By Julius Sai Mutyambizi-Dewa (posted on different sites — original source unclear)

I am a direct descendant of Emperor Netjasike, the last King of the Lozwi/Rozvi/BaNyai[Kalanga]. My greater grandfather Ntinima/Mutinhima was his first son. I have taken interest in the continuing debate about Njelele, a shrine that we are traditionally linked with but that have unfortunately become the centre of immature tribal bickering. Essentially it was and is a Kalanga shrine, we have always been the custodians but it was and is always a shrine for everyone. Religious shrines do not serve the priests and their families; they serve the religion and its followers as one whole. I must rush to say I am not oblivious of the sensitivities surrounding the issues here but seek to correct misconceptions for the good of the nation of Zimbabwe.

Is Njelele a holy Shrine and according to whom?

The question that needs to be asked first is whether Njelele is a Holy Shrine. The answer to that seems a resounding “Yes”. Njelele is the holiest of the shrines of the Mwali Religion. However it is not the only such shrine. Other Shrines are to be found at at Mahwemanyolo, Domboshaba in Botswana, Mapungubwe in South Africa, Domboshava in Mashonaland East in Zimbabwe, at Khami, at Nzhelele among the Venda in South Africa, etc. The next question is “Whose shrine is it?” The answer is it is clearly a shrine for people who were at one time part of the Lozwi Empire and these include parts of South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique and the whole of what is now Zimbabwe. It has never been personalised or tribalised. It is our Njelele together, as a people. When Mzilikazi settled in what is now Matabeleland he found the shrine there and also worshipped and respected everything he found there. I am in no doubt that his respect for Njelele extended to its inclusiveness and this is why Mashonaland based prophets such as Chaminuka continued to have access to Njelele even under Mzilikazi and Lobengula’s rule. He never closed Njelele to anyone and this is why at no point did Njelele become an issue surrounding Ndebele-Shona relations.But yes Njelele like any other holy shrines, has rules that must be observed. Njelele has its own custodians and traditionally it is the Moyo, Ncube, Mpofu and Dube people that have leadership and prestine roles at Njelele. The question to ask at this point is “has this been observed”?

Chiefs Nematombo, Chivero, Nyajena and Marange

I have picked the above for a reason. Does their entrance into Njelele breach anything? Do they have the locus standi to be in Njelele? The answer is “Yes”. In fact all the four chiefs are originally from Matabeleland which is popularly referred to as “Guruuswa” or “Butwa” in pre-colonial Zimbabwe. The founding ancestor of Chief Nematombo is Ntinima/Mutinhima, my ancestor and Emperor Netjasike’s first son. History has it that he left Matabeleland after a quarrel with his father, passed through places such as Buhera and ended up in Mhondoro in Mashonaland West. Apart from the name Ntinima/Mutinhima he was also known by the code names “Nyakuvambwa” and “Nevanji” which simply meant first born. He had another shine at Nharira. His brothers were Basvi, Luzani (also known as Ruzane/Rozani) and Rovanyika [who settled in Wedza], Lukuluba[ also known as Huruva, Mukuruva and Washayanyika], Dlembeu [also known as Mashonganyika], Tohwetjipi [also known as Sibumbamu]. They had several sons among them Mhepo [also known Mawachini [what have you heard], Mutyambizi [also known as Kaseke/Kasekete], Chigavazira [also known by the names Tumbale and Chitomborwizi], Dzumbunu, Tandi, Chimombe, Matibenga, Gumunyu, Malisa, Mangena, Bidi etc. Some of their sons were Kadungure, Mapondera, Kunaka, Chitate, Chikumbirike, my grandfather Munemo etc.

But as a King he never moved alone. The Lozwi had spies, known as “gwanangwa” and their chief spies where the Mpofu, who were known by the titles Tjibelu and Mundambeli, meaning those who were the advance party in military terms. Chief Chivero [Shonalised version of Tjibelu] was tasked with this. Up to now the praise lines of Chief Chivero’s people are: “Shava[Mhofu], Chivero [Tjibelu], Mwendamberi[Mundambeli]; gwenzi rakaviga Mambo[the one who hid the King] and this meaning the one who was with Mutinhima/Ntinima as he escaped from his father Netjasike. Nyajena and Marange are also of the same line as Chivero. Mutinhima had many sons with different women and this led to so many chiefdoms in Mashonaland that are directly descended from him and through him, Netjasike. These are Negomo, Nematombo, Nyamweda, Samuriwo, Kasekete, Chimombe, Tandi, Chiduku etc. Chivero has other related chiefdoms such as Chirau.

I haven’t mentioned Makumbe, Goronga, Makoni as I am not so sure what roles they were playing but I believe Makoni’s presence may have been due to his relationship with Chiduku, another of chiefdoms that have a direct links with Mutinhima[Ntinima] and through him, Netjasike. Nyajena neighbours Samuriwo and Marange neighbours Tandi and both Njajena and Marange may have played the same role that Chivero played on Mutinhima to Samuriwo and Tandi, being his advance party as both are Mhofu. One thing is clear, all these chiefs have their recent roots in present day Matabeleland. Everyone in present day Mashonaland whose isithemo/chidawu/praise title is Vakabva Guruuswa [those who came from Guruuswa] has his or her origins in present day Matabeleland and they left that area in the late 19th century. All of them are clearly permitted as a matter of their bloodline to take part in rituals in Njelele.

If Chief Nswazi could return to Botswana I do not see how the above chiefs could be blocked from entering Matabeleland and taking part in holy rituals there. Their attendance at Njelele has clearly been blown out of proportion to gain political mileage which is unfortunate. Matabeleland is their homeland, and Njelele is their shrine. We cannot hide behind political correctness in these matters. These chiefs are Kalanga by all accounts, and going back simply is retracing their roots. We can’t be more direct than that. Father Zimbabwe Joshua Nkomo was given his treasured emblem by a Mashonaland Chief, Chinamhora following rituals that had started at Domboshava which is in Chinamhora’s area. The Longwe people of Malawi still have connections to this day with their Swazi cousins and they conduct joint rituals even to this day. As Ndebeles discuss the possibility of restoring their Monarchy some point at Nkulumane’s family, and they are based in South Africa and have never been in Matabeleland. Obvious if the Lozwi[Kalanga] start discussing about the possibilities of restoring their own Monarchy they may also have to discuss the possibilities of someone based in present day Mashonaland or even Botswana or Malawi as they trace Netjasike’s family.

Consulting other traditional leaders

Respect is always important and has always been the cornerstone of healthy relationships. Chiefs of the area should have been contacted. This do it alone mentality is really defeatist and it is what should be criticised. But the Chief’s must be able to discuss these issues in the Chief’s council. I am sure Chiefs Bango and Tshtshi can bring the issue forward. I don’t see how politics should then become seized of a matter that can easily blow out of hand if in the hands of politicians. We have systems that can be used and this is why we have a Chiefs’ Council. This is a sensitive area which demands responsible approach as at the centre of it are historical issues that politics has been unwilling to discuss. Had issues of accountability and the powers of traditional leaders including the return of monarchs been addressed without the influence of political correctness we wouldn’t be where we are. Uganda has several kingdoms, any people that ask for it and can justify it have been given the go ahead. The UDI-era atrocities and Gukurahundi are long overdue we should have done with them already and moved the country forward.

History, geography and genotype, not contemporary demography that is largely a design of colonialism and irresponsible politics means Zimbabwe was, is and ought to be a united country. Anyone thinking otherwise unnecessarily plays into a very sensitive matter and risks being judged harshly by the future. What happened in Rwanda is not a play, not even a real life drama. We lost people there. What happened during Gukurahundi is not a campaign matter; we lost people then. Maturity is very important and this is why I condemn in equal measure those who are attempting to block people from Mashonaland from accessing Njelele as if it’s in Europe and also those who went to Njelele without the clearance of the local traditional leadership. Inventing no go areas that never happened in our country is cheap. So is the defeatism portrayed by the traditional leaders from Mashonaland. Real leaders would have sat down together and mapped the way as all the traditional leaders of Zimbabwe and done the cleansing rituals for everyone who took part in the liberation struggle and that includes both ZANLA and ZIPRA. Without any doubt and judging with the behaviour of some of the war veterans, a cleansing ceremony is long overdue. But doing it alone will not benefit anyone.

by Abel A. Mabuse Sunday Standard

Over the last two months, I have read with shock and sometimes disdain at some apparent confusion surrounding the settlement history of Bukalanga. Since December 2012, a number of disingenuous newspaper articles have been published on these two related topics. Misleading information covered in these issues has compelled me to offer some direction on the settlement history of Bukalanga. Among the disingenuous articles I read, there are three which I find interesting.

One article covers a story of one certain Facebook elected Ndebele Induna (chief) who claims to have the right to political leadership of all Bakalanga found in the North East District (NED).  The misled leader is a youthful man better described in newspapers as a tertiary dropout who goes by the name Nhlanhla Simon. The claims by Simon were reported in an article in which Dr Manatsha was erroneously quoted by one Mmegi journalist Lawrence Seretse. Information on the arrival of Baperi of Nswazwi and Tjilagwane in Bukalanga was clearly misinterpreted in the article. Dr Manatsha subsequently offered a candid chronicle of events leading to the NED land situation and chieftainship quandary in a paper published in Volume 30, no 24 of Mmegi dated 15 February 2013. The paper focused mainly on the NED and clarified some misrepresentation of historical events covered in the Seretse article.

The other two articles mainly cover the settlement history of Baperi of Tjilagwane in Bukalanga. Of interest is a recent article written by She (Kgosi) Alphonse Nsala of Tjilagwane ward in Tutume. His article titled ‘The real story of Baperi of Tjilagwane’ appeared in Mmegi newspaper volume 30 No 32 dated 01 March 2013. This is in fact a rebuttal of an earlier account of Baperi of Tutume published by one Barati Mathambo in Mmegi of 13 December 2012. In his account, She Nsala of Tjilagwane attempted but did not quite succeed in correcting some historical delusions carried in Mathambo’s article on the settlement history of the Baperi living in Bulilima (areas of Bukalanga around Sebina, Nshakazhogwe, Madandume, Tjilagwane and Nswazwi where Lilima dialect is spoken).

The point raised by the leader of Tjilagwane about the settlement of the Baperi at Old Shoshong and their subsequent movement to Old Palapye with Bangwato is inconsistent with the available body of literature of the origins of Baperi. Secondly, the statement that the Baperi were led by Tjilagwane and Shabalume into Bukalanga in 1902 is not correct. She Nsala should know that since the Baka Nswazwi Royal Dynasty spans at least 8 generations, his 1902 date cannot be correct. To buttress my point, the dynasty begins with Shabalume who becomes Nswazwi I and ends with John Madawo Nswazwi stylised Nswazwi VIII. This historical information is freely available at the tombstone of She John Madawo Nswazwi VIII at Nswazwi Royal Cemetery. If She John Madawo Nswazwi VIII was born in 1875 in Bukalanga, how is it possible that his first generation forefather, Shabalume or Nswazwi I, led Baperi from Old Palapye into Bukalanga in 1902?

Another important aspect that can be deduced from She Nsala and Barati Mathambo’s articles is the extensive misinterpretation of the settlement record of Bulilima region in Bukalanga. The two articles fail to acknowledge that when Baperi arrived in the areas around Tutume, they found the Bawumbe of Madandume in the areas around Duthu la Majambubi. The Bawumbe of Madandume, Nshakazhogwe, Motshwane ward in Sebina and BaSenete are Balilima. They venerate tjibelu as their totem and have the longest occupation record in Bukalanga than any other groups found in the area.

These people lived in areas around present day Tutume, Goshwe, Nkange up to Maitengwe as early as AD 1700 (Mabuse 2012). The residences of the chiefs of these Balilima are found on hilltop ruins such as Selolwane near Tjilagwane, Sulawali and Matombo Mashaba on the western side of Madandume. The largest of these prehistoric Balilima villages is found at Magapatona Ruin, some 5 kilometres north of Goshwe village. These Balilima people were found here by all Sotho-Tswana-turned Bakalanga groups of Baperi of Tjilagwane, Nswazwi and Masunga and the Bakaya of Tjizwina.

NOTE: The rest of Mabuse’s original article was a history of Bakalanga settlement, which has been posted in the history section of this site.

*Abel A. Mabuse is Head of Archaeological Research Laboratory at Botswana National Museum and writes in his personal capacity as an Archaeologist with Bukalanga roots.

FRANCISTOWN: The Botswana government has been urged to recognise all the spoken languages to help revive the seemingly dying culture in the country. Francistown councillors agreed that the non-recognition of minority languages while focusing on Setswana languages only has resulted in “our culture dying a natural death”.

Debating the government’s idea of reviving culture through the recently introduced Constituency Arts and President’s Day Arts competitions, councillors in the country’s second city dismissed the development as a joke. Jefferson Siamisang, the Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Youth, Sport and Culture, said he is convinced that the constituency art and President’s Day arts competitions have added fresh impetus to government’s efforts towards reviving culture.

Siamisang said this when presenting the “mandate and programmes” of his ministry to the Francistown full council session recently.”These (constituency and President’s Day competitions) promote cultural revival and unpolluted recreation,” he said.  Echoing the country’s founding president Sir Seretse Khama, Siamisang said “a nation without a past is a lost nation”.He said the competitions are held in a spirit of togetherness, joy, happiness and self-reliance, as culture demands. Siamisang remains confident that the competitions will help breathe new life into the disappearing culture of Batswana.

However, Francistown councillors think otherwise. They said for the government to achieve the aspirations of reviving culture, it should start by recognising all the minor languages in the country. “Culture is one’s identity.And one is identified through a language,” explained Ikageleng East ward councillor, Tabengwa Tabengwa.”But as long as my own language that defines who I am, is not recognised in this country, forget about reviving culture,” said a seemingly fuming Tabengwa while mixing Setswana and Kalanga language.

Tabengwa said Ikalanga should be reintroduced and other languages introduced in learning institutions’ syllabi.Boikhutso ward councillor Robert Mosweu concurred, saying the government should start by recognising all spoken languages in Botswana if it is to achieve its explicit goal.

Stanley Masalila, councillor for Bluetown ward, said one cannot be taught culture through dancing and singing.”One has to know his/her language first before talking about teaching him/her about the culture,” he said.Siamisang agreed with councillors that culture and language are inseparable. He promised that government would look into the suggestions to speed cultural revival in Botswana.

by Bawumbe wa Chiwidi, repr. Sunday Standard

This paper provides a critique of the Domboshaba Festival of Culture and History. The opinions raised here result from a critical evaluation of objectives of Domboshaba Cultural Trust, the chief proponent and organisers of the cultural festival and general intentions of the event itself.

The need for this evaluation is compelled by sceptical reports, rising levels of dissatisfaction by traditional leaders and communities of Bukalanga at large on the future of what is arguably one of the largest cultural festivals in Botswana. In general, there is a public outcry that apart from a few traditional Kalanga huts built at the famous site where the festival is held annually, there is absolutely nothing more to show that this festival is of benefit to Bakalanga.

This is despite large amounts of money generated annually through gate takings, selling of various Kalanga regalia and even funds that are brought in through sponsorships and event donations. Many critics argue that the festival has now been detached from communities, lost meaning and is alarmingly turning into a commercial consortium that worries more about raising money than showcasing and promoting the culture of Bakalanga.

Digression of the festival from its original mandate, lack of active involvement of communities and sidelining of traditional leaders of Bukalanga as well as the apparent absence of a sustainable approach towards ensuring benefits to communities necessitates this paper.

As a result of the views advanced above, this year’s Domboshaba Cultural Festival should be more important to the organizing committee than any other held before. First of all, it provides an excellent opportunity for them to learn from last year’s poor attendance, lacklustre speeches reported in the Midweek Sun newspaper and unconvincing commentary provided by the area’s Member of Parliament and the few so called ‘prominent Bakalanga’ who spoke at the Open Forum at the last event.

The low levels of public participation at the Mayedziso (evening session) held at Kalakamati as well as the main event held at Domboshaba festival grounds should certainly provide a motive for improvement. This can only be feasible in the long run if the organizing committee can shift their focus from luring more people to the event for sake of generating funds.

They should instead work on establishing ways through which they can use the festival to generate a pool of relevant ideas which can be used to send the message to the ordinary Bakalanga people; the young, elderly and even physically challenged who do not go to the festival. This focus will require the organizing committee to revisit the mandate set up for Domboshaba Cultural Trust

At its inception on the 26th March 2006, the Trust sought to preserve and promote both the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of Bakalanga through a number of interrelated objectives. Of paramount importance among these are; organization of the annual Domboshaba Festival of History and Culture, resuscitation of traditional Kalanga craft production practices, enter into strategic partnerships to foster fundraising activities, development and management of a cultural village, to establish and maintain links with local authorities, Department of Culture, community organisations, land boards and any existing bodies that deal with promotion of culture including external bodies such as the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). This list forms the essence of major objectives that the Trust exists to achieve in Bukalanga.

The second major point of introspection that the organizing committee and The trust should do, is to try to understand their major stakeholder, Bakalanga people living in Botswana.

There is serious need for those at the helm to appreciate the fact that Bukalanga of North East District and the one falling in the Central District differ politically and culturally. While the former enjoys some degree of political autonomy, the latter falls, according to the Constitution of the Republic of Botswana, within the jurisdiction of Bangwato chieftainship.

This point shall be discussed further to elaborate on the need for an open minded, as opposed, to radical approach in mobilisation of communities to promote Ikalanga culture and language.

Another point that the Trust needs to appreciate is the relevance of Domboshaba Hills and the Domboshaba National Monument in the all-important process of reviving Ikalanga culture and language. Is it pure coincidence that the festival is held at the Domboshaba Hills not far from the nationally acclaimed monument of Domboshaba Ruins? If the answer to this question is in the negative as one would expect, then we need to question whether this festival resembles the exact meaning of what these two prominent places hold in the history of Bukalanga. Domboshaba Hills are significant in that they are a prehistoric area openly used for trading purposes in the whole of Bukalanga found in Botswana today and beyond.

One cannot help but wonder whether the present day Domboshaba provides Bakalanga of today an opportunity to trade openly ( instead of freely) at the area during the festival.

This point will be clarified later to elaborate some egocentrism displayed in recent times when the festival’s organisers chased away members of the community selling crafts, Kalanga meals and other essential commodities that the organisers did not even provide. Instead of viewing and treating these people as traders to resemble and therefore revive the prehistoric trading practice conducted at Domboshaba in the past, these poor people were cast out and labelled as vendors.

The third factor deals with the need for recognizing the role that community leaders play in preservation and even revival of cultural practices. There is need to realize that Bakalanga chiefs are traditional custodians of the culture of their people. From as far back as the early days of Bakalanga civilization around AD 1000, chiefs played the all-important role of determining the direction in which the culture of their people had to take.

They did this either by allowing foreign influence or discouraging it. They have always managed to do this as they are perpetually empowered by the virtue of their hereditary position in society to influence acceptable behavioural patterns in their communities. Failure to consult and closely work with them, as is the case now at Domboshaba festival, results in mistrust and alienation of Bakalanga people from making meaningful contribution in the otherwise good course of reviving their culture.
As mentioned above, there is general failure (perhaps deliberate) in the organisers of the event to appreciate and even understand the dynamics of chieftainship in the Bukalanga area falling within the Central District. The chiefs in this region have no authority to make a collective and final decision regarding certain issues revolving adjudication of the area which traditionally or culturally belongs to Bakalanga without consulting their ‘superiors’ at Serowe.

This is worsened by the fact that their positions as community leaders has become a fully paid job that is regulated by policies just like any other that is held by the organizing team.

Radical, unpopular and misguided approaches in the revival of Bakalanga culture and addressing sensitive issues like the need for political independence from Bangwato rule has potential to steer unnecessary tribal wars in the country. Apart from that, it is considered offensive within the realm of their job descriptions as it will be tantamount to insubordination.

To engage these chiefs and win their support in promotion of Bakalanga culture and language requires patience and understanding of their unfortunate positions. Today, many people living in the North East District label chiefs and fellow Bakalanga living in the Central District as sell-outs due to their lack of appreciation of these critical matters.

The case of the Baka Nswazwi and the ultimate results of their struggle against Bangwato domination during the 1940s remains a deep and ugly scar in the memories of elderly people in the Bukalanga part of the Central District. This therefore calls for Domboshaba Cultural Trust to adopt a different approach when dealing with these chiefs. Alienating and labelling them as Bangwato puppets will not help in addressing the issue of promoting Ikalanga culture.

Domboshaba Cultural Trust also needs to understand the dynamics needed in reviving and promoting Ikalanga culture. In the 7 years of their existence, what plan do they have in place to ensure that Bakalanga people do not go back to their respective homes and continue their normal lives each year after the annual Domboshaba Cultural Festival?

Apart from the Trust’s assumed office in Francistown and the cultural festival grounds in the Domboshaba Hills, where else do we have structures in place to ensure continuous implementation of the objectives of the Trust in all parts of Bukalanga?

As we do not have satellite offices or even desks at Tati Siding, Masunga, Mosojane, Mathangwane, Nata, Gweta, Sebina, Tutume and Maitengwe, can we certainly claim that an event that is attended only by those who have money to pay bus fees or use their own transport to go to Domboshaba Hills is enough to spearhead a revival of Ikalanga cultural practices? Do we see the impact caused by failure of the festival’s core values and messages to reach children aged between 4 & 15 and elderly people who are usually left behind with them? Is it not ironical then that the messages and important cultural practices conducted at Domboshaba do not reach the major targeted group; our children?

*Bawumbe wa Chiwidi is a pseudonym for a concerned Nkalanga

by Kangangwani Phatshwane, Sunday Standard

Domboshaba Cultural Trust (DCT) wishes to respond to an article (titled Another look at Domboshaba cultutral festival and Bakalanga heritage – Part 1) which appeared in the Sunday Standard of 11 – 17 August 2013 authored by a concerned Nkalanga using a pseudonym, Bawumbe wa Chiwidi.

DCT welcomes open debate as the author of the said article himself acknowledges allocation of time for an open forum at the annual Domboshaba Festival of Culture and History (DFCH), so-named deliberately in recognition of the significance of the pre-colonial Domboshaba Ruins in Bakalanga heritage. However, DCT wishes to correct inaccuracies and innuendoes which if left uncorrected might cause unnecessary discord among Bakalanga as well as besmirch the good name of the festival.

The formation of DCT was formally endorsed by traditional and community leaders at a well-attended and representative meeting in August 2005. Ever since all Bakalanga traditional leaders have been invited to annual general meetings of the Trust and have two ex-officio representatives on the board of trustees. In fact DCT has received significant support from traditional leaders across Bukalanga. DCT, therefore, finds Bawumbe’s claims of ‘rising levels of dissatisfaction by traditional leaders and communities…’ absurd given that the traditional leaders and communities referred to are free (and in fact encouraged) to participate in different fora of DCT.

The insinuation that DFCH is of little benefit to Bakalanga is also not accurate. The festival provides and will continue to provide a forum for the expression of Bakalanga culture and heritage. In addition, the festival has inspired many cultural festivals across Botswana, which in DCT’s considered view is a significant contribution. The direct and indirect spend arising from the annual festival events is significant to both formal and informal businesses most of which are either owed by or employ locals.

The festival was started by volunteers, continues to be organised by volunteers and adopted a organic model where initial resources to organise it were raised by the community of Bakalanga, until it grew to a level where sponsors could be brought on board. DCT remains a non – profit organisation whose financial statements are open for discussion at annual general meetings. The suggestion by Bawumbe that the festival is ‘turning into a commercial consortium’ is inaccurate and misleading. Another inaccuracy by Bawumbe is the assumption that the festival makes large amounts of money from gate takings and the sale of memorabilia. The fact is these two sources of income contribute less that the total cost of hosting the festival, which cost stands at just under P200 000 per annum.

Bawumbe raises a concern over the treatment of informal traders and suggests that there ought to be freedom of exchange like there was in pre-colonial Bukalanga. While he has got a point, the reality is that most traders attracted by the festival present not to sell traditional craft and Kalanga food (both of which are encouraged by DCT) but clear beer carried in deep freezers. The main challenge has been the attendant littering, the offence such littering causes to local authorities and the burden it places on DCT to clean up.

DCT’s mandate as correctly quoted by Bawumbe is the promotion of Bakalanga culture and language, mainly but not only for the people who have been living in that area of Botswana for more than a 1 000 years. To DCT’s knowledge, there is no division among Bakalanga save that some live west and others east of the Shashe River within the Central and North East Districts respectively but are in fact governed by the same laws of Botswana and therefore challenged in equal measure by any weaknesses in such laws and their administration, whether there are colonial or post-colonial in origin.

However, the culture of Bakalanga east and west of Shashe is identical as the culture had existed for centuries before the more recent administrative boundary demarcations in 1895. The suggestion by Bawumbe that for the purpose of promoting Bakalanga culture and language, these Bakalanga communities be treated differently or that DCT is insensitive to their location differences and/or as to whom they pay allegiance is also patently as absurd as it is shortsighted.

In conclusion, we acknowledge that community engagement could be intensified but remain confident that Bakalanga and other stakeholders recognise the significance of Domboshaba festival and will continue to support it. Could more progress have been made? Yes. To realise even faster progress, DCT invites all interested, including Bawumbe wa Chiwindi, to attend DCT’s annual general meetings, and influence and support the development and promotion of Bakalanga culture and language, submitting ideas that can be tested at such meetings for relevance, appropriateness and feasibility in pursuance of the DCT’s mandate.

by Bawumbe wa Chiwidi, Sunday Standard

This article provides further discussion on the Domboshaba Cultural Festival and Bakalanga heritage. Admittedly, this discussion appears to have angered some people, particularly those who do not subscribe to open dialogue, criticism and alternative views on how we need to organize, manage and develop the diverse heritage of Bukalanga.

I have read the rebuttal article authored by one Kangangwani Phatshwane in which he tried to address pertinent issues regarding Domboshaba festival covered in the article I put forward about 3 weeks ago. The views expressed by his rejoinder article on Domboshaba Cultural Trust’s (DCT) poor event, organisation and management skills evident in the last festival are not convincing at all. To set the record straight, the views expressed in the article entitled ‘Another look at Domboshaba Festival and Bakalanga Heritage’ are consistent with those forwarded by many youth in various Bakalanga social network groups that discuss and share Bakalanga history, culture, language and other issues.

Lamentations and utter disappointment among some youth expressed in these social networks and concerns of the majority of Bakalanga elders (as mentioned in the introductory article) provides motivation to continue this discussion. As an optimistic and patriotic Nkalanga, I am not going to fold my arms and wish for the best from Domboshaba Cultural Trust or any organisation that shows signs of derailment in the holistic pursuit to promote, develop and preserve our cultural heritage. Like the majority of the youth who are unshaken in their conviction that the Trust is not doing certain things right, I remain untainted by Kangangwani Phatshwane’s sarcastic personal response. I consider his views personal as his rejoinder article fails or omits any relationship he has with Domboshaba Cultural Trust. I hope that such omission is intentional and does not reflect personalization of the Trust to such an extent that he no longer sees the difference between himself and the DCT. As such, I will continue to critique and condemn, where necessary, unpopular decisions and approaches consistent in the organisation and management of Domboshaba festival. Alternative views regarding how Bakalanga heritage should be managed need to be taken seriously.

My substitute views of Domboshaba festival should not be regarded as a total dismissal of those who are organizing the event only. Instead, it reflects that I recognize the invaluable input made by all those who have been instrumental in the development of the Domboshaba festival from its infantry to where it stands today. I have no doubt that it is by far one of the largest cultural festivals conducted in Botswana. I appreciate that this festival stands out to show the need to promote and pride ourselves with our unique cultural heritage as different ethnic groups making up this nation.

If this festival was not at this advanced stage of development, I would not waste my precious time providing insights and advice on what needs to be done to achieve better results. Kangangwani Phatshwane and all those who found part 1 of these articles too negative and inconsiderate should subscribe to the views offered by Kabajan Sam Kaunda’s article titled Criticism and Opposition : critical premises for progress – Part 1, which was published in the Sunday Standard newspaper of August 18 -24, 2013.

Kaunda’s article stands out to support my view that the diversity of the Bakalanga heritage (as opined in my last article) warrants an opportunity for alternative ways of doing things. I am duty bound to remind those who shudder at the slightest mention of their inadequacies that questioning, dismissal or providing dissident opinion should not allow them to believe that such criticism is aimed at destroying them. Members of Domboshaba Cultural Trust should open up to all sorts of criticism, irrespective of whether it is constructive, destructive or instructive in nature. As leaders in the organisation of a cultural festival in which Bakalanga wish to showcase and appreciate their cultural heritage, they should learn to develop a thick skin that tolerates criticism. By eliminating their obvious phobia of being criticized openly and being emotional about how much effort they put in volunteering for the festival, they can certainly register progress and yield better results.

In the last article, I raised concern over lack of development at the Domboshaba cultural grounds and mentioned that there is little progress in terms of development at the site apart from few Ikalanga traditional huts and the wooden fence or bhakasa as it is locally known. By raising this issue, I was not suggesting misappropriation of funds as Phatshwane seems to believe. I was purely making an open and obvious statement that DCT needs to think outside the box. They obviously need to find alternative ways of raising funds for developing the cultural village. They also need to come up with other progressive initiatives that can help Bakalanga realize tangible benefits from sustainable development and management of their cultural heritage. The current physical outlook of the Domboshaba cultural festival location demeans the importance of the otherwise rich and diverse cultural and natural heritage of Bukalanga.

DCT needs to realize that Domboshaba festival is not identical to Bakalanga cultural heritage. In my mentioning of the 1000-year-old development of this culture, I wanted to highlight that the 13-year-old Domboshaba festival is certainly not the first cultural ceremony held by Bakalanga. Its existence today is simply a platform aimed at perpetuating certain aspects of Bakalanga heritage that were begun by our ancestors in Bukalanga as far back in time as 1000 years ago.

One cannot help but wonder why I should not be worried when the festival has now turned into a commercial centre where stalls that should be focusing on promoting Ikalanga culture are reserved for government organisations, NGOs and few individuals? Is it sensible for instance to chase away a small scale Nkalanga craftsman selling wooden spoons, bowls, pestles and mortars who needs to sell his craft inside the Domboshaba yard and invite Phafana beer company just because they can pay amounts that are required for putting up a stall? How many craft producers do we support at the annual Domboshaba festival?

If DCT and any other Bakalanga pride ourselves with our delele, thopi, mashonja, bhobola, tjimoni, swaye, dhobi and zembgwe, why does DCT prefer established companies like Curry Pot to continue to serve modernized versions of these dishes at the festival when we can support a group of Bakalanga women to produce original menus and sell at the festival? This is certainly a better way of ensuring tangible benefits to a wider group of Bakalanga than a situation where one individual is favoured at the expense of the majority. Does DCT have an answer as to why it has to engage Curry Pot catering company which is owned by the area’s Member of Parliament and fail to develop means of empowering ordinary Bakalanga women and even youth?

Kangangwani Phatshwane and DCT need to own up to the demands and aspirations of the modern day Bakalanga. Modern day cultural activists do not pride themselves on organising well attended festivals only. They go beyond that and find means through which they can develop, promote and sustainably utilise cultural heritage for the benefit of their communities. In the last article, I asked several rhetorical questions which were intended to help DCT and its committee to look at Bakalanga heritage beyond ndazula, woso, iperu, poetry and singing the National Anthem in Ikalanga. These are of course necessary, but should no longer be worried about their survival now. We need to focus on helping ordinary Bakalanga benefit from their cultural heritage.

We are tired of seeing a parade of University of Botswana (UB) academics at Domboshaba festival. The irony of this display is that while a majority of them spend a considerable amount of their careers in high and influential positions in this country, they do pretty little or nothing at all during those careers to drive the course of promoting critical matters such as the need to teach Ikalanga language in Bukalanga schools and development of Bukalanga at large.

Is it not ironical that it is only now that a group of retired Bakalanga are waking up to the fact that despite the high positions of influence they held for so long in the country, they failed to help develop Bukalanga? The UB scholars should be reminded as early as now that Domboshaba festival is not an academic gathering like a graduation ceremony where they are expected to be at the helm.
The festival is about promoting (not teaching) Ikalanga culture. My advice to them is to avoid falling in the trap of the ‘elders’ who recently petitioned the Office of the President to complain about a lack of certain developments that they clearly failed to facilitate during their prime time when they were still at the helm.

The academics should consider forgetting about their lust to be Masters of Ceremonies at the festival and organize academically oriented conferences on Ikalanga language, culture, history and other life challenges affecting Bakalanga. The last conference of this kind was held in October 14 and 15 1989 at the Civic Centre in Francistown. Since Bakalanga children born on this date have graduated from some of the courses they teach at the UB, they too need to graduate from their MC roles at Domboshaba and concern themselves with providing relevant answers to the development and management of culture of Bakalanga.

* Bawumbe wa Chiwidi is a pseudonym for a concerned Nkalanga

by Ndzimu-unami Emmanuel Moyo (repr. from ZimEye)

One day not many years ago whilst passing by the Plumtree District Hospital, I overheard two men arguing about the people bearing the surname ‘Moyo’. The other gentlemen, apparently a Moyo himself, was fiercely arguing that he is a Ndebele, whilst the other one, who apparently believed himself to be the ‘real Ndebele’, argued that the other gentlemen is a Shona, declaring, “vele bonke oMoyo ngamaShona.”

The line taken by this gentleman is common, especially if one is a follower of debates of this nature on Facebook, Online Newspapers and Chatrooms. I have joked sometimes and said that if the Moyo people are really Shona, then ‘Matebeleland’ has to be changed to ‘Mashonaland’ since people bearing the royal surname Moyo constitute perhaps at least 50% of Matebeleland (randomly gather any 10 people in Matebeleland chances are 5 are Moyos).

“The Kalanga are a hybrid of the Ndebele and Karanga”

The above was used just as an illustration of the confusion that exists in Matebeleland in particular and Zimbabwe in general as to the identity of the people known as the Kalanga, or Bakalanga, BaNambya and Vhavenda. This confusion is compounded by the official Zimbabwean history narrative which actively seeks to promote the idea that the Kalanga are a hybrid of the Karanga and Ndebele who only came into being in the 18th century as a result of Ndebele-Karanga intermarriages. It further claims that the “L” in TjiKalanga was dropped from the “R” in ChiKaranga as a result of Ndebele influence.

Of course this narrative falls on itself in three ways. First, it ignores the fact that when Mzilikazi and his Ndebele arrived in what is now ‘Matebeleland’, the Kalanga were already in occupation of that
region. Secondly, it does not explain how the Kalanga are found in Botswana and the Limpopo Province (Brakpan River Saltpan) where the Ndebele never settled, and they have been in those regions for many centuries before the 18th. Thirdly, the narrative ignores the fact that TjiKalanga properly spoken contains no Ndebele words at all. It surely could not only have borrowed the “L” only from IsiNdebele and nothing else.

Why we should answer the question: Who are the Kalanga?

This question becomes more urgent to ask now that the Constitution of Zimbabwe recognizes the Kalanga as a distinct people group separate from the Ndebele and Shona. It also becomes important to ask and answer because, with the new Constitution recognizing the Kalanga as a distinct group, there will be a need to teach their history in addition to the language.

One of the tragedies of the Kalanga is that their history has been parceled out between the Shona and Ndebele. The precolonial history
has been ‘given’ to the Shona (for example, it is falsely claimed that the Shona built Maphungubgwe, Great Zimbabwe, Khami, etc; that the
Shona were the Monomotapa, Togwa and Lozwi Kingdom peoples, etc). Post-colonialism, all Kalanga nationalist leaders – Dr Joshua Nkomo,
JZ Moyo, TG Silundika, John Landa Nkomo, Alfred Nikita Mangena, etc are presented as Ndebele.

The sum of it is that the Kalanga are practically left with no history of their own at all, which obviously negatively affects the self-esteem and pride of a Kalanga child who is made to grow up believing that his or her own people have never achieved anything worthwhile in this world.

So, who are the Kalanga?

It will no doubt take many articles, or a whole book (as in my book, The Rebirth of Bukalanga), to answer this question. But we can briefly
answer this question in this short article to at least give the reader an idea of who the Kalanga are as a People.

The Kalanga originate in the North East Africa region, specifically the Sudan-Egypt-Ethiopia region. Like many Bantu groups, they trekked from the North down South, finally settling in the region now called Southern Africa. The difference with other groups is that the Kalanga settled Africa south of the Zambezi over two millennia ago. By 100 AD, they had already settled in the lands now called Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa and Botswana, with most groups arriving between 500 and 1700 years later (the Sotho-Tswana about 500AD, the Nguni about 1600 and the ‘Shona’ about 1700).

By the earliest centuries of the Christian era (500AD) the Kalanga had established what archeologists have called the Leopard’s Kopje Culture. It was an Iron Age sequence culture which was the first in Sub-Saharan Africa to practice mixed farming; mine, smelt and trade in gold, copper and iron. By 1000 AD, the Kalanga had become a sophisticated people, establishing the first city-state in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Maphungubgwe City, on the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe Rivers.

Here they traded in gold, and indeed so great was this industry at Maphungubgwe that archeologists have found several artifacts made from that precious mineral there. Of course, the most famous is the Golden Rhino, which now forms the Order of Maphungubgwe, South Africa’s highest national honor.

From Maphungubgwe the Kalanga expanded their state, moving to and constructing Great Zimbabwe, and later Khami. In all these areas they carried on their industries and trade. They traded with the Arabians, the Chinese, the Ethiopians, the Portuguese and Phoenicians. It has been suggested by one writer – Gayre of Gayre – that much of the gold
that found its way into the Solomonic Temple and Palace mentioned in the Bible originated among the Kalanga in what later became Zimbabwe.

The Zimbabwe Civilization – epitomized by Maphungubgwe, Great Zimbabwe, and Khami – three of the four man-made UNESCO World Heritage sites in Southern Africa, can be classified as the greatest civilization ever established Africa south of the Sahara. Indeed, barring its lack of a writing culture, it can be classed in the same level with the other great civilizations of the world, from the
Akkadian to the Sumerian to the Egyptian to the Axumite to the Graeco-Roman Civilizations.

The Monomotapa, Togwa and Lozwi Kingdoms

On the political side, the Kalanga established the greatest kingdoms ever established Africa south of the Sahara, both in terms of power, wealth and expanse. They established the Monomotapa Kingdom which swept from the Zambezi to the Makhado Mountains (Luis Trichardt) north to south, and from the Tendankulu (now Pungwe River) in the middle of Mozambique to the Makadikadi Salt Pans on the boundary of the Kalahari Desert, east west.

The Monomotapa Kingdom, which existed for about 500 years (1000-1500) as the greatest polity in Southern Africa, later disintegrated as a result of external attacks and internal decay. It would be succeeded by the Togwa Kingdom which was headquartered at Khami, 22km west of Bulawayo. The Togwa Kingdom, which had been established by Madabhale Shoko/Ncube, later Tjibundule, existed for about 200 years, after which its ruling dynasty, the Tjibundule Dynasty, was overthrown by Mambo Dombolakona-Tjing’wango Dlembewu Moyo, otherwise known as
Tjangamire.

(Tjangamire, a title which originated with the Monomotapa Dynasty when the Arabs still traded in the land, is a combination of two words, the name ‘Tjanga’, and the title Amir/Emir, meaning ‘The Justice.’ The title emir is still in usage in Arab lands, which is why some of them are called Emirates. Tjangamire is not a Shona word as commonly
believed. It is a Kalanga-Arabic word.)

The Lozwi Kingdom of course was to be overthrown after a nearly 30-year onslaught by a succession of five impis – four Nguni and three non-Nguni, these being: the Swati of Mtshetshenyana and Nyamazana, the Ngoni of Zwangendaba, the Gaza-Nguni of Soshangane, the Makololo of Sebituane, the Tswana of Kgari and the Portuguese. This Kingdom finally fell about 1830 with the arrival of the Ndebele of Mzilikazi.

The earliest remembered Kalanga kings are Hee Hamuyendazwa Nkalange Hhowu (Ndlovu) and Malambodzibgwa Nkalange Hhowu (it is from these kings that we take our name – Ba-Nkalange, that is, those of Nkalange (some Ndlovu-surnamed Bakalanga still swear by BaNkalange today. We are told that Nkalanga/Nkalange means “People of the North”).

And of course some of the greatest Kalanga kings to ever live were the likes of Mambo Nhu-unotapa (Monomotapa) Mokomba Hhowu, Mambo Dombolakona-Tjing’wango Dlembewu Moyo, Mambo Madabhale Tjibundule Shoko/Ncube.

The Kalanga Identified by their Tribes and Surnames

Today the Kalanga are divided into 12 major tribes comprising the so-called Bakalanga “proper” (properly BaLozwi), BaLobedu, BaNambya, Vhavenda, BaTalawunda, BaLilima, BaPfumbi, BaLemba, BaLembethu, BaTswapong, BaTwamambo, BaTembe (Mthembu), Babirwa and BaShangwe. They are scattered across Southern Africa from KwaZulu-Natal all the way to
Tanzania, speaking almost all the languages to be in all the countries in between.

Being Kalanga therefore does not mean TjiKalanga-speaking, but it is an ethno-racial identity. Once born a Kalanga always a Kalanga, as long as one carries ancestral Kalanga blood. In other words, as long as one has one or both parents who is or was Kalanga, they are Kalanga too. But how do they get to know if they are ancestrally Kalanga? The answer is to be found in their surname.

The Kalanga, wherever they are in the world, are identifiable primarily by their animal and body parts name surnames like Moyo (variants Pelo, Mbilu, Nhliziyo, Mthunzi, Nkiwane), Ndlovu (Ndou, Tlou, Zhowu, Hhowu), Sibanda (Shumba, Tjibanda, Tau, Motaung, Sebata), Ngwenya (Mokoena, Ngwena, Kwena), Dube (Mbizi, Tembo, Mthembu), Mpala (Mhara/Mhala), Tjuma/Tshuma/Chuma (Ng’ombe, Mung’ombe, Sola), Gumbo, Ndebele (Tjibelu, Phupute), Nyathi (Nare, Mokone), Ncube (Shoko, Mokgabong, Tshwene, Motshweneng, Phiri, Msimang, Nsimango), Mpofu
(Phofu, Shaba-Thuka), Khupe (Shulo, Hulo, Mvundla), Sebele, Kulube (Ngulube, Musele), Nungu (Maphosa), Nkala, etc.

A close look at the numbers of people bearing these surnames shows that the Kalanga Nation is perhaps one of the largest in Southern Africa, perhaps surpassed only by the Zulu.

Born a Kalanga, always a Kalanga. Ndaboka imi n’Kalanga weBulilima-Mangwe ndilikuTitji.

t is easy to note the linguistic similarities between Kalanga and Karanga languages.  Ordinarily, where the Karanga use  the letter “r” in a word, the Kalanga use “l”. This linguistic relationship, some historians argue, suggests that the Karanga and Kalanga peoples are related, and at some point in history were one group of people that spoke the same language and possibly lived in the same area. While their languages sound similar, spatially however, the people live at least 200km apart – the Kalanga inhabit parts of Kezi and Plumtree while the Karanga are dominant in Masvingo, and the southern to central parts of Midlands.

It is not exactly known at what point they went so much apart, but some argue that it must be in the early 1830s when a then militarily powerful Ndebele people chose to settle on the Zimbabwe plateau, sending the weaker now Karanga and Kalanga fleeing to the east and west respectively.  After they were splintered, their common language assumed slight differences over time. There is debate, however, why there has been the specific lexical shift of “r” and “l”.

Prominent historian, Mr Pathisa Nyathi argues that indeed there is a historical relationship between the two peoples dating back centuries ago. Then, he said, the land stretching from the Kalahari Desert in Botswana to Mozambique, was occupied by a people with a common ancestry and language – Kalanga.

“In Zambia, there are the Lozi (Rozvi in Shona); we have the Nambya in western Zimbabwe, and the Kalanga who had a number of dialects like the Vahumbe, Batalaunda, and VaJahunda in the Gwanda area.  The Karanga and various other groups that are now known as the Shona are part of that group.”

It was a vast group of people; he said, whose lifestyle was characterised by the building of stone structures, first at Mapungubwe near the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers to the south in present day South Africa. These people were migrating from South Africa northward, through Botswana, he said. The Mapungubwe Kingdom, Mr Nyathi said, built the first organised state in southern Africa around AD 1000 before they moved northward again to and over time built the Great Zimbabwe Monument, a more impressive metropolis than Mapungubwe.

Between AD1200 and 1500, the Kalanga-speaking people reigned at Great Zimbabwe in Masvingo until it collapsed, resulting in another trek to the west to establish Khami, another stone-walled city.  There the Torwa State reigned. Mr Nyathi argues that the word “torwa” indicates a possible reason why the people moved westward.  Environmental degradation could be one of them, but a more compelling factor could have been a succession struggle that degenerated into a bloody civil war.

“The Kalanga and Karanga both say ‘togwa’ meaning we are fighting or simply fighting,” he said.
“The Kalanga and Karanga descended from the same stock. They are one people.  The initial language was Kalanga but because the Kalanga haven’t written their history, we have lost a lot of information.”

Professor Thomas Huffman, chairman of the Wits School of Archeology, Geography and Environmental Studies argues that Kalanga was the language of the Mapungubwe Kingdom. The Karanga dialect, he said, could have emerged from Kalanga as a result of influence from Zezuru.

He said the Karanga and Kalanga are dialect clusters within the larger Shona language family.  He said Kalanga at one time covered a much larger area before Ndebele incursions in the 1930s scattered the people around.

“You might be interested to know,” said Prof Huffman from South Africa, “that a Kalanga dynasty was probably the leaders at Mapungubwe on the Limpopo River in the 13th century, and a Karanga dynasty probably led the people at Great Zimbabwe.

The Kalanga dynasty at Khami (near Bulawayo) appears to have out-competed Great Zimbabwe at about AD 1450 and the leaders at Great Zimbabwe appear to have gone north to become the famous Mwene Mutapa dynasty.”

Prof Huffman’s argument that Karanga emerged from Kalanga is a question of considerable contestation, as some historians say Kalanga is, in fact a derivative of Karanga.  Kalanga emerged as a result of corruption of Karanga by the invading Ndebele people, in whose language the letter “l” is common.

Karanga and Kalanga words that sound basically the same include body parts -“mpimbila” in Kalanga, (mupambare in Karanga and other Shona dialects, shin in English), “chibvi” (bvi in Karanga, knee in English), “ntumbu” (dumbu in Karanga and other Shona dialects).  In addition to similarities language, there are many common totems between the people such as Hungwe, Moyo, Chuma, Zhou and so on.  Both peoples also worshipped the same deity, Mwari/ Mwali.

Mr Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu, a retired journalist once worked in the 1960s as a researcher in social anthropology among the Kalanga. He argues that Karanga and Kalanga peoples are historically one group.  He said Kalanga was spoken along Macloutsi River in Botswana to Gwilo (now Gweru). To the east of Gwilo, Karanga was the language.

The name Zimbabwe, he said, is a corruption of the Karanga/Kalanga term “dzimbabwe” (houses of stone).  When white settlers were settling in the territory that is now Zimbabwe, they were assisted by Zulu, Sotho or Xhosa whose languages, Mr Ndlovu said, do not have a strong letter “d”.

He said when he visits his uncle in Zaka, Masvingo, he speaks in Kalanga and he speaks in original Karanga with a heavy Rozvi accent.
“The situation was disrupted in the 1820s as a result of Swazi raiders who did not come to defeat the people of that area and take over their territory but to capture foodstuffs, especially livestock,” he said.

In one such Swazi raid around 1831 and 1832, a large group of BaKalanga fled the Matopo area under Ntinima (Mutinhima in Karanga, a MuRozvi and son of King Nechasike whose original name was Chilisamhulu in Kalanga or Chirisamhuru in Karanga) and settled in the Buhera area. These people frequently came back to Matopo at Njelele for religious purposes. It was easy for them to move because there were no boundaries at that time.

“When the Ndebele came,” said Mr Ndlovu, “the Karanga were being raided by the Ndebele army that was controlled by Kalanga boys. So the Karanga were saying, ‘oh they are already Ndebele’ referring to the Kalanga soldiers. You must understand that the Ndebele army was predominantly BaKalanga raiding their cousins in Karangaland.”

Reprinted from The Chronicle.

It involves casual engagement in discussions about others and it is usually spiced with some falsehoods or unsubstantiated claims. Gossiping is the blood relative of rumour mongering.

The Kalanga people seem to have perfected the art of gossiping by inventing a stealthy gossip character.

The Kalanga have a character known as Libilibi in the art of gossip. Libilibi defines the people’s imagination and defies the tenets of uneasy oneness. The character is not anyone in particular. Libilibi could be the other you in you as it is the other side of the same coin.

It is your call whether it is heads or tails. Libilibi was necessitated by the love of gossiping about individuals in their presence.

The subject of gossip is assigned the name Libilibi and may inadvertently take part in the banter. Ignorantly, innocently, unwittingly and unknowingly, Libilibi quips in with more slander that pours scorn upon the self.

Libilibi was born out of intelligent sarcasm owing to too much spare time in people’s hands. The witty nature of the Kalanga people is enviable. Women are the most captivating in the art of skilful gossip. Plumtree women are good gossipers and they have a Libilibi for everyone.

A typical gossip conversation would go as follows:
“Libilibi is wearing his Sunday best today,” says MaMoyo who is famous for gossiping.

“He is taking the cattle to the dip tank today!” says MaNyathi, wife to Comrade Stalin.

“In his best suit?” Manana asks.

“The cattle are in trouble today. The whip will crack on their backs,” MaMoyo the gossip initiator states caustically.

At that moment Comrade Stalin, clad in youth brigade gear, joins the conversation. He is angry that someone is thinking of taking cattle to the dip tank on Sunday when he has a party meeting to address. Comrade Stalin is readying himself to drive all the villagers to a party meeting.

“Women, it is Sunday today. There is no scheduled dipping on Sunday. Tell your well-dressed Libilibi to stop thinking about the ticks on his cattle. No-one is going to interrupt my meeting by going to the dip tank. I want everyone at the meeting.”

Comrade Stalin spits venom when he talks about the party meetings.

“This Libilibi we are talking about wants his cattle dipped today at all costs,” MaMoyo helps Comrade Stalin with the character of Libilibi.

“I don’t want disobedience in this ward. No-one should oppose my command. Your stupid Libilibi should not be hijacking my meeting for the sake of some ticks on the village cattle.”

Comrade Stalin begins to show signs of frustration. He wants people to do farming yet he will not have them engage in operations that limit the parasites on their beasts. Comrade Stalin did not realise that he was the Libilibi under witty scrutiny. He was about to drive everyone to a party meeting.

He was a Libilibi who thinks that cattle are not part of the land question like crop farming. This is the Libilibi who gives seed packs and fertiliser to the people of an arid region and demands a bumper maize crop.

As this Libilibi walked away in triumphant gaiety, one could not help realise that he had unknowingly contributed to his own assassination. Comrade Stalin was being derided in a discussion which he happily took part in.

“Libilibi was given a gift by her husband,” MaMoyo was at it again.

“A gift! Is it the one-way ticket to Johannesburg?” MaNtuli said as she tuned into the topic.

“No return?” MaMoyo adds carelessly.

“But Libilibi thought her husband was stingy,” MaNtuli now knows the subject.

“It is an expensive gift, a one-way ticket to Johannesburg. The gift caught her unawares,” says MaNkala who has been quiet all along.

“Why would she not return. Why should she accept a one-way ticket?” asks MaDube, a sickly woman. MaMoyo the senior gossiper of the village gives a blunt answer: “The husband cannot afford a return trip.”

“Why does she not refuse to go?” MaDube tries to reason on behalf of the Libilibi she did not know.

MaDube was the Libilibi. Her chivalrous and lecherous husband had infected her with the viruses of eternal peril. She was ungainly and sickly and her husband was also frail and emaciated. The gossiping women of the village concluded that the two had exchanged the gift of ill health; a one-way ticket to the dark side of life.

So, this is how Libilibi works. Do not laugh loud at the follies of Libilibi as you might be laughing at your own folly. Anyone can be a Libilibi. The school headmaster is a Libilibi who fondles books. The country’s president is a chief executive officer of a company in sequestration.

The chairman of the local wing of the Taliban is a Libilibi who claims to have died for the top soil. An operative who leads an election campaign is a Libilibi who sells limited choices. A die-hard party man who leads an orgy of violence is a Libilibi of the Jihad movement.

In the eyes of the Kalanga gossip mongers, we are all Libilibis.

 Masola Wadabudabu is a social commentator, reprinted from the Daily News.

by Ndzimu-unami Emmanuel Moyo (repr. from Bulawayo24)

Alan Dershowitz notes his feelings about his Jewish identity when he was a Yale law student: “When I went home for the Jewish holidays, I told my parents about the brilliant teachers at Yale: Goldstein, Pollack, Bickel, Skolnick, Schwartz. Then I told them about the most brilliant of my teachers: Calabresi. Without missing a beat, my mother asked, ‘Is he an Italian Jew?’Angrily I said, ‘Don’t be so parochial. He’s an Italian Catholic. Not all smart people have to have Jewish blood.’ Several months later, I learned that Guido Calabresi was in fact descended from Italian Jews.” [DERSHOWTIZ, p. 50, quoted in When Victims Rule: A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America]

Another Jew, Joshua Halberstam writes that “Pointing to the high proportion of Jewish Nobel Laureates … is a custom practiced around Jewish tables everywhere”, while in the 1970s a Jew from Odessa told the American Jewish Congress that “it was kind of a hobby [among Jews] to collect the names of famous Jews who hide their identity [in the Soviet Union].” [ROTHCHILD, 1985, p. 38, in When Victims Rule.]

The opinions expressed above capture what this article seeks to accomplish. It shows that like Jewry all over the world, the Kalanga stand out as a distinct and exceptional people group among the Bantu, exceptional for their disproportionate achievements compared to other people groups in Sub-Saharan Africa.

These achievements are to be seen not only in history which saw the Kalanga establish the greatest civilization ever established Africa south of the Sahara – the Zimbabwe Civilization – epitomized by three of the four man-made Unesco World Heritage sites in Southern Africa (Maphungubgwe, Great Zimbabwe and Khami); become the first people in Sub-Saharan Africa to create an Iron Age Culture as early as 100AD, mining, smelting and trading in iron, copper and gold; becoming the first farmers to domesticate animals and practice mixed farming; having the most advanced idea of the Supreme Being – the Mwali Religion – a variant of Yahwe’ism (see Summers 1971, Daneel 1970 and Gayre 1972), etc., the achievements are to be seen even in the 20th and 21st centuries.

We find the Kalanga, despite their smaller numbers compared to other groups, becoming the first to organize Africans and take leadership in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa to fight and overthrow white racist rule. We can count here the likes of Dr Joshua Nkomo who founded the ANC which would become the NDP and later ZAPU; Dr John Langalibalele Dube who became the first president of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, and Dr Knight Maripe who earned his Doctorate in Industrial Relations in Belgium in the 1950s and went on to found the first nationalist party in Botswana, the Bechuanaland People’s Party in the 1960s. Indeed, the greatest challenge to the colonialists in the 19th and 20th centuries in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa where the Kalanga and the AbaThembu, a Kalanga people.

These same achievements are to be found in industry where today the two largest telecommunications companies in Africa – MTN and Vodacom – are led by Kalanga CEOs – Sifiso Raymond Dabengwa Ndlovu and Peter Moyo; some of the finest Deans and University leaders from Dr Mthuli Ncube at Wits Business School to Tawana Khupe at the Wits Faculty of Media to Dr Luke Bhala at Lupane State, Professor Lindela Ndlovu at NUST, and nearly all the top faculty at the University of Botswana. The list is endless.

Now, one of these stories that has not been told concerns perhaps the greatest leader that Africa (and perhaps the whole world) has ever produced, viz, Tata Nelson Rholihlahla Mandela. Whilst known to many as a Xhosa, or just as a Thembu, research reveals that his clan, the AbaThembu, are originally a people of Kalanga stock, and only became Xhosa by assimilation.

“Crazy, stupid, foolish, hahaha, all people to you are Kalanga, even Barack Obama is Kalanga then if that’s the case, actually, even Jesus was Kalanga, if not God himself!” These are the initial responses that I anticipate at this stage, but dear reader, if you are one who is not afraid of facing evidence and dealing with it, please read on. Thank you.

Who are the AbaThembu, and Where Did they Come From?

To be honest, since I started researching and writing Kalanga history, I suspected that there must be there some kind of relationship between the Kalanga Tembe/Mthembu and the now Xhosa AbaThembu. But I was a bit afraid to even come close to making such a statement for fear of damaging my credibility as a writer. But that all changed during the funeral of the great Nelson Mandela. It was changed by the statement that was made by the Thembu King, Ikumkani Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo, that the AbaThembu are not originally Xhosa, but they are an assimilated people. To my amazement, when I turned to Tata Mandela’s own autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom, I found that he had already made that statement, and I quote:

The Thembu tribe reaches back for twenty generations to King Zwide. According to tradition, the Thembu people lived in the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains and migrated toward the coast in the sixteenth century, where they were incorporated into the Xhosa nation … The Nguni can be divided into a northern group – the Zulu and the Swazi people – and a southern group, which is made up of amaBaca, amaBomyana, amaGcaleka, amaMfengu, amaMpodomis, amaMpondo, abeSotho, and abeThembu, and together they comprise the Xhosa nation (Mandela 1994: 1).

By Mandela’s own account and that of Ikumkani Dalindyebo, the Thembu were incorporated or assimilated into the Xhosa nation, otherwise, they were a distinct people from the Xhosa, and indeed from the Nguni. But who were they, and where did they come from?

I looked around various sources to answer this question, and a number of internet sources that I found pointed to two locations of Thembu origin – Central Africa and modern KwaZulu-Natal. The claim of origins in Central Africa might not tell us much since all the land from north of the Limpopo to the Central African Republic is by some considered Central Africa. It is the KwaZulu-Natal origin that becomes of serious interest, and of course, as we shall see later, the Thembu in KwaZulu-Natal claim origins in what was once the Kingdom of Bukalanga, now Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique and North Limpopo Province.

In his 1933 seminal work on Thembu history, Who are the Abathembu, and where do they come from?, E. G. Sihele states that the AbaThembu were one of the first  black nations to settle in what is now KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape. He states that their genealogy, which is also the official genealogy of Nelson Mandela (available online as a pdf document titled “Mandela Family Tree”) can be traced to Zwide, great-great-great-grandfather of Chief Thembu, from whom the AbaThembu take their name. (The Reverend J. H. Soga’s Thembu genealogy also starts with Thembu.)

Sihele then writes: “It is clear therefore that we (AbaThembu) broke off from the rest of the Black people with Zwide who left the people in Central Africa, where they still are even today. Zwide’s progeny split and divided as it moved southwards along the seaboard, with their herds of cattle, in search of livelihood AbaThembu broke off from Zwide’s descendants when they moved ahead.”

Whilst no one, as Sihele argues, has been able to delve into and bring out more information on the person of Zwide, this particular individual remains of particular interest to any historian interested in Thembu history. So far as we can establish, the term or name “Zwide” carries no meaning whatsoever in any of the Nguni languages, instead it carries meaning in TjiKalanga. (It is rare for Bantu names to be just names without carrying some particular meaning in that language. Also note: the Zwide mentioned here is nothing to do with the 19th century Zwide KaLanga of the Ndwandwe.)

Could it be then that the “Central Africa” referred to is the former Kingdom of Bukalanga, where the name “Zwide” carries meaning, meaning “Love Yourself”? Perhaps yes, perhaps not.

Of AbaThembu and Tembe/Mthembu Settlements in KwaZulu-Natal

I indicated at the beginning of this article that I have always wondered if it was mere coincidence that there are ‘Xhosa’ people called AbaThembu (singular – umThembu) and the Mthembu people, both settled and/or once settled in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, and the two be just unrelated peoples. I began to believe that there is a relationship between the two once I got information that the AbaThembu, before moving to their present homeland in the northeastern Eastern Cape Province around the Mthatha, were originally settled in the old Natal State.

At look at an old map of the Union of South Africa (for example, a 1905 map is available online under the title “Kapstaaten_1905) shows that the Old Natal spread from just north of Kokstadt in the modern Eastern Cape into KwaZulu-Natal. In this Natal, to the surprise of many, were first settled people of Kalanga stock, the AmaLala, barring the Khoisan (please see Alfred T. Bryant, Synopsis of Zulu Grammar and a Concise History of the Zulu People from the Most Ancient Times, 1905; Clement M. Doke, The Bantu Speaking Tribes of South Africa, 1937, and Theodore Bent, The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland, 1892) .

These people were pushed further south away from the shadow of the Drakensburg Mountains first by the wars of the AbaMbo as they arrived in the region around 1600, and later by the raids of Tshaka in the 19th century. But where had they come from? It is here that we find a convergence of the AbaThembu bakaDalindyebo in the Eastern Cape and the Kalanga AbaThembu bakaMabhudu Tembe/Mthembu in KZN.

As already indicated, the AbaThembu take their name from the patriarch Thembu, whereas on the other hand, the Mthembu Clan in KwaZulu-Natal – who we definitely know to have Kalanga origins – also takes its name from a patriarch of the same name – Thembu, otherwise known as Tembe (see Roelie J. Kloppers, page 27, The History and Representation of the Mabudu-Tembe, a Master of Arts Dissertation presented to the University of Stellenbosch Faculty of Humanities in 2003; and Henry A. Junod, 1927, The Life of a South African Tribe, Volumes I and II.)

This writer is of the opinion that this cannot be mere coincidence, that two people groups can carry the same name, claim ancestral origins from a patriarch of the same name, be settled or have settled in the same geographical region, and yet be unrelated. I am convinced the Eastern Cape AbaThembu and the KwaZulu-Natal Mthembu Clan are one and the same peoples, although more research would be needed in this area.

The Origins of the Patriarch Thembu/Tembe and his People 

The claim that the AbaThembu, and hence the great Nelson Mandela (an AbaThembu Prince) are originally of Kalanga stock is based on the evidence of the Kalanga origins of the Thembu patriarch, Tembe/Thembu. Kloppers indicates in page 84 of his dissertation that Mthembu or Thembu is the ‘Nguni’ized’ version of Tembe. In a document available on the University of Pretoria website we are told that “The Tembe are named after Chief Mthembu, who arrived from Zimbabwe [Bukalanga] around 1554 and settled in the region around Maputo Bay” (www.upetd.up.ac.za/../02chapter2). “Historically they settled in the region that spans from Maputo Bay in Mozambique in the north of the Mkuze River in the south, and the Pongola River in the west in the middle of the 16th century (Kloppers 2001 – The History and Representation of the History of the Mabudu-Tembe).

Yes, they came from what is now Zimbabwe, the former Kingdom of Bukalanga, but that is not enough to say that they are a people of Kalanga stock. More evidence is needed to that end. This we find in the 1927 work of the Swedish missionary the Reverend Henry A. Junod. Of the Tembe/Thembu he wrote:

Almost every clan [in the African south east coast] pretends to have come from afar, and strange to say, they came from all points of the compass. Two of their clans, without doubt, came from the north, the Ba-ka-Baloyi and the Tembe. The Ba-ka-Baloyi, they say, came down the valley of the Limpopo in very remote times … According to some of the Native historians, the Ba-Loyi came from the Ba-Nyai country along with the Ba-Nwanati (a Hlengwe group), who also belonged to the Nyai or Kalanga race [the BaLoyi are the same as BaLozwi and BaNyai, being a Kalanga group].

As regards the Tembe clan, it is said to have come down as far as Delagoa Bay from the Kalanga country by the Nkomati River on a floating island of payrus, and to have crossed the Tembe river and settled to the south of the Bay … The Tembe people, when they greet each other, sometimes use the salutation Nkalanga, i.e. man of the north or of the Kalanga country, and there is little doubt that, notwithstanding the legendary traits of this tradition, the fact itself of the northern origin of these clans is true (Junod 1927, 21-23).

In the introduction to the first volume, Junod tells us that his informants were all over the age of eighty years at the turn of the 20th century, which means that they would have been born about the turn of the 19th century, somewhat closer to the events that they were recounting in their discussions with the missionary.

Junod’s report on the Kalanga origins of the Tembe is also attested to by W.S. Felgate who, in The Tembe Thonga of Natal and Mozambique: An Ecological Approach, reports that the Tembe claim to have migrated from Kalanga country (1982: 11).

In an abridged version of a document published in submission to the Nhlapho Commission opposing the claim by Eric Nxumalo that he should be installed as King of the Tsonga (and Shangaan people) in 2007, Mandla Mathebula, Robert Nkuna, Hlengani Mabasa, and Mukhacani Maluleke wrote that over the centuries, the Tsonga have assimilated other cultural groups who came to live with them in South East Africa, and among those were:

Tembe-Kalanga, who were in the Delagoa Bay region by 1554. The Baloyi-Rozvi (Lozwi), were already in the N’walungu region during the time of the Dutch occupation of the Delagoa Bay (1721-31). Some Hlengwe oral traditions claimed that the Hlengwe were actually the ones who converted the Valoyi from Rozvi (Lozwi) into Tsonga in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. This probably happened after the death of the powerful king of Rozvi, Changameri Dombo [i.e., Mambo Dombolakona-Tjing'wango Dlembewu Moyo] in 1696 (Mathebula, et al 2007, Online).

The Portuguese traveler and chronicler, Perestrelo, who had made a survey of all the land and peoples from the Transkei to the Delagoa Bay (located just to the north of the St. Lucia Bay and the Mkhuze River which is just to the south of Maputo and the Lebombo Mountains), wrote in 1576 that he had encountered the Tembe in 1554, apparently long settled on the south east coast, or modern KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Eastern Cape and Swaziland (see Dr. Sidney Welch, 1948, South Africa Under John III, 1521-1557.)

Conclusion

There is no doubt that this article will open a hornet’s nest, perhaps result in a lot of debate on the part of those with scholarly minds, and also arouse tremendous laughter and condemnation from those of limited intellect who would not take the time to judge the evidence on its own merits or lack thereof.

But I believe that I have attempted to show that indeed, if the patriarch Thembu from whom AbaThembu take their name is the same patriarch of the Kalanga Tembe/Thembu, then the AbaThembu are originally a people of Kalanga stock, and as explained by Ikumkani Dalindyebo and Nelson Mandela himself, became Xhosa by assimilation. Zwide would probably have been an older patriarch whose remains lie somewhere north of the Limpopo, for as Sihele put it, “in search of livelihood AbaThembu broke off from Zwide’s descendants when they moved ahead.” Apparently, no one knows where that “breaking off” would have happened.

Now, if indeed the AbaThembu of Nelson Mandela (presently led by Ikumkani Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo) and the Tembe/Mthembu (presently led by Inkosi Mabhudu Tembe/Mthembu in KZN) are one and the same people, we can safely conclude that Nelson Mandela and the AbaThembu are people of Kalanga stock. And like those Jews around their tables counting the number of Jewish Nobel Laureates and the Jews in Russia making a hobby of counting Jewish high achievers, we of Kalanga stock may find ourselves having an extra political hero – Nelson Mandela – in addition to the likes of Dr Joshua Nkomo, Jason Ziyaphapha Moyo, Dr Knight Maripe, Festus Mogae, Daniel Kwele, George T. Silundika, Moses Mzila-Ndlovu, etc.

Ndaboka imi n’Kalanga we Bulilima-Mangwe. Ishwani. Goledzwa. Catch me on ndzimuunami@gmail.com

Reporter Portia Ngwako of Botswana’s The Voice recently boarded the Block 8 Route 4 combi from game city when they found a traffic cop controlling the movement of traffic on the road.

The naughty passengers debated about the officer’s origin because he was dark skinned.

One of the passengers said he was Kalanga and others attacked her for being tribalistic.

Lady in blue Top: This traffic officer is delaying us. He is so dark skinned.

Lady in pink skirt: He is a Kalanga (in a derogatory tone).

Man in white shirt: what makes you think she is Kalanga?

Stop being tribalistic! You are offending us.

Lady in black scarf: People have turned us into a football pitch.

I am light in complexion but I am Kalanga.

Who do you think you are?

Lady in pink skirt: You people are known to be dark in complexion. I think yellow bones are very few that side.

Lady in blue Top: You people undermine us. What will you say if I say you are light in complexion and you are Mosarwa?

Lady in black scarf: Stop arguing with that empty vessel. She is not civilized.

Man in white shirt: We are in trouble, us and Batswapong. This stereotype thing really annoys me.

Lady in black scarf: Somebody on Facebook was saying “I am more stressed than a mophane worm seeing a Kalanga going into the bush with a sack”. It really pisses me off and people like making fun of it.

Passengers laugh

Lady in blue Top: She is giving us attitude and she does not know what the future hold for her.

May be she is going to be married by a Kalanga man.

Lady in black scarf: Do not talk of the future. She might be dating a Kalanga boy.

What makes her think she is better than others? Why is tribalism even a thing anymore?

Haven’t we moved past that?

Man in white shirt: This is totally wrong. After all, we are Batswana and we should be a united nation.

This is why people do not progress in life; it is because of this attitude.

Lady in blue Top: After all, there are no biological differences between people.

No tribe is superior or inferior to another. We are all the same.

Don’t think that one day you will wake up white and speak English through nose.

Lady in pink skirt: People it is enough. I am sorry; I did not mean to offend you.

Lady in blue Top: There are no reasons or excuses for tribalism.

This should be the first and last time you say that.

You should never repeat it. It is very dangerous. People can attack you physically and even hurt you.

This reporter drops off the combi at the next stop and the conversation comes to an end.

[Reprinted from The Voice]

By Ntandoyenkosi Dumani
(Development practitioner and cultural activist)

The development of marginalised and poor communities has been a phenomenon pursued by various development partners the world over using various strategies and approaches from humanitarian aid to capacity building, needs based approaches to human rights based approaches. These approaches have been employed in addressing poverty, gender and women’s issues, children’s’ rights, youth issues, environmental issues to mention a few. The bitter confession of every development practitioner is the admission of failure to create sustainable interventions whose impact truly benefits society for a long time and solves the challenge being tackled in a sustainable way

Various reasons for the failure of very good programs with the potential of extracting communities from poverty, inequalities, maladministration, corruption and various other social, economic and political injustices have been explored. Of late, effective citizen participation in their own development has been emphasized as a way of ensuring the sustainability of interventions implemented. This has been touted as the ‘eureka’ of sustainable development by enabling the beneficiaries of programs to be ‘owners and drivers’ of development interventions.
The difficult question which we often do not answer is, ‘what does citizen participation really mean?’ In most cases, we simply mean involving community members in the implementation of programs, monitoring and evaluation exercises and other related processes.
A more meaningful approach to effective citizen engagement would be doing so from a cultural perspective. Culture is simply defined as, ‘the way in which people in a certain society live’. This includes their belief systems, their language, their values, their norms and traditions. Ultimately, they both influence and are influenced by the thinking and behavior of that society. Culture is that aspect of a people which gives them identity, a sense of being and a sense of worth in the world. Ngugi Wa Thiongo rightly asserted that, “language carries a culture(literature and orature) and culture carries the body values with which we perceive our worth and our space in the world.” Culture carries aesthetic value which is deeply entrenched into the people’s consciousness of being and sub-consciously influences their thinking and behavior.
Culture is the ‘software’ of society; it is invisible but greatly influences the ‘hardware’. In her paper titled, ‘Seven Deadly Sins: Reflections on Donor Failings’, Nancy Birdsall observed that,

“Now development theorists are emphasizing the ‘software’ of an economy: the institutions, customs, laws and social cohesion that help to create and sustain markets.”

The UN SYSTEM TASK TEAM ON THE POST -2015 UN DEVELOPMENT AGENDA also reported that,

“Throughout the past decade, statistics, indicators and data on the cultural sector, as well as operational activities have underscored that culture can be a powerful driver for development, with community-wide social, economic and environmental impacts.”

This then means that the way in which people respond to change is greatly influenced by their culture more than other factors. The culture of targeted communities ought to be closely studied by development practitioners before they attempt to make interventions.
While development practitioners carryout situation analyses and baseline studies, these often look at the problems in society and the data on people affected or not affected by those problems. They see the community as a problem that needs to be solved. This notion is backed by statistics from findings of these studies. What usually lacks is the understanding that those statistics are a product of the way in which people live, their culture. Had it not been because of their way of life (culture) it could have been worse or better. The situation of communities is because of their way of life which affects various dynamics both positively and negatively. This is the qualitative analysis that would probably greatly change the way in which the data and findings from various development related studies are interpreted and would greatly, (positively so) influence a change in the approaches and program designs of development practitioners.
The approach to development which views communities from a ‘half full’ and not from a ‘half empty’ perspective would yield more positive results. This is the kind of approach which does not view poor and marginalised communities as problems that need to be solved or blank slates that needs to be written. It rather acknowledges that communities have their own assets, knowledge, skills, values and systems of responding to and coping with various challenges which they face from time to time. The assumption that communities are some ‘desperate Israelites’ that need to be saved is myopic because it means that without the intervention of the development practitioner, the people will perish from the disaster of challenge which they have resiliently faced for decades be it drought, floods, environmental degradation, gender disparities or poor service delivery. This greatly undermines the body of values, knowledge and wealth embedded in the culture of the particular society which has seen them survive decades of marginalization, poverty or natural disasters. The fact that these communities have survived the problem for a long time speaks to certain skills, knowledge, values and practices. The UN SYSTEM TASK TEAM ON THE POST -2015 UN DEVELOPMENT AGENDA further noted that;
“Of particular relevance is the cultural sector’s contribution to the economy and poverty alleviation. Cultural heritage, cultural and creative industries, sustainable cultural tourism, and cultural infrastructure can serve as strategic tools for revenue generation, particularly in developing countries given their often-rich cultural heritage and substantial labour force.”

This, however, does not mean that the societies do not need external assistance to develop. It means that the external assistance should be brought into the society at the backdrop of their way of life, their culture, to enhance and strengthen their existing values and tap into the indigenous knowledge systems as well as create cultural ‘shock absorbers’ for those practices and norms that may appear a direct confrontation to their culture. Some cultural practices and norms are what can be called ‘harmful’ with regards to development, human rights, environment and gender equality and may undermine the attempts to empower society and the development of communities. While the most obvious approach would be to create laws or policies to address the harmful practice, it may at times not be the solution to sustainable development.
The reflections on the failures and shortcomings of the successful implementation of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) have exposed the missing link to sustainable development – culture. Culture plays a key role in influencing the success of social change programmes because they (programs) speak directly to the need for society to change the way in which it does things, in essence, to change their way of life presumably for the better. As asserted earlier, culture projects the identity of a people and the way in which they perceive themselves. The people’s way of life is the soul of society, it is the invisible component of society which is non-existent to an outsider of the particular society and exists in the sub-conscience of the insiders of that society.

This why it is easy to see the gap between a poor household and its rich neighbor who owns a solar panel and a donkey drawn cart in a typical rural setup. You would not see the poor household relying on their neighbor to charge their phones using the solar power nor see the rich neighbor sharing his donkey drawn cart with the neighbor to fetch water seven kilometres away. You would not see the ‘rich neighbor’ relying on the poor neighbor’s son to drive the cart and fetch firewood for both families 10 Kilometres away. That is their way of life, that is their culture, sharing. The obvious approach if it’s a humanitarian intervention is to provide aid to the ‘poor’ household and not the ‘rich’ household. Such an approach would create conflict between the two and the sharing will stop. When the development practitioner goes back later, the poor household would be poorer than it was and will no longer have any means of sustenance since the neighbor no longer shares his resources. This is an example of the destruction of social fibre and the disruption of a sustainable poverty alleviation and coping system ostensibly to empower the poorest of society.

Ntandoyenkosi Dumani is the coordinator at the Kalanga Development Centre and is also the Secretary of the Kalanga Language and Cultural Development Association (KLCDA). He writes in his personal capacity. He can be reached at yalilahwehhu@gmail.com

Ndi Ntando Dumani

ATTENTION: KLCDA Members

Date: 7 March 2016

The above subject matter refers,

This is a call for KLCDA members to nominate members to hold positions in the Executive Committee as well as in the Board of Directors as stipulated in the KLCDA Constitution and Election procedures manual

VACANCIES 

1. THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS (BOD)

There are 10 vacancies in the Board of Trustees open for nominations. The positions are,  Non-Executive President, Non- Executive Vice-President and eight (8) other members to be elected at an Annual General Meeting.

2. THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

There are nine (9) vacancies in the Executive Committee open for nominations. The positions are Chairperson, Vice Chairperson, Secretary, Vice-Secretary, Treasurer and four (4) Committee Members consisting of chairpersons of Executive Sub – Committees.

NOMINATIONS

a. For the purposes of convenience, nominations shall be made in in the KLCDA Full members’ Whatsapp group and made by the proposer and seconder and confirmed by the candidate accepting nomination, all of which shall be voting members in good standing. Nominations shall be made at least seven days before the Annual General Meeting.

b. A candidate may be nominated for more than one position. If he/she is elected successfully on one nomination, his/her name shall be removed from the rest of the remaining nominations.

The deadline for nominations is Monday 21 March 2016.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE REFER TO THE KLCDA ELECTION PROCEDURES MANUAL.

Notice placed by;

N. Dumani

KLCDA Secretary

info@kalanga.org

0775 962 762

BaKalanga abazozwibiga pasi, bakulukugwi bakabe belebesa kuti “Wasudza mankuku ndewalibulaya, walimenha masiba loobuya likasinila amwe!” Hawo ke masiba osinila !

The Kalanga Language and Cultural Development Association will, on the 17th of June 2016 launch 5 Kalanga books authored by various independent writers as a means of boosting Kalanga literature which is one thing that has hampered its effective teaching in schools and Institutions of Higher Learning.

The recognition of TjiKalanga as one of the official languages in the new constitution of the republic of Zimbabwe has exposed a literary gap that needs the effort of academics and writers to fill. Ntandoyenkosi Dumani, Belthazor Mlalazi, Nontobeko Sibanda and Nomathemba Ndlovu have risen up to that challenge and will on that day unveil the fruits of their work to the public.

Date: 17 June 2016

Venue: TMB Hall, Plumtree Twon Council

Time: 0900hrs

Guest of honor: Prof Jonathan Moyo (Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education)

Please confirm your attendance on or before Tuesday 14 June 2016 by email: info@kalanga.org or by phone : 0775 962 762

Brief information about the books;

1. Zwitunho nezwitetembelo zweBaKalanga (Kalanga totems and praise names) by Ntando Dumani

   About the author:

Ntando Dumani is a budding writer having published three books in 2015, two of  which are currently used by Great Zimbabwe University as set books for their  teacher capacity building program for TjiKalanga. (Articles and Mentions –  Plumtree writer publishes three Kalanga books    Kalanga Books Launched )

 About the Book:

The book traces the totems and praise names in Kalanga surnames. It goes on to   touch on praise names for BuKalanga Kings and their Chiefs from King Tjibundule   up to King Nitjasike as well as praise names for ‘Mwali of Njelele’. This book has a  wealth of knowledge about Kalanga political, settlement and economic history  from a clan level, which is embedded in age old praise names and frozen over time. The 90 page book has a rendition of 26 praise names including commentary and analysis of the praise names. This is a culmination of 2 years of research reaching out to hundreds of Kalanga elders and other knowledgeable people.

2. Gombalume Pedzani (The Hero, Pedzani) by Belthazor Mlalazi

 About the author:

Belthazor Mlalazi is an experienced teacher having taught Literature in  English for decades. He has a passion for TjiKalanga and has written various  works most of which has not yet been published. Mlalazi is currently  studying towards an Honors Degree in Education (Secondary) majoring in  TjiKalanga at Great Zimbabwe University.

 About the Book:

Gombalume Pedzani tells the story of colonialism and the liberation  struggle. While the story has been told by various authors, he endeavors to  tell it from a perspective of how it unfolded in BuKalanga, a perspective  which has not really been explored. The book unravels the pains borne by  the communities from the ire of colonialism and the sacrifices they made  during the liberation struggle. The book is written in rich language which displays the convergence of skill and experience.

3. Matukuta, Malopa Nemihodzi (Sweat, Blood and Tears)  by Belthazor Mlalazi                       

  About the book:

‘Matukuta, Malopa neMihodzi’ is a continuous poem in the fashion of ‘The      Song of Lawino’. It traces the hardships that befell the nation at different times  of the history of Zimbabwe. The whites came into the land like a stalk borer  which ate into the nation and destroyed its sovereignty, destroying its heritage  taking them into servitude. This is where the first chapter of the book ‘Lukonye  Gutjena’ (The white stalk borer) derives its meaning.

There came a time where the blacks fought back, liberating the country from  the chains of colonialism after the shedding of blood and tears. The painful  narrative was the emergence of tribalism and ethnic tensions which almost  destroyed the nation. The chapter, ‘Malopa nemihodzi’ (Blood and tears)  endevaours to remind the nation that hard times have befallen us, some of  those wounds are yet to heal. It also reminds the leadership that tribalism and  ethnic intolerance is a poison in the nation.

The last chapter ‘Eke ntolo’ (The good old days) portrays the writer looking back, yearning for the life that he lived long back. He reminisces the good old days when our culture and traditions were not yet eroded.

4. Kwakati Kulintolo (Once upon a time) by Nontobeko Sibanda, Nomathemba Ndlovu, Ntando Dumani

 About the Authors:

This book was written by Nomathemba Ndlovu and Nontobeko Sibanda  with guidance from Ntandoyenkosi Dumani

Nontobeko and Nomathema are emerging Kalanga writers who have  been involved in various Kalanga projects and are finding their way into  the literary arts. Nontobeko is also involved in the Bible Translation  project while Nomathemba is involved in the Secondary Schools  Textbook writing project..

 About the book:

Kwakati kulintolo is a collection of 16 folk tales written for all age  groups. The folktales contain moral lessons which mould a society as  well as wisdom embedded in the age old tales.

5. Kalanga Basic Vocabulary

About the Authors:

Same as above

About the book:

The Kalanga Basic Vocabulary contains the first words you need to learn in TjiKalanga. They have been chosen for their everyday usefulness. The book is useful for beginners in TjiKalanga and those who work amongst BaKalanga and need to master the spoken language in a short time. It gives the English word and its Kalanga equivalent.

This booklet is a useful tool for all those that wish to learn the language for various purposes.

Luswingo heritage site lies 36 km North of Plumtree Town in Zimbabwe on a hill by the riverbank of Thekwane River at Tokwana Village in Bulilima. Luswingo was built by BaKalanga in their distinguished workmanship in the fashion of Maswingo  and Kami heritage sites in Zimbabwe as well as Mapungubgwe and Domboshaba heritage sites in Southa Africa and Botswana respectively amongst others.

Though much smaller in size, the stone walled settlement exhibits the combination of both structural and civil engineering skills of early civilization. It  is situated near a water source (Thekwane River) and was established  to also serve for the purposes of security as a fortress. The top of the hill which makes the inner enclosure can only be accessed from the western side of the hill whilst there is a secret exit through a cave to the east towards the river. It is impossible toclimb the mountain from the secret exit.

‘Luswingo’ is a Kalanga word which means ‘stone wall’. Praise names of the famous Kalanga Kings, Mambo Tjibundule Hhowu and Mambo Tjilisamhulu Nitjasike Moyo glorify their security consciousness of constructing stonewalled fortresses asfollows:-

Mambo Tjibundule Hhowu;

‘Mbaki wamatombo asingangin’we tjita

Tjinoodla nkoma tjoongina naponi?’

‘Builder of mountains that can not be entered by enemies

From whence would the attackers enter?’

Mambo Tjilisamhulu Nitjasike Moyo;

‘Mhulu yonsikanyika

Isingabakigwe ngelupango gunopfusiwa ngelukonye

Koga inobakigwa neluswingo gwamabgwe’’

‘Calf of the creator of the earth

Whose kraal can not be built with logs which can be eaten by stalk-borers

But is built with a stone wall’

Luswingo seems to have been one of the key settlements of BaKalanga in Bulilima as it is between Dombodema and Tokwana areas which are the areas of origin for most BaKalanga in Bulilima who later dispersed to settle in various parts of Bulilima and beyond.  These areas consist of Nhope, which was controlled by the Habe clan, Lulo which was controlled by the Gonde clan and Ndzidzime which was controlled by the Nikuwana clan.

To the west of Luswingo is the famous Malitikwe mountain which has a secret cave whose opening was sealed like a granary compartment which suggests that it was a communal grain storage facility for use during times of famine and wars.

Luswingo, like all other similar structures had a spiritual significance with the famous whosana, ‘Njenjema’ having been linked to the site when he was in charge of a small rain shrine (daka) known as Zondani not far from Tokwana School in Bulilima District. Zondani rain shrine later relocated to Manyangwa at the time when Njenjema was still spiritually operational. To date, the rain shrine is still located at Manyagwa with whosanas from all over BuKalanga in Zimbabwe and Botswana making a pilgrim to the shrine every year in October to pray for rain.

The occasion of the  LUSWINGO CULTURAL FESTIVAL is like a retracing of steps by most BaKalanga to their cradle in Bulilima.

The walls of Luswingo are collapsing!

Could it be symbolic of the the collapse of our language and culture?

Luswingo gokolomoka!

Kungabe kulikolomoka kwelulimi nemilenje yedu kene?

Koobe lini tilumbidza matula emizi tletja edu emunywa nentjenje epfusiwa nezwipfusi!

by Ndzimu-unami Emmanuel Moyo (repr. from ZimEye)

One day not many years ago whilst passing by the Plumtree District Hospital, I overheard two men arguing about the people bearing the surname ‘Moyo’. The other gentlemen, apparently a Moyo himself, was fiercely arguing that he is a Ndebele, whilst the other one, who apparently believed himself to be the ‘real Ndebele’, argued that the other gentlemen is a Shona, declaring, “vele bonke oMoyo ngamaShona.”

The line taken by this gentleman is common, especially if one is a follower of debates of this nature on Facebook, Online Newspapers and Chatrooms. I have joked sometimes and said that if the Moyo people are really Shona, then ‘Matebeleland’ has to be changed to ‘Mashonaland’ since people bearing the royal surname Moyo constitute perhaps at least 50% of Matebeleland (randomly gather any 10 people in Matebeleland chances are 5 are Moyos).

“The Kalanga are a hybrid of the Ndebele and Karanga”

The above was used just as an illustration of the confusion that exists in Matebeleland in particular and Zimbabwe in general as to the identity of the people known as the Kalanga, or Bakalanga, BaNambya and Vhavenda. This confusion is compounded by the official Zimbabwean history narrative which actively seeks to promote the idea that the Kalanga are a hybrid of the Karanga and Ndebele who only came into being in the 18th century as a result of Ndebele-Karanga intermarriages. It further claims that the “L” in TjiKalanga was dropped from the “R” in ChiKaranga as a result of Ndebele influence.

Of course this narrative falls on itself in three ways. First, it ignores the fact that when Mzilikazi and his Ndebele arrived in what is now ‘Matebeleland’, the Kalanga were already in occupation of that
region. Secondly, it does not explain how the Kalanga are found in Botswana and the Limpopo Province (Brakpan River Saltpan) where the Ndebele never settled, and they have been in those regions for many centuries before the 18th. Thirdly, the narrative ignores the fact that TjiKalanga properly spoken contains no Ndebele words at all. It surely could not only have borrowed the “L” only from IsiNdebele and nothing else.

Why we should answer the question: Who are the Kalanga?

This question becomes more urgent to ask now that the Constitution of Zimbabwe recognizes the Kalanga as a distinct people group separate from the Ndebele and Shona. It also becomes important to ask and answer because, with the new Constitution recognizing the Kalanga as a distinct group, there will be a need to teach their history in addition to the language.

One of the tragedies of the Kalanga is that their history has been parceled out between the Shona and Ndebele. The precolonial history
has been ‘given’ to the Shona (for example, it is falsely claimed that the Shona built Maphungubgwe, Great Zimbabwe, Khami, etc; that the
Shona were the Monomotapa, Togwa and Lozwi Kingdom peoples, etc). Post-colonialism, all Kalanga nationalist leaders – Dr Joshua Nkomo,
JZ Moyo, TG Silundika, John Landa Nkomo, Alfred Nikita Mangena, etc are presented as Ndebele.

The sum of it is that the Kalanga are practically left with no history of their own at all, which obviously negatively affects the self-esteem and pride of a Kalanga child who is made to grow up believing that his or her own people have never achieved anything worthwhile in this world.

So, who are the Kalanga?

It will no doubt take many articles, or a whole book (as in my book, The Rebirth of Bukalanga), to answer this question. But we can briefly
answer this question in this short article to at least give the reader an idea of who the Kalanga are as a People.

The Kalanga originate in the North East Africa region, specifically the Sudan-Egypt-Ethiopia region. Like many Bantu groups, they trekked from the North down South, finally settling in the region now called Southern Africa. The difference with other groups is that the Kalanga settled Africa south of the Zambezi over two millennia ago. By 100 AD, they had already settled in the lands now called Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa and Botswana, with most groups arriving between 500 and 1700 years later (the Sotho-Tswana about 500AD, the Nguni about 1600 and the ‘Shona’ about 1700).

By the earliest centuries of the Christian era (500AD) the Kalanga had established what archeologists have called the Leopard’s Kopje Culture. It was an Iron Age sequence culture which was the first in Sub-Saharan Africa to practice mixed farming; mine, smelt and trade in gold, copper and iron. By 1000 AD, the Kalanga had become a sophisticated people, establishing the first city-state in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Maphungubgwe City, on the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe Rivers.

Here they traded in gold, and indeed so great was this industry at Maphungubgwe that archeologists have found several artifacts made from that precious mineral there. Of course, the most famous is the Golden Rhino, which now forms the Order of Maphungubgwe, South Africa’s highest national honor.

From Maphungubgwe the Kalanga expanded their state, moving to and constructing Great Zimbabwe, and later Khami. In all these areas they carried on their industries and trade. They traded with the Arabians, the Chinese, the Ethiopians, the Portuguese and Phoenicians. It has been suggested by one writer – Gayre of Gayre – that much of the gold
that found its way into the Solomonic Temple and Palace mentioned in the Bible originated among the Kalanga in what later became Zimbabwe.

The Zimbabwe Civilization – epitomized by Maphungubgwe, Great Zimbabwe, and Khami – three of the four man-made UNESCO World Heritage sites in Southern Africa, can be classified as the greatest civilization ever established Africa south of the Sahara. Indeed, barring its lack of a writing culture, it can be classed in the same level with the other great civilizations of the world, from the
Akkadian to the Sumerian to the Egyptian to the Axumite to the Graeco-Roman Civilizations.

The Monomotapa, Togwa and Lozwi Kingdoms

On the political side, the Kalanga established the greatest kingdoms ever established Africa south of the Sahara, both in terms of power, wealth and expanse. They established the Monomotapa Kingdom which swept from the Zambezi to the Makhado Mountains (Luis Trichardt) north to south, and from the Tendankulu (now Pungwe River) in the middle of Mozambique to the Makadikadi Salt Pans on the boundary of the Kalahari Desert, east west.

The Monomotapa Kingdom, which existed for about 500 years (1000-1500) as the greatest polity in Southern Africa, later disintegrated as a result of external attacks and internal decay. It would be succeeded by the Togwa Kingdom which was headquartered at Khami, 22km west of Bulawayo. The Togwa Kingdom, which had been established by Madabhale Shoko/Ncube, later Tjibundule, existed for about 200 years, after which its ruling dynasty, the Tjibundule Dynasty, was overthrown by Mambo Dombolakona-Tjing’wango Dlembewu Moyo, otherwise known as
Tjangamire.

(Tjangamire, a title which originated with the Monomotapa Dynasty when the Arabs still traded in the land, is a combination of two words, the name ‘Tjanga’, and the title Amir/Emir, meaning ‘The Justice.’ The title emir is still in usage in Arab lands, which is why some of them are called Emirates. Tjangamire is not a Shona word as commonly
believed. It is a Kalanga-Arabic word.)

The Lozwi Kingdom of course was to be overthrown after a nearly 30-year onslaught by a succession of five impis – four Nguni and three non-Nguni, these being: the Swati of Mtshetshenyana and Nyamazana, the Ngoni of Zwangendaba, the Gaza-Nguni of Soshangane, the Makololo of Sebituane, the Tswana of Kgari and the Portuguese. This Kingdom finally fell about 1830 with the arrival of the Ndebele of Mzilikazi.

The earliest remembered Kalanga kings are Hee Hamuyendazwa Nkalange Hhowu (Ndlovu) and Malambodzibgwa Nkalange Hhowu (it is from these kings that we take our name – Ba-Nkalange, that is, those of Nkalange (some Ndlovu-surnamed Bakalanga still swear by BaNkalange today. We are told that Nkalanga/Nkalange means “People of the North”).

And of course some of the greatest Kalanga kings to ever live were the likes of Mambo Nhu-unotapa (Monomotapa) Mokomba Hhowu, Mambo Dombolakona-Tjing’wango Dlembewu Moyo, Mambo Madabhale Tjibundule Shoko/Ncube.

The Kalanga Identified by their Tribes and Surnames

Today the Kalanga are divided into 12 major tribes comprising the so-called Bakalanga “proper” (properly BaLozwi), BaLobedu, BaNambya, Vhavenda, BaTalawunda, BaLilima, BaPfumbi, BaLemba, BaLembethu, BaTswapong, BaTwamambo, BaTembe (Mthembu), Babirwa and BaShangwe. They are scattered across Southern Africa from KwaZulu-Natal all the way to
Tanzania, speaking almost all the languages to be in all the countries in between.

Being Kalanga therefore does not mean TjiKalanga-speaking, but it is an ethno-racial identity. Once born a Kalanga always a Kalanga, as long as one carries ancestral Kalanga blood. In other words, as long as one has one or both parents who is or was Kalanga, they are Kalanga too. But how do they get to know if they are ancestrally Kalanga? The answer is to be found in their surname.

The Kalanga, wherever they are in the world, are identifiable primarily by their animal and body parts name surnames like Moyo (variants Pelo, Mbilu, Nhliziyo, Mthunzi, Nkiwane), Ndlovu (Ndou, Tlou, Zhowu, Hhowu), Sibanda (Shumba, Tjibanda, Tau, Motaung, Sebata), Ngwenya (Mokoena, Ngwena, Kwena), Dube (Mbizi, Tembo, Mthembu), Mpala (Mhara/Mhala), Tjuma/Tshuma/Chuma (Ng’ombe, Mung’ombe, Sola), Gumbo, Ndebele (Tjibelu, Phupute), Nyathi (Nare, Mokone), Ncube (Shoko, Mokgabong, Tshwene, Motshweneng, Phiri, Msimang, Nsimango), Mpofu
(Phofu, Shaba-Thuka), Khupe (Shulo, Hulo, Mvundla), Sebele, Kulube (Ngulube, Musele), Nungu (Maphosa), Nkala, etc.

A close look at the numbers of people bearing these surnames shows that the Kalanga Nation is perhaps one of the largest in Southern Africa, perhaps surpassed only by the Zulu.

Born a Kalanga, always a Kalanga. Ndaboka imi n’Kalanga weBulilima-Mangwe ndilikuTitji.

t is easy to note the linguistic similarities between Kalanga and Karanga languages.  Ordinarily, where the Karanga use  the letter “r” in a word, the Kalanga use “l”. This linguistic relationship, some historians argue, suggests that the Karanga and Kalanga peoples are related, and at some point in history were one group of people that spoke the same language and possibly lived in the same area. While their languages sound similar, spatially however, the people live at least 200km apart – the Kalanga inhabit parts of Kezi and Plumtree while the Karanga are dominant in Masvingo, and the southern to central parts of Midlands.

It is not exactly known at what point they went so much apart, but some argue that it must be in the early 1830s when a then militarily powerful Ndebele people chose to settle on the Zimbabwe plateau, sending the weaker now Karanga and Kalanga fleeing to the east and west respectively.  After they were splintered, their common language assumed slight differences over time. There is debate, however, why there has been the specific lexical shift of “r” and “l”.

Prominent historian, Mr Pathisa Nyathi argues that indeed there is a historical relationship between the two peoples dating back centuries ago. Then, he said, the land stretching from the Kalahari Desert in Botswana to Mozambique, was occupied by a people with a common ancestry and language – Kalanga.

“In Zambia, there are the Lozi (Rozvi in Shona); we have the Nambya in western Zimbabwe, and the Kalanga who had a number of dialects like the Vahumbe, Batalaunda, and VaJahunda in the Gwanda area.  The Karanga and various other groups that are now known as the Shona are part of that group.”

It was a vast group of people; he said, whose lifestyle was characterised by the building of stone structures, first at Mapungubwe near the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers to the south in present day South Africa. These people were migrating from South Africa northward, through Botswana, he said. The Mapungubwe Kingdom, Mr Nyathi said, built the first organised state in southern Africa around AD 1000 before they moved northward again to and over time built the Great Zimbabwe Monument, a more impressive metropolis than Mapungubwe.

Between AD1200 and 1500, the Kalanga-speaking people reigned at Great Zimbabwe in Masvingo until it collapsed, resulting in another trek to the west to establish Khami, another stone-walled city.  There the Torwa State reigned. Mr Nyathi argues that the word “torwa” indicates a possible reason why the people moved westward.  Environmental degradation could be one of them, but a more compelling factor could have been a succession struggle that degenerated into a bloody civil war.

“The Kalanga and Karanga both say ‘togwa’ meaning we are fighting or simply fighting,” he said.
“The Kalanga and Karanga descended from the same stock. They are one people.  The initial language was Kalanga but because the Kalanga haven’t written their history, we have lost a lot of information.”

Professor Thomas Huffman, chairman of the Wits School of Archeology, Geography and Environmental Studies argues that Kalanga was the language of the Mapungubwe Kingdom. The Karanga dialect, he said, could have emerged from Kalanga as a result of influence from Zezuru.

He said the Karanga and Kalanga are dialect clusters within the larger Shona language family.  He said Kalanga at one time covered a much larger area before Ndebele incursions in the 1930s scattered the people around.

“You might be interested to know,” said Prof Huffman from South Africa, “that a Kalanga dynasty was probably the leaders at Mapungubwe on the Limpopo River in the 13th century, and a Karanga dynasty probably led the people at Great Zimbabwe.

The Kalanga dynasty at Khami (near Bulawayo) appears to have out-competed Great Zimbabwe at about AD 1450 and the leaders at Great Zimbabwe appear to have gone north to become the famous Mwene Mutapa dynasty.”

Prof Huffman’s argument that Karanga emerged from Kalanga is a question of considerable contestation, as some historians say Kalanga is, in fact a derivative of Karanga.  Kalanga emerged as a result of corruption of Karanga by the invading Ndebele people, in whose language the letter “l” is common.

Karanga and Kalanga words that sound basically the same include body parts -“mpimbila” in Kalanga, (mupambare in Karanga and other Shona dialects, shin in English), “chibvi” (bvi in Karanga, knee in English), “ntumbu” (dumbu in Karanga and other Shona dialects).  In addition to similarities language, there are many common totems between the people such as Hungwe, Moyo, Chuma, Zhou and so on.  Both peoples also worshipped the same deity, Mwari/ Mwali.

Mr Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu, a retired journalist once worked in the 1960s as a researcher in social anthropology among the Kalanga. He argues that Karanga and Kalanga peoples are historically one group.  He said Kalanga was spoken along Macloutsi River in Botswana to Gwilo (now Gweru). To the east of Gwilo, Karanga was the language.

The name Zimbabwe, he said, is a corruption of the Karanga/Kalanga term “dzimbabwe” (houses of stone).  When white settlers were settling in the territory that is now Zimbabwe, they were assisted by Zulu, Sotho or Xhosa whose languages, Mr Ndlovu said, do not have a strong letter “d”.

He said when he visits his uncle in Zaka, Masvingo, he speaks in Kalanga and he speaks in original Karanga with a heavy Rozvi accent.
“The situation was disrupted in the 1820s as a result of Swazi raiders who did not come to defeat the people of that area and take over their territory but to capture foodstuffs, especially livestock,” he said.

In one such Swazi raid around 1831 and 1832, a large group of BaKalanga fled the Matopo area under Ntinima (Mutinhima in Karanga, a MuRozvi and son of King Nechasike whose original name was Chilisamhulu in Kalanga or Chirisamhuru in Karanga) and settled in the Buhera area. These people frequently came back to Matopo at Njelele for religious purposes. It was easy for them to move because there were no boundaries at that time.

“When the Ndebele came,” said Mr Ndlovu, “the Karanga were being raided by the Ndebele army that was controlled by Kalanga boys. So the Karanga were saying, ‘oh they are already Ndebele’ referring to the Kalanga soldiers. You must understand that the Ndebele army was predominantly BaKalanga raiding their cousins in Karangaland.”

Reprinted from The Chronicle.

It involves casual engagement in discussions about others and it is usually spiced with some falsehoods or unsubstantiated claims. Gossiping is the blood relative of rumour mongering.

The Kalanga people seem to have perfected the art of gossiping by inventing a stealthy gossip character.

The Kalanga have a character known as Libilibi in the art of gossip. Libilibi defines the people’s imagination and defies the tenets of uneasy oneness. The character is not anyone in particular. Libilibi could be the other you in you as it is the other side of the same coin.

It is your call whether it is heads or tails. Libilibi was necessitated by the love of gossiping about individuals in their presence.

The subject of gossip is assigned the name Libilibi and may inadvertently take part in the banter. Ignorantly, innocently, unwittingly and unknowingly, Libilibi quips in with more slander that pours scorn upon the self.

Libilibi was born out of intelligent sarcasm owing to too much spare time in people’s hands. The witty nature of the Kalanga people is enviable. Women are the most captivating in the art of skilful gossip. Plumtree women are good gossipers and they have a Libilibi for everyone.

A typical gossip conversation would go as follows:
“Libilibi is wearing his Sunday best today,” says MaMoyo who is famous for gossiping.

“He is taking the cattle to the dip tank today!” says MaNyathi, wife to Comrade Stalin.

“In his best suit?” Manana asks.

“The cattle are in trouble today. The whip will crack on their backs,” MaMoyo the gossip initiator states caustically.

At that moment Comrade Stalin, clad in youth brigade gear, joins the conversation. He is angry that someone is thinking of taking cattle to the dip tank on Sunday when he has a party meeting to address. Comrade Stalin is readying himself to drive all the villagers to a party meeting.

“Women, it is Sunday today. There is no scheduled dipping on Sunday. Tell your well-dressed Libilibi to stop thinking about the ticks on his cattle. No-one is going to interrupt my meeting by going to the dip tank. I want everyone at the meeting.”

Comrade Stalin spits venom when he talks about the party meetings.

“This Libilibi we are talking about wants his cattle dipped today at all costs,” MaMoyo helps Comrade Stalin with the character of Libilibi.

“I don’t want disobedience in this ward. No-one should oppose my command. Your stupid Libilibi should not be hijacking my meeting for the sake of some ticks on the village cattle.”

Comrade Stalin begins to show signs of frustration. He wants people to do farming yet he will not have them engage in operations that limit the parasites on their beasts. Comrade Stalin did not realise that he was the Libilibi under witty scrutiny. He was about to drive everyone to a party meeting.

He was a Libilibi who thinks that cattle are not part of the land question like crop farming. This is the Libilibi who gives seed packs and fertiliser to the people of an arid region and demands a bumper maize crop.

As this Libilibi walked away in triumphant gaiety, one could not help realise that he had unknowingly contributed to his own assassination. Comrade Stalin was being derided in a discussion which he happily took part in.

“Libilibi was given a gift by her husband,” MaMoyo was at it again.

“A gift! Is it the one-way ticket to Johannesburg?” MaNtuli said as she tuned into the topic.

“No return?” MaMoyo adds carelessly.

“But Libilibi thought her husband was stingy,” MaNtuli now knows the subject.

“It is an expensive gift, a one-way ticket to Johannesburg. The gift caught her unawares,” says MaNkala who has been quiet all along.

“Why would she not return. Why should she accept a one-way ticket?” asks MaDube, a sickly woman. MaMoyo the senior gossiper of the village gives a blunt answer: “The husband cannot afford a return trip.”

“Why does she not refuse to go?” MaDube tries to reason on behalf of the Libilibi she did not know.

MaDube was the Libilibi. Her chivalrous and lecherous husband had infected her with the viruses of eternal peril. She was ungainly and sickly and her husband was also frail and emaciated. The gossiping women of the village concluded that the two had exchanged the gift of ill health; a one-way ticket to the dark side of life.

So, this is how Libilibi works. Do not laugh loud at the follies of Libilibi as you might be laughing at your own folly. Anyone can be a Libilibi. The school headmaster is a Libilibi who fondles books. The country’s president is a chief executive officer of a company in sequestration.

The chairman of the local wing of the Taliban is a Libilibi who claims to have died for the top soil. An operative who leads an election campaign is a Libilibi who sells limited choices. A die-hard party man who leads an orgy of violence is a Libilibi of the Jihad movement.

In the eyes of the Kalanga gossip mongers, we are all Libilibis.

 Masola Wadabudabu is a social commentator, reprinted from the Daily News.

by Ndzimu-unami Emmanuel Moyo (repr. from Bulawayo24)

Alan Dershowitz notes his feelings about his Jewish identity when he was a Yale law student: “When I went home for the Jewish holidays, I told my parents about the brilliant teachers at Yale: Goldstein, Pollack, Bickel, Skolnick, Schwartz. Then I told them about the most brilliant of my teachers: Calabresi. Without missing a beat, my mother asked, ‘Is he an Italian Jew?’Angrily I said, ‘Don’t be so parochial. He’s an Italian Catholic. Not all smart people have to have Jewish blood.’ Several months later, I learned that Guido Calabresi was in fact descended from Italian Jews.” [DERSHOWTIZ, p. 50, quoted in When Victims Rule: A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America]

Another Jew, Joshua Halberstam writes that “Pointing to the high proportion of Jewish Nobel Laureates … is a custom practiced around Jewish tables everywhere”, while in the 1970s a Jew from Odessa told the American Jewish Congress that “it was kind of a hobby [among Jews] to collect the names of famous Jews who hide their identity [in the Soviet Union].” [ROTHCHILD, 1985, p. 38, in When Victims Rule.]

The opinions expressed above capture what this article seeks to accomplish. It shows that like Jewry all over the world, the Kalanga stand out as a distinct and exceptional people group among the Bantu, exceptional for their disproportionate achievements compared to other people groups in Sub-Saharan Africa.

These achievements are to be seen not only in history which saw the Kalanga establish the greatest civilization ever established Africa south of the Sahara – the Zimbabwe Civilization – epitomized by three of the four man-made Unesco World Heritage sites in Southern Africa (Maphungubgwe, Great Zimbabwe and Khami); become the first people in Sub-Saharan Africa to create an Iron Age Culture as early as 100AD, mining, smelting and trading in iron, copper and gold; becoming the first farmers to domesticate animals and practice mixed farming; having the most advanced idea of the Supreme Being – the Mwali Religion – a variant of Yahwe’ism (see Summers 1971, Daneel 1970 and Gayre 1972), etc., the achievements are to be seen even in the 20th and 21st centuries.

We find the Kalanga, despite their smaller numbers compared to other groups, becoming the first to organize Africans and take leadership in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa to fight and overthrow white racist rule. We can count here the likes of Dr Joshua Nkomo who founded the ANC which would become the NDP and later ZAPU; Dr John Langalibalele Dube who became the first president of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, and Dr Knight Maripe who earned his Doctorate in Industrial Relations in Belgium in the 1950s and went on to found the first nationalist party in Botswana, the Bechuanaland People’s Party in the 1960s. Indeed, the greatest challenge to the colonialists in the 19th and 20th centuries in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa where the Kalanga and the AbaThembu, a Kalanga people.

These same achievements are to be found in industry where today the two largest telecommunications companies in Africa – MTN and Vodacom – are led by Kalanga CEOs – Sifiso Raymond Dabengwa Ndlovu and Peter Moyo; some of the finest Deans and University leaders from Dr Mthuli Ncube at Wits Business School to Tawana Khupe at the Wits Faculty of Media to Dr Luke Bhala at Lupane State, Professor Lindela Ndlovu at NUST, and nearly all the top faculty at the University of Botswana. The list is endless.

Now, one of these stories that has not been told concerns perhaps the greatest leader that Africa (and perhaps the whole world) has ever produced, viz, Tata Nelson Rholihlahla Mandela. Whilst known to many as a Xhosa, or just as a Thembu, research reveals that his clan, the AbaThembu, are originally a people of Kalanga stock, and only became Xhosa by assimilation.

“Crazy, stupid, foolish, hahaha, all people to you are Kalanga, even Barack Obama is Kalanga then if that’s the case, actually, even Jesus was Kalanga, if not God himself!” These are the initial responses that I anticipate at this stage, but dear reader, if you are one who is not afraid of facing evidence and dealing with it, please read on. Thank you.

Who are the AbaThembu, and Where Did they Come From?

To be honest, since I started researching and writing Kalanga history, I suspected that there must be there some kind of relationship between the Kalanga Tembe/Mthembu and the now Xhosa AbaThembu. But I was a bit afraid to even come close to making such a statement for fear of damaging my credibility as a writer. But that all changed during the funeral of the great Nelson Mandela. It was changed by the statement that was made by the Thembu King, Ikumkani Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo, that the AbaThembu are not originally Xhosa, but they are an assimilated people. To my amazement, when I turned to Tata Mandela’s own autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom, I found that he had already made that statement, and I quote:

The Thembu tribe reaches back for twenty generations to King Zwide. According to tradition, the Thembu people lived in the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains and migrated toward the coast in the sixteenth century, where they were incorporated into the Xhosa nation … The Nguni can be divided into a northern group – the Zulu and the Swazi people – and a southern group, which is made up of amaBaca, amaBomyana, amaGcaleka, amaMfengu, amaMpodomis, amaMpondo, abeSotho, and abeThembu, and together they comprise the Xhosa nation (Mandela 1994: 1).

By Mandela’s own account and that of Ikumkani Dalindyebo, the Thembu were incorporated or assimilated into the Xhosa nation, otherwise, they were a distinct people from the Xhosa, and indeed from the Nguni. But who were they, and where did they come from?

I looked around various sources to answer this question, and a number of internet sources that I found pointed to two locations of Thembu origin – Central Africa and modern KwaZulu-Natal. The claim of origins in Central Africa might not tell us much since all the land from north of the Limpopo to the Central African Republic is by some considered Central Africa. It is the KwaZulu-Natal origin that becomes of serious interest, and of course, as we shall see later, the Thembu in KwaZulu-Natal claim origins in what was once the Kingdom of Bukalanga, now Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique and North Limpopo Province.

In his 1933 seminal work on Thembu history, Who are the Abathembu, and where do they come from?, E. G. Sihele states that the AbaThembu were one of the first  black nations to settle in what is now KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape. He states that their genealogy, which is also the official genealogy of Nelson Mandela (available online as a pdf document titled “Mandela Family Tree”) can be traced to Zwide, great-great-great-grandfather of Chief Thembu, from whom the AbaThembu take their name. (The Reverend J. H. Soga’s Thembu genealogy also starts with Thembu.)

Sihele then writes: “It is clear therefore that we (AbaThembu) broke off from the rest of the Black people with Zwide who left the people in Central Africa, where they still are even today. Zwide’s progeny split and divided as it moved southwards along the seaboard, with their herds of cattle, in search of livelihood AbaThembu broke off from Zwide’s descendants when they moved ahead.”

Whilst no one, as Sihele argues, has been able to delve into and bring out more information on the person of Zwide, this particular individual remains of particular interest to any historian interested in Thembu history. So far as we can establish, the term or name “Zwide” carries no meaning whatsoever in any of the Nguni languages, instead it carries meaning in TjiKalanga. (It is rare for Bantu names to be just names without carrying some particular meaning in that language. Also note: the Zwide mentioned here is nothing to do with the 19th century Zwide KaLanga of the Ndwandwe.)

Could it be then that the “Central Africa” referred to is the former Kingdom of Bukalanga, where the name “Zwide” carries meaning, meaning “Love Yourself”? Perhaps yes, perhaps not.

Of AbaThembu and Tembe/Mthembu Settlements in KwaZulu-Natal

I indicated at the beginning of this article that I have always wondered if it was mere coincidence that there are ‘Xhosa’ people called AbaThembu (singular – umThembu) and the Mthembu people, both settled and/or once settled in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, and the two be just unrelated peoples. I began to believe that there is a relationship between the two once I got information that the AbaThembu, before moving to their present homeland in the northeastern Eastern Cape Province around the Mthatha, were originally settled in the old Natal State.

At look at an old map of the Union of South Africa (for example, a 1905 map is available online under the title “Kapstaaten_1905) shows that the Old Natal spread from just north of Kokstadt in the modern Eastern Cape into KwaZulu-Natal. In this Natal, to the surprise of many, were first settled people of Kalanga stock, the AmaLala, barring the Khoisan (please see Alfred T. Bryant, Synopsis of Zulu Grammar and a Concise History of the Zulu People from the Most Ancient Times, 1905; Clement M. Doke, The Bantu Speaking Tribes of South Africa, 1937, and Theodore Bent, The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland, 1892) .

These people were pushed further south away from the shadow of the Drakensburg Mountains first by the wars of the AbaMbo as they arrived in the region around 1600, and later by the raids of Tshaka in the 19th century. But where had they come from? It is here that we find a convergence of the AbaThembu bakaDalindyebo in the Eastern Cape and the Kalanga AbaThembu bakaMabhudu Tembe/Mthembu in KZN.

As already indicated, the AbaThembu take their name from the patriarch Thembu, whereas on the other hand, the Mthembu Clan in KwaZulu-Natal – who we definitely know to have Kalanga origins – also takes its name from a patriarch of the same name – Thembu, otherwise known as Tembe (see Roelie J. Kloppers, page 27, The History and Representation of the Mabudu-Tembe, a Master of Arts Dissertation presented to the University of Stellenbosch Faculty of Humanities in 2003; and Henry A. Junod, 1927, The Life of a South African Tribe, Volumes I and II.)

This writer is of the opinion that this cannot be mere coincidence, that two people groups can carry the same name, claim ancestral origins from a patriarch of the same name, be settled or have settled in the same geographical region, and yet be unrelated. I am convinced the Eastern Cape AbaThembu and the KwaZulu-Natal Mthembu Clan are one and the same peoples, although more research would be needed in this area.

The Origins of the Patriarch Thembu/Tembe and his People 

The claim that the AbaThembu, and hence the great Nelson Mandela (an AbaThembu Prince) are originally of Kalanga stock is based on the evidence of the Kalanga origins of the Thembu patriarch, Tembe/Thembu. Kloppers indicates in page 84 of his dissertation that Mthembu or Thembu is the ‘Nguni’ized’ version of Tembe. In a document available on the University of Pretoria website we are told that “The Tembe are named after Chief Mthembu, who arrived from Zimbabwe [Bukalanga] around 1554 and settled in the region around Maputo Bay” (www.upetd.up.ac.za/../02chapter2). “Historically they settled in the region that spans from Maputo Bay in Mozambique in the north of the Mkuze River in the south, and the Pongola River in the west in the middle of the 16th century (Kloppers 2001 – The History and Representation of the History of the Mabudu-Tembe).

Yes, they came from what is now Zimbabwe, the former Kingdom of Bukalanga, but that is not enough to say that they are a people of Kalanga stock. More evidence is needed to that end. This we find in the 1927 work of the Swedish missionary the Reverend Henry A. Junod. Of the Tembe/Thembu he wrote:

Almost every clan [in the African south east coast] pretends to have come from afar, and strange to say, they came from all points of the compass. Two of their clans, without doubt, came from the north, the Ba-ka-Baloyi and the Tembe. The Ba-ka-Baloyi, they say, came down the valley of the Limpopo in very remote times … According to some of the Native historians, the Ba-Loyi came from the Ba-Nyai country along with the Ba-Nwanati (a Hlengwe group), who also belonged to the Nyai or Kalanga race [the BaLoyi are the same as BaLozwi and BaNyai, being a Kalanga group].

As regards the Tembe clan, it is said to have come down as far as Delagoa Bay from the Kalanga country by the Nkomati River on a floating island of payrus, and to have crossed the Tembe river and settled to the south of the Bay … The Tembe people, when they greet each other, sometimes use the salutation Nkalanga, i.e. man of the north or of the Kalanga country, and there is little doubt that, notwithstanding the legendary traits of this tradition, the fact itself of the northern origin of these clans is true (Junod 1927, 21-23).

In the introduction to the first volume, Junod tells us that his informants were all over the age of eighty years at the turn of the 20th century, which means that they would have been born about the turn of the 19th century, somewhat closer to the events that they were recounting in their discussions with the missionary.

Junod’s report on the Kalanga origins of the Tembe is also attested to by W.S. Felgate who, in The Tembe Thonga of Natal and Mozambique: An Ecological Approach, reports that the Tembe claim to have migrated from Kalanga country (1982: 11).

In an abridged version of a document published in submission to the Nhlapho Commission opposing the claim by Eric Nxumalo that he should be installed as King of the Tsonga (and Shangaan people) in 2007, Mandla Mathebula, Robert Nkuna, Hlengani Mabasa, and Mukhacani Maluleke wrote that over the centuries, the Tsonga have assimilated other cultural groups who came to live with them in South East Africa, and among those were:

Tembe-Kalanga, who were in the Delagoa Bay region by 1554. The Baloyi-Rozvi (Lozwi), were already in the N’walungu region during the time of the Dutch occupation of the Delagoa Bay (1721-31). Some Hlengwe oral traditions claimed that the Hlengwe were actually the ones who converted the Valoyi from Rozvi (Lozwi) into Tsonga in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. This probably happened after the death of the powerful king of Rozvi, Changameri Dombo [i.e., Mambo Dombolakona-Tjing’wango Dlembewu Moyo] in 1696 (Mathebula, et al 2007, Online).

The Portuguese traveler and chronicler, Perestrelo, who had made a survey of all the land and peoples from the Transkei to the Delagoa Bay (located just to the north of the St. Lucia Bay and the Mkhuze River which is just to the south of Maputo and the Lebombo Mountains), wrote in 1576 that he had encountered the Tembe in 1554, apparently long settled on the south east coast, or modern KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Eastern Cape and Swaziland (see Dr. Sidney Welch, 1948, South Africa Under John III, 1521-1557.)

Conclusion

There is no doubt that this article will open a hornet’s nest, perhaps result in a lot of debate on the part of those with scholarly minds, and also arouse tremendous laughter and condemnation from those of limited intellect who would not take the time to judge the evidence on its own merits or lack thereof.

But I believe that I have attempted to show that indeed, if the patriarch Thembu from whom AbaThembu take their name is the same patriarch of the Kalanga Tembe/Thembu, then the AbaThembu are originally a people of Kalanga stock, and as explained by Ikumkani Dalindyebo and Nelson Mandela himself, became Xhosa by assimilation. Zwide would probably have been an older patriarch whose remains lie somewhere north of the Limpopo, for as Sihele put it, “in search of livelihood AbaThembu broke off from Zwide’s descendants when they moved ahead.” Apparently, no one knows where that “breaking off” would have happened.

Now, if indeed the AbaThembu of Nelson Mandela (presently led by Ikumkani Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo) and the Tembe/Mthembu (presently led by Inkosi Mabhudu Tembe/Mthembu in KZN) are one and the same people, we can safely conclude that Nelson Mandela and the AbaThembu are people of Kalanga stock. And like those Jews around their tables counting the number of Jewish Nobel Laureates and the Jews in Russia making a hobby of counting Jewish high achievers, we of Kalanga stock may find ourselves having an extra political hero – Nelson Mandela – in addition to the likes of Dr Joshua Nkomo, Jason Ziyaphapha Moyo, Dr Knight Maripe, Festus Mogae, Daniel Kwele, George T. Silundika, Moses Mzila-Ndlovu, etc.

Ndaboka imi n’Kalanga we Bulilima-Mangwe. Ishwani. Goledzwa. Catch me on ndzimuunami@gmail.com