Zimbabwe is the Ndebele State just misnamed - Manheru!

Here is Nathaniel Manheru - aka George Charamba - telling this known truth to the world in his piece in The Herald yesterday:

"For all that white historiography is ready to admit, the Ndebele State was bigger, more multinational, more unified, than Bavaria and Milan. It was a country of many nations, stratified into categories as any other in Europe. It has (sic) its own English, its own Scots, its own Welsh, measured according to proximity to royalty."

"The Enhla, the Zansi, the Hole: nothing knew, but all kneaded together into a solid nation."
Did you read that correctly, thoughtfully; absorbingly, People; Mthwakazi? Let me summarise what Manheru has just said for those who may have missed the point in Manheru's generally difficult prose. Nathaniele Manheru has just said the Ndebele State - that is, the Ndebele Kingdom - was a multi-national, multi-ethnic State neatly woven together into … wait for what Manheru actually says brother Siqhubumthetho … "a solid nation"! Not tribe or tribal enclave of Ndebele and Shona!

And how about the stratification of abeNhla, abeZansi and amaHole? Was there ever anything purposively evil or politically demeaning about that, as some Ndebele State detractors - both Ndebele nand Shona - have tried to do over many years? No, nothing - completely nothing - of the sort, according to Manheru! Those stratifications were exactly for nation-building, not nation-destruction, as detractors have claimed.

What an admission by Manheru, even forced as it is, in the total context of accusatory Gukurahundism and claimant Shonaism, and given Manheru's own scurrilous attacks on Mthwakazi over many years behind his veil of chosen anonimity! What an admission?

And there is a further admission Manheru made about uMthwakazi State in his piece yesterday, again a favourite political hunting ground of Gukurahundism and Shonaism over the last 37 years of Gukurahundist and Shonaist rule under Zimbabwe. And this relates to the concocted claims and assertions that the Ndebele State raided and terrorized Shonas before the advent of colonialism. Manheru has also dispelled all that. He writes:
"This is why they had to invent Ndebele butchery of the hapless Shonas, to mobilise for and complete the invasion of Zimbabwe (sic)."

Yet, it is this invented and concocted colonial narrative that informed and drove the Gukurahundi genocide and has ever animated Gukurahundism and Shonaism, the twin drivers of the Zimbabwe state oppression and repression of uMthwakazi to this day. Yet, according to Manheru - and quite rightly so - this could not have been true then, cannot be now and will never be in the future.

Those who want a brief history about abeZansi, abeNhla and amaHole follow this link: http://www.bulawayo1872.com/history/ndebele_SocialStructure.htm. It is on the Hole where I want to make a brief comment, because it is on these, that the Ndebele's own and Shonaist and Gukurahundist detractors often focus on when seeking to denigrate and undo the Ndebele State retroactively.
AmaHole was never a derogatory term, nor will it ever, not least because amaHole are the very essence of uMthwakazi but certainly because amaHole were a core of uMthwakazi as were abeZansi (mostly Zulus) and AbeNhla (mostly amaNdebele from Transvaal). And by the way, abeZansi and abeNhla were not themselves homogenous groups, just as amaHole were not.

AmaHole - as they later came to be referred to derogatorily by those who promoted such false views - simply meant in isiNdebele: abaholiweyo. Those who have been assimilated. And these - again - were heterogenous groups who would have voluntarily assimilated or been conscripted into the Ndebele State. What is significant from the point of view of the Ndebele State as a unified state is King Mzilikazi's treatment of what later became known as the Shona. King Mzilikazi never sought to remove Shona chieftaincies from power in Mashonaland but - but as a nation-builder - worked with them as they were so long as they paid homage in the usual way. Nor did King Mzilikazi see them as the Shona at all (they didn't even have that name), but as amaHole, who by now were a key element of the Ndebele State and Ndebele society at large, and who outnumbered abeZansi and abeNhla, combined. The story and the reasons for the Fort Victoria raid of Mashayamombe (was it?) by King Lobengula is now well-known, and needs no rehashing.

So, where does Manheru's piece of yesterday leave us in terms of this Zimbabwe, this Zimbabwe of today? There are two points made there.

Firstly, it is that the very notion or idea this Zimbabwe is a state created on 18 April 1980 is false, concocted, and politically choreographed. Zimbabwe - this Zimbabwe - is simply the recovered Ndebele State, misnamed. Secondly, it makes the point that the very notion and idea of the Ndebele State having been colonised as two separate entities is nothing more than a colonial fiction invented for reasons Manheru so eloquently states in his piece yesterday: conquest of the Ndebele State.

So brother Siqhubumthetho, I think there is reason to pose and re-look at you're your history and interrogate your own analysis. Facts and historiographies freely admitted by political ‘enemies' are not easy to dispute.

And there, begins - not ends - the big political issue of our time wrought by Gukurahundism and Shonaism that came in the form of the Zimbabwe State in 1980. Most bizarrely, if not outrightly comically, Gukurahundism and Shonaism have tried - VERY UNSUCCESSFULLY - to turn the truth on its head and say - against Manheru's admission of yesterday - that the Zimbabwe State - as a false claim of Gukurahundism and Shonaism - is, and was, a Shona State, not a Ndebele State, and that it was the Shona who fought against colonialism against the combined forces of the colonialists and the Ndebele impis. Decent Shona people - forget for a moment Shonaists and Gukurahundists - have swallowed and actually believed this sticky bile or led themselves into believing that they believe such sick political nonsense of Shonaist and Gukurahundist Zimbabwe.  

What we can say - and say we have seen with our own eyes with the advent of Gukurahundist and Shonaist Zimbabwe in 1980 - is political vandalism of the kind only, and only Mugabe and Mnangagwa, could have wrought. Nobody else - the length and breadth of present-day Zimbabwe - is, and could have been capable of such a horrendous raid on political decency. It simply had to be Robert Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa - and the bands of baying and braying Shonaists and Gukurahundists they have recruited into their sick and perverted project and planted on all levels of the Zimbabwe state in the 37 years of their sorry rule!

It is therefore not uMthwakazi politics that is destroying, and has destroyed what would have been Zimbabwe (even with this sad misnaming) - and this is where I differ with Manheru's piece yesterday. Rather, it is Zimbabwean politics - Shonaist and Gukurahundist politics to be precise - that has. On this point Manheru has tripped on an illogicality informed by the Shonaism and Gukurahundism to which he has so subscribed for many, many years. He says: "We who would rather recede into parochial politics of Mthwakazi, than expand our energies in reconstructing grand narratives that befit a great sprawling civilisation we are known to have been."

But the " … great sprawling civilisation we are known to have been", is not the Zimbabwe State or Zimbabwean politics, but, as he himself has earlier stated, but the Ndebele State.

To get things right again, then, what must be rid of is Zimbabwean politics and what must be re-introduced is Mthwakazi politics. Because where uMthwakazi built and "kneaded together" a "solid nation", Zimbabwean politics has sought to strike repeated blows at by-gone history and tried to make the Shona - via a genocide - permanent MASTERS of Zimbabwe, and uMthwakazi, permanent subjects of that utopian Shona kingdom. Underpinning and securing that Utopian Kingdom of Mashonaland are the parochial misadventures of Shonaism and Gukurahundism. The natural consequence of Zimbabwean politics, therefore, and not surprisingly, has been this truly Zimbabwe Ruins now bowing out and leaving the Zimbabwe Project on the cusp of violent disintegration, both internally and generally, in contrast to the Ndebele State which marshalled the Ndebele - and Shona eventually - against White colonialism.

To use Manheru's own words, the Ndebele State today remains even "bigger, more multinational, more unified" than the Ndebele State of King Mzilikazi and King Lobengula, in conditions where the Zimbabwe State as representing Shonaism and Gukurahundism has shrunk to the two or three men now left of the original group that invented Shonaism and Gukurahundism. Those two or three men are in fright and flight and purporting to hold the escaping and re-emerging at ransom. It is Zimbabwe politics in fright and flight in the face of Mthwakazi politics on the march and on political time! It is not Zimbabwean politics that will rescue that "great civilisation" of which Manheru so clearly speaks, but Mthwakazi politics! And we have said - time and time - that Mthwakazi's freedom subsumes Zimbabwe's freedom. On that, we will forever be right!

So how do you resolve a political problem of this nature - that is, a political problem of disintegration rather than re-organization? The answer is simple. You start at the beginning, not at the end or in the middle.

And that is the subject of my second piece coming later today.