 affair, but re-emerged later and remained one of the great mysteries of amaNdebele mythology. The momentum of controversy has persisted only because, upon the death of Mzilikazi, and as the question of succession was pondered, an unexpected voice from Natal, that of a certain individual named Kanda, claimed to be, if not nKulumane himself, then at least a son of Mzilikazi. The story was then circulated that the Induna uMncumbata intervened during the bloody events of the reunification and secreted the boy to Natal where he was placed under the care of Natal colonial administrator Theophilus Shepstone. The potential that nKulumane did indeed survive the wrath of his father does exist, but a far greater likelihood is that he did not. What is certain, however, is that Mzilikazi youngest potential heir Lobengula did survive, and was at a later date re-introduced to his father, who appeared by then more tranquil and forgiving, after which Lobengula became something of a favoured son.
Mzilikazi in the meanwhile put the unpalatable events of the reunification behind him and set about rebuilding the nation. By then both he and his people had established a custom of consolidation that involved the defensive positioning of military kraals and the creation of pacified zones some 150 miles wide in every direction. Thereafter the amaNdebele settled into the by then well established routine of cattle husbandry and predatory attacks on their less warlike neighbours. The latter involved a preliminary reconnaissance of the human landscape before the potential strength and wealth of the inhabitants of the country were gauged. The new country inhabited by the amaNdebele was not utterly unknown, and had been a peripheral raiding ground in the past, although not in the wholesale manner now planned.
What the amaNdebele found on the central plateau and in the regions surrounding their current settlements was an inter-related language group that they named the Mashona, or aMaTswina. The latter reference literally refers to the Tswana word ‘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 