byoThis past week’s commemorative ceremonies marking Bulawayo’s 120 years of existence, in the words of the Monday Chronicle, “as a modern city”, left me wondering the same way similar yearly commemorations by Zimpapers have.And if the rest of our cities have not been marking similar anniversaries, I don’t ascribe this to misgivings grounded in any philosophical objections such as afflict me, but to sheer ahistorical slothfulness and disinterest.

Bulawayo has always been an activist city, which is why much happens there the same way little does in Harare.

Flipping through the same Monday Chronicle, I also saw quite a detailed piece from the inimitable hand of Pathisa Nyathi, himself quite some authority on that strand of our collective history that relates to the Ndebeles and Matabeleland.

The piece dealt with the way Bulawayo has given names to its suburbs, as it has grown them in history. And grown them it has, from “just one township in 1894 . . . to more than 16” now.

Of course he restricted himself to the western townships, presumably because these bring out in clear cut terms the African dimension of its cityscape over time and history.

And here is my dilemma which might very well turn out to be our dilemma together, dear reader, a dilemma all along un-grasped, un-debated.

Naming and riding the  entire history

I have already noted that this was a commemoration of Bulawayo “as a modern city”.

I still have one more portion to excerpt from Pathisa Nyathi’s insightful piece, and it is the closing paragraph of that piece which is a call-to-action one.

It reads: “It is clear that in the names of Bulawayo’s African townships, a lot of history is contained. If one were to deal with the numerous street names, virtually the entire history of the Ndebele people and their state would be adequately covered. We only need to research.”

Also included in the whole coverage of the Sunday commemorations was a piece which proudly announced that about 300 people “rode on a special train from Bulawayo to Figtree and back . . . to celebrate the city’s 120th Anniversary”.

The article went on to note: “The US$30 train ride was meant to complement the city’s celebrations and also to re-enact the momentous arrival of the first train in Bulawayo in 1887 from Mafeking, Botswana, three years after the city was established.”

Fortuitously but in quite a fraught way, the riders included “fire fighters from the United Kingdom who (were) in the country on an exchange programme with the city’s Fire Brigade”.

This completes the setting for my puzzlement.

Running from vermins?

Now the hard questions.

The fact of modernity as a cut-off point for the period being memorialised and re-enacted spews a huge dilemma, a self-flagellating and self-mortifying one in my view.

It is a stubborn fact of history that Bulawayo was founded by King Lobengula, and this after a tempestuous succession which had badly divided the Kingdom.

My African sense will not be clouded by the minor fact of the subsequent re-site-ing of Bulawayo a mere four miles from its original site, allegedly after its occupation by Jameson’s column on 4th November 1893, and ostensibly because the “native site was found unsuitable on account of the presence of myriads of house-flies, rats, and other vermins”, as the American naturalist-turned imperialist William Harvey-Brown claims.

Worse when that same American aggressor finishes that falsifying sentence by adding: “And a new era of civilisation was thus opened in Matabeleland”!

Grace in defeat

Many missionaries, hunters, traders, gold-seekers, spies, empire builders and other pillagers unsolicitedly reported Bulawayo as a massive, ever expanding conurbation with a cosmopolitan character, both tribally and racially, by the time it is set upon by the imperialists in 1893, in fact from the days of its Founder King, Mzilikazi.

The “vermins” Harvey-Brown is talking about were bred by the riches and abundance of that sprawling city whose cattle herds, small stocks, grains, ivory and other tradable goods were legendary.

And this small detail, obviously entered by Harvey-Brown for calculated disparagement, holds key to my first, fundamental point: we have to know how to relate to colonial narratives if we are to regain our own history as a people.

Two key details buttress this point.

While white lore, both official and non-official, civilian and military, seek to repudiate the value and achievements of Ndebele civilisation, and indeed all native civilisation before conquest, one still glimpses unintended acknowledgement and tribute to that civilisation.

It is a fact of history that from founding, the citadel of the Ndebele Kingdom was a magnet for free white traders who to the very end enjoyed roaring business between them and the Kingdom, including trade in grain which met the food needs of South Africa’s huge but un-farming mining settlement culture.

Those white traders were not foolish to brave harsh existence among “savages” for the hack of it.

Interestingly, even amidst the 1893 hostilities, little shops run by these traders were not looted or gutted, alongside the rest of the city as the defeated Kingdom retreated.

What a contrast to the massive pillage by white conquerors which followed the fall of the Ndebele Kingdom!

Did that not indicate a higher humanity, higher respect for private property, even in low moments of defeat, by the so-called savage people?

Does our sense of history as Africans redeem that most amazing disposition displayed by the Ndebele Kingdom in conquest and flight?

Amazing native grain  technology

Two, verbatim reports from the Meikles brothers, one of whom was the chairman of the Loot Committee, put animals grabbed from Lobengula both from within the precincts of Bulawayo and from his subjects at well over a quarter of a million, most of them inoculated against virulent animal diseases through native technique.

In the majority of cases these inoculated cattle — visible by their short, cut tails — survived the maladies which afflicted and destroyed white herds.

Linked to that, we are told by the same white marauding gangs, huge underground grain silos full to the brim, and usually located at the centre of big cattle pens, were also impounded; their contents emptied for immediate internal trade with fellow grain magnets, or for export to South Africa’s mines by hard-up whites.

And these massive silos could keep grain for well over four seasons.

Tellingly, the immediate aftermath of conquest was a massive hunger among natives which stirred even the conscience of the most hardened whites.

A whole civilisation and its mechanism for food security had been overrun and destroyed.

The economy that built Bulawayo

Let it be noted that Bulawayo was never been its buildings. It always was its economy that sustained its whole superstructure.

That economy was not brought in or invented alongside white occupation and the so-called “new era”.

It was there, built over years by Africans, and then lost to the colonial victor.

This dismisses as inconsequential the fact that Lobengula burnt his city before fleeing.

Around the ashes, he left a throbbing economy attractive enough to provide the basis of the Victoria Agreement through which otherwise disenchanted and penurious white invaders were mobilised to fight against the Ndebele Kingdom.

Loot was such a key component promised to these hard-up white recruits, once the Ndebele Kingdom would have been vanquished.

Seen from that angle, one begins to see the unfortunate decision to commemorate Bulawayo purportedly as “a modern city”.

And if you have read Selous’ “Sunshine and Storm” narrative, you are struck by one salient peculiarity in armed engagements between whites and Ndebeles in the 1896 resistance.

Most of the battles were less about gaining and occupying territory: they were about capturing massive herds of cattle and grain.

And these two elements of the Ndebele and Company economy swung to and fro as the battles progressed.

We must read our history right, so we are able to memorialise it in a manner which does not alienate us, or which gets us to end up paying unintended tribute to white conquerors.

Whatever happens, we  have the wheel

Another salient feature one gets in reading Rhodesian history narratives — principally in their triumphalist, post-Kingdom, post-rebellion stage — is how the wheel emerges as a foremost symbols of the colonial advancement and takeover civilisation.

Emerges too, as great justification for the dismantlement of native kingdoms and rights.

The most visible side of this symbol of progress and superior civilisation is the wagon which brought this occupying class, before, during and after occupation.

One of the Dutch invaders pontificated about the wagon as home, church, transport and fortress. The wagon with its wheel becomes a key symbols of the new, emerging mobile yet usurping power.

Its more sophisticated version by way of the Zeederberg postal wagon marks the acme to this bragging narrative which is always contrasted by the “barbarous” native’s cracked, unwashed feet: his only mode of locomotion.

More than a train ride

Then came the rail link from Mafeking, docking initially in Bulawayo in 1887, in the words of the Chronicle, “three years after the city was established”.

Not even three years after the fall of the Ndebele Kingdom and a year after the collapse of the war of resistance! Vakomana!

Modern Bulawayo becomes the new time marker for momentous developments, and that completes our effacement from this re-enacted narrative!

My heart bleeds!

Did Bulawayo not realise it was re-enacting and celebrating a key symbol of the conquest of its real founding fathers?

And is there no reckoning that well into the occupation, Rhodesians, both as the BSAC  and as a responsible colonial government used the advancing railway horse inscribed

“Advance Rhodesia”, to symbolise the deservedness of African conquest?

And how appropriately fateful that we had a team of British firefighters on the ride! How else except by rail was Rhodes’ Cape-to-Cairo dream connected?

The book he would not sell

pathisa

Pathisa Nyathi

My last point relates to Pathisa Nyathi’s well-researched but fatally signified or interpreted piece.

Inescapable is the fact that Bulawayo was built by the white man to whom we must pay everlasting tribute, consciously or unconsciously.

That does not bother me very much.

What bothers me is the averment that through naming, Rhodesia was a benevolent preserver of Ndebele history. What psychology are we cultivating in our children?

And if the townships carry our history, whose history does the rest of Bulawayo carry, strictly from a naming perspective?

And as we cull and cover “virtually all our history” from those townships names, who else in that naming tradition culls and cover their history? To what end?
I have a small anecdote for Pathisa.

There is a book done by Rhodesians which identifies key areas in and around Bulawayo City where major battles were fought in 1896.

It is now very difficult to get a copy of it.

I saw it in some bookshop owned and ran by some white man whose father was a prominent Rhodesia figure.

I pleaded to buy it, for any amount. He would not let go.

He knows what history does to a people’s consciousness, and how accessing it might just rewrite events, landscapes and cityscapes, that of Bulawayo included.

Another book the white man would not let go related to an inventory of all old mine workings developed by native miners, well  before the onset of colonialism, and which provided the first geological map of conquered Rhodesia before all else.

But before he whisked it away, I had read one small paragraph.

It confessed such sites is what gave value to claims, indeed what pointed geologically to sites which later developed into Rhodesia’s leading mines.

The history we haven’t bridled

Unlike the Tswanas, the Hereros and other African principalities that had acquired writing skills from missionaries before their conquest by Europe, ours never did, whether from a Ndebele or Shona perspective.

That was fatal, maybe the most fatal mistake by Mzilikazi, who was already in contact with missionaries like Moffat in the early 1830s.

He could have sent his children to Kuruman for education; the way Khama sent his to South Africa.

We would have had documents that carried our forbears’ thinking and struggles, the way the Namibians through their main tribes do.

We don’t have that.

Which is why we rely on white narratives to recreate our past, our collective personality as it has evolved in history.

And when we have no skills with which to read and discern through that biased historiography, we are bound to have a very big problem, the biggest of which is paying homage and giving prayer to foreign gods.

Is there much difference between what the City of Kings did and what some white family from Matabeleland South sought to do a few years back, through re-enacting the movement of the pioneer column?

Gentle reader, whether you agree or disagree with my analysis, you cannot run away from the fact that we have a real problem in taming Rhodesia’s unbridled history.
Icho!

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