Power, Education, and Identity in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe: The Fate of King Lobengula of Matabeleland

The writing of history is dependent both on values and on methodology. An author’s values come to the fore most clearly when dealing with politically significant events that are difficult to reconstruct because evidence is scarce. This is evidenced in the way in which the indigenous historian Pathisa Nyathi represents Ndebele history as opposed to how colonial authors represent that history, on the one hand, and to how authors of Zimbabwean schoolbooks represent it, on the other. The positions of ‘Ndebele’, ‘colonial’ and ‘Zimbabwean’ authors are especially apparent in descriptions of three key events in Ndebele history: the origin of the Ndebele State, or why Mzilikazi Khumalo left Shaka Zulu in the early 1820s to settle in what is today Matabeleland; the succession crisis within the Ndebele State, or what happened to Mzilikazi’s son Nkulumane, who was elected king about 1840; and the end of the Ndebele State, or what happened to Mzilikazi’s successor Lobengula in 1893. They exemplify how Ndebele belonging has been built on colonial images and indigenous counterimages of the Ndebele as either ‘cruel’ or ‘brave’ warriors, how Ndebele identity is simultaneously constructed in relation to the colonial past and the present nation-State of Zimbabwe, and how indigenous authors in present-day southern Africa increasingly claim the right to define their own people in written form. Bibliogr., notes, ref.