3. Severe Conflicts: Frustration-Deprivation
4.6. Conclusion: Ethnicity – Disentangling Identity Formation
153
“…because the way you sit, what I’ve seen them do is; maybe the Shona guys would support the other team, sit on the other side, and they will just be a
minority. And all they can do is just hope maybe ‘it’s a draw, or their team loses’.
Cause if their team wins, then coming out of there is going to be war, it’s going be war. I mean [they] just vent their anger on you. So it’s been elevated to the status of a count, it’s like a rallying point for Ndebeles now that ‘okay, we’ll rally around this team because we have lost faith in all political institutions.’”425
“ So yes, so I’m saying it’s paradoxical in the sense that they’re singing about Shonas, but there are Shonas that they know are playing for Highlanders, they don’t really regard them as Shonas…As far as the Ndebeles are concerned, Highlanders is the last institution that they have, you know, that belongs to them as Ndebeles. Everything else has been taken away from them including their jobs, including their country, or should I say the part of their province because, you know, you will find Shonas in all the positions and they are subservient to them.
So, it’s all tied in to, you know, to the issues…into history, particularly after Independence.”426
Here, in the above treatises one sees the irrationality of ethnic-hatred when Ndebele fans of the Highlanders can be aroused to sing songs of prejudice and violence against the Shona people, while at the same time being fully aware those Shona players make up part of that team. Also, when dealing with the issue of ethno-sports, it is of interest to note that the polarizing narrative of the Ndebele-Shona segregation is exceptionally caught up in the discussion of ownership or ‘faith’ in a political process and its institutions. For Matabeleland, as long as there is no public political domain made available for the collective emancipatory venting of historical pain, the children of the survivors of Gukurahundi will continue to nurse their rage; allowing vengeance to simmer just underneath the tentative veneer of social sensibilities.
154 Third, if spatial mobility of one ethnic group into the territory of the other increases, then ethnic salience will rise. Fourth, if social mobility of one ethnic group into the
occupational domain of the other rises, then ethnic salience will rise.427 All four of these principled dynamics are recognisable in the historic time-line of ethnic-identity relations and formations outlined in this chapter.
Summarizing the work of leading anthropologist John Comaroff, Professor Ndlovu- Gatsheni posits five theoretical propositions to better understand the nature and formation of ethnic identity:
1. Ethnicity is constructed by specific historical forces which are simultaneously structural and cultural.
2. Ethnicity is never a unitary phenomenon because it describes both a set of relations and mode of consciousness that is ever changing.
3. Ethnicity has its origins in the asymmetric incorporation of structurally dissimilar groupings into a single political economy.
4. Ethnicity tends to take on the ‘natural’ appearance of an autonomous force and a ‘principle’ capable of determining the course of social life.
5. Ethnicity could be perpetrated by actors quite different from those that caused its emergence and could also develop a direct and independent impact on the context in which it arises.428
Bearing in mind Sithole and Comaroff’s propositions on ethnicity above, certain streams of Matabeleland ethnic-identity narratives reveal and confirm a number of essential points which are well-substantiated in the interview transcriptions and the document analysis engaged in for this research. These are as follows:
• Ethnic Identity is not static, it is often in flux – For example, a Zulu Clan of approximately 300 persons referred to as the Khumalos' evolved into a
conglomerate Kingdom of the Umthwakazi (now referred to as the Ndebele people) and consists of over ten different incorporated ethnic groups including Sotho, Tswana, Shangaan, Venda, Tonga and Shona ethnicities. Likewise, the Shona delineation is a relatively recent ethnic classification as a canopy label
427 Sithole, M. 1985. “The Salience of Ethnicity in African Politics: the Case of Zimbabwe”. Journal of Asian and African Studies, XX, 3-4: 185-187.
428 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. 2008: 31-32. See Comaroff, J. 1997. Of Totemism and Ethnicity: Consciousness, Practice and the Signs of Inequality, in Grinker, R & Steiner, C. (eds.) Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
155 which covers at least seven other historically distinct sub-ethnic formations
including Korekore, Zezuru, Manyika, Ndau, Rozvi, Kalanga, and Karanga.
• Ethnic Identity is pluralistic, not monolithic – For instance, both the Ndebele and Shona ethnic groups historically consist of networks of diverse linguistic dialects, clearly defined cultural classes and internal ‘ranking’ structures. Through language disassociation, inter- or cross-clan marriage, name change or certain economic rituals and transactions one could ‘move’ among and between these various class and ranking systems.429 During the Gukurahundi period, some Ndebele took on Shona names as a form of protection and of political survival in the face of direct violence perpetrated against the Ndebele as the ‘opposition’
(ZAPU).
“And all the sudden Uncle Joe and ZAPU were persona non grata, and all of a sudden we were concerned as a family that ‘are we gonna be connected to Uncle Joe?’, because he was called Msika. He chose to keep the original Shangaan name, my dad and his older brothers decided to keep the Shona version of it – Musikavanhu – which is the version I use to this day out of respect for my father, but the real name is actually Msika. And…so that kept us safe because not everyone made the connection between Msika and Musikavanhu.”430
• Ethnic Identity is often manipulated by historical conflict memory and political opportunism - The dominant ‘colonial narrative’ was founded on evolutionary prejudice and dehumanizing contempt toward the African
populations in general (both Ndebele and Shona) as well as through a system of ranking the different African peoples by privileging (through special treatment and relationship assumptions) between certain ethnic groupings; in this case Ndebele over Shona. This ‘white man’s’ narrative has been refuted by the voices of new historicism and through the continuation of rapid changes in the geo- political landscape (both relationally and structurally) as independent Africa positions itself in the global scene across a myriad of racial and ethnic lines.
However, the post Independence African government (ZANU-PF) and its security forces have carefully crafted the same instruments and tactics of inter- and intra-
429 Lindgren, B. 2004: 179.
430 Interview: TM1, Johannesburg, South Africa – 01/11/07 – (Shona Businessman whose relative was a prominent leader in the ZANU-PF government).
156 ethnic conflict, stereotyping and hatred in order to subdue any threat (either political or military opposition) from whomever they perceive as their political enemy.
• Conflict identity is often formulated around the psychology of victor
(‘legitimated’ offender) and vanquished (the offended) For instance, there is a distinctly proud Ndebele association of ZAPU with the military prowess of its armed wing, ZIPRA when it successfully shot down the Viscount, a Rhodesian tourist airplane coming from Victoria Falls. This incident, which required the use of state-of-the-art Russian weaponry (ground launched anti-aircraft missiles) is used as indicative ‘proof’ that ZANU-PF and its armed wing ZANLA were actually militarily threatened by ZIPRA which serves as another tangential explanation for the Gukurahundi violence of the 1980s. This military
sophistication of ZIPRA is in turn is linked historically to the Ndebele being a military nation, superior in the strategies of war to the Shona.431
• Overemphasis of one dimension of identity can exacerbate conflict - In neglecting the many facets that make up identity one runs the risk of narrowing identity to one salient feature of crucial importance. When this singular yet overemphasized identity collides with the singular yet overemphasized identity of the ‘other’ (the enemy) conflict escalates. For example, the ZANU-PF label of
‘dissident’ became associated with Matabeleland, the geographical area where the Gukurahundi violence was concentrated resulting in the notion that being an Ndebele is equated with being a ‘dissident’.
“That’s what they were told. ‘Ndebeles are dissidents’. So if Ndebeles are dissidents, get rid of them. I’ve heard of stories of the Fifth Brigade ripping open women’s bellies who were pregnant and they want to see this dissident inside.”432
431 Unrecorded interview: BN1, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe – 31/03/07 – (Ndebele Commercial Farmer, businessman, and agricultural consultant). This respondent was referring to the highly secretive ZERO PLAN HOUR in which ZIPRA was apparently poised to invade Rhodesia with a full-scale conventional army on the brink of the peace talks in 1979. See also: Brickhill, J. 1995. Daring to Storm the Heavens: the Military Strategy of ZAPU 1976-1979, in Ranger, T., and Bhebe, N. (eds.) Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War. London: James Currey, 48-86.
432 Interview: DN3, Johannesburg, South Africa – 30/10/07 – (Ndebele NGO peace worker facilitating trauma healing and reconciliation among rural Matabeleland communities and survivors of Gukurahundi violence).
157
“My wife has been a member of the Zanu (PF) village committee, the lowest level of Zanu. You know that everyone in the area has been forced to join Zanu… I am Ndebele, of course.”433
This latter quote above vividly illustrates this identity confusion and politico-identity fusion whereby the Shona ethnic identity is so deeply equated with ZANU-PF political party that the speaker disassociates from the ZANU-PF by referring to himself as an Ndebele, not a member of ZAPU, the opposition political structure to ZANU-PF.
In summary, this exploration of the narratives of ethnic identity indicates that the ethnic distinctions assigned to Matabeleland are not by nature essentialist scripts. The pre-colonial and colonial ethnic definitions and demarcations between the Ndebele and Shona were frequently blurred and remain as cloudy logics throughout Zimbabwe’s history up to the present. Likewise, from its genesis the nationalist liberation movement of Zimbabwe was not an ethnically purist project. It was for many years a configuration of different solidarities coalescing around pertinent issues of resistance. However, in the advent of the symbiotic blending of unbridled power-mongering, militant exclusivity and the manufacture of the ‘enemy’ along the existing natural ethnic cleavages of
geographical and political associations, an ethnic segregation was produced in
Zimbabwe. This divergent ethnic construction crystallised when the narrative texts of ethnic hatred and severe state-sanctioned violence fused together in the ZANU-PF’s disastrous management of the ‘dissident’ and Gukurahundi violence in the early 1980s.
For the vast majority of victims and survivors of the Matabeleland massacres (1980-87) the following historic orations of Robert Mugabe ring hollow: “Our war must teach us to forget our tribal affiliations. If it fails in this regards, it will have achieved nothing.”434
433 Berkeley, B. and Schrage, E. 1986. Zimbabwe: Wages of War: A Report on Human Rights. New York:
Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 56-57.
434 Mugabe, R. 1983. Our War of Liberation – Speeches, Articles, Interviews 1976-1979. Harare: Mambo Press, 125.
158 Chapter 5: Nationalism – Ordering and Disordering Narratives