ord ‘letsine’, which is a liquid strained from a mixture such as fermented beer, but was adapted by the amaNdebele to mean dirt, and in some instances shit.[i]
The Mashona are a difficult to define grouping made up of similarly mixed origins, with in combination something of great empire to reflect back upon. The disunited body of small political units that the amaNdebele discovered waiting for their spear did not necessarily define the Mashona of old, and certainly these were a race of people deserving of more than a nomenclature of shit! And yet that is how the amaNdebele viewed them, and not only the amaNdebele but many other sundry travellers in the region, the salient among them being those Victorian hunters and explorers who also had nothing but the present with which to judge a once great people.
A factual examination of the tribes of the central plateau, known collectively as Mashona, either in isolation or as a group, blunders into territory both rich with political interpretation and impoverished of fact. The arrival of white colonists in the late 19th century represented the first opportunity for a systematic anthropological examination of the Mashona, and even then this was conducted with many pre-conceptions. Often it was documented as a thinly veiled attempt by early missionaries to define and justify their own turf wars, and later to support African history as it was written by white historians for white consumption.
Like the amaNdebele themselves, the peoples of the central plateau are Bantu in origin, and have been in occupation of the central plateau since more or less the 11th century. By the mid-19th century when the amaNdebele arrived in the territory to occupy the south-western extremities of the plateau, Mashona political organisation was fractured, although in the centuries prior to this several large and unified political grouping had at various times held sway over the landscape. The best known of these was that which greeted early Portuguese explorers and traders who began to appear in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The Mutapa, or Mwane Mutapa Empire was founded in the early 15th century and centred largely around the Karanga division of the Mashona language group (modern Mashona historian reject the use of the term ‘tribe’ or ‘clan’ leaving little scope to describe the sub-divisions other than as sub-divisions). The Empire of the Mutapa at its pinnacle controlled territory covering most of modern day Zimbabwe and Mozambique more or less between the Zambezi and Sabi (Save) Rivers. It was the first major civilisation to become established in the territory, and the great wealth and sophistication achieved by its leaders and aristocrats came as a consequence of trade in gold, ivory and other primary materials with Arab/Swahili traders at the coast, and later the Portuguese.
In about 1490 the empire split into two parts with the Changamire dynasty ruling in the south and the Mwane Mutapa holding sway in the north. Great wealth from trade with the coast was circulating within both economies, centred in the south on the city of Great Zimbabwe. However after 1500 the power of these entities peaked and began to decline until by the mid 18th century the ‘empire’ was largely controlled by the Portuguese. The movement north of the Nguni armies of the Shangaan and the Ngoni that had sheared off their parents groups as a consequence of the rise of Zulu, introduced a level of violence onto the central plateau that had hitherto never been seen. First came the Ngoni on their turbulent march north, followed later by the Shangaan who settled on east side of the highland escarpment, occupying territory from eastern Zimbabwe almost to the outskirts of present day Maputo. By the time the amaNdebele made their claim to the territory there was little apparent glory left among the Mashona, and certainly there seemed no reason to expect any resistance as the amaNdebele began to organise their new home. The initial attacks mounted against the Mashona villages and settles took on the by now familiar pattern.
As 