Missionaries, migrants, and the Manyika: The invention of ethnicity in Zimbabwe
Date
1984-04-02
Authors
Ranger, Terence
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Abstract
Over the last twenty years there have been all too many conflicts
in Zimbabwean African politics - conflicts between and within African
parties and guerrilla movements, divisions amongst voters, strains
within the cabinet of the government of independent Zimbabwe. There
have also arisen a number of schools of interpretation of such divisions.
Some see them in terms of class conflicts; others however see
them in terms of ethnicity. They invoke not only the allegedly
'traditional' hostility of 'the Ndebele' and 'the Shona', but also an
asserted conflict between Shona sub-ethnicities, the so-called
'Korekore', 'Zeruru', 'Karanga', 'Kalanga' and 'Manyika’….
Analyses such as these raise two main questions in an historian's
mind. The first question, to which I shall return briefly at the end
of this chapter, is whether they provide an accurate explanation for
recent conflicts. The second question, to which most of this chapter
will be devoted, is from where the idea of such entities as the
'Manyika', the 'Zezuru' and the rest has come. These entities
certainly do not represent pre-colonial 'historical fact', nor can
they in the present be properly described as 'tribes' or 'clans', no
matter that both Africans and European commentators employ these
terms. Yet they evidently have come to possess a subjective reality in
the minds not only of commentators but of participants. How has this
come to pass?
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 2 April, 1984
Keywords
Manyika (African people), Ethnic groups. Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe. Politics and government