessly projected the party and its leader as the true inheritors of the pan-Africanist and nationalist liberation tradition in Africa and the Third World.

In Zimbabwe itself, the ruling party and its leader again made a concerted effort to awaken the whole nation to  what it termed the looming danger of re-colonization of Zimbabwe and set the nation on the path of the so-called Third Chimurenga (a new nationalist struggle for economic emancipation) predicated on fast track land reform programme and farm invasions. The Zimbabwean youth were taken away from the mainstream society into National Service Training Centres, where they were to be taught the ideals of the liberation war and inculcated with what was termed ‘patriotic history.’ The emergent opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) under the veteran trade union leader Morgan Tsangirai was lumped together with the white commercial farmers and then othered into the so-called ‘running dogs of imperialism,’ an enemy of Zimbabweans, and a front for re-colonization of Zimbabwe that was not supposed to be tolerated at all. The slogan ‘Zimbabwe Will Never Be a Colony’ again reverberated on radio and television and Britain (the former colonial power) and its leader Tony Blair was presented as the vampire imperial power that harboured an insatiable desire to re-colonize Zimbabwe. Violence was generally tolerated as long as it was targeted on the so-called enemies of Zimbabwe, which included white commercial farmers, their workers and all those who supported the MDC.

All this was happening within a context of exhausted nationalism and triumphant neo-libaralism, where ZANU-PF and President Robert Mugabe were no longer too popular.³ The forces of post-nationalist politics were crystallizing around civil society and the opposition MDC as a counter-hegemonic wave to the liberation nationalist politics represented by ZANU-PF. The country was nose-diving and plunging into an unprecedented crisis that has been variously termed the governance crisis, executive lawlessness, collapse of constitutionalism, economic crisis, the limits of patriarchal model of liberation, unfinished business, exhaustion of nationalism, mutating millennial crisis, neo-colonialist conspiracy, as well as leadership crisis.⁴

Patriotic History and its Limits

Within the academic sphere and political discourse, a new brand of history, which Terence Ranger depicted as patriotic history occupied the centre stage of Zimbabwe with its dose of romanticization of the nationalist history and emotional bashing of colonial history. Also, a new crop of what ZANU-PF preferred to term patriotic scholars were given state support to shun out a skewed narrative of the colonial encounter and a highly politicised, partisan, propagandistic and emotionally charged nationalist history. This has put the nationalist paradigm in a mess, as it is adulterated, distorted and expropriated in defence of a particular political establishment.

This has led Terence Ranger, long regarded as one of the most articulate representative of the nationalist scholarship in Africa, to defend his position vis-à-vis the advocates of patriotic history as well as the critics of the nationalist paradigm. Ranger had to clarify his stance in a recent article entitled Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe where he wrote:

In my own case, I maintained, my first two books about Zimbabwe-Revolt in Southern Rhodesia and the African Voice in Southern Rhodesia-had been ‘nationalist historiography’ in the sense that they attempted to trace the roots of nationalism. They were historicist in so far as they presented narratives leading to its triumphant emergence. But my more recent books, particularly those on Matebeleland, had been histories of nationalism as well as histories of religion and landscape and violence. Nationalism as a movement, or set of movements, and as an ideology, remains central to contemporary Zimbabwe and still requires a great deal of rigorous historical questioning.⁵

Ranger also defended his more recent books in these words:

I don’t think that either Voices or Violence and Memory take a merely reaction view to African responses to colonialism but that they are full of ambiguities, internalization, etc. And I don’t accept that my critique of patriotic history is a rejection of the significance of studying anti-colonialism, which is significant but not the whole. However, historiography always leaves the battlefield strewn with historians mowed down by over-simplifying generalizations.⁶

I agree entirely with Ranger that if properly subjected to rigorous historical questioning studies crafted within the nationalist and anti-colonial lenses of inquiry can still enrich African studies in general and Zimbabwean history in particular. This is particularly important in Zimbabwe where the nation as well as the academic community is being suffocated with politicization and propaganda that is currently stifling scientific analysis.

My intervention in this debate is two fold that is, critiquing orthodox nationalist paradigm and theorizing and historicizing the colonial encounter predicated on the case study of the engagement between the Ndebele and the early white Rhodesians in the period 1898-1934.  One problem with a majority of Zimbabwean historical studies is that of timid empiricism devoid of critical theory. Therefore, in this essay, I brought theory into the interrogation of the colonial encounter while at the same time deploying historical questioning. 

One of the main problems of orthodox nationalist interpretation of the colonial encounter was to reduce this encounter to domination and resistance. The second problem was that the colonial encounter was understood largely as a political phenomenon, excluding its cultural and epistemological aspects that are equally important.

The theoretical insights to understand the colonial encounter and Ndebele responses to it are drawn from Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalysis of the colonial moment and his concept of alienation, Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry and hybridity, Mahmood Mamdani’s theory of the bifurcation of the colonial state into ‘citizen’ and ‘subjects’, Shula Marks’ thoughts on ambiguities of dependence, as well as Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff’s analysis of Christianity, colonialism and consciousness.⁷  These ideas are employed in an endeavour to understand and to explain the overlapping and intersection of the language of modernity with the language of tradition, continuity and change, complicity and resistance, in the complex interactions and relational engagement between the Ndebele and the early Rhodesian settlers.

This is a largely interpretative intervention that is in a way critical of previous orthodox nationalist scholarship that simplistically presented every aspect of Ndebele action and behaviour, be it passive or active, political or economic, agrarian or religious, as part of common resistance and anti-colonial politics. It failed to realize that Ndebele reaction to early colonialism was equally characterized by crucial ambiguities as they tried to appropriate traditional, modern, Christian, rural, urban, liberal, and colonial settler influences. These were mixed with theories of individual, divine, secular as well as collective rights in their responses to settler colonialism.

At the empirical level, Zimbabwean historians, besides Ranger who wrote the book, African Voice in Southern Rhodesia covering the period 1898-1930, have not shown any interest on this period.  The concentration of studies is on the Ndebele-Shona Uprisings (First Chimurenga) 1896-1897, and later period of the drama of mass nationalism and liberation movements, usually traced to the late 1950s. The period, 1898-1934 is viewed simply as a pre-history of Zimbabwean nationalism. However, I find this period of Zimbabwean history to be very significant. First, it was a crucial time of the construction of the colonial state characterized by crucial ambiguities and contradictions not only on the part of the early Rhodesians but also on the part of the Ndebele; second it was a period of initial direct engagement between the whites and the Ndebele; third it was a period of routinization of the subordination of the Ndebele, and on the part of the Ndebele it was a period of learning how to cope with the shock of conquest. If one uses Fanon’s psychoanalysis of the colonial encounter, the period 1898-1934 becomes even more significant as it allows one to ponder on some  the most fundamental and searching historical questions of the colonial encounter as:

·         What was it like for the Ndebele to find themselves transformed into colonial subjects?

·         What were the psychological effects of colonialism for both the Ndebele and the early Rhodesians?

·         What was the nature of engagement between the Ndebele and the early Rhodesians?

·         How did the early Rhodesians try to indigenize themselves as the new rulers?

·         What was the nature of Ndebele political consciousness in this period?

·         How did the Ndebele contest white power?

·         What strategies were used by the Ndebele to fit themselves into the contours of the colonial state?

This essay responded to these questions through a double move combining historical interpretation and imagination on the one hand, and employment of various shades of post-colonial theories as the torchlight to navigate the darker corners of the colonial encounter in Zimbabwe.

Using these post-colonial theoretical lenses, I was able to discover complex dynamism within the colonial encounter that far transcended the old-fashioned binaries of domination and resistance. The encounter between the Ndebele and the early Rhodesians exhibited overlapping and intersection of the politics of modernity with tradition, continuity and change, complicity as well as mimicry, hybridity, and resistance. It emerged that the early Rhodesians were not as powerful and confident as the orthodox nationalist paradigm wanted us to believe. It became clear that between 1898 and 1934, the economic geography of Rhodesian settler colonialism was very uneven as was its geography of power.

This enabled the Ndebele to exploit the fissures within the colonial establishment to push forward their own agendas about entitlement to land, cattle ownership, and some degree of cultural and political autonomy. The question of how colonized people sought to build their lives in the crevices of colonial power via deflecting, appropriating and reinterpretation of the colonial encounter is lacking from the traditional nationalist scholarship.

During the initial stages of colonial engagement between the early white Rhodesians and the Ndebele, the elites (Ndebele chiefs) emerged as the wealthiest people in the post-Matopos Indaba that concluded the Ndebele Uprising of 1896. This happened in the context of Cecil John Rhodes’ (the leading colonialist in Southern Africa) tactic of placating the Ndebele and strategy of making sure there was no further Ndebele political revolt. To achieve this Rhodes masqueraded as a peace-maker (Umlamlankuzi) and gave back a lot of the looted cattle to the Ndebele chiefs, making them confident within the early colonial environment. Besides giving the Ndebele chiefs some cattle, Rhodes also made the following undertakings in accordance with the Amnesty of August 1896:

·         Provision of agricultural seeds to the Ndebele

·         Abolition of the hated Native Police

·         Continued Ndebele occupation of their traditional lands around Bulawayo.

This made the Ndebele to enter the colonial social order more confident rather than as a completely defeated and submissive people at the mercy of white power.

The Ndebele revolt had shaken white confidence to a considerable extent so much that the early whites were very cautious not to provoke another Ndebele revolt. This reality made the early white Rhodesians to spend much of their time in search of a less provocative colonial dispensation.

The colonial authorities found themselves in a dilemma whereby they had to strike a balance between fulfilling their promises to their white constituency that wanted quick wealth, avoiding provoking Ndebele revolt and putting in place a colonial framework of governance. The colonialists, therefore, took the following steps:

·         Established some amicable working relationship with the Ndebele chiefs who eventually occupied the lowest rank of colonial civil servants within the hierarchy of Native Department. This was part of the colonial search for some legitimacy and an indirect way of intervening in the life of the Ndebele.

·         Native Commissioners projected a patronizing attitude that was less provocative to the Ndebele. They even developed a lingua franca known as isilaphalapha, a combination of English and Ndebele in their communication with the Ndebele.

·         The Native Department’s intervention on Ndebele life was projected as an emancipatory as well as law and order project beneficial to the Ndebele as well. The intervention was covered under the garb of eliminating hitherto undemocratic and repugnant practices such as witch-hunting and forced marriages.

·         Even the leading colonialist, Cecil John Rhodes, adopted a less arrogant characteristic and projected himself as a peace-maker umlamlankunzi prior to his death in 1902.

·         King Lobengula’s sons were removed from the mainstream of Ndebele society in an endeavour to extinguish the Ndebele desire for a monarchy. Cecil John Rhodes took them to South Africa where they were to be inculcated with Western civilization and mannerism amenable to the colonial dispensation.

·         Early Rhodesians were not too quick to remove the Ndebele from their traditional lands, fearing provoking a rebellion.

One of the pertinent issues in the studies of the colonial encounter is that of the agency of the colonised and how they contributed to the shape of the colonial dispensation. In traditional nationalist interpretation of the colonial encounter the agency of the colonized was reduced to revolt and resistance. Post-colonial theorists have taken this further and enriched the debate on the agency of the colonised.

Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff raised a crucial point in their analysis of Christianity, colonialism and consciousness that subordinate populations with strong communal identities were able to deploy resilient ideologies that survived military conquest. The Ndebele were indeed one such group. So my analysis of Ndebele responses to early settler colonialism was guided by this analytical framework.

Ndebele responses consisted of a complex admixture of tacit (even uncomprehending) accommodation to the colonial order at one level and diverse expressions of symbolic and practical contestation of colonial order. The chiefs and the royal houses politics tended to revolve around issues of royal privileges, cattle ownership, entitlement to land as well as restoration of an Ndebele monarch. Lobengula’s eldest son (Nyamanda) who escaped Rhodes’s action of sending other sons to South Africa, became very active in advancing Ndebele grievances as well as trying to secure a niche for himself as a royal person. The slant of this politics was more backward looking, premised on pre-colonial Ndebele ideologies of entitlement to land, cattle ownership and rule by a traditional monarchy. This politics was also crafted around Rhodes’ promises to the Ndebele. Some of which were unfulfilled and others were being repudiated by the colonialists in the face of the Ndebele.  Cleavages emerged within the chiefly circles as the ‘royals’ specifically the sons of Lobengula sometimes demanded royal privileges that had the potential to even disadvantage some Ndebele chiefs. The chiefly families were the first to protest against white land monopolies because they had large hers of cattle which needed large grazing lands. Their option was to go to the reserves, but this meant leaving behind some of their subjects who were now working for the white farmers and miners.

At the religious level, the Ndebele imbibed Christian discourses as well as continuing with their pre-colonial Ndebele religious beliefs. With the collapse of the Ndebele state, Christian missionaries were able to make inroads into Ndebele way of life. Their discourse of equality was attractive to the Ndebele in a new colonial environment that was surely demonstrating a clear slant towards racial inequality. The Christian Church, therefore, offered a non-state institution where Ndebele critical imagination could be expressed. However, some Ndebele were soon to realize hypocrisy within the church and came face to face with early Rhodesian arrogance even within this institution. This led to the emergence of Independent African Denominations that mimicked the white church first and then turned the gazed on white power. The Christian ideology was therefore appropriated by the Ndebele to challenge some of the iniquities of the early colonial state. Independent Churches were a clear case of hybridity and mimicry in practice, introducing a mode of practice that interacted with indigenous cultural forms to yield a Christianity that stood in vivid contrast to colonial orthodoxy.  In religious terms, the majority of the Ndebele had one foot remaining deep in their traditional pre-colonial rituals and another foot astride into the new Christian religion. What then emerged was hybridity, a blending of what was considered beneficial from both religions.

The Ndebele also grappled with other emerging modern ideas associated with urbanization and migrant labour, making them to imbibe nascent worker and proto-nationalist politics prior to 1934.

Conclusions

The colonial encounter was not a mere theatre of domination and resistance. It was more complex than that involving the contradictory agencies of the colonizer and the colonized. It was a complex phenomenon of institutions, behaviours and beliefs operating dialectically rather than simply through violent imposition and domination. This implies that orthodox nationalist paradigm missed the complexities of the colonial encounter that operated above the domination-resistance mode.  African nationalist like Robert Mugabe has taken advantage of the domination-resistance binary to hide behind the legacy of colonialism.

Drawing inspiration from post-colonial theorists, and extending one’s imagination to the contemporary African condition, one realises that Africa has not managed to transcend the legacy of colonialism. African nationalists’ language is still revealing its colonial origin, fixed between nativist nostalgia, romanticization of African past, bashing out of colonialism, while at the same time embracing some of the modernistic visions initiated by colonialism.

For instance, the binary of urban and rural in Africa has been inherited and was later reinforced by African nationalist leaders. In Zimbabwe this binary is being exploited by Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF to claim support in the rural areas, whereas the MDC is popular in the urban sphere where the ideas of citizenship, civil rights and modernist are dominant. The urbanites are free from the suffocating control of traditional authorities that have been appropriated by ZANU-PF for political reasons. The so-called Operation Murambatswina (Operation Clean Up) that has been condemned throughout the world can be viewed as Mugabe’s strategy to put more people under rural traditional structures now dominated by ZANU-PF political functionaries and where it is easier to trample on people’s right without the notice of the media. Mugabe is using a colonial strategy of evicting people from the urban sector.  

Africans still face the dilemma of remaining either as mimic persons or charting a new identity going beyond the legacy of colonialism. Such initiatives as the African Renaissance are attempts to transcend the enduring legacy of colonialism. The Africans are still searching for the ‘lost self’ and identity. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff’s argument that the colonial encounter altered everything and everybody in Africa remains very valid because what has remained after colonialism are mimic men and women as well as hybrids who are busy trying to transcend colonial acculturation while at the same time reproducing it every day.    

Notes:

1. This essay is a summary of a long paper entitled, Transcending the Nationalist Paradigm and Grappling with the Ambiguities of the Colonial Encounter in Zimbabwe: A Case Study of the Ndebele and the Early Rhodesian Settlers, 1898-1934, presented at The South African Historical Society Biennial Conference on the Theme: Southern Africa and the World: The Local, the Regional and the Global in Historical Perspective, University of Cape Town,  South Africa, 26-29 June 2005. 

2. Dr Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a Zimbabwean historian, currently teaching International Studies in the School of Arts, Monash University, South Africa, Campus.

3. Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya (eds.). Zimbabwe’s Plunge: Exhausted Nationalism, Neo-Colonialism and the Search for Social Justice, (Weaver Press, Harare 2003).

4. Ibid. See also the following scholarly diagnosis of the Zimbabwe crisis; Amander Hammer, Brian Raptopolous and Stig Jensen (eds.). Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State and the Nation in the Context of Crisis, (Weaver Press, Harare, 2003); Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Kings, Settlers and Nationalists in Zimbabwe: Connecting the Past and the Present” (Post-Doctoral Research Project Proposal, 2005); Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Dynamics of the Zimbabwe Crisis in the 21^st Century” in African Journal in  Conflict Resolution, Volume 3, No.1, (2003); Horace Campbell, Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation, (Africa World Press, Trenton, 2003); Terence Ranger (ed.). Historical Dimensions of Democracy and Human Rights In Zimbabwe: Volume Two: Nationalism, Democracy and Human Rights, (University of Zimbabwe Publications, Harare, 2003) and many others. 

5. Terence Ranger, “Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle Over the Past in Zimbabwe” (Paper presented at the Britain-Zimbabwe Society, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 2004).

6. E-mail communication with the author of this essay 2005. Ranger wrote this comment following reading my long paper on the nationalist paradigm and the colonial encounter in Zimbabwe from which this essay is based.

7. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth (Peguin, Harmondsworth, 1967); Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, (James Currey, London, 1996); Shula Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependency in South Africa: Class, Nationalism and the State in the Twentieth Century Natal, (The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1986); John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier: Volume Two, (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1997) and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (Routledge, London, 1994).