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The Other Side Nathaniel Manheru
IN February 1953, a blue-sleeved booklet was published by Rev. W.J. Van Der Merwe, who was chairman of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission.
Titled “The Day Star Arises in Mashonaland”, the little book sought to chronicle the story of the Dutch Reformed Church in the then Southern Rhodesia.
Its title derived from an Afrikaans name — MORGENSTER — which means “Day Star”. Originally Morgenster was the name of some small home in Paarl, South Africa, owned by a missionary family which would give the new Morgenster its founder.

Geographically, the name Morgenster is located in Masvingo, on top of a hill, in Chief Mugabe’s area. It is the site of the seminal Dutch Reformed Church mission founded and first led by Reverend Andries Adriaan Louw, who reached that site on 9th September, 1891.

The Paarl home belonged to Louw’s parents, themselves religious leaders. Of course our Morgenster is a few “strides” away from the Great Zimbabwe Monuments, from which we derive our collective name and brittleness as a people.

Why does your God make you ill?

Then, the whole Mugabe area was said to be part of the “Banyai”, Vanyai in proper Shona orthography, which is why the mission itself was known as a Banyai mission.

The hilltop was chosen because it was healthier, given the malarial affliction which tormented early white settlers, Reverend Louw included. In fact the good Reverend got to the site in a state.

He was fighting off a very bad bout of malaria fever, prompting old Chief Mugabe to ask: “Why does your God make you ill?

“Is He angry with you? Let us consult the witch doctor and find out what will satisfy Him.

“If He wants cattle, I shall pay.”

Here was an expression of native goodwill, but one which the ailing reverend received as idolatry. He knelt in a prayer, pleading for God’s defence against “false gods worshipped by the heathens”.

The little book records that the chief’s second visit a few days later found the good reverend in a far better state. He was on the mend. The booklet’s imputation is very clear: it was the white man’s God, not that of the Vanyai, who had saved him.

Supplanting Great Zimbabwe
What white history will never acknowledge is that Reverend Louw came in the company of seven vavhangeri, seven evangelists who included Izak Kumalo, a grandson of one of Mzilikazi’s sisters.

Izak remained on the banks of Lundi River, evangelising at some place called “Nezuro”, possibly Neshuro. The other six — all from Zoutpansbergen — included Lukas Mokoele, Jozua Mosaha, Micha Maghato and Gabriel Buys.

Originally, Reverend Louw was supposed to be part of a mission led by Reverend S.P. Helm, himself cousin to C.D. Helm of the London Missionary Society who played interpreter during the fatal Rudd Concession by which Lobengula lost control of his country, nominally its resources, ultimately its sovereignty.

It is significant that one other reason the Mugabe hilltop was chosen was because of its proximity to the Great Zimbabwe.

The booklet explains why: “Mr Louw was, moreover, fascinated by the idea of starting a mission station for the proclamation of the Gospel near the famous Zimbabwe ruins which, in all probability in years gone by, had been the centre of pagan worship”.

We see a similar reasoning in Rhodes’ choice of his burial ground atop the Matopos, the hill whose caverns carried bodies of Ndebele royalty, apart from being a forbidding habitat for African gods. Christianity worked by supplanting focal points of African worship.

And because places of worship were also power points, it meant displacing sinews of African political power, itself an act of conquest.

Of course coming nearly a year after occupation of Mashonaland by Rhodes and his column, Reverend Louw had to get the authority of the British South Africa Company to set shop.

The Vanyai land now had new guardians, new rulers. Jameson granted that authority, with Rhodes even making a contribution of £50 towards the mission work at Morgenster. These were difficult days, or in the words of the booklet, “days of privation”.

Food was scarce, diseases were a continuous affliction. Much worse, Fort Victoria was upwards of some twenty miles away, itself the place of “civilised succour” for the budding white settler community in what would be the southern part of Rhodesia.

Worth fifty police
Using BSAC communication network, Louw requested his father back in South Africa to plead with Cecil Rhodes for basic support for the nascent mission, not least food support.

John Cecil Rhodes’ reaction and its underpinning reasoning is quite instructive and worth citing here: “There is a much quicker and cheaper way to supply your son with food; he is worth fifty police to me to keep peace. I shall wire at once to the Commissariat at Fort Victoria to deliver him what he needs.”

In due course, the BSAC quartermaster delivered 1 bag of meal, 2 pockets of sugar, 50lbs ground coffee, 1 case Shoshong tea, 1 large bag of salt and a few other luxuries.

“This was a most bounteous and welcome gift at a time when the prices of those foodstuffs ran high”, writes the little blue book.

Many years afterwards, Reverend Louw would write: “I can never forget Mr Rhodes’ generosity when he so bountifully fed a hungry missionary, who had been living for some time mostly on native porridge, soup made of native beans, with wild pig flesh in it and monkey nuts”.

Reverend Louw was only indebted to Rhodes; he would not acknowledge the Mugabe people and their land on whose bounty he survived and lived. In fact other sources do reveal the good reverend was given utmost care by the Mugabe people who did not want a dead white man in their land, lest they would be blamed for the death, with predictable repercussions.

So, it is not only vavhangeri who are not acknowledged by white historiography; it is also the sustaining hospitality and care of natives in goodwill to forlorn white wonderers.

How could this be acknowledged without accepting that the white man was in fact supplanting a functioning civilisation underpinned by a sophisticated agricultural and mining economy?

Animated by high humanity unknown to savages, to heathens? Without acknowledging at the same time that the people targeted for white British conquest and occupation were not barbarians, mindless heathens?

In 1892, Reverend S.P. Helms finally arrived, and missionary work at Morgenster was boosted. A few days later, Helms wrote: “The darkness is so frightfully dark. What is the use of a few candles in a pitch-black night at a distance of several hundred yards from one another?”

The import of the good reverend went beyond the literal; it was metaphoric.

The Vanyai who had looked after his brethren in Christ were that engulfing darkness.

The great cohabitation
I said the little booklet was published in 1953, itself a year of Rhodesia’s second transition after its establishment.

The first one was in 1923/4 when settler Rhodesia achieved white self-governance.

The year 1953 was when it federated with Zambia and Malawi, a political arrangement which would last for the next ten years.

But above all, 1953 was Rhodes’ Centenary. The question that begs is why would the Church sit so comfortably within the centenary of a man of secular pursuits: a gold/diamond digger and empire-builder?

And the comfort comes through in Dr Van Der Merwe’s introduction to the booklet. Noting the coincidence of the publication with Rhodes’ Centenary, Dr Van Der Merwe added: “The missionaries whom this church has sent out, have been men and women with a mental makeup similar in many respects to that of the pioneers of Southern Rhodesia.

They had become rooted in the same soil as the African whom they sought to evangelise. By their missionary fervor they have proved that men and women of pioneering stock could also be missionaries.

This has been a spiritual contribution of great significance towards the development of Southern Rhodesia.

In the past the development of the African and the success of Christian missions in Africa have been greatly affected by the missionary attitudes of the resident European settlers.

It is of the utmost importance to get the European community in Africa favourably disposed towards and actively engaged on mission work.”

A settler Church
Dr Van Der Merwe is writing a good sixty-one years after Reverend Louw. But by conceptualisation, that vast time difference counts for nothing. Both looked up to the empire builder as an arbiter of evangelical work, as a sweetener to missionary life.

In fact both looked at themselves as part of the white settler community politically, racially, ideologically, mentally, culturally, religiously and economically. A little later, Reverend Louw would receive from Rhodes 6 000 morgen of land.

Alongside many other whites, he became a settler. His Dutch Reformed Church became a landowner, just like the white settler. And from Dr Van Der Merwe’s extract, it is clear creating European settlement was an integral part of evangelising to the benighted native.

And both the BSAC and the missionaries would be involved in the pacification of the native, perhaps only using different tools, skills, but to same end, which is why Rhodes percipiently noted that one missionary was “worth fifty police to keep peace.”

And the imagery of darkness runs through, uninterrupted, forever serviceable. Even as late as 1953 after all those major strides in African education, Van Der Merwe could still write about “first streaks of the dawn of a new life”, the story of “divine light breaking through the gloom of a formerly benighted land”.

Supplanting a civilisation
But there is a key element which Van Der Merwe brought out in that little book.

He noted that the Africa-born missionary, unlike his visiting foreign counterpart, had this one distinct advantage in that he approaches “the African in his own vernacular and produce(s) literature in his language”.

“In this way (he) tried to approach him (the African) in a world of ideas and in expressions of thought which were familiar to him”. This is a point of wider significance to the imperial project, and to our lives therefore.

If in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, clearly on the continent, the vernacular word was with the missionary.

And the notion of vernacular should never be taken literally. Rather, it is literary, a figure of speech to represent a tactic of close simulation in order to beguile, to inveigle. Scholars like Fernand Braudel and Samuel Huntington have long told us that there is no civilisation; there are civilisations.

Even these scholars only limit these civilisations to about three: Islamic, Chinese and Western. Africa is either dismissed as “darkness” which has no history, or as a half-civilisation.

Of course progressive scholars like Marshall Eakin add African civilisation as the fourth one, even explaining the Hispanic civilisation as a by-product of the interaction, often violent, of the four civilisations.

This scholarship does not see the church/colonial encounter which I cited above as a Manichean story of light versus darkness. It sees it as an encounter between two distinct civilisations, each with its own vectors, its own set of dynamics.

And in place of the supplanting theory, this scholarship develops an interactive model where civilisations in contact mutually enrich, to varying outcomes. It was never a one-way street.

Whispers behind the throne
But because history does much more that retell a story, because history shapes today and tomorrow, even legitimising the disfigurement of both, history becomes contested.

Rhodesian history enriched its claims to legitimacy and pre-eminence by incorporating the Church in its story. The Church, in turn, put itself in a position of invincibility by associating with the maxim gun, by serving the colonial authorities.

This is why for us going into a native commissioner’s office and going to the chapel felt the same, save for the fact that the latter gave racial settler oppression its benignity, its false homeliness.

The church had gone vernacular in order to dissemble. Reading through the colonial history, you see the same strategy of vernacularising foreign rule and values assuming many forms.

The BSAC policed through a native class of black watchers. This is what sparked by First Chimurenga. The local administration needed native messengers who ran errands for the white native commissioner. The same administration needed native knowledge to give its alien rule to communities a patina or tincture of Africanness. Native chiefs were needed, and as wars of resistance gained thrust, even native spirit mediums were invented by an order that claimed to be founded on Christian values.

In Lurgardian terms, whites had to be invisible, to be “whispers behind the throne”. Even churches needed vavhangeri, first from natives communities from South Africa, much later from local native converts. Native teachers became medians of the new civilisation from the West, which sought to supplant an African one. The story goes on and on. What is clear is that imperialism does not want to rule by the sword, never mind that it moves with it, all the time visibly displayed to dissuade mischief. It wants to manufacture a veneer of consent, wants to appear like it is governing through your people, by your ways, to your benefit, in your interest. It goes vernacular, in other words, often in person, deeds and words.

Putsches in the past
I have been getting lots of comments from my readers. A key strand of those comments relates to the topical story to do with factional fights in Zanu-PF.

Why have you not tackled that one, Mister Manheru? Anything else you write about, they charge, is an alibi. You might as well stop writing, one writer had the temerity to suggest. Is it because the factional boot is now on your ZANU-PF toe, yet another asked. Or are you a participant in factions yourself, still another charged. Well, gentle reader, here is my response and please take it in the spirit of honesty, of deeply held beliefs I carry. Frankly, I would be the least worried by the ongoing tussle in ZANU-PF, if matters merely boiled down to factions.

That would have make the tussle endogamous, and thus hardly fatal, hardly worthy of national attention. And this column has been about national issues at the very least, world issues at the very most. ZANU-PF has gone through many tussles. Even putsches, some quite violent. Nhari rebellion is the most notable, paling the other two which followed. I am not counting the 2008 one which whilst wrongly imaged as an aspect of Zimbabwe’s maturing multi-party democracy, actually represented a very real existential threat to ZANU-PF. Little has been understood about developments which climaxed that year, whose beguiling faces have been Simba Makoni and Dumiso Dabengwa, with Ibbo Mandaza playing parrot to it all.

History as a gyroscope
What has been fatal or near-fatal in all these perturbations has been to wrongly ascribe these to local forces, local players, overlooking their foreign origins. Interacting with war veterans of the early and mid-seventies, principally those who operated in what Rhodesians termed the Northeast, and reading Rhodesian confessional literature, you quickly realise how deeply involved the Rhodesians, the British and the Americans were, in those disturbances which looked local, which vernacular.

Contacts were made at Mukumbura, deadly contacts which almost defeated the struggle. Read Dzinashe Machingura’s confessional publication to get to know the liaisons which occurred in Maputo between his group of rebels and some foreign embassies. Read chapters on the Geneva conference and check out the contacts of this group. Read chapters on the return of his group to Zimbabwe before Independence, and the role played by the British and Rhodesians in minding their activities in the run-up to the crucial 1980 elections. When you have done all that, read your history of on the formation of the MDC and Mavambo and tell me whether history has shifted the politics of this country by a single inch.

If you think it has, then re-read your history. Get more facts, interpret them well. If you think it has not, then know where to lay emphasis. In one of his meetings with Botha, Henry Kissinger spoke about the need to isolate “men with guns”, extremists or hardliners. Those to be saved were those who projected the face of reasonableness in the eyes of imperialism. These had to be helped to succeed white Rhodesia, so the status quo of white dominance would prevail.

The new vernacular for that nowadays is “a pro-business leadership”, a leadership ready for “a paradigm shift”. Why did the Rhodesian favour a paradigm shift, civilisational shift in 1890, resist it until 1980, now want it in 2014? When you shift paradigmatically from an ethos of empowerment, where do you go? Where do you take the country? In whose interest? Does the so-called succession issue raise such matters, questions?

Two kinds of contradictions
In one meeting Robert Mugabe made a key point regarding contradictions in life. He said contradictions that remained non-antagonistic did not always deserve your immediate attention, or drastic tools. Those ones, you could ignore or tolerate, talk over, or even allow time to take care of. But contradictions that became antagonistic, aah, those demanded your immediate, swift attention for they have the potential to create real crises. Of course this is not a philosophical invention of Robert Mugabe. He was borrowing from the Chinese, from Chairman Mao, to be precise. How would one characterize the present contradictions in ZANU-PF, contradictions glibly called factionalism? How would one characterise the President’s disposition towards them? Cde Msipa thinks the President is sleeping on the job. He should deal with factions swiftly, once and for all. It could lead to a split, he says and fears. What do you think? Is the behaviour of the President suggesting that he is treating these problems as non-antagonistic or antagonistic?

Is ZANU-PF, going through internally generated frictions, capable of creating antagonistic contradictions, real ones demanding the President’s immediate attention? Or are we looking at a phenomenon much deeper, more sinister, quite capable of creating and sustaining a lasting conflict situation in ZANU-PF? A lasting conflict in the country? Why are Zimbabweans, including those in the opposition, fretful about the so-called ZANU-PF succession issue, if one it is at all? Surely a ZANU-PF succession is a ZANU-PF affair? Nay, an opportunity for what has now become a permanent dynastic opposition that never governs? Why fret at an opportunity to supplant? More pointedly, why is it that ZANU-PF’s perturbations — not those engulfing the MDCs — deserves national attention, national concern? And why has Manheru heightened national focus on Anglo-American imperialism, highlighting its wiles and subterfuge? Is factionalism itself imperialism gone vernacular?

Icho!

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