THERE have been numerous incidents of tribalism among the Shona and Ndebele people in Zimbabwe generated by regime change architects in order to divide and rule.
These architects formed tribal groupings who fought against their fellow tribesmen like the Mthwakazi Joint Youth Resolution who went on a rampage in Matabeleland South calling for the removal of non-Ndebele-speaking teachers in schools.
The late Ntabazinduna Paramount Chief Khayisa Ndiweni, wanted Matabeleland to be separated from Mashonaland.
There are many other incidents, but when one traces tribalism, whites cannot go unmentioned.
There is evidence that at least some of the contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are fairly recent inventions in historical terms.
This article offers some evidence from Zimbabwe to show that missionary linguistic politics was an important factor in this process.
The South African linguist, Clement Doke, was brought in to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona.
His Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) shows how the language politics of the Christian denominations, which were also the factions within the umbrella organisation the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed significantly to the creation and promotion of Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika as the main groupings of dialects in the central area which Doke later accommodated in a unified orthography of a unified language that was given the name ‘Shona’.
While vocabulary from Ndau was to be incorporated, words from the Korekore group in the north were to be discouraged and Kalanga in the west was allowed to be subsumed under ‘Ndebele’.
Sixty years later, the late Terrence Ranger focuses closely on the Manyika and takes his discussion to the 1940s, but he also mentions that the Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately incited tribalism between the Shona and Ndebele.
It would appear then that, for the indigenous Africans, the price of Christianity, Western education and a new perception of language unity was the creation of regional ethnic identities that were at least potentially antagonistic and open to political manipulation.
Missionaries played a big role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethno-linguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation.
These maps have remained intact and continue to influence African research scholarship.
In The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Cleavages: The Case of Linguistic Divisions in Zambia, Daniel Posner asserts that colonialism created tribalism in Zambia by establishing linguistic categorisation and mapping of ethnic groups.
In his view, these groupings bore little or no resemblance to actual ethnic divisions; rather, they represented the careless manner in which missionary and educational systems favoured some languages over others.
The case of Zimbabwe closely resembles Posner’s study.
Tribal identities in Zimbabwe too developed through language mapping on the part of missionaries and educators.
Missionaries in Zimbabwe made distinctions both among the Shona dialects and between the Shona and Ndebele languages.
There were seven missionary societies operating in various areas throughout the nation.
Each, because of its isolation from the other, had a significant impact on the ‘regionalisation’ of the languages it came across.
This process occurred when the missionaries converted spoken dialects of their subject groups to written form.
According to scholar Herbert Chimhundu, the missionaries employed different letters to describe the same Shona sounds because the Roman alphabet could not accurately capture the Shona language (e.g. the same sound could be denoted by a, b, v, w, or y).
Furthermore, ‘word division’ was inconsistently applied.
For example, ‘akasvika’, ‘aka svika’, or ‘a ka svika’ could all be a Shona translation for s/he arrived.
Thus, similarities between the Shona dialects were hidden in written Shona works. Clement Doke, who was employed in 1928 to create a common Shona language that would simplify dissemination of the Bible to the natives, noted that: “The differences between the dialects have been grossly exaggerated by these artificial means.”
Beyond exaggeration, these dialectical differences were also used to define six distinct ethno-linguistic groups, or ‘tribes’, within the Shona: Karanga, Kalanga, Ndau, Manyika, Korekore and Zezuru.
For example, the Manyika were people under Chief Mutasa. Simply because of the speakers’ proximity to two of the earliest mission churches, the Manyika language was expanded through the mission schools and finally came to denote a much larger group of Manyikas.
Moreover, the words Korekore and Zezuru were regional nicknames for northerners and highlanders respectively and not meant to describe any ethnic differences.
And the term Kalanga was simply a corrupted version of Karanga, which was originally synonymous with Shona.
Thus, the linguistic, and in turn, tribal distinctions were not based on significant historical rationales.
The consolidation of the Shona dialects into a single form only exacerbated tribalism.
By the time Doke devised common Shona, the various dialects had long been established through missionary schools and thus it was impossible to break down the tribal associations created around them.
While the influence of English on both Shona and Ndebele is unquestionable, pretending that there is completely no mixing of, or switching between, the two indigenous languages is unrealistic.
Pedzisai Mashiri suggests that there are implications for tribal identification when similarities of language are not recognised.
Before independence, such identities were imposed upon Zimbabweans through the education system set up by the missionaries and colonial government.
The late Ranger argues that with the movement toward standard Shona, a Shona identity was created and reinforced in schools through the productions of written histories and accounts of African customs.
Likewise, a Ndebele identity was imparted to children who were taught Ndebele in schools although their parents did not speak the language at home.
Moreover, the emphasis on differentiating between the Ndebele and Shona spurred stereotypes surrounding these ‘tribes’.
“The very widespread historical ‘memory’ of how ‘the Ndebele’ raided ‘the Shona,’ is not a product of genuine traditional reminiscence, but is the result of generations of school history lessons,” says Ranger.
Indeed, the education system entrenched the belief that the Ndebele were militaristic, well disciplined and in constant conflict with the docile Shona in the pre-colonial period.
Thus, the written and regionalised languages of missionaries established Zimbabwe’s tribal map.
These tribal identities were more than monikers as they became reinforced as real identities through the education system.
The example of Zimbabwe strengthens Posner’s argument that colonialism is a significant cause of tribalism and that: “A country’s ethnic cleavage is not just a social fact, but a historical product that can be traced.”