When are we ever going to talk about Matabeleland?

By Tinomudaishe Chinyoka

The first time I truly went to Harare, not to the stadium to watch Dynamos or Zimbabwe and then be driven back by a drunk relative or other (Dynamos makes you do brave things, the Warriors too but not as much), was the day I went to a certain school in Mt Pleasant.

I do not recall much of my first few weeks there, but one of the things I do remember from those days is that I met VMN, a man whose friendship I have since lost but who I will forever hold as an honourable man.

It was a chance encounter, he was much older than I was, but he made an impression on me. We stayed friends until long after varsity, and then life happened.

I am reminded of this man because it was he that showed me the epigram which remains to me the best lawyer joke ever. It is not even meant to be a joke. And I think maybe because unlike most such jokes, it is neither insulting nor wrong, and is more than a thousand years old. It talks of exasperation at verbosity nokuchinja nyaya kwemagweta:

My suit has nothing to do with assault, or battery, or poisoning, but is about three goats, which, I complain, have been stolen by my neighbour. This the judge desires to have proved to him; but you, with swelling words and extravagant gestures, dilate on the Battle of Cannae, the Mithridatic war, and the perjuries of the insensate Carthaginians, the Sullae, the Marii, and the Mucii. It is time, Postumus, to say something about my three goats.

Zimbabweans, we talk a lot. We talk about El Classico like we live in Spain, we talk about LeBron James like he was our neighbour, we talk about the Kardashians like they come from Dotito. But it is time, my fellow countrymen, that we talked about home. There is a stench on the nation that is Zimbabwe, and that is that we never speak about Matabeleland. Not really no.

Yes, we talk about Matabeleland. We talk about the drought. About the women from Matabeleland. About how Obert Mpofu probably owns half of it and Simon Khaya half of the other half, with the rest being places that you never hear about.

We talk about Matabeleland when a prominent politician from there messes up, like when Mphoko stays in a hotel for years because all the houses in Harare are just not good enough, or when Jonathan Moyo is in trouble, which is happening way too often lately.

We talk about Matabeleland when Zanu PF is going to a congress and looking for a token VP, the one that will do nothing except spend time teaching mischievous people how to pronounce his name.

Nor is this a Zanu PF only disease, even the opposition has been afflicted with the same problem. They talk about Matabeleland when looking for a VP, and just prior to elections. Matabeleland, you see, can be relied upon to keep Mugabe at bay, the red wall that the opposition can always count upon. Matabeleland can only produce VPs, never the actual leaders.

But we do not, really realy, speak about Matabeleland.

There was talk once, about a pipeline project. Matabeleland-Zambezi Water Project it was called. Back at UZ, when I was meeting my friend (he is genuinely Ndebele, abeZansi, the sekurus to Lobengula, a descendent of Gundwane himself), they were already talking about this project. Children have been born and have had their own children and those children are now texting love poems on WhatsApp since this project was mooted. But not one single pick or shovel has been swung in anger to bring it to reality.

I suspect that I know why. From the outset, we have been conditioned to treat this project as a favour that we are doing for ‘them’. ‘We’ were going to do this to solve ‘their’ perennial water problems. ‘They’ would be grateful, and maybe stop speaking ill of ‘us’ and stop making demands about devolution. Not because ‘we’ have to, but because ‘we’ are nice that way.

 And the sinister bit is that this is not even the worst of it. Consider for a moment that ‘we’ and ‘us’ is not used in this context to denote ‘Shona’ or ‘non-Ndebele’, but us as in we Zimbabweans. That has the double effect of not just ‘othering’ the people of Matabeleland, but looking at them like ‘they’ aren’t really, fully Zimbabwean.

Imagine if you lived in a family and your parents had five children, and you were all happy, then one day your father brings a child that he had with someone else after you were already a family. That child is tied to you by blood yes, but there might be a feeling that this child does not really belong within the family, not really. Many times I get that that is how some of us regard the people from Matabeleland.

Part of it of course is a direct consequence of that thing called African Heritage which we were fed in school without much thought into how is shapes behaviour and thinking. The Ndebele came from Zululand, running away from Shaka, and then used his tactics to defeat us. See how that othering just gels. We will even deny them their fighting prowess and ascribe them to someone else (Shaka)  that never came to our side of the Limpopo, because doing otherwise does not fit with our view of the Ndebele as the usurper.

What was not emphasised in this teaching was that everyone came to this plateau we call home from somewhere. We are all immigrants, except that others got here first. Some of us came from very far, nokuti tiri vaSena, others came from such close places as South Sudan.

Think deeper and you find that if the Ndebele were part of the Bantu migration from South Sudan, but came via South Africa, then it stands to reason that their ancestors passed through the plateau on their way south, then came back. Who is to say that they were not the original owners? The point is, such questions were never asked, it was just Mfecane this Mfecane that, all the time the ‘hordes’ of war mongers coming from the south.

According to Yiannis Gabriel, Othering is the process of casting a group, an individual or an object into the role of the ‘other’ and establishing one’s own identity through opposition to and, frequently, vilification of this Other. The term Othering describes the reductive action of labelling a man or a woman as someone who belongs to a subordinate social category defined as the Other. The practice of Othering is the exclusion of persons who do not fit the norm of the social group, which is a version of the Self. No group ever defines itself without simultaneously positing the Other facing itself.

Lajos Brons argues that the apparent identity of what appear to be cultural units – human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations – are maintained only through constitutive repression, an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization. A phenomenon maintains its identity in semiotic systems only if other units are represented as foreign or ”other” through a hierarchical dualism in which the first is privileged or favoured while the other is deprivileged or devalued in some way. This process must itself be hidden or covered up, so that the hierarchy can be assumed inherent in the nature of the phenomena, rather than a motivated construction.

And according to Lajos Brons, “othering is a process  through which identities are set up in an unequal relationship. Othering is the simultaneous construction of the self or in-group and the other or out-group in mutual and unequal opposition through identification of some desirable characteristic that the self/in-group has and the other/out-group lacks and/or some undesirable characteristic that the other/out-group has and the self/in-group lacks. Othering thus sets up a superior self/in-group in contrast to an inferior other/out-group, but this superiority/inferiority is nearly always left implicit. Othering makes it possible for us to not emphathise with our fellow man.

That is very true of our country. Othering killed tens of thousands of Ndebele people, and the callousness of it is seen in the name we give it. Gukuruhundi. Washing away of the chaff. Human beings = chaff. Entire generations of children are being taught a history of Zimbabwe that skirts over this genocide. Because it did not really affect Zimbabweans, but those people in Matabeleland. Perpetrators of the genocide are lauded as heroes, and some even either have or aspire to the presidency, and we are not filled with revulsion by this. Because it did not really happen to Zimbabweans, but to the people of Matabeleland.

Slavenka Drakuli´ once wrote “I understand now that nothing but ”otherness” killed Jews, and it began with naming them, by reducing them to the other. Then everything became possible. Even the worst atrocities like concentration camps or the slaughtering of civilians in Croatia or Bosnia.”

We react with suspicion when some within Matabeleland talk about devolution and of a Mtwakhazi or Matabeleland  Republic, as if we do not see why that would make sense. But what we do not admit to is that secretly we would prefer a better option, that they just go back to South Africa and leave ‘our country’ alone. That it is as much their country as it is ours never reaches the imagination, because they came from South Africa. As if isu takamera muno.

There are some truths that are hard to accept. There are some truths that we skirt over. There are some truths that we would rather have stay hidden. But the problem with truth is that it will always out itself. Truth will come out.

And if that is as inevitable as death and taxes, isn’t it time we started speaking about Matabeleland?

Zimbabweans killed Zimbabweans in Matabeleland. That is a truth. That Shurugwi farmer who fought in the Second World War as a fighter pilot, him called Ian Smith? Remember him? Know how  we are all conditioned to hate him?

Well, ask yourself this: why do we hate him again? And while you ponder that, here is a truth: he killed less Zimbabweans than we did. Way, way less. And not to justify him or anything, but at least he was fighting a war, the one that we all now keep giving people pensions for fighting in. What war were we fighting in when we slaughtered the chaff of Nkayi and Lupane?

Like I said, there is a stench on the nation. But it is made worse by how we look at it. You are tempted to think, let’s remove Mugabe first, and then deal with that. Why? Why is removing Mugabe worth going to the streets for and not the murder of tens of thousands of Zimbabweans? 

You are thinking why bring this up now? Well, I ask you, when is it time to talk about the murder of tens of thousands of Zimbabweans? When will it be convenient for you? Diarise that discussion and explain why then and not now. Why is this not the single most important issue in Zimbabwe right now? The life of a human being must be sacrosanct, and we killed tens of thousands. Why are we not every day talking about that chaff?

 If we get new leaders in, and we have not made it known to them that this is the most important question facing our country, why will they prioritise it? To ensure they do, is it not time, Zimbabweans, that we said something about Matabeleland? And if they do not speak about the shame that we committed in Matabeleland, please do not give them your vote. Because they cannot possibly love Zimbabwe if the murder of tens of thousands of Zimbabweans does not move them to tears and action.

Perhaps you are thinking why am I bringing this up. You are probably thinking that I have previously given an impression that this was not a big deal. Well, you are wrong, I never did. But let’s say that I did, then I was wrong, it is a very big deal.

Patrick Buchanan once said ‘we react more to the death of 6 people in Lithuania than to massacre in Zululand because Lithuanians are like us’. If that is unfortunately true, then if anyone thinks of themselves as Zimbabwean, then a first requirement for that has to be anger than tens of thousands of our fellow men were killed and we are going about thinking that it is okay to forget to remember. They were like us. They were, in fact, us.

Someone recently told me to never put forward to tomorrow what can be done today. I am heeding that advice, in the area she was talking about. But that applies equally here too. While we excoriate Mugabe for mismanaging our economy, let us not forget to remember that he murdered tens of thousands of Zimbabweans.

While we complain about Bond notes and queuing to get our money from the bank, let us not forget to remember that Zimbabweans in Matabeleland were promised water from the Zambezi decades ago. While we march and agitate for respect of the flag, let us also demand justice for the tens of thousands of dead Zimbabweans that cannot march because some people regarded them as chaff. And while we agitate for change, let us not forget to remember to promise prosecutions for those that perpetrated our own genocide.

Let us not forget to remember to speak about Matabeleland. Zimbabweans live there.

Tinomudaishe Chinyoka is a UK based lawyer and prominent former student leader at the University of Zimbabwe.