When Zimbabwe becomes rhodesia

Piler up of the rocks into towering mountains...

Waters of the pool that turn

Into misty rain when stirred

Vessel overflowing with oil!

Father of Runji,

Who seweth the heavens like cloth:

Let him knit together that which is below

Caller forth of the branching trees...

Show mercy when we beseech thee, Lord.

...Gracious One...

Over the past weeks we have listened to news of Zimbabwe, of Robert Mugabe, of a currency where US$1 is equal to one million Zimbabwe dollars, and to the desolation in a country which was “once the bread basket of Southern Africa”, to quote the BBC news announcer. There was once another Zimbabwe where Praise poems were sung to Mwari, the Great One of the single breast who nurses all Peoples, and to his son Runji, he who restores what is broken and mends what is torn.

I was in a cocktail party held in Oxford for a meeting on Human Rights, when the news broke: Ian Smith had declared the Unilateral Independence of Rhodesia. The conversation, until then the superficialities of whiskey and port, revolved around whether or not Britain should intervene to stop what, to some of us, was destined to lead to bloodshed and eventual tragedy. But for most of the cocktail guests, intervention was an impossible task to ask of a British army.

Ian Smith died sometime during the end months of last year. Died and was buried quietly as if he hadn’t unleashed the Devil’s hurricane in a land conquered less than a century before. At the time of UDI, there was no Robert Mugabe, Nkomo led ZAPU. Its base was much the African base of Morgan Tsvangirai today. Its strength was in the trade unions and among the Ndebele. It never quite penetrated the rural Shona. ZANU recruited from the Shona. But ZANU was almost a joke organisation then led by Revd Canaan Banana and by Sithole. It was this organisation that Robert Mugabe would capture. It was the capacity of Mugabe’s ZANU to wage a guerilla war against Ian Smith’s UDI army which gave Mugabe the leadership of the armed struggle.

Rhodes of Rhodesia

One of the first acts of victory of the Liberation Movement of the then Rhodesia, was the re-naming of the country. It had been called Rhodesia as a tribute to Cecil Rhodes. It was Cecil Rhodes who had led the column of the British South Africa Company which left South Africa to settle in what was until then an area loosely ruled by Lobengula and largely divided between the Ndebele and the Shona.

It was also one of the last parts of Africa to come under white rule. This was first represented by the rule of the British South Africa Company from 1890 to 1923 followed by British colonial rule. And then by UDI.

An encircled kingdom

In 1890 Lobengula was in an unenviable position: Zimbabwe had been severely weakened by more than three centuries of defensive wars against Portuguese and Arab traders seeking slaves. At the time of his death in 1480, the Shona monarch Mwenye Mutapa was recognised as the supreme political authority from the Zambezi to the Limpopo valley and from the Kalahari to the Indian Ocean. Buy the 16th century the Portuguese, benefitting from a number of internal battles which had split the Empire into several smaller states, captured a large part of the former Empire. The section around the Limpopo was captured by South Africa. Lobengula himself was the descendant of Mzilikazi Ndebele, an offshoot of the Zulu, who has partially conquered the area in the 1830s.

Missionaries and traders

By 1890 Lobengula had consolidated his power. However not only was Zimbabwe virtually encircled by European rule, Lobengula must have been aware that there was considerable interference within his kingdom. There were two foreign sources of interference: missionaries and traders.

During the last half of the nineteenth century, European Christians were convinced that the end of the world and the return of Christ were at hand. Both however depended on the preaching of the gospel to “the ends of the earth”.

Lobengula himself had at first welcomed missionaries not as a source of conversion, but as a means to gain access to European technology and medicine. Missionaries were also useful intermediaries between Lobengula and European traders on whose goods he increasingly depended. It was Lobengula’s independence on the missionary Helm as both intermediary and interpreter, which permitted Helm to trick Lobengula into signing a document which made him nothing more than ward and vassal of the British South Africa Company. Lobengula’s refusal to be ward and vassal gave Cecil Rhodes the excuse to march his column in, to confiscate African lands and to encourage European settlement with the offer of lands and mining concessions. It is this confiscation of African lands which led to the two African revolts in the 1890s.

The fight for land

The confiscation of African lands was followed by regulations which restricted the African purchase of land outside of the African reserves to certain areas. As early as the 1970s it was recognised that the non-productivity of African farms was due to their small size, the incapacity to get credit, and the lack of capital to purchase fertiliser and machinery. The drift to the towns was the result of the increasing impoverishment of African rural areas.

When armed conflict did come, it was as much a revolt for land as it was a revolt against Ian Smith’s UDI.

It was Robert Mugabe who recruited on the promise of land reforms. It was this which permitted him to eventually isolate N’Koma’s ZAPU – with which he was in government alliance brokered by the SADEC countries – and some would say, eventually to launch the massacre which ended ZAPU as a political force.

The Zimbabwe ruins

The name Zimbabwe comes from the Zimbabwe complex and the associated Khami ruins. The first occupation of the Zimbabwe site in AD 330 is known only from the remains of wooden construction. It is the walled buildings with its altars, the massive soapstone birds mounted on pedestals, the monoliths and decorated towers which have fascinated visitors. The first walled buildings go back to AD 1085 and continue being built for 365 years. Nothing like this had existed south of the Zambezi. It suggests the emergence of an important political power existing at roughly the same time as Europe’s Middle Ages. It is the first hint of the expansion of the Shona political might that Mwenye Mutapa would preside over in the 15th century. Building began again in the 16th century continuing on until the 19th century – roughly around the time when the Shona Kingdom finally collapsed.

The monument to those fallen in the Zimbabwe War of Independence copies the soapstone birds of ancient Zimbabwe. It marks symbolically that Rhodes and European rule was only an interlude in Zimbabwe’s history.