History and Identity : Some Vignettes from Africa
A. Srinivas Rao
31st May 2011
It was a searingly hot afternoon in 1992, in the village of Pupu somewhere in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe; as the local orderly from the Ndebele people and a member of ZAPA (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) scanned the site for the ancient ritual the Umbiyiso to be held that night under the starry awning. It was to be “Heroes day” the next day. The Mugabe government was suspicious of this spirit ancestors’ ceremony and the switching of the loyalties of the Ndebele people. Mugabe never liked the ZAPA and he had achieved notoriety by killing several of their members. Many of the non-Ndebele people of Pupu were unhappy that their nationalist struggle would be credited to Lobengula, last king of the Ndebele. The evening falls langrously, the ceremony commences and the Svikiro or medium is beginning to feel the heady punch of the local brew rapoko beer. Several beer pots dot the end of the hut, on the ceremonial table is a plate of snuff and another one of ground maize and meat (sadza nenyama) and beer that has been offered to the ancestor spirits of the realm of Amadlozi. The gathering chant “woz ekhaya”…'come come' and pour small pots of beer on the head of an ox inkomo yamadlozi. There is a silence as the medium grunted and fretted and declared his identity. The non-Ndebele seemed relieved that he was an ancient spirit Rozwi mambo a ruler of the local people even before the Ndebele. The medium then exhorted the gathering to seek to recognize the older past and heal the wounds of the violence before he broke into incoherence. It was an order to transcribe their history.
Matabeleland has stood still in time like a primeval consciousness that recognised no object. Archaic, ancient, it had no record of history, oral or written. These Ndebele people were descendents of the great Zulu Mzilikazi who had rebelled against the Shaka king and proceeded to start his own tribe the Ndebele. A series of violent wars with the locals left a trail of destruction called the great scattering Mfecane where the local indigenous people were crushed or driven by the Ndebele. They then dominated the Transvaal between 1826-1836. The Boers (Dutch and other Europeans) battled the Ndebele until they were repelled by Mzilikazi in 1852. After Mzilikazi’s death his son Lobengula made his last stand with the British in 1893. It was thrown into a tumult when the ruling British (1888-1965) herded the Ndebele people into a reserve called Shangani. Through the 1890s the tribal chiefs of the Ndebele settled their uprooted people into the Shangani forests and often encountered resistance from the local dwellers who spoke many languages, the Tonga, Shangwe among others. The Ndebele looked down on these indigenes and considered themselves as modern, progressive and Christian and called the locals as Zambezis, while the locals called them Daluka the dumped ones. Under the colonial British they were all one race, essentially ‘black’ and a study in contrast, inferior, child like, irrational, everything that they were not; an essential ‘other’-The Orientalist. How a history could then be written for Africa is the question that teases us to this day and the spirit of Rozwi mambo yet asks them what they make of that question.
How does one write a history when there are no written records or when records are as sparse as the Saharan landscape and only littered in a few centres of learning like Timbuktu in Mali and Ethiopia. One possible way is to dig oral histories like those of the griots. It was 1976 and Waa Kamisoko was tuning his lute komasa to raise his strains as the best known griot or wandering bardic historian the Jeli. He was the best known of the Jeli in the Maghrib or the Muslim west that was North Africa; of the Manden or ancient Mali empire on the upper reaches of the river Niger. Few could surpass his insight or his great song on the Epic of the Sundjata based on the life of Sundjata Keita the ruler of the empire of Mali (1217-1255 CE). His was a tradition that bespoke of an ancient voice rising from the ruins of Jenne juno that dated 3rd century BCE, through the empires of Ghana (830-1235 BCE) followed by the Mali and that of Songhay that flourished till the 16th century. Kamisoko sang of Sundjata of the Mandinkas the son of Nare and Sogolon, conquered by the Ghana king Sumaoro Kante. Sundjata devoted his life to training and raising an army and overthrew the Ghana king and became the king of the Mali Empire. Sundjata introduced several crops like, beans, rice, and cotton and made Mali prosperous. But in the 1970s Kamisoko the bard was troubled that the ruling elite of Mali wanted him to legitimate their rule through the oral traditions which he steadfastly refused. He was also castigated by the ruling classes for not being a true Muslim and not renouncing his private affiliation to Kirina Komo an indigenous religion to which being a Jeli he was excluded. He was outspoken of the fanaticism of some Islamic elements within Mali and traced it back to the times of Haji Mansa Musa the greatest Mali in history after Sundjata. Kamisoko resented the elite Arab-Berber supremacy that looked down on the blacks, who despite the status of Bilal the first muezzin in history to stand on the Kaaba and call the faithful to Prophet Mohammad was always considered an inferior a mawali. The Sahara seemed like a searing ember on the forehead that for ever blackened the face below and divided the African continent into The fair Arab-Berber north and the Bilad-As Sudan the land of the blacks which was the Dar-al-Kufr the region of unbelief (condemned to jahiliya or ignorance even after Mohammad) as against Dar-al-Islam of North Africa. One day fateful day in 1976 this songbird Kamisoko while tuning his lute was silenced by the powerful into the black depths of African history for daring to sing the few songs it ever sang. For so scarce was there a written document of the past in African history that this cycle of songs was some substitute to hearken antiquity.
Primeval, impenetrable a metaphor for the jungle, dark and unknown, such is the image of Africa in the colonial mind. Contemporary images are those of despotic regimes, widespread poverty, rampant corruption, epidemics and HIV/AIDS, civil wars, state collapses the pagaille or ‘mess’ as the Congolese put it. What is it that is fascinating about the history of Africa? It begs a series of questions that brings to fore our prejudice and assumptions, however false, about the nature of the subject. Can there really be a history of a continent? What is the unit of history when we are all schooled into history of a nation-state that retrospectively appropriates a past and represents it is a marker of identity. By looking for an African history are we essentializing Africa as singular, homogenous, invariant racial history of the blacks; as though race was its only significant category for study? They were as the racial theory suggests the sons of Ham rather than Shem or Japheth, black and backward (not “Burkina Faso” or the incorruptible man). How do the people themselves wish to represent and look at their past and who legitimates their choice when they may operate out of a paradigm of difference? When the consciousness of Africa as a homeland emerged it did so with the 12 million who survived the perilous overseas slave trade and yearned for a return. It is the Diaspora who imagined the unity of Africa not as a geographic territory but as a homeland. Does the history of Africa then extend beyond their shores across the Atlantic? The History of Africa is the history of the marginalised like that of colonial subjects, women and the poor. They were the cradle of mankind, survivors of some of the most inhospitable and infertile and disease infested terrains, speaking more tha1500 languages, and a challenge to anthropologists who use terms like heterarchy (as against hierarchy) and acephalous (almost headless) rather stateless to describe their political systems
History is necessary to build identity and often in many cases the past is imagined or reinvented to suit the desired identity. Identity is constructed, is based on kinship, religion, culture, language, and nation, is fluid in character and selectively appropriates a past. Yet of all things that determine identity with respect to Africa the most interesting one has been “tribe”. However tribal references of Africa were often pejorative references of some thing primitive and unlike their colonizers who pretended to bring civilization in their midst with their Bible and the gun. Often the people acknowledged their colonial masters’ notions of value and internalised them. Let’s look at two examples from the Rwanda-Burundi and that of the Dorobo.
It was May 6th 1994 a hot afternoon in Sovu, Rawanda where the nuns were at prayer in their convent in Sovu. Suddenly several refugees from the Tutsi tribe burst in begging to seek refuge and not be turned over to the marauding bands of Hutu rebels. Sister Gertrude the head of the convent was a Hutu and called in the Hutu militia. Hundreds of Tutsi were shot, hacked or burned to death. There were Tutsi nuns in her convent as well, all covered by a veil and no way to identify them. Sister Gertrude did not hand them over. Seeing this 19 year old girl Aline, the niece of a nun, begged Sister Gertrude to give her a habit and a veil to cover herself and be protected. Sister Gertrude refused and Aline was killed. Seven years later Sister Gertrude was convicted in Belgium of war crimes and among the witnesses was Aline’s mother who cried “my daughter died because of a little piece of cloth”. The European colonisers especially the Belgian in Rwanda had internalised the Victorian notion of the African race as descendents of Ham and that Tutsis embodied the Hamitic ideal of being tall pastoralists who dominated the Hutus who were shorter and were Bantu speaking. However these notions were wrong. Both the groups spoke the same language Banyarwanda. Several of the Hutus were cattle-keepers themselves and there were Hutus who were dominant and several Tutsis who were subservient. Moreover some Hutus became Tutsis and so did some Tutsis become Hutus. During the Belgian rule of Rwanda and Burundi all indigenes, all births were to be registered along with their tribal affiliations and that froze these permeable identities into something unchangeable; you could be either a Tutsi or Hutu and condemned by the choice. With the Belgians acknowledging the racial superiority of the Tutsis and thereby permitting them greater access to mission education and positions in the bureaucracy they fostered an inequity and conflict to dangerous levels that has haunted Rwanda until recently.
All identities shift, new ones are created or old ones are re-imagined and thus constructed, as the case of the Dorobo shows. The British who had colonised the Great Rift Valley that covers what is today Kenya and Tanzania in the early 20th century had allotted to the white settlers the most fertile of the highlands and held some of the tribal populations in special reserves. The original inhabitants Mukogodo were foragers and hunters and had not been pastoralists but were pushed into a settled way of life by the British in a special reserve. The neighbouring Maasai who were pastoralists had long looked down upon the Mukogodo and called them “people with no cattle” (il torrobo) in their language Maa. To the British it sounded like Dorobo and lumped all tribes there as the Dorobos. However in a final act of irony the Dorobos now, who became the new cattle lords, began lording over the Maasai with their cattle stocks and began a process of becoming Maasai themselves. They gave up their earlier identities including their Yaaku language and adopted the Maa as their tongue and thus created new re-imagined identities within two generations.
The Africans are now writing their own histories and are probably celebratory about it despite the crises that never seem to dwindle in their midst. 2007 was the 200th year of the abolition of slave trade in the Atlantic. An entire continent had been torn apart on issues of race, colour, and the commoditisation of man. The wounds still don’t heal. It has always seems that Pandora was from Africa with her ‘black’ box of human migrations. With hope set free Pandora can sleep less guilty.
A. Srinivas Rao
31st May 2011
It was a searingly hot afternoon in 1992, in the village of Pupu somewhere in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe; as the local orderly from the Ndebele people and a member of ZAPA (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) scanned the site for the ancient ritual the Umbiyiso to be held that night under the starry awning. It was to be “Heroes day” the next day. The Mugabe government was suspicious of this spirit ancestors’ ceremony and the switching of the loyalties of the Ndebele people. Mugabe never liked the ZAPA and he had achieved notoriety by killing several of their members. Many of the non-Ndebele people of Pupu were unhappy that their nationalist struggle would be credited to Lobengula, last king of the Ndebele. The evening falls langrously, the ceremony commences and the Svikiro or medium is beginning to feel the heady punch of the local brew rapoko beer. Several beer pots dot the end of the hut, on the ceremonial table is a plate of snuff and another one of ground maize and meat (sadza nenyama) and beer that has been offered to the ancestor spirits of the realm of Amadlozi. The gathering chant “woz ekhaya”…'come come' and pour small pots of beer on the head of an ox inkomo yamadlozi. There is a silence as the medium grunted and fretted and declared his identity. The non-Ndebele seemed relieved that he was an ancient spirit Rozwi mambo a ruler of the local people even before the Ndebele. The medium then exhorted the gathering to seek to recognize the older past and heal the wounds of the violence before he broke into incoherence. It was an order to transcribe their history.
Matabeleland has stood still in time like a primeval consciousness that recognised no object. Archaic, ancient, it had no record of history, oral or written. These Ndebele people were descendents of the great Zulu Mzilikazi who had rebelled against the Shaka king and proceeded to start his own tribe the Ndebele. A series of violent wars with the locals left a trail of destruction called the great scattering Mfecane where the local indigenous people were crushed or driven by the Ndebele. They then dominated the Transvaal between 1826-1836. The Boers (Dutch and other Europeans) battled the Ndebele until they were repelled by Mzilikazi in 1852. After Mzilikazi’s death his son Lobengula made his last stand with the British in 1893. It was thrown into a tumult when the ruling British (1888-1965) herded the Ndebele people into a reserve called Shangani. Through the 1890s the tribal chiefs of the Ndebele settled their uprooted people into the Shangani forests and often encountered resistance from the local dwellers who spoke many languages, the Tonga, Shangwe among others. The Ndebele looked down on these indigenes and considered themselves as modern, progressive and Christian and called the locals as Zambezis, while the locals called them Daluka the dumped ones. Under the colonial British they were all one race, essentially ‘black’ and a study in contrast, inferior, child like, irrational, everything that they were not; an essential ‘other’-The Orientalist. How a history could then be written for Africa is the question that teases us to this day and the spirit of Rozwi mambo yet asks them what they make of that question.
How does one write a history when there are no written records or when records are as sparse as the Saharan landscape and only littered in a few centres of learning like Timbuktu in Mali and Ethiopia. One possible way is to dig oral histories like those of the griots. It was 1976 and Waa Kamisoko was tuning his lute komasa to raise his strains as the best known griot or wandering bardic historian the Jeli. He was the best known of the Jeli in the Maghrib or the Muslim west that was North Africa; of the Manden or ancient Mali empire on the upper reaches of the river Niger. Few could surpass his insight or his great song on the Epic of the Sundjata based on the life of Sundjata Keita the ruler of the empire of Mali (1217-1255 CE). His was a tradition that bespoke of an ancient voice rising from the ruins of Jenne juno that dated 3rd century BCE, through the empires of Ghana (830-1235 BCE) followed by the Mali and that of Songhay that flourished till the 16th century. Kamisoko sang of Sundjata of the Mandinkas the son of Nare and Sogolon, conquered by the Ghana king Sumaoro Kante. Sundjata devoted his life to training and raising an army and overthrew the Ghana king and became the king of the Mali Empire. Sundjata introduced several crops like, beans, rice, and cotton and made Mali prosperous. But in the 1970s Kamisoko the bard was troubled that the ruling elite of Mali wanted him to legitimate their rule through the oral traditions which he steadfastly refused. He was also castigated by the ruling classes for not being a true Muslim and not renouncing his private affiliation to Kirina Komo an indigenous religion to which being a Jeli he was excluded. He was outspoken of the fanaticism of some Islamic elements within Mali and traced it back to the times of Haji Mansa Musa the greatest Mali in history after Sundjata. Kamisoko resented the elite Arab-Berber supremacy that looked down on the blacks, who despite the status of Bilal the first muezzin in history to stand on the Kaaba and call the faithful to Prophet Mohammad was always considered an inferior a mawali. The Sahara seemed like a searing ember on the forehead that for ever blackened the face below and divided the African continent into The fair Arab-Berber north and the Bilad-As Sudan the land of the blacks which was the Dar-al-Kufr the region of unbelief (condemned to jahiliya or ignorance even after Mohammad) as against Dar-al-Islam of North Africa. One day fateful day in 1976 this songbird Kamisoko while tuning his lute was silenced by the powerful into the black depths of African history for daring to sing the few songs it ever sang. For so scarce was there a written document of the past in African history that this cycle of songs was some substitute to hearken antiquity.
Primeval, impenetrable a metaphor for the jungle, dark and unknown, such is the image of Africa in the colonial mind. Contemporary images are those of despotic regimes, widespread poverty, rampant corruption, epidemics and HIV/AIDS, civil wars, state collapses the pagaille or ‘mess’ as the Congolese put it. What is it that is fascinating about the history of Africa? It begs a series of questions that brings to fore our prejudice and assumptions, however false, about the nature of the subject. Can there really be a history of a continent? What is the unit of history when we are all schooled into history of a nation-state that retrospectively appropriates a past and represents it is a marker of identity. By looking for an African history are we essentializing Africa as singular, homogenous, invariant racial history of the blacks; as though race was its only significant category for study? They were as the racial theory suggests the sons of Ham rather than Shem or Japheth, black and backward (not “Burkina Faso” or the incorruptible man). How do the people themselves wish to represent and look at their past and who legitimates their choice when they may operate out of a paradigm of difference? When the consciousness of Africa as a homeland emerged it did so with the 12 million who survived the perilous overseas slave trade and yearned for a return. It is the Diaspora who imagined the unity of Africa not as a geographic territory but as a homeland. Does the history of Africa then extend beyond their shores across the Atlantic? The History of Africa is the history of the marginalised like that of colonial subjects, women and the poor. They were the cradle of mankind, survivors of some of the most inhospitable and infertile and disease infested terrains, speaking more tha1500 languages, and a challenge to anthropologists who use terms like heterarchy (as against hierarchy) and acephalous (almost headless) rather stateless to describe their political systems
History is necessary to build identity and often in many cases the past is imagined or reinvented to suit the desired identity. Identity is constructed, is based on kinship, religion, culture, language, and nation, is fluid in character and selectively appropriates a past. Yet of all things that determine identity with respect to Africa the most interesting one has been “tribe”. However tribal references of Africa were often pejorative references of some thing primitive and unlike their colonizers who pretended to bring civilization in their midst with their Bible and the gun. Often the people acknowledged their colonial masters’ notions of value and internalised them. Let’s look at two examples from the Rwanda-Burundi and that of the Dorobo.
It was May 6th 1994 a hot afternoon in Sovu, Rawanda where the nuns were at prayer in their convent in Sovu. Suddenly several refugees from the Tutsi tribe burst in begging to seek refuge and not be turned over to the marauding bands of Hutu rebels. Sister Gertrude the head of the convent was a Hutu and called in the Hutu militia. Hundreds of Tutsi were shot, hacked or burned to death. There were Tutsi nuns in her convent as well, all covered by a veil and no way to identify them. Sister Gertrude did not hand them over. Seeing this 19 year old girl Aline, the niece of a nun, begged Sister Gertrude to give her a habit and a veil to cover herself and be protected. Sister Gertrude refused and Aline was killed. Seven years later Sister Gertrude was convicted in Belgium of war crimes and among the witnesses was Aline’s mother who cried “my daughter died because of a little piece of cloth”. The European colonisers especially the Belgian in Rwanda had internalised the Victorian notion of the African race as descendents of Ham and that Tutsis embodied the Hamitic ideal of being tall pastoralists who dominated the Hutus who were shorter and were Bantu speaking. However these notions were wrong. Both the groups spoke the same language Banyarwanda. Several of the Hutus were cattle-keepers themselves and there were Hutus who were dominant and several Tutsis who were subservient. Moreover some Hutus became Tutsis and so did some Tutsis become Hutus. During the Belgian rule of Rwanda and Burundi all indigenes, all births were to be registered along with their tribal affiliations and that froze these permeable identities into something unchangeable; you could be either a Tutsi or Hutu and condemned by the choice. With the Belgians acknowledging the racial superiority of the Tutsis and thereby permitting them greater access to mission education and positions in the bureaucracy they fostered an inequity and conflict to dangerous levels that has haunted Rwanda until recently.
All identities shift, new ones are created or old ones are re-imagined and thus constructed, as the case of the Dorobo shows. The British who had colonised the Great Rift Valley that covers what is today Kenya and Tanzania in the early 20th century had allotted to the white settlers the most fertile of the highlands and held some of the tribal populations in special reserves. The original inhabitants Mukogodo were foragers and hunters and had not been pastoralists but were pushed into a settled way of life by the British in a special reserve. The neighbouring Maasai who were pastoralists had long looked down upon the Mukogodo and called them “people with no cattle” (il torrobo) in their language Maa. To the British it sounded like Dorobo and lumped all tribes there as the Dorobos. However in a final act of irony the Dorobos now, who became the new cattle lords, began lording over the Maasai with their cattle stocks and began a process of becoming Maasai themselves. They gave up their earlier identities including their Yaaku language and adopted the Maa as their tongue and thus created new re-imagined identities within two generations.
The Africans are now writing their own histories and are probably celebratory about it despite the crises that never seem to dwindle in their midst. 2007 was the 200th year of the abolition of slave trade in the Atlantic. An entire continent had been torn apart on issues of race, colour, and the commoditisation of man. The wounds still don’t heal. It has always seems that Pandora was from Africa with her ‘black’ box of human migrations. With hope set free Pandora can sleep less guilty.
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