Raping of daughter-in-law (Nnholo we Mwizana) NOT Kalanga Culture

Last week, on June 30, there appeared an article in the press titled "Man jailed for raping daughter-in-law (Nnholo we Mwizana)". An excerpt from the article read: "Asked in court why he committed the offence, the man told the court that he was fulfilling his Kalanga custom as his father had also slept with his wife."

Here on Bulawayo24 alone, there were some 3588 hits on the article as of July 4, and it was perhaps one of the mostly widely circulated and debated articles on Facebook in our community last week. A lot of denigrations were directed not only at Kalanga culture but at Bukalanga identity itself. Being Kalanga was even by some portrayed as something inferior and to be shunned. Yet all this was based on a belief that amongst Bakalanga does not exist nor is the custom practiced.

Naturally, as one who writes a lot in defence and promotion of Bukalanga, I received enquiries as to whether indeed there is such a custom in our culture. I then spent the last weekend interviewing elders if they knew about this custom. Three of them were aged 76, 69 and 61. To one's surprise, none of them claimed there is such a custom in Bukalanga. They stated that even their grandfathers, born in the mid-1800s, never mentioned anything of that sort to them, neither was it practiced then. The three old men that I interviewed ruled that there is no such cultural practice in Bukalanga as Nholo-we-Mwizana. All they said was that it is perhaps an insulting view originating with the conquering Ndebele in the 1800s which might have been a result of a misunderstanding of some other practice, just like one would hear Ndebeles call Bakalanga 'madlandolila', and yet to Bakalanga that term has no meaning at all.

The only custom they professed to know of that may be close to this alleged Nnholo-we-Mwizana is that when a man married, and perhaps went away for a long time (e gewuka) or wasn't having kids, his brother would be asked to sleep with his wife, a custom akin to the ancient Near East Levirate marriage. That was an accepted cultural practice which was used to keep the family intact and to ensure that the lady does not find men outside the family. Not only was this protecting the family but it also respected the wife's conjugal rights in the absence of her husband. It was accepted that she too has feelings that needed satisfaction. But, this was never a forced thing. She had to accept it herself of her own will, and since it was a generally accepted custom, rarely would she decline.

Perhaps it is a damning tribute to the Zimbabgwean education system and media that only the culture and languages of the Shona and Ndebele are being taught in the schools and shown in the media that there is such confusion. Had it been that all languages and cultures are taught in school and celebrated in the media, there would be no such misunderstanding. In fact, what would come out is that perhaps Bukalanga had one of the most colorful cultures of any people group here in Zimbabgwe.

Bukalanga, or Vhukalanga is a great historic nation dating back some 2000 years ago made up of such ethnic groups as BaKalanga, BaNambya, Vhavenda, Babirwa, BaPfumbi, BaLemba, BaLovhedu, BaKgalaka, BaTwamambo, and the majority of the people called Ndebele today using animal names for their surnames such as Ndlovu, Sibanda, Mpala, Ngwenya, Nyathi, Nkomo, etc. These people are the builders of Mapungubgwe, Great Zimbabgwe, Khami, etc, and were the first of all sub-Saharan African peoples to mine and trade in gold, trading with such far off lands as Persia, India, China, Arabia, South Asia and so forth; and were highly celebrated workers in iron and copper. This was at an era when not a single other sub-Saharan African people group was involved in the same. Even their religion, the Mwali Religion, had the most distinct and clear idea of a monotheistic God called Mwali, with the most elaborate and organized form of worship of any Bantu peoples. Many other aspects of Bukalanga which show them to have been a great civilization in the precolonial era can be mentioned ad finitum. But for the last thirty-two of this country's independence, the history and heritage of Bukalanga has not been told. Where it has been told that history has been falsely appropriated to the Ndebele and the Shona. It is my hope that with the publication of my upcoming book, The Rebirth of Bukalanga: A Manifesto for the Liberation of a Great People with a Proud History, the story of Bukalanga will be known, and perhaps, the rebirth and renaissance of this proudest of nations will begin. Never in the history of sub-Saharan Africa has a people attained as great a civilization as Bukalanga did in precolonial sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, it would not be an over-estimation to say Vhukalanga had one of the three greatest civilizations in Africa - the Zimbabgwe Civilization, the Egyptian and the Axumite Civilizations. Up until now, in an an unprecedented act of theft of heritage and national lying, the Shona have claimed the Zimbabgwe Civilization for themselves, with the only justification for that being the claim that Kalanga Group Languages - TjiKalanga, TshiVenda, TjiNambya, KiLovhedu, TjiPfumbi, etc - are Shona dialects, which claim is totally false and without historical basis.

For detailed information on Bukalanga please see my The Rebirth of Bukalanga blog at www.ndzimuunami.blogspot.com.

Ndaboka imi n'Kalanga, nditi mbeli be Bukalanga. Mbeli ne TjiKalanga, TshiVenda ne TjiNambya. Gone are the days when we were being parcelled out amongst the Shona and Ndebele as if we have no identity of our own. Ndaa. Ndolivhuwa. Ke a leboha