Academic literature on the topic 'Ndebele (Rhodesia)'

In the works of many generations of white writers on Africa, the “Great White Hunter” has remained one of the most powerful and enduring images. A model of Caucasian masculinity, he quickly masters a hostile and wild environment in ways which amaze the aboriginal population, who are usually portrayed as savage and incompetent. Perhaps the best known real-life example of this classic image was Frederick Courteney Selous, a product of the English public school system, who hunted elephants in southern and central Africa during the 1870s and 1880s. Never having made much money from the ivory trade because of the dwindling number of elephants, Selous became an employee of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSAC) in the 1890s and worked towards the colonization of Southern Rhodesia. After fighting against the Ndebele in 1893 and 1896, Selous eventually based himself in England and became a recognized environmental expert, safari guide, and collector/seller of zoological specimens.Through writing six books and numerous articles from 1881 to the 1910s, Selous successfully created and popularized an image of himself as a skilled, yet sporting, hunter, a painfully honest gentleman of the bush, and a friend, as well as leader, of Africans. He was an adventurer with a dramatic habit of narrowly escaping danger and these episodes were often illustrated through drawings in his books. Discussing one such incident, a writer of hunting stories once remarked that “throughout Lobengula's country the story went that Selous was the man even the elephants could not kill. It helped to build the ‘Selous Legend’ among the Rhodesian tribes.”

There is evidence from across the disciplines 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 were 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 organization the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed quite 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.Writing about sixty years later, Ranger focusses more 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 the Ndebele, while at the same time magnifying the differences between the regional divisions of the Shona, which were, in turn, played against one another as constituent clans. 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.Through many decades of rather unnecessary intellectual justification, and as a result of the collective colonial experience through the churches, the schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities, and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them, have become fixed in the collective mind of Africa, and the modern nation states of the continent now seem to be stuck with them. Missionaries played a very significant role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethnolinguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation. To a significant degree, these maps have remained intact and have continued to influence African research scholarship.