UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND
 A F R I C A N S T U D I E S I N S T I T U T E
 African S t u d i e s Seminar Paper
 to be p r e s e n t e d in RW
 4.00pm APRIL 1984
 Title: Missionaries, Migrants and the Manyika: The Invention of
 Ethnicity in Zimbabwe.
 by: Terence Ranger
 No. 146
UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND
 A F R I C A S T U D I E S I N S T I T U T E
 African Studies Seminar Paper to
 be presented at Seminar in RW 319
 at 4,00 p.m. on Monday, 2nd April
 1984
 MISSIONARIES, MIGRANTS AND THE MANYIKA: THE INVENTION OF ETHNICITY IN
 ZIMBABWE
 TeA.on.ce.
 INTRODUCTION
 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 divi-
 sions. 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 'Manyika1.
 Thus in March 1976 an international commission of inquiry, appoint-
 ed by the Zambian Government and composed of representatives from a
 dozen or so African states, reported on the murder of Herbert Chitepo,
 then national Chairman of the Zimbabwe African National Union, in
 March 1975. The report found that Chitepo had not been killed by a
 Rhodesian agent. He had instead been a victim of the 'mutual hatred
 and suspicion among the tribal groups' within ZANU. The commision
 found 'abundant evidence of tribal and regional manifestations in
 ZANU'. In particular it found that Chitepo's death was the climax of a
 struggle for power between the Manyikas and the Karangas. The
 victorious Karangas, now supreme in the party's command, had elim-
 inated the Manyika Chitepo.
 In May 1976 Mdabaningi Sithole, who was then struggling to regain
 the leadership of ZANU," endorsed these findings. In an open letter,
 calling on 'all Zimbabweans to do away with tribalism and regional-
 ism', he analysed the successive elections to ZANU?s central committee
 in terms of tribal rivalry:
 The main thesis of my letter is that ZANU as we had first
 formed it became constantly subject to a process of tri-
 balisation or regionalisation so that it completely lost
 the nationalist perspective . . . When we formed ZANU in
 1963 it was called the Zimbabwe African National Union,
 but by 1974 and at the beginning of 1975 it had become in
 practice Zimbabwe African Tribal Union ... If the death of
 Herbert Chitepo is to be associated with any ?isms', it
and the. ManyXka
 cannot be directly or immediately with colonialism or
 capitalism, but rather with tribalism or regionalism ...
 If it is to be associated with any race, it can only be
 the African race ... I want everyone to know that this
 tribalism did not originate from the people outside
 Zimbabwe. The Karanga, Zezuru, Korekore, Ndau, Kalanga and
 other tribes in Zimbabwe are solidly united and determined
 to become a nation.
 In March 1977, by which time Sithole had set up his own splinter
 ZANU group, he sought to carry this analysis into practice:
 In appointing the central committee, I have been guided by
 definite objective criteria ... (but) in the allocation of
 the various offices I have been guided by the principle of
 ethnic balance, in order that we may forestall any ethnic
 manipulation of any of our political structures. In ZANU
 we have had tragic experience resulting from ethnic
 imbalances in the central committee. The allocative
 principle of ethnic balance will be applied to the
 national executive committee, the central committee, the
 provincial committee, the district committee, the branch
 executive, the high command, the general staff, all
 committees and to any other organs of ZANU.
 Sithole appointed two Ndau, two Karanga, two Kalanga, two Zezuru, two
 Ndebele, two Manyika, and two Korekore to his executive.
 Political scientists also began to adopt this style of analysis. In
 1979 Ndabaningi Sithole's brother, Masipula, published his Zimbabwe.
 Struggles within the Stuggle. With the aid of ethnic triangle
 diagrams, he argued that prior to 1971 ZANU's party leadership was
 shared between the Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika, an arrangement which
 had prevented straightforward 'tribal' hostility:
 Competition, whether perceived in personal, tribal, or
 regional terms, was in three directions. An individual
 from the Manyika group could not only rely on regional/
 tribal support .. . One had to appeal at least to one
 other tribal/regional grouping.
 After 1971, however, 'the Zezuru group pulled out', and 'bi-polarity
 sharpened tribal/regional competition in the party. A deadly struggle
 between Manyika and Karahga developed*
 The analysis spread to British commentators. In July 1979, for
 example, Professor Claire Palley made an ethnic interpretation of the
 recent Internal Settlement elections which had been won by the
 1Manyika' Muzorewa:
 If the tribal basis of (Muzorewa's) support is analysed,
 it will be seen that, at the time of the election, his
 party (the UANC) largely consisted of a coalition between
 the Manyika, Korekore and Zezuru tribes, totalling forty
 three percent of the population. The UANC received . ..
 only about forty percent of the total potential vote.
Migrant* and the Manyika
 There is here a remarkable tribal correlation. Since Mr
 Chikerema led Zezuru dissidents out of the bishop's party,
 much of the bishop' s Zezuru support has been lost. The
 bishop is now left with basically twenty five percent of
 the African population supporting him. The Ndebele
 speakers support Mr Nkomo .. . The Ndau and some Rozwi
 support the Rev_. Sithole. The Karanga by and large sup-
 port Mr Mugabe.
 The British press and others began to reproduce and refer to maps
 produced in Southern Rhodesia which showed the exact boundaries of
 these sub-ethnicities and the exact proportion of the country's Af-
 rican population which each contained. Such maps often carried be-
 neath them a note to the effect that 'the above divisions are based on
 historical fact1. Even the Minority Rights Group, which published a
 report on Inequalities in Zimbabwe in December 1979, devoted a page to
 the 'tribal background' in which it informed its readers that the
 Korekore constitute twelve percent, the Zezuru eighteen percent and
 the Karanga twenty two percent of the African population. It noted
 'that the tribal character of African affairs in Rhodesia has not been
 transcended' and that this sort of ' tribalism' was a factor 'which
 looks set to grow'. (Map four)
 Analyses such as these raise two main questions in an historian1s
 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?
 ETHNICITY AND HISTORY
 David Beach's admirable history of the Shona-speaking peoples shows
 clearly that before 1890 there were two 'historical realities'. One
 was that all speakers of Shona possessed not only the language but
 many other cultural traits in common. Scattered over a very large
 area, in contrasting environments, and pulled in different directions
 by trading links and military alliances, however, these Shona-speakers
 were not conscious of a cultural identity, still less a political one.
 The second reality and the one of which Shona-speakers were conscious
 was the local chieftancy group. These very numerous groups were not
 and never had been clustered together in self-conscious ethnicities
 such as are today implied by the terms Manyika, Zezuru and the rest.
 At times in the past powerful states had emerged which had extracted
 tribute from chiefly groups in a system of over-rule, but these states
 had never pulled all their subjects together into conscious identi-
 ties. Between the Shona culture as a whole and the local chiefly group
 there existed no intermediate concept of ethnicity.
 Beach does show, however, that the terms Korekore, Zezuru, Manyika
, M-lgsiarvtA and the. fllanyJMa 4
 and the rest did have a pre-colonial currency. Each arose in a diff-
 erent way and had different connotations; each was available to be
 pressed into distorting service by the classifiers of the twentieth
 century. Two of the terms had a long historical significance, two were
 topographical, one was a slang term invented by an enemy.
 The terms which had a long recorded history were Karanga/Kalanga
 and Manyika. When the Portuguese came into contact with the Shona-
 speaking peoples in the sixteenth century they recorded that the
 chiefly lineages which ruled over the commoners were known as 'Karan-
 ga'. They also reported the existence of a chiefly territory which was
 called Manyika. European usage came to transform the significance of
 these terms. As we shall see, the Portuguese called a large region
 around the Manyika chieftancy by the name of Manicaland and the name
 was picked up by the British in the late nineteenth century. Most of
 the peoples in this region, however, did not think of themselves as
 related in any way to the Manyika chieftancy.
 As for the term 'Karanga' it suffered a shift both of location and
 meaning. The Portuguese had used it to refer to the ruling lineages of
 the northern and eastern Shona-speakers. The incoming British at the
 end of the nineteenth century picked up this 'historic1 term to
 describe the first Shona-speakers they encountered, naming the total
 populations of the south-west 'Kalanga' and of the southern plateau
 1Karanga?.
 The terms which had a topographical connection were 'Korekore' and
 'Zezuru'. Beach tells us that 'Korekore gradually appeared in the
 north ... In general it meant the people of the north and northwest'.
 He also tells us that 'by the middle of the eighteenth century the
 Portuguese were beginning to refer to the people around the head of
 the Mazoe Valley as "Zezuru". The term meant people who lived in a
 high area'. The two words were the equivalent, then, of 'northerner'
 and 'highlander' rather than ethnic or tribal categories. As for the
 term 'Ndau1 , it was a derogatory nick-name given to the peoples of the
 eastern frontier by the raiding Gaza Nguni of the mid nineteenth
 century. Beach concludes by regretting the projection backwards into
 'tradition' of what have become modern 'tribal' names since, as he
 says, ' most of ttiese terms were originally used in a much more
 restricted sense'.
 In this way terms which certainly did not mean to convey the idea
 of ethnic homogeneity in pre-colonial times were picked up in the
 colonial period precisely to convey that idea. Even then they did not
 convey the idea very successfully to rigorous observers. Thus the
 anthropologist Hans Holleman, writing of a number of Shona chiefships,
 remarked:
 All these are commonly regarded as belonging to the Zezuru
 cluster of the 'Shona1 tribes, but it is doubtful if such
 a classification can be justified on ethnological grounds
 as no detailed comparative study has yet been attempted.
 From a native point of view this affiliation is meaning-
 less , as it is not supported by any special ties of a
 political or other nature. Few, if any, have an
 intelligent conception of a 'Zezuru cluster' as distinct
 from, say, a Karanga or Manyika cluster.
and -the
 The terms had no 'traditional' validity nor did they correspond to
 any clearly perceived twentieth century 'tribal' realities. Nor were
 they made use of, moreover, by the Southern Rhodesian administration
 for the purposes of breaking up its subject peoples into manageable
 blocks, hence there was no incentive for Africans to 'invent'
 ethnicities because these might tap the flow of administrative patron-
 age. And yet, despite all this, the terms have come to possess at
 least that degree of reality illustrated by the opening citations of
 this chapter. I believe that this has happened as a result of the
 agency both of 'unofficial' Europeans and of 'unofficial' Africans -
 of missionaries and their converts and of African labour migrants.
 Later, when these 'unofficials' had achieved a diffused sense of
 'Manyikahood', 'Zezuruness' and so on, the concepts were belatedly
 taken up by 'officials', by chiefs, by the administration and by the
 propaganda agencies of the Rhodesian regime. I hope to illustrate this
 generalisation by a case study of twentieth century ethnicity in parts
 of eastern Zimbabwe. In particular I shall examine the changing sense
 of self identification in the old chiefdom of Maungwe under chief
 Makoni which in the twentieth century constituted the greater part of
 the Makoni administrative district. In the 1890s no-one in Makoni
 thought of themselves as 'Manyika'; by the 1930s most of them had come
 to accept that they were members of a wide Manyika identity. I shall
 try to explain how this happened.
 ETHNICITY, HISTORY AND THE EARLY COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION IN EASTERN
 ZIMBABWE
 Before I can turn to the task of tracing the growth of an extended
 Manyika identity in the twentieth century I must deal with at least
 four other uses of the concept 'Manyika'. The first three of these I
 derive from Dr H.H.K. Bhila's excellent Trade and Politics in Shona
 Kingdom^ The Manyika and their Portuguese and African Neighbours, 1575
 - 1902. For Bhila the essential historical meaning of 'Manyika1 is
 the territory and people of chief or king Mutasa. 'My research was
 focused on the area where the Mutasa dynasty has settled since the
 late seventeenth century', Bhila writes, and he shows this area on a
 map as a relatively small zone, north and north-west of modern Mutare,
 comparable in size to one of the later Rhodesian colonial administra-
 tive districts and bounded by African 'kingdoms' which were not in any
 sense part of 'Manyika' so defined. (Map one). Bordering Mutasa's
 kingdom to the west lay the kingdom of Maungwe under Makoni, which in
 the nineteenth century was Mutasa's chief enemy and competitor for
 land, cattle, women and slaves. As Bhila explains, 'the boundaries of
 these kingdoms often shifted following the vicissitudes of wars';
 hence the best definition of traditional Manyika was political rather
 than geographical. Manyika comprehended all those who at any one time
 acknowledged the authority of Mutasa - and nobody else. (Map two).
 A second use of the concept 'Manyika', however, was developed by
 the Portuguese and propagated by them especially in the later nine-
 teenth century. Claiming that the then reigning Mutasa had 'made a
 voluntary submission' to them in 1876, they expanded the area of
 'Manyika1 on their maps to cover an enormous territory to which they
 then laid claim. As Bihla tells us:
fl\iA-4i-on.a/iLeA, MigA.wvb4 and the ManyJJza 6
 on a Portuguese map of 1887 . .. its boundaries extended
 along the Zambezi from Shupanga to near Tete, then south-
 west along the Mazoe and south by the Sabi river valley to
 its junction with the Odzi river, then east along the
 Musapa and Buzi rivers to the mouth of the Pungwe. This
 enormous size of Manyika was evidently fixed by political
 and commercial considerations. The Mazoe valley was
 included because of the rumours of abundant alluvial gold.
 The Kingdom of Manyika over the which the Manyika rulers
 ... exercised authority ... was a much smaller area.
 This greatly inflated Portuguese Manyika did include, among much else,
 the territory of Maungwe but as a merely notional and paper definition
 it did nothing to affect sense of identity. In other moments,
 moreover, the Portuguese treated the Makoni chiefs of Maungwe as
 independent sovereigns and made treaties with them.
 A third use of the concept 'Manyika1 was that made by the British
 in the 1890s as a counter to these Portuguese claims. In their at-
 tempt to gain control of 'the Pungwe River route, which was the main
 water way to and from Beira', the British South Africa Company imposed
 'a treaty on Mutasa, on 14 September 1890'. This treaty 'provided
 that no one could possess land in Manyika except with the consent of
 the BSA Company', and once it was signed the Company invented its own
 1
  Greater Manyika', the western boundaries of which lay deep inside
 Portuguese territory, though areas like Mazoe and Maungwe, to which
 the Company made quite differently based claims, were excluded.
 Once the Company ? s frontiers had been fixed by means of war and
 arbitration, there was no longer any need to inflate the power or the
 territory of Mutasa; rather the reverse. The old kingdom of Mutasa
 was broken up between the two administrative districts of Umtali and
 Inyanga; much of the land was alienated to white farmers; and the
 administration was very concerned to advance a minimalist definition
 of Manyika-hood. 'Umtassa's country and people are called Manyika's,
 wrote the Native Commissioner, Umtali, in January 1904. 'They do not
 speak the same dialect as the other Mashonas. ' The same desire to
 separate Mutasa off from neighbouring peoples can be seen in the early
 district reports from Umtali in which Native Commissioner Hulley spelt
 out that the three chiefs in the district, Mutasa, Maranke and
 Zimunya, were of quite distinct origins, even if there was a popular
 tendency to refer to his district as 'Manicaland'.
 So far as the administrative district of Makoni was concerned, the
 native department were very concerned to emphasise the distinction
 between its people and the Manyika. In 1910 there was a boundary
 dispute between the native commissioners of Makoni and Inyanga dis-
 tricts. The Native Commissioner, Inyanga wrote to the Superintendent
 of Natives, Umtali, to explain whey he was collecting tax from Af-
 ricans on farms which lay just within the western border of Makoni
 district:
 There are no Makoni (Shonga) natives on any of these
 farms. I have always acted on your suggestion - that is I
 have dealt with Manyikas only . . . (Let) the Native
 Commissioner Rusapi deal with Makoni natives and I with
 Manyika ... No dispute should arise.
and the
 The matter was so decided and the Chief Native Commissioner decided
 'that the N.C., Inyanga deal with all Manyika natives and the N.C. ,
 Rusapi with all the Makoni.
 It is clear from this that the native department firmly separated
 the Waungwe of Makoni from the Manyika in a political sense. The same
 separation was also insisted upon in the cultural sphere. Thus in 1915
 a debate arose within the native department about the significance of
 the term mayinini in relation to Manyika marriage customs. Llewllyn
 Meredith, who had been Native Commissioner in both Melsetter and
 Makoni, districts which today are held to fall within 'Manicaland',
 ventured to advance his opinion on 'Manica customs and language1. He
 was crushed by the scorn of the Manyika specialists. The Superinten-
 dent of Natives, Umtali, mocked Meredith's 'eighteen years experience
 of Manyika customs gathered in other districts', and invoked the
 authority of Archdeacon Etheridge, the leading missionary 'expert' on
 Mutasa's chiefdom. 'I do not of course know,' wrote Etheridge, 'what
 word may be used in Chindau, or Chirungwe, the dialects spoken in
 Melsetter and Rusape Makoni districts, but as regards Chimanyika there
 is no question at all.1
 In short, nothing in the precolonial history of eastern Zimbabwe
 had predisposed the people of Makoni to think of themselves as 'Man-
 yika1 and the colonial administration - by means of its decisions on
 district boundaries and by its issue of registration certificates
 which included an official allocation of 'tribal' status - actively
 told them that they were not Manyika. Posselt's Survey of the Native
 Tribes of Southern Rhodesia which was issued by the Government Printer
 showed the Waungwe of Makoni as one of the sixteen 'separate tribes'
 in Southern Rhodesia, though this map of the 'Approximate Distribution
 of Tribes and Languages' showed them as part of the Zezuru language
 zone. Posselt's classifications were confused but the one thing he was
 certain of was that the people of Makoni were tribally, culturally and
 linguistically distinct from the people of Mutasa's Manyika.
 At the beginning of the colonial period the people of Makoni
 certainly also believed that they were distinct from the Manyika. The
 unity of pre-colonial Maungwe had been, in fact, a unity of political
 allegiance rather than a unity of shared ethnicity. Within Maungwe
 there lived not only the related chiefly dynasties of the Makoni and
 Chipunza dynasties, but also headmen and their followers who were the
 acknowledged descendants of the original occupants of the land. During
 the nineteenth century, and no doubt long before, small groups from
 north, south, east and west entered Maungwe as hunters, specialists,
 refugees and adventurers and were allowed to settle there in return
 for their services as smiths, elephant-hunters, diviners, rain-makers
 or fighters. Many of these incomers were made use of by the Makoni
 chiefs in their wars with the Mutasas of Manyika and in hostility to
 Manyika they forged their new political identity.
 Maurice Nyagumbo's unpublished account of the arrival in Maungwe of
 his grandfather, Nyagumbo from 'the Nyashanu country', who had fled
 with his two brothers as a political refugee, is very revealing of
 this process:
 When the three brothers and their sister arrived in Ma-
 koni 's country they settled in a cave .. . Here they were
 found by Makoni soldiers who suspected them of being
t fl\-LgA.arutA and the ManyXka
 spies. They were taken to the chief, where they were
 kindly received ... Chief Makoni had become a terror to
 all those who surrounded his chiefdom, especially the
 Wamanyika of chief Mutasa ... It was at this time that the
 Nyashanu brothers and their sister arrived in Makoni?s
 country. The sister later became Makoni's wife; the
 brothers joined one of the regiments of the chief. After a
 few raids, Nyagumbo, the youngest of the Nyashanu
 brothers, proved to be an excellent fighter and he was
 later promoted to lead his own regiment.
 Nyagumbo's regiment had a special task to perform. This
 was to scout and to waylay enemy soldiers. After a few
 years as a soldier, Nyagumbo became one of main council-
 lors of the chief and as a reward for his outstanding
 achievements in the raids, he was given a slave girl of
 the Wamanyika tribe as his wife ... At that time Mutasa of
 the Wamanyika decided to attack Makoni with a large army
 ... Makoni had been informed of these preparations and
 since he had only a limited number of soldiers, he decided
 to move his army to a fortified hill at Mhanda. Makoni had
 large stores of food for his army on the hill ... When
 Mutasa arrived with his unwieldy army he found the
 villages deserted. Soon Mutasa and his army became very
 tired and hungry ... then very early in the morning, as
 the war-drum beat and the women ululated thunderously,
 Makoni's army descended to meet Mutasa's army. This his-
 toric battle started early in the morning and was fought
 throughout the day ... Makoni's army, although suffering
 heavy losses, inflicted even greater losses on the enemy.
 Mutasa fled with his few remaining soldiers ... This was
 known as Pakafa dende remukaka by the Wawungwe people -
 the calabash containing milk was smashed - because both
 Mutasa and Makoni lost their most important warriors. The
 two Nyashanu brothers who fought in the battle were both
 wounded but they survived.
 Memories of these wars remained vivid in the early twentieth cen-
 tury, reminding the people of Makoni of their distinction from the
 Manyika. In December 1902 Archdeacon Upcher, itinerating around kraal
 schools in Makoni, 'passed a wooded kopje, the scene of a massacre as
 horrible as that of Glencoe. M?tasa surrounded the village and set
 fire to the houses ... People do not like to pass that way by night as
 they hear, so they say, people talking. Vaungwe women, captured by
 the Manyika during the wars, took the opportunity of the colonial
 'pacification' to escape from their masters and to return home. When
 in October 1898 the Anglican missionaries, Douglas and Vera Pelly,
 travelled to the farm of their Zulu catechist in Makoni they tried to
 persuade Mutwa, widow of the martyred Bernard Mzeki, to come back with
 them to Umtali so that her little son could 'be brought up as a
 Christian, for Bernard's sake'. Mutwa's response revealed all the
 local dislike of and sense of distance from the territory of the
 recent enemy - 'She said that she did not want to come and live with
 us as she did not like the Manyika country. ' And yet, by the 1930s
Mig/uarvtA and the. ManyJAa 9
 very many people in Makoni were Defining themselves as Manyika. It is
 precisely in the missionary context that we must begin to search for
 an explanation.
 MISSIONARIES, LANGUAGE AND ETHNICITY: THE AMERICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL
 CHURCH.
 Three mission churches dominated the Christian history of Makoni
 and Umtali districts - the Anglicans, the Trappist-Mariannhill Cath-
 olic fathers, and the American Episcopal Church. All three developed
 a particular vested interest in these eastern territories. The Angli-
 cans developed their main Southern Rhodesian intellectual and educa-
 tional centre at St Augustine's near Umtali and they had by far their
 greatest early evangelical successes in Umtali and Makoni districts.
 The American Methodists radiated out from their main station at Old
 Umtali: unlike the Anglicans they did not have missionary bases in any
 other parts of the country. Their first and deepest penetrations were
 in Umtali aed Makoni districts where they, too, scored very
 considerable evangelical success. Although Catholicism aspired to and
 increasingly achieved a territory-wide presence, the Trappist-Mariann-
 hill mission represented an odd enclave in a Jesuit domain. The
 Mariannhill fathers operated out of their main mission at Triashill on
 the borders of Inyanga and Makoni and from there spread into Inyanga,
 Makoni and Umtali districts. Beyond these they could not go without
 invading the sphere of influence of the Jesuits. It was not
 surprising, then, that all three of these churches came to dewelop a
 strong doctrine of the special qualities of the peoples of these
 eastern districts - of what they came to regard as 'Manyikaland1.
 This doctrine was founded intellectually on the language work of
 the three churches. The American Methodists made their linguistic
 assumptions very explicit. They knew that they must acquire the ver-
 nacular and they knew that to do so they had to learn from their first
 converts. On the other hand they believed that Africans were longing
 for something which only they could give - namely the reduction of the
 language into writing, with a formal orthography and a regular
 grammar. At first they concentrated especially on giving God's word -
 1
  we never forget', wrote Helen Springer in 1905, 'that the primary
 object of our work here is to give the native the Bible and enable him
 to read it.' Soon, however, they broadened their ambition. 'We need
 literature - TRANSLATIONS - for these people,1 wrote J.R. Gates in
 1911; 'they cannot grow without it. They art dependent upon it as
 every other race has been dependent upon it - ' 'We ourselves have
 hundreds, of devotional and other volumes on our shelves to go to,
 while they have almost nothing' ; ? The situation with us as far as
 vernacular literature is concerned is nothing short of appalling ...
 What a supply other peoples of the world have of national life
  5?of
 literature, of history ... But all of these are absent in Africa.'
 These ideas attained their most impassioned expression in 1918 with
 two articles in the A.M.E.C. journal African Advance. Under the
 heading 'And He Said Unto Me Write', one of these described the
 linguistic and printing work at Old Umtali. 'What would the World be
 today without ... books?', it asked. 'Without a written language?' In
 Africa, 'without a history and a literature, or the knowledge of how
 to make them, the shadows of the primeval forest have deepened into
t flligsi.a/vtd and the ManyJJia 10
 blackness ... That there has never been a written language may in some
 measure explain why there are nearly a thousand different spoken
 languages and dialects ... The highway to constantly rising levels of
 human life and living is paved with good books. Africa must have
 books ... and educational literature in the vernacular'.
 From the beginning, then, American Methodist missionaries worked
 with their converts to create a written language. On the missionary
 side, the great pioneer was E.H. Greeley. 'My duties have been large-
 ly with the boys,' he wrote in 190 , 'and it has been delightful work
 to talk rW-th them . . . and to learn their language, manners and
 customs.' On the African side, many of the first converts and pupils
 from the area around Umtali worked closely with Greeley as they pro-
 gressed on their way towards becoming a Christian elite. They provided
 the vocabulary; Greeley the grammar and orthography. 'I am learning
 grammar and helping Mr Greeley in translation work1, wrote Mark
 Kanogoiwa in 1909. ' L teach the Chimanyika Primer, the New Testament
 in Chimanyika also.' Another African pioneer was Enoch Sanehwe, a
 product of Old Umtali school and a subject of Mutasa, through whom,
 wrote Greeley in 1910, 'much^pf our vernacular work has reached its
 present stage of perfection1. Others of the founding generation of
 African Methodism who were deeply involved in language work were David
 Mandisodza, Joseph Nyamurowa, Paul Mariyanga and Jason Machiwanyika,
 all of them Manyika in the narrowest sense.
 Between them these converts and the missionaries had created some-
 thing new - a literary instrument which in various ways differed from
 speech; an instrument to which the mission-educated elite had unique
 and privileged access; an instrument which African teachers and clergy
 went on to use in order to write the histories, moral fables and
 collections of literature which justified their claim to be the
 leaders of their people. Machiwanyika, for example, produced 'hundreds
 of pages of history and folklore ... a volume of material concerning
 the kings and their wars, and the native customs and a number of hymns
 of merit ... No native I know1, wrote Greeley on Machiwanyika1s death
 in 1924, 'spent more of his spare time for the good of his people1.
 Moreover, this written language in which the mission elite came to
 have such a vested interest was innovative in another significant way.
 It created rather than merely reflected a dialect of Shona -
 Chimanyika. I do not, of course, write as in any way an expert on
 language, but the impression which I derive from the sources is that
 in pre-colonial Zimbabwe there did not exist bounded dialect zones
 within the overall Shona-speaking territory. Each village spoke the
 'same' language as its neighbour across the whole area, but there was
 nevertheless gradual lexical and idiomatic change so that by the time
 a man from the extreme western edge of the Shona-speaking area reached
 the extreme eastern edge he encountered significant differences.
 Missionary linguists created dialect zones by developing written
 languages at a number of widely scattered bases - the Americans at St
 Augustine's and the Marianhill fathers at Triashill all produced
 Chimanyika; the Jesuits at Chishawasha, near Salisbury, produced
 Chizezuru; the Dutch Reformed Church at Morgenster produced Chikaran-
 ga. Differences were thus exaggerated, obscuring the gradualism and
 homogeneity of the real situation. And once the new dialects had been
 codified, they then expanded out from these missionary centres by
 means of the mission out-school networks until dialect zones had been
ftL44Lon.aJU-.eA, MlgAarubi and the ftanyJJia 11
 defined. As C M . Doke put it in 1931 in his report on Shona language
 and dialect:
 Owing to the way in which Missionary work (and hence
 language study and literature production) has ben develop-
 ed in districts isolated one from the other, and by Mis-
 sionary Societies working independently, four distinct
 dialects have been pushed into prominence, viz., Karanga
 in the 'Victoria Circle1, Zezuru in the 'Salisbury Cir-
 cle' , Manyika in Manicaland, and Ndau in Melsetter Dis-
 trict .. . The difference between the dialects has been
 grossly exaggerated by these artificial means ...
 For the sake of argument, let us suppose England to be a
 heathen country. Four distinct Missionary Societies
 commence work, one among the Cockneys, one among the
 University class, one in Yorkshire, and one in Devon-
 shire. Each produces a translation into the 'local1 ver-
 nacular, each further uses a different orthography and
 some split up their words into small component parts. What
 an enormous difference there would be between the four
 literary efforts; they would not be mutually understood!
 It was not at all the original intention of the American Methodists
 to create a dialect. At first they thought that they were reducing
 the language of all the 'Mashona' into written form. When Helen
 Springer produced the first vocabulary and handbook in 1906 she called
 the language Chikaranga in order to emphasise its links with the
 recorded past of all the Shona. But inevitably the language work of
 the mission reflected the particular forms of language spoken among
 the Manyika of Mutasa. Thus wherever they worked in the American
 Methodist zone of influence, they produced Chimanyika. In 1909
 Greeley was based at Mount Makomwe among the people of chief Maranke;
 in his school he had 'ten sons of the King (Maranke) and all are
 praying. I am diligently seeking after every possible heir to the
 throne*. Greeley was urgently seeking to indigenise and localise the
 gospel among a people who were quite distinct from the Manyika of
 Mutasa- 'A hundred boys and girls are reading the Gospels in their own
 tongue,' he exulted, 'and going out to talk it, and sing it and live
 it. ' But the African teacher with whom he worked in Mount Makomwe
 school,?who helped him 'in translation work', was Mark Kanogoiwa from
 Umtali. In 1910 Greeley remarked that four out of the seven school
 boys who were going on to higher training at Old Umtali from his
 school in Maranke were themselves 'from Mutasa's kingdom ... part of
 the fruit of our labours there1. The great majority of the 'Native
 Pastor Teachers. The Apostles to the Manyika People. The output of our
 Training School', whose group photograph appeared in 1916, had been
 born in Mutasa's chiefdom. Hence in its formative stages the
 'language of the American Methodists' was profoundly shaped by the
 experience and contribution of a particular group of converts.
 Fairly soon the A.M.E.C, missionaries came to accept that what they
 had produced was Chimanyika, the language of 'the Manyika nation'.
 Greeley, having begun by finding 'the language so limited as to
 vocabulary and especially so in words expressing religious truth',
 ended by loving and admiring its richness:
and the ManyUAa 12
 The Lord has helped me to say some things in the native
 language which I have never said in English ... There are
 greater depths in Chimanyika than you dream and while in
 some ways it is inferior to our world conquering English
 there are wonderful possibilites in using a vernacular ...
 Even paul Mariyanga, who has been doing little else for
 years than translating is constantly discovering new words
 and new meanings for old ones.
 Armed with this new literary language and with instructional and
 devotional material in Chimanyika, teachers and evangelists poured out
 into all the areas of the American Methodist outreach. The A.M*E.C.
 paid no attention to colonial administrative boundaries - so far as
 they were concerned, their thriving stations in the Gandanzara,
 Chiduku and Headlands circuits (situated in the Makoni Reserve, the
 Chiduku Reserve and the white farmland areas of Makoni district
 respectively) were an integral part of their core territory. Converts
 in Makoni were offered the full progressive American Methodist package
 - plough production for the market and literacy in Chimanyika going
 hand in hand. A scene recorded in Gandanzara, which rapidly became the
 nucleus of American Methodist entrepreneurial enterprise in Makoni
 district, vividly illustrates the inter-connections:
 In November I carried a trunk full of books and some grain
 bags to the quarterly meeting at Gadanzara. When the
 announcement was made that books would be given in
 exchange for grain, the children scattered in every direc-
 tion. Presently they returned, each laden with a basket of
 grain ... After the purchase little groups could be seen
 here and there about the village, the proud owner of a new
 Catechism asking ^Questions and the other children chiming
 back the answers.
 In this way Methodist Chimanyika entered Makoni as one of the marks
 of committment to modernisation. At the same time boys were taken out
 of Makoni district to be added to the elite of potential teachers and
 catechists being trained at Old Umtali. In 1910 Herbert Howard,
 propagandist for both plough and pen, toured Makoni to hold up 'to the
 boys there their need for such a training as
  qQld Umtali affords, and
 of the need of our church for the besst boys'. Reluctance to go and
 live in the feared 'Manyika country1 was overcome; soon teachers nad
 evangelists from Makoni constituted a second wave of A.M.E.C.
 'progressives'. They married into the families of the Methodist
 leaders in Umtali district and were themselves posted to yet other
 areas of the A.M.E.C. ' s outreach, As they reponded to the great
 popular clamour for literacy which raged through these eastern regions
 in the 1910s such teachers did so through the medium of the literacy
 Chimanyika which was their particular and prized possession. These men
 from Makoni had come to see themselves as 'the Apostles to the Manyika
 People'.
 Such a process of assimilation and incorporation could not go on
 for ever. Over the years the hierarchies of status and authority among
 the African agents of the church hardened and it was no longer
 possible for the bright young men of a newly evangelised district to
and the ftanyxka 13
 add themselves rapidly and easily to their ranks. So when the
 established teachers and evangelists from Makoni and Umtali districts
 spread out into Mrewa and Mtoko they encountered a new hostility and
 resentment from local converts. The differences perceptible between
 the Chimanyika texts from Old Umtali and the speech of Mrewa and Mtoko
 were magnified by this rivalry into ethnic notions. Mrewa American
 Methodists sought to repudiate foreign 'Manyika? teachers and to
 obtain local 'Zezuru' ones. 'It has always been recognised that there
 has existed a strong and at times unfriendly feeling between the
 Africans in the Eastern sections of Southern Rhodesia and those of the
 Mrewa and Mtoko Areas,? noted an A.M.E.C. memo. 'Although both
 sections speak different dialects of the same Chishona language, yet
 the language barrier has always been exaggerated as a reason for these
 feelings.1 Nevertheless, the idiom of the confrontations in Mrewa
 and Mtoko served to confirm and sharpen the sense of men from Makoni
 district as well as men from Umtali that they belonged to a superior
 Manyika culture. ,
 MISSIONARIES, LANGUAGE AND ETHNICITY: THE ANGLICAN CHURCH
 The influence of the American Methodists alone would certainly not
 have sufficed to make most people in Makoni district come to think of
 themselves as 'Manyika1. The A.M.E.C. influence was most marked in
 those areas of Makoni district in which relatively large scale
 production of maize for the market was possible - in the Gandanzara
 area of the Makoni Reserve, which had unimpeded access to the Umtali
 urban and mining market, or in those areas of the Chiduku Reserve
 which were close to the district centre at Rusape or to the railway
 line. It was much less felt among the peasant families who produced a
 small surplus for sale or among those who lived so far from markets or
 communications that they had virtually no opportunity ,?p sell produce;
 families who were, of course, in the large majority. I have argued
 elsewhere, however, that missionary influence did reach these other
 two groups; that Anglican influence was especially effective in the
 subsistence production areas in the east of Makoni district. (Map
 Three)
 Different though their spheres of influence - and their theologies
 - were from those of the American Methodists, one thing the Anglicans
 and Catholics did share with them. They were equally committed to
 language work, and ultimately equally committed to the production of
 Chimanyika. The Anglicans began with a series of rather delightful
 speculative assertions about language. Upcher concluded in 1893 that
 ?the Mashona have two languages, High Mashona and Low, they use the
 former while clapping their hands'. Douglas Pelly told his parents
 in July 1982 that he was 'learning the language rather quickly or
 rather four tongues, i.e. all the languages between Beira and
 Matabele, i.e. Shangaan, Mashuna, Makone and Matabele', which suggests
 that at that time he was thinking of the eastern dialects in terms of
 Makoni' s rather than of Mutasa' s people. But even as they
 speculated, and long before they had mastered the language, the
 Anglicans began linguistic work.
 From the beginning Bishop Knight Bruce thought of the eastern dis-
 tricts as the natural site for the main base of Anglicanism's mission-
 ary work amongst Africans. This was partly because they were the part
ftL44ij3n.an.LeA, ft\JjQA.arct4 and the ftanyUJia 14
 of Southern Rhodesia closest to the sea and to international
 communications; partly because he had been impressed with the evan-
 gelical potential of the region. During the early 1890s the Bishop
 pondered where best to establish this eastern head-quarters. The two
 possibilities were Mutasa's country or Makoni's country. In May 1893
 Pelly told his parents that he had been chosen 'to start the work at
 Umtasa's kraal' and to build a station 'which in time the Bishop
 wishes to be the big station of the diocese. I shall have lots of
 boys, cart, oxen, etc. and everything I want and aim to build dwelling
 houses, church, native hospital, etc. and also to begin teaching there
 . . . Fancy being choae/i to build ... the first church and station for
 natives in Manica'. In January 1894 the Bishop himself wrote from
 the Mission House, Umtali, that:
 The House is being dedicated by our beginning the first
 methodical translation into Seshona of parts of the Bible,
 the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Creed.
 Our party consists of our two leading Catechists - Frank
 and Bernard - who have been learning the language now for
 two and a half years, Mr Walker, who has been studying it
 with Frank, and Kapuiya, a Headman's son, and myself ...
 Every word in the grammar and its pronunciation has to be
 passed by (Kapuiya) before it is allowed to exist. The
 peculiarities of grammar are extraordinary.'
 Language work thus began for the Anglicans where it began for the
 American Methodists - in Umtali district. But Mutasa's kraal turned
 out to be hotly contested territory; rival parties formed there, one
 backing the Methodists, another the Anglicans, and a third under the
 chief himself seeking to repudiate both of them. Knight Bruce's
 successor began to think of Makoni's territory as a more attractive
 base; after Pelly's ordination in 1895 he was poted:
 Maconi's, a Mission Station to the East of Salisbury,
 founded by my predecessor, and a very important centre
 which, I hope, will become a strong 'base of operations'
 for work throughout the district, and, in time, develop
 into a 'school of the prophets', with its influence radia-
 ting through the whole of Manicaland ... Much, I am sure,
 depends upon our having one strong centre of Native work
 to begin with, where two or three Clergy can live in
 community, and associated with them a number of Cate-
 chists, who shall go forth to various stations around.
 The Bishop planned a hospital and an industrial training centre at
 Makoni's:
 I am not eager for a mere literary education of Natives
 .. . English manhood and womanhood had acquired its dis-
 tinctive character and nobility long before School Boards
 were dreamt of.
 Despite these strictures on literary education, Pelly's work at
 Lesapi Mission, Makon, began with teaching and translation. In
and the. ftonyika 15
 October 1895 he told his parents that some fifteen boys 'had learnt
 the catechism which I have been translating and also could sing some
 hymns tunes which Bernard has taught them ... I am going to translate
 for the singing at once'. A letter in December 1895 gives a vivid
 glimpse of the linguistic complexity of this little station, where
 Pelly, the Englishman, Frank, the Zulu, Bernard, the Mozambiquan, and
 Kaupya, the indigenous convert: at this stage, it will be noted, Pelly
 was calling the vernacular 'Chino':
 Frank comes to my hut and I give him a Bible lesson ...
 Then I read and work and copy tranlsation . .. Frank mean-
 time gardens and helps Kapuia to read S. Mark in Zulu ...
 At half past six Evensong with Kapuia present. The hymns,
 creed and Lord's Prayer and Advent College being in Chino.
 Then tea followed by school, the first half taught by
 Frank, jfhile I taught Kapuia English and he taught me
 Chino.
 It is intruiging for a historian of Makoni district like myself to
 imagine what would have the consequence of the development there,
 rather than in Umtali, of the major Anglican school and language
 centre. Perhaps the 'Anglican language1 would have come to be called
 'Chiungwe' rather than Chimanyika1. This did not happen. Chief Makoni
 and most of his people came out in arms during the Chimurenga of 1896,
 sacking the mission station, while Mutasa and his people maintained a
 somewhat ambiguous neutrality. Thus it was determined that Anglican-
 ism's chief centre should be established in Umtali district.
 The cumbrous machinery of Anglican linquistics was now focussed
 once more on Mutasa. In August 1896 the Zulu priest, H.M. M' tobi,
 wrote an account of his visit to Mutasa's kraal in which he revealed
 both his ignorance of the vernacular and of long-established chiefly
 linguistic ceremony.
 I am only just beginning to learn the language of this
 country, for although I am a native, Mashonas speak quite
 a different language from any that I have ever heard ... I
 have visited (Mutasa) several times, and he has spoken to
 me through three interpreters, although I have always
 taken with me a young Mashona who fairly speaks Zulu, and
 through whom we might speak to each other ... He must have
 seen white people being interpreted for whenever they go
 to see him, and he must have thought it expressive of
 dignity to have so many interpreters. His plan is to sit
 among the councillors, and then speak very lowly to the
 one nearest him, who passes what has been said loudly to
 another, and then this one passes it on to the young man I
 always take with me.
 But Mutasa and his people were to have the last linguistic laugh.
 In March 1897 the decision was taken to set up the Anglican educa-
 tional and missionary base at St Augustine's College near to Mutasa,
 whose prestige and the antiquity of whose line began to be built up in
 missionary reports. Bishop Gaul described him as 'His Majesty
 occupying the throne of the Monomotopo dynasty, dating certainly from
and the ManyJAa 16
 King Solomon's time, 3,000 years ago, and who knows how much longer1.
 The missionary brotherhood at St Augustine's set out to learn the
 local language from their first pupils. Ronald Alexander, writing in
 December 1898, described the chaotic state of collegiate language at
 that time. 'We want this place to be a college for natives to come to
 from all parts of the country to learn to read and write,' he wrote.
 But at that time there was only one full-time pupil, a Mozambiquan,
 upon whom they were completely dependent linquistically, together with
 'three or four little boys from a kraal close by', upon whom in turn
 the Mozambiquan depended for his Manyika vocabulary. 'Talking is
 rather a slow business,' confessed Alexander, 'as one of us speaks
 first in English, then John (a Zulu teacherj puts it into Zulu, and
 then our pupil . .. puts it into Chino. * But by 1900 Alexander
 himself was engaged in the business of translation: 'Mr M'tobi and I
 have been translating Collects today,' he reported in August, ' and
 have done several. We appeal to the boys for some doubtful word, and
 then a great and often heated argument takes place.1 By 1904 this
 method, so dependent on local pupils, had achieved translations of
 'all the most useful parts o? the Prayer- Book ... together with St
 Mark, St Luke and St John1 . As with the American Methodists, the
 missionaries contributed grammar and orthography: their pupils
 contributed vocabulary? Meanwhile, Pelly's first catechism had been
 scattered by the rising and only slowly came together again.
 Nevertheless, when the Anglican mission in Makoni re-opened at its
 twin centres of Epiphany and St Faith's its clergy, and in particular
 Edgar Lloyd, at once resumed translation work. What happened was that
 Etheridge at St Augustine' s ^and Lloyd at St Faith' s collectively
 produced Anglican Chimanyika* 'Our educational aims will not appear
 very high,' wrote Lloyd in 1905. 'To enable our people to read and
 write in their own tongue, and to understand what they read, s?ems the
 ideal only practicable and perhaps desirable at this stage.' So he
 and John Kapuya continued language work. 'After breakfast John Kapuya
 arrives,' wrote Lloyd. 'Thanks to the labours of the Priest in charge
 of Penhalonga (St Augustine's) ... we no longer lack so woefully
 translations in the vernacular. Yet there remains much to be done and
 our mornings are made busy in copying and correcting translations.1
 Gradually Anglican language work intensified and hardened into what
 was no longer called 'Chino1 but 'Chimanyika'; gradually too teachers
 from Makoni and Umtali came to play the same role as their peers were
 playing in American Methodist language work. In 1914, or example, a
 committee appointed by the Bishop 'at the Native Conference was hard
 at work at St Augustine's; it consisted of Etheridge and Buck of St
 Augustine's and Christelow from St Faith's:
 When they meet, the discussion of points of grammar ...
 (is) long and learned and often loud; till two vote one
 way and the third is silenced . . . What a laborious work it
 is, and what an immense deal there is to do ... Cyril, the
 eldest of the three native teachers living here, is relied
 upon most of all, I think, in translation work. And he is
 constantly to be found in the afternoons, sitting by the
 side of Mr Buck; who must first make sure that he really
 understands the English, and must then get the English
 turned into the Chimanyika ...
and the. ManyU-ka. 17
 The mission press at St Augustine's had 'three great works on hand1 -
 'the Provincial Catechism, which was originally translated at Rusape
 and published by them, and has now been entrusted to the St Augus-
 tine's Mission Press'; a shorter catechism; and a r_??der compiled by
 Buck. 'Rusape have a "Lives of the Saints" in hand.'
 So the mission remained a major centre of the production of Chiman-
 yika, ultimately producing a series of 'Rusape Readers', in which the
 history of Makoni district was presented in the new language.
 Moreover, as with American Methodist Chimanyika, but even more so, the
 teachers and catechists of Makoni and Umtali, who had come to possess
 this new language, found themselves carrying it into other regions of
 Southern Rhodesia. The material published at St Augustine's was used
 in Anglican churches and schools throughout the territory - Doke's
 book of 1^31 contains a map tracing this expansion of Anglican
 Chimanyika. And as white missionaries and their African agents
 encountered rural populations in other parts of the country, so they
 came to think of the Chimanyika language as an aspect of a superior
 Manyika ethnicity.
 Anglicanism in the east was buoyed up in the late 1900s and 1910s
 by a grass-roots demand for the new learning in the new language. In
 Makoni district schools and churches sprang up, often under the
 leadership of young men who themselves took the founding initiative,
 setting up their own Christian villages and only later being appointed
 as agents of the Anglican church. The area around Umtali clamoured for
 teachers 'due to the general desire for the New Learning'. 'Here in
 Manicaland,' wrote Canon Etheridge in 1909, ' it is no longer a
 question of the conversion of individuals - it is a question of the
 conversion of a district - practically of a people - the Manyika.'
 But it was very different to other parts of Southern Rhodesia, and
 disillusioned missionaries contrasted these with 'Manyikaland' in
 terms with which assumed an identity between language, ethnicity and
 culture.
 Thus S.J. Christelow, earlier at St Faith's, Makoni, was posted to
 Selukwe. In December 1914 he drew the contrast between them:
 My earlier labour ... had been ... at St Faith's, Rusape,
 where I was privileged to see the wave of enthusiasm for
 teaching, etc., then passing over that part of the Diocese
 Here it seems that many years of hard work must
 precede the harvest ... Instead of about thirty schools as
 at Rusape, here I have only two in my care. Perhaps you
 wonder why such opposite conditions exist in our diocese.
 Geographical position seems to have much bearing on the
 answer - the Mashona in the north and the Matabele in the
 south. The Matabele has all along been less responsive to
 missionary work, whereas the Mashona has, after much
 labour, responded to an abnormal degree. Here at Selukwe,
 between the two tribes, we have the Wakaranga ... They are
 bi-linguists. The old men speak fluently both the language
 of the Mashona and the Matabele. Further, it would seem
 that in habits they conform more to the Matabele and are
 slow in embracing the Gospel.
 In the same year another missionary made the same contrast: 'The
and ih& fllanyJMa 18
 Wakaranya, as the people here are called, are not nearly so keen or
 enthusiastic as the Manica.' 'It is clear,' wrote Etheridge from
 Selukwe in 1916, 'that we must not expect quick results amongst these
 Makaranga folk; they differ in many ways from those with whom we have
 to deal in our larger stations . . . Much more intent upon ploughing
 than upoxu learning, they need different treatment from our Manica
 people.? Nor had the situation changed by 1920. 'The Wakaranga,'
 wrote a missionary in that year, 'are very slowly turning to God and
 his Church; there is no enthusiasm as there is among the Manyika
 people.'
 In this way the Anglicans gave more and more reality to national
 entities such as the 'Karanga' and the 'Manyika' . And wherever else
 they went in the territory, they longed for the net-work of mission
 stations which gave Anglicanism in 'Manyikaland' its almost 'national'
 character:
 It's a weird country, is Matabeleland, dry - physically
 and spiritually ... with a proud native race, that shows
 almost no desire for education, and almost less than no
 desire for our religion ... I want to show you a few
 contrasts in our work between this district and Manyika-
 land. Manyikaland appears to me now as a garden watered
 from above, and with springs and rivers of water rising
 within it ... There growth came from within by native
 initiative; here it must be organised, and fed, and fos-
 tered. We have here no large centre humming with life and
 devotion, to which the out-stations look for encouragement
 and with pride as their birth-place. Thus here we have no
 esprit de corps, we are split up into tiny parishes, and
 there is almost no inter-communication between stations,
 congregations or teachers. This means that our people from
 different places don't know each other ... No town church
 can ever have the influence on a district such as radiates
 from St Augustine' s, St Faith' s or Bonda (a station in
 Inyanga) ... Again up north there is practically a
 homogenous people, and not more than three types of
 Missions at work. Here the tribes are mixed up, and every
 imaginable type of Christianity is at work.
 It was, indeed, this esprit de corps, this 'inter-communication
 between stations, congregations ... (and) teachers', which brought
 African Anglicans in Makoni, Umtali and Inyanga districts into one
 Manyika identity. Thus Maurice Nyangumbo, whose Nyashanu ancestors had
 been integrated into Makoni by means of their shared hostility to the
 Manyika, but who was himself a pupil at St Faith's, regards himself
 and his family as 'Manyika1 . In 1934 the Anglican missionary B.H.
 Barnes illustrated the situation with reference to language and
 ethnicity by taking the examples of the peoples of chief Makoni of
 Maungwe and chief Zimunya of Jindwe:
 In our Mashonaland there is no single race and language
 which is definitely representative of the whole area.
 There are, instead, a large number of small tribes or
 clans, and almost as many divergent dialects. Any in-
and the. ManyJAa 19
 dividual will declare himself to be of this or that clan
 and a speaker of this or that dialect. None call them-
 selves Mashona, and there is at present none who will say
 that his speech is Shona. You will find that he speaks
 Ciungwe or Cijindwi and belongs to the Maungwe or the
 Wajindwi, Either of these may claim to be Wamanyika and to
 speak CiManyika; but they know nothing of a Shona race or
 a Shona language ... In the various districts you will
 find that the lesser divisions are already able to
 recognise themselves as included under one or other of
 four or five principal groups, such as Karanga, Zezuru,
 Manyika, Ndau, Korekore. The process of unification has,
 in fact, begun ... (uniting) neighbouring sub-dialects
 under the main dialects.
 MISSIONARIES, LANGUAGES AND ETHNICITY: THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
 The third main missionary influence in Makoni, Inyanga and Umtali
 districts was the Trappist/Mariannhill mission. The mission establish-
 ed itself at Triashill a good ten years later than the establishment
 of American Methodism and Anglicanism and at a time when the main
 outlines of missionary Manyika had already been laid down. Neverthe-
 less, it made its own peculiar contribution to the spread of the
 Manyika identity, and this for three main reasons.
 The first was that Triashill and its associated station of St
 Barbara's were not situated near Umtali, like St Augustine's and Old
 Umtali, but rather on the border between Makoni and Inyanga districts.
 As its out-stations spread out both eastwards into Inyanga and
 westwards into Makoni, Triashill served to bring together its converts
 across what had been military frontier between chiefs Makoni and
 Mutasa. Secondly, Triashill and St Barbara's were cut off from good
 communications and markets by a great range of hills. The people who
 lived on the mission farm and the areas around it were subsistence
 producers and labour exporters, very different either from the
 entrepreneurs of American Methodist Gandanzara or the surplus pro-
 ducing peasantry of Anglican Chiduku. The Mariannhill fathers and
 brothers had a good deal to do with the Manyika identity in Makoni
 becoming more than merely an elite self-identification. Thirdly, the
 Mariannhill missionaries were perhaps more self-consciously concerned
 to stress the past glories of the 'Manyika1 and to foster a sense of
 local pride than were either the American Methodists or the Anglicans,
 perhaps because they felt themselves constantly under the scrutiny of
 the disdainful and Zezuru-propagating Jesuits.
 The main Triashill linguist was Father Mayr - a man 'so simple, so
 thoroughly earnest about all the work he undertook, so modest and
 unsparing of himself ... a highly talented linguist, a thorough master
 of the Zulu and Chimanyika languages ? . According to a later note
 prepared for the Jesuits by Father Withnell:
 Father Mayr was given the work of preparing books in Shona
 for the new Mission. Fr. Mayr ... said he wished to visit
 St Augustine's and asked me to accompany him. I was
 present with an attentive ear at the discussion which Fr.
 Mayr had; Canon Etheridge was the chief spokesman. Fr.
, ft\igA.ont>6 and ManyJJia 20
 Mayr seemed very keen on forming his native language on
 the prevailing St Augustine's language. What he seemed to
 insist on was that the language of his projected books
 should not slavishly follow Chishawasha (i.e. the Zezuru
 literature of the main Jesuit mission centre), that in
 fact it should be different, as far as was seemly, from
 Chishawasha. With a smile between them the two learned
 linguists were at one on this point ... I know that
 prayers, as arranged by Fr. Mayr differed much from those
 of Chishawasha .. So far as I have heard, these versions
 appeared without any approval, Imperatur. etc. of Our
 Pref. Apost. The books were rushed through the press to
 supply a pressing need ... What struck me much in their
 books was the determination of the Trappists to differ
 from Chishawasha language.
 Once Mayr's Chimanyika material was ready, the Triashill fathers
 wished to use it throughout Makoni district. They also ran a station
 at Monte Cassino in western Makoni, as far from Mutasa's Manyika as
 anywhere in the district. In August 1911 Father Fleischer wrote from
 Triashill to the Jesuit Apostolic Prefect asking permission to
 'introduce the Chimanyika language spoken by the natives at and in the
 country around Triashill at our mission of Monte Cassino1. Father
 Fleischer wrote from Triashill:
 At present we make use of different catechisms on our two
 stations there, i.e. a Chiswina one at Monte Cassino and a
 Chimanyika one at Triashill but in the future time we
 think the catechism which Fr. Mayr compiled in Chimanyika
 for Triashill to take also for Monte Cassino ... (to) make
 uniform our work for the black people.
 This proposal to bring all of Makoni into the Chimanyika zone
 triggered off a great language controversy between the Jesuits and the
 Mariannhill fathers and among the Jesuits themselves. Many Jesuits
 reacted with hostility to the Triashill proposals:
 There is but one language in Mashonaland (wrote the Jesuit
 Father Bert in October 1911). It may be called Chiswina
 around Salisbury, Chimanika near Inyanga, Shona, Shuna
 generally, Chikaranga ... about Victoria, but the language
 is essentially the same ... There is and should be only
 one language for our Mashonaland stations ... I would
 boldly stand by the Chishawasha Catechism. Not because it
 comes from Chishawasha - although the first or oldest ...
 station might reasonably urge its claims on that score -
 not merely because it is the one actually 'in possession1,
 but chiefly because,, it is a translation of the one
 followed in England.
 Father Withnell was also an advocate of the dominance of Zezuru - he
 hoped 'the Salisbury (Chishawasha) dialect may be kept to; in my
 experience it is the most widely understood; just as in my ex-
 perience, too, this dialect is richer and, as far as I could judge,
fl\-lA<4Lonani.QA, MigstantA and the. C\an.yXka 21
 more correct than others ... When I went to Chilimanzi ... I was
 agreeably surprised to find that Chishawasha had everything that
 Chilimanzi had, and much more besides. Fr. Hornig had previously told
 me the same of Chimanyika1. 'I think that the central Rhodesia dialect
 ought to be preserved,' Withnell wrote again. 'I think it would be
 very unsafe to follow Chimanyika ... with its wretchedly poor
 vocabulary.'
 As the controversy developed it extended beyond vocabulary into
 theology and the desirability of missionary 'adaptation'. The Mariann-
 hill fathers had followed St Augustine's and Old Umtali, for example,
 in translating God as Mwari, while the Jesuits at Chishawasha used
 Jave. The priests at Triashill did this after taking the advice of
 their teachers, drawn from both Inyanga and Makoni. The record of the
 teachers' discussions illustrates very well the compromises that were
 drawing them together within missionary Chimanyika:
 Four of us said that ' in olden times the word Mwari was
 never used, it only came to us by the first missionaries
 of the Church of England. The old people always used the
 word Nyadenga ..." The rest of the teachers said the word
 Mwari was always used in some districts and Nyadenga in
 others ... Then all of them agreed that the word Nyadenga
 means only the ownejx of heaven, then Mwari should be the
 really name of God.
 Jesuit critics of Triashill objected precisely to such consulta-
 tions and to the indigenous input into Chimanyika. Old Father Richartz
 wrote in very different terms in describing the evolution of
 Chishawasha Zezuru:
 We found that the heathen name Mwari had no definite
 meaning besides 'Rainmaker' and we were in this special
 important case like in general, very much impressed by the
 secrecy, want of clearness and straightfowardness with
 which all actions of the Natives were surrounded,
 especially everything that could be supposed to be in
 connection with 'religious' ideas, as prayer, sacrifice,
 etc. at occasions like child-birth, marriage, field work,
 war, etc., etc. Most of all was our teaching hampered by
 using existing words ... This very doubtfull meaning of
 Mwari forced us soon to avoid this dangerous word and
 replace it by another word which meant surely the true God
 and fitted well in the native language (Chizezuru and
 Chikalanga) Yave.
 The persistent Withnell extended these criticisms to Triashill - and
 St Augustine's - usage in general, instancing the case of the
 translation of the word 'prophet':
 You are perfectly right in coining the verb 'anoprofeta'
 (he wrote to the Jesuit Father Johanny) ... You are simply
 applying the principle which has guided us all along in
 rendering ideas of the religious or supernatural order,
 for which Chizezuru could not possibly have an exact
t fti.gA.ant4 and the. ManyUJia 22
 equivalent. The Trappists went on a different track, and
 tried to pour the new wine of Christian ideas in the old,
 rotten skins of pagan words, creating confusion where
 there should have been order and unity.
 The critics drew a picture of sound Catholic usage everywhere else in
 Southern Rhodesia contrasting with an infernal Triashill alliance with
 'the sects' in the use of 'wretchedly poor' and 'rotten' Chimanyika.
 There were no obstacles to the spread of Old Umtali Chimanyika out
 into Mrewa and Mtoko or to the spread of St Augustine's Chimanyika
 into almost the whole territory. Triashill's case was very different.
 Jesuit opposition prevented them from extending Chimanyika even to
 Monte Cassino and threw them very much on the defensive. Soon Jesuit
 opponents followed up this negative success. They persuaded the Jesuit
 Apostolic Prefect, Monsignor Brown, that the use of Mwari was
 intolerable. In August 1923 Brown ordered that the word must be
 /ueverywhere replaced by Jave forthwith. When the Triashill congrega-
 tions continued to use Mwarj., Brown threatened to close down all
 Trappist stations immediately. As Brown later wrote:
 Although our Jesuit Fathers had been in the territory for
 forty years and knew the native language well and had
 finally decided on the word to be used for God, the
 Mariannhill fathers without consultation with us began to
 use a word which although used by Protestants, had a very
 evil connotation ... I gave a formal order that Jave was
 to be used. In my next visit to Triashill, six months
 after the order had been given, I found no notice had been
 taken of my decision and that the objectionable word was
 still used. I then gave an order on the subject which had
 to be obeyed under pain of censure. This was obeyed.
 The prohibition was deeply resented by both missionaries and the
 Triashill Christians and was seen as auguring a more general attack on
 Chimanyika. Together with disagreements over other questions of
 evangelical policy, the question led the Mariannhill fathers to ap-
 proach Rome with a request that Manicaland be made a separate prefec-
 ture so that they could create their own Manyika Christianity. When
 this failed, they began negotiations with the Jesuits for an exchange
 of territory which would give the Manyika stations over to Jesuit
 control and give the Mariannhill fathers complete control over a
 mission area elsewhere. Even these negotiations broke down, so that
 when Jesuit priests moved in to take over Triashill, St Barabara's,
 Monte Cassino and the rest of the Mariannhill stations in September
 1929 they found Mariannhill fathers still in defiant possession and
 refusing to move. In the end they did move out, leaving behind them
 an apprehensive and disgruntled 'Manyika' church to confront their new
 missionary masters. No love was lost on either side. In March 1930 the
 Jesuit Jerome O'Hea wrote to Brown bewailing 'the dearth of teachers
 who are fit for the work1 . 'These Manyikas want and seem to expect
 incessant propulsion a terga,' he complained. 'They are an awfully
 slack crowd and they find good medicine in F. Schmitz who won't stand
 any nonsense and tells them often and clearly what he thinks.'
QA, (fiiQA.an.t4 and the ManyUAa 23
 POPULAR EXPRESSIONS OF MANYIKA IDENTITY AND THE MIGRANT LABOUR FACTOR
 I have argued above that the expansion of missionary Chimanyika
 into other areas, carried as it was by teachers and evangelists from
 Makoni and Umtali districts who enjoyed privileged access to it, went
 a long way to build a common sense of Manyika identity among them. But
 it was the Jesuit take-over of Triashill, with the accompanying
 introduction of the Chishawasha church and school books in Zezuru,
 that provoked by far the most articulate expression of a Christian
 sense of Manyika self identity.
 The Triashill teachers tried to defend their leadership of a Man-
 yika church. 'Trouble is brewing among the teachers,1 wrote O'Hea in
 September 1930, ' as may be clearly seen from the set we have here
 doing their course. One or two have openly declared that they will
 never teach children from a 'Chizezuru book1. One of these teachers
 announced in class that if Monsignor Brown 'doesn't give us everything
 we want1 and restore the Manyika church, he would 'give up the whole
 thing' . 'To my way of looking at it, ' exploded O'Hea, 'they are
 treated FAR too softly. I wouldn't give that chap a chance of giving
 up - I'D FIRE HIM AT THE TOE OF MY BOOT. Close his school and give a
 jaw to the Christians who were any good round about it, letting them
 see that such bolshies brought nothing but trouble and unhappiness.'
 But the most active part in the protest was taken by migrant la-
 bourers from the Triashill zone of influence. Very many men had taken
 their mission education with them to the towns of Southern Rhodesia
 and South Africa. Now intervened in the crisis at home. 'The boys of
 Jo'burg,' worte O'Hea, 'have sent unsigned letters to boys about here
 to stir up protests at the church on Sunday and to get the teachers on
 their side against the use of Chizezuru books in Manyikaland. "You are
 taking away our language ... Our king Mtasa .. . the religion of our
 fathers" ... all this sort of high sounding rot is being pumped out at
 various kraals.' Triashill, wrote the Johannesburg migrants, 'belong
 to us black people, not to the whites'. The Jesuits had come 'to
 spread divisions, because they have come like intruders to despise us,
 as we have made no agreement with them ... See how these Jesuits are
 stepping into our possessions and snatching them from us! We, the
 owners of these things, how are we being treated by them? We are being
 looked upon as nobodies'. The teachers were to write 'many and
 countless letters' to Bishop Fleischer in Natal 'for he knows
 Chimanyika', and through him their case would reach 'the Holy Father'*
 'Announce this to all the people, assemble together at all times.1
 Patrick Kwesha, leader of the Johannesburg migrants, wrote to Brown
 himself to complain that people at Triashill 'are forbidden their own
 tongue and forced to use a tongue which we never knew nor our
 fathers'; that the Jesuits were closing down schools and were not 'the
 means of teaching us or serving us or raising us, but the means of
 destroying us and killing us'.
 Meanwhile, the economic depression was forcing many of the migrants
 back home. These men joined in the protest against the Jesuits:
 There is a certain amount of trouble, of a Bolshi sort,
 brewing and coming to the surface among the Manyikas
 (wrote O'Hea) ... The Young Ethiopians, the ICU and a few
 local societies are talking a great deal of hot air in the
and the ManyUAa 24
 Reserves ... Boys back from Cape Town and Johannesburg are
 particularly active and it is really astonishing to hear
 the clear echoes of Moscow out here in the wilds. The
 missionaries, of course, are merely for the sake of
 drugging the blacks to make them the slaves of the whites
 ... A fairly good grasp of the theory and practice of the
 'class war1 being in the hands of the blacks ... it is
 easy to be understood how the slightest grievance is
 siezed upon and ventilated to the^ full. One of these
 grievances is the language question.
 The combination of teachers, labour migrants, returned labour
 migrants and the general congregation confronted O'Hea with a populist
 Manyika movement, expressing itself both in Makoni and in Inyanga.
 O'Hea called down curses on the whole idea of the Manyika identity:
 Nothing but a rod of iron is any use for these people ...
 They are utterly blinded by the most foolish vanity. It is
 a poison that has its roots in history - they the most
 despised of the despised Mashona are given a chance at
 last, owing to the coming of the white man, and they now
 openly declare that they are the cream of the black
 race!!! Trouble that has its roots deep down in history is
 big trouble. As far as I can gather Bro. Aegidius fostered
 this idea, if he did not hold it himself, among them ...
 We had a great discussion the other day in Makoni Reserve
 and there were a number of pagans present ... One fellow
 envisaged the^ rising of the kingdom of Mtasa, claiming
 independence.
 All this was the most spectacular manifestation of migrant 'Man-
 yika1 identity; after all in addition to the Jesuit intervention, the
 Triashill missionaries had made more contact with zones of subsistence
 production and labour migration than had the Anglicans or the
 Methodists. Still, both these missions had also prepared young people
 to carry their skills of literacy into labour migration. Beause of
 these skills, Anglican and Methodist migrants had access to much
 desired jobs in domestic service and in hotels. The churches kept in
 touch with them in ways which heightened their sense of Manyika
 identity. ' The little intercession paper printed here in their own
 tongue every quarter,' wrote Buck from St Augustine's in September
 1914, 'has reached a circulation of 2,000 and goes to Manyika boys and
 girls as far away as Johannesburg and Kimberley. ' The American
 Methodists found in the mid 1930s that they were 'every year drawing
 from the Reserves hundreds of the best of the boys and girls, training
 them, and seeing most of them return not to their homes to enrich the
 life there, but to the town1, going into 'cooking, waiting table,
 carrying messages or wheeling babies in the park'. So many Old
 Umtali pupils were to be found in Salisbury that the A.M.E.C. sent one
 of their African ministers there to minister to them in Chimanyika.
 Rather than to join 'Zezuru' Wesleyan Methodist congregations, ' to
 conduct our own evangelistic services, to sing our own hymns, to be
 free to develop in our own way, would make our preacher and our people
 rejoice'.
and ihe. ManyJJia 25
 By no means all the migrants from the eastern region were mission
 Christians, of course. But it was to the advantage of all such mi-
 grants to attach themselves to the growing 'myth of the Manyika1 in
 the towns of southern Africa. In the urban and industrial ethnic
 hierachy the ' Manyika' came to be thought of as 'natural' domestic
 servants. 'The Vamanyika are in great demand as domestic servants,'
 noted the Native Commissioner, Inyanga in 1929, 'and they obtain good
 wages for this class of labour . .. The wage for this unproductive
 labour is generally higher than that for other productive work.'
 Chief Native Commissioner Bullock gave official backing to the myth:
 'These Wa Manyika ... now supply the best houseboys to South Africa.1
 During my field research in Makoni district I found that very many
 of my informants had worked as waiters in South Africa and retained
 photograph albums to prove it. They also retained memories of the
 'Manyika1 networks along which they were able to move from job to job
 and town to town.
 All this meant that the realities of the migrant labour market made
 an impact even on the most stubborn 'traditionalist' groups in Makoni
 district. Thus the Rozvi chief Tandi and his people were very
 reluctant to accept even a Makoni identity, let alone a Manyika one.
 They were very concerned to argue that they had always been autonomous
 of Makoni, and they were regularly involved in schemes to re-establish
 the Rozvi paramountcy. But, as chief Tandi and his elders told me in
 1981, they ceased to speak Rozvi and came to speak what they call
 Chimanyika, 'because we had to marry foreign women'. ' And when
  flQur
 young men went to town they had to accept that they were Manyika. '
 In this way an urban Manyika identity grew up, in which migrants
 from Makoni district fully participated. In September 1913, for ex-
 ample, a cluster of 'Manyika workers' at the Argus Printing Company in
 Salisbury, which included men from both Umtali and Makoni, wrote in
 protest to the administration:
 There are three of Manica girls here and they have nothing
 to do. They are not working. Their work is to commit all
 sorts of evil going from one man to another. We wish you
 could report it to Native Commissioner in Salisbury and
 have them sent back to Umtali; or sir if it please you
 send us a letter that we may carry it over to Native
 Commissioner in Salisbury. Also we wish if there is a law
 that shall never allow a Manica girl to come here and not
 let one of them ride the train from Umtali or from any one
 of the stations and sidings, such as Odzi, Rusapi and etc.
 save she that has her husband.
 In Salisbury boxing and other recreation 'was organised around a
 number of "tribal" clubs', comprising the 'Wakorekore, the Wamanyika,
 the Zezuru, the WaBudjga and the MaBlantyre1, with 'the WaKorekore,
 the MaBlantyre, the WaManyika on the one side, the WaZezuru and
 WaBudjga on the other'. More radical groupings existed also. 'There
 are societies established in the following towns,' wrote the Native
 Commissioner, Inyanga, in Noember 1930, (Cape Town, Bulawayo and
 Salisbury known as the Young Ethiopian Manica Society. The objects are
 political and many of the younger Natives of the district belong to
 one or other of the branches in the towns.'
, ft\igA.ardi4 and the fllanyJMa 26
 There was little point in or possibility of maintaining a distinct
 Makoni identity in the towns. Certainly other African workers lumped
 everyone from Umtali, Makoni and Inyanga districts together. In Bula-
 wayo, for example, 'Manyika' migrants had entered domestic service and
 other employment from the turn of the century. Their access to good
 jobs caused them to be disliked by Ndebele workers. Thus the Super-
 intendent of Natives, Bulawayo, explained the great 'faction fights'
 in Bulawayo in 1929 as 'an attempt to oust the Manyikas and the
 Natives of Victoria District, large numbers of whom are employed in
 the town, and because they are good servants, were preferred by
 employers at good wages. Also because these men attracted Matabele
 girls because they were in position to do so financially1. In 1930
 the rumours flew that there would be a renewal of the fighting at
 Christmas time. It was rumoured that a meeting of Ndebele had 'agreed
 that the following tribes must be wiped out, or so terrorised that
 they would leave Bulawayo and the general labour f iel^ d, to the Mata-
 bele, viz., Abanyika, Makorikori, Blantyre, Amabemba'. Such rumours
 made many migrant labourers from Makoni district return home in order
 to avoid such an attack on the 'Manyika1 - an identity which had
 become disadvantageous. But in rumour at least 'a number of Manyikas
 are coming from Salisbury at Christmas time to assist the members of
 their tribe in Bulawayo against the Matabele' . 'On the part of the
 Mashonas, ' it was reported, ' the daring and defiant ones hail from
 Victoria and Umtali Circles who consider Jbey are a match for the
 Matibili and are quite ready to meet them.' It is clear that by the
 1930s the idea of an extended Manyika identity, which included the men
 of Makoni district, was very much alive, not only in 'Manicaland'
 itself but throughout Southern Rhodesia.
 It is also clear that for some men this 'Manyika' identity was not
 just a convenient urban reference group, but an ideal which sustained
 them during their migration. There was, for example, Patrick Kwesha,
 spokesman of the Manyika workers of Johannesburg in their protest
 against the Jesuits. Kwesha 'used to convert people in Johannesburg
 .. . Many, many were baptised. These people were nearly all labour
 migrants from Manyikaland. There may have been some South AJTricans too
 but what he was really interested in was the Manyika' . Kwesha' s
 'only wish which led my whole life', was to go back to Manyikaland and
 to set up an all-African missionary order there. 'I wanted God to be
 fulfilled ... and his great servants to rise up among them, and that
 some of them as the apostles may swarm over the whole of Manyikaland,
 as the bees, and banishing all the heathenism, protestantism and
 superstition, and establish a pure and holy kingdom of God and glory
 of Mary so that from that our God may be called God of Manyikaland as
 He was called God of Israel, and Our Lady be nai 1 f?d Queen of
 Manyikaland as She is called queen of angels and saints.'
 CONCLUSION
 It seems clear, then, that by the 1930s the Manyika identity was a
 reality in Makoni, Umtali and Inyanga districts and in the migrant
 diaspora. It had arisen as a result of the operation of the main
 forces which transformed Makoni district under early colonialism -
 participation in peasant agriculture, labour migration, and as a
 corollary of both the grass-roots demand for literacy and education.
Misyiaruba and the ftonyJJia 27
 It had arisen as a result of the emergence of local entreprenurial and
 church elites, but it also allowed for wider protest against the
 manifestly failing colonial political economy in the 1930s. Whites and
 especially the missionaries had played a key role in the definition of
 the Manyika identity but in such a way that the idea was open for all
 sorts of uses by Africans. Plainly there had developed many vested
 interests in Chimanyika and its implied ethnic and cultural identity.
 In the 1930s not only did the teachers of Triashill resist the
 imposition of Zezuru, but many Anglican teachers protested against the
 new and uniform Shona orthography which had been one of the results of
 Doke's recommendations.
 I have carried the story forward to the 1930s, after which time
 another complex and very similar process, once again involving mis-
 sionary language policy and the ambitions of Africans, slowly gave
 rise to a sense of Shona identity in Makoni elsewhere. If in the 1930s
 no-one in Makoni would have described themselves as 'Shona1, by the
 late 1950s when the nationalist movement came to the district, nearly
 everyone thought in such terms. But I cannot leave the chapter in the
 1930s without making some attempt to connect up my story with the
 questions raised at the beginning. What were the connections between
 the development of the sense of a wider Manyika ethnicity and the
 assassination of Chitepo, the faction fights within ZANU, or the
 support given to Muzorewa in the 1979 elections? Did the Manyika
 identity survive underneath the new consciousness of being Shona, to
 surface destructively in these ways?
 I think the answer is that what I have been describing was in no
 sense a monolithic process. A Manyika identity emerged but it emerged
 as a result of the distinct work of three different missionary
 churches, each appealing most to different areas and to different
 classes or proto-classes. The African groups involved in developing
 the Manyika identity were also distinct from each other, both in their
 experiences and in their interests. Hence 'the Manyika' did not exist
 as a bloc, readily at the disposal of any leader or party. Indeed, it
 seems to me that where Manyika-hood did play a role in recent politics
 it was in this particular rather general way. Thus in December 1975
 Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe Star attacked Muzorewa for 'appealing to the
 African of the Mushona tribe using him or her as a cover while in
 reality the group leadership is interested in ... the Mamanyika tribe
 The death of Herbert Chitepo and Bishop Muzorewa's United
 Methodist Church are cleverly being used as baits to woo the
 Vamanyika. ' It was not true that Muzorewa cared little for the
 support of other groups, but it was true that in Manicaland his
 support was founded upon his control of the old American Methodist
 Manyika network. The stalwarts of the church, who had previously been
 unwilling to commit themselves to mass nationalism, came solidly
 behind a leader who had himself been brought up in Makoni District and
 whose family represented the quintessential ambitions of the Methodist
 entrepreneur. As I have argued elsewhere, Muzorewa's essential
 support in Makoni came from this particular strand in the 'Manyika'
 tradition.
 In February 1980 James MacManus of the Guardian brought out very
 clearly the distinct strands in the 'Manyika vote':
ftL64i.oriQAi.ZA, ftixyiantA and the. ManyiAa. 28
 There lies St Augustine's, the most famous mission school
 in the country, whose old boys, including the late nation-
 alist leader, Herbert Chitepo, have risen to positions of
 influence in every sphere of African life in Rhodesia. The
 Anglican school has strong nationalist connections which
 explains the loyalty among staff and students to
 Robert Mugabe's party and army ...
 The arguments advanced at St Augustine's can easily be
 reversed at Old Umtali Mission a few miles away which
 counted Bishop Muzorewa among its old boys. Here one hears
 lurid tales of ZANLA activity.
 I have tried to show elsewhere that the Catholic strand of Manyika-
 hood played the radical role of all during the guerrila war.
 Nevertheless, though certainly not 'traditional' or 'natural' or
 monolithic, the continued existence in this multi-layered way of the
 idea of an extended Manyika identity does offer, along with the
 continuance of the other sub-Shona identities, a potential danger to
 the Zimbabwean state. During the war the Rhodesian regime belatedly
 picked up and exploited the notion of this 'traditional' ethnic
 division - hence the maps setting out their exact percentages. In
 January 1976 the Zimbabwe Star alleged that the Rhodesia Front had a
 secret plan, Operation Tshaka. 'According to this document the first
 task of the R.F. is to divide the Ndebeles and Shonas by inciting
 tribalism and magnify their tribal differences. The second task is to
 divide the Shonas themselves and break them into their constituent
 clans.^ the Manyikas, Makaranga, Mazezuru, Makorekore,. etc., etc.,
 etc. ' The Zimbabwe Star feared 'good-for-nothing megalomaniac
 so-called leaders who cannot impress anybody and resort to tribalism
 as an instrument for manufacturing support1. It might be that strands
 in the Manyika identity could again be manipulated - in an attempted
 UANC revival, for example. For this reason it seems useful to set out,
 as this paper has tried to do, how and why the notion of the extended
 Manyik identity arose in the first place; not indeed as the fruit of
 megalomaniac tribalism but as a very human and often constructive
 response to socio-economic change, a response however which now needs
 to be replaced by the development of other kinds of consciousness in a
 period of even sharper transformation and contradiction.
and the. 29
 Map 1. The Manyika kingdom
 j.W3tsomba
 ANyakslsapa
 iChikadahuyu
 ngaguru
 AChirowerowe
 10 Miles
 16 km
and the 30
 Map 2. Eastern Shona country
, (AijgA.an.t4 and the 31
 Map 3. Major Mission Station in Makoni District
 Tribal Trust Lands
 C.bikore
 To
 Salisbury
 >
 ?z.
 o
 (Anglican)
 Triashill
 MUTASA
 To Umtatl
 (TTrappist)'
 Gandanzaxa (A.M.E.C.)
and the 32
 Map 4. The major tribal groupings in Zimbabwe Rhodesia with approx-
 imate percentage of African population
 B?it Bf
 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
 10
 11
 Tribe
 Ndebele
 Kalanga
 Tribe
 Rozwi
 Korefcore
 Zezuru
 Manyika
 Karanga
 Ndau
 Tribe
 Ton^a
 Venda
 Shangaan
 NDEBELE ORIENTATED TRIBES
 Percentage No.
 14%
 5%
 SHONA ORIENTATED TRIBES
 Percentage No.
 9%
 12%
 18%
 13%
 22%
 3%
 OTHERS
 Percentage No.
 '2%
 1%
 \%
 of Chiefs
 44
 3
 of Chiefs
 20
 20
 22
 9
 35
 11
 of Chiefs
 27
 6
 5
 NOTE
 1.
 2.
 3.
 The three above divisions are based on historical fact. They
 do not necessarily mean that a modern African from the KALANGA
 group, for example, automatically considers himself to be NDEBELE
 orientated in matters of politics, sport or any other aspect
 of organised life.
 Some of the above groups have further sub-groups. The NDEBELE,
 for example, have 12 such sub-groups, the ZEZURU have 8, and
 the KARANGA have 15.
 The SHONA language group has approximately 65 sub-groupings.
,&>4, ft\ljgA.ant4 and the ManyJAa 33
 NOTES
 1. Republic of Zambia. Report of the Special International Commis-
 sion on the Assassination of Herbert Wiltshire Chitepo, Lusaka,
 March 1976.
 2. Ndabaningi Sithole, 'Open Letter1, 10 May 1976.
 3. Sitholefs announcement of 30 March 1977 is cited and heavily
 criticised in 'The Scourge of Divisions and Splits in the Lib-
 eration Movement1, Zimbabwe Report, 3 July 1977.
 4. Masipula Sithole, Zimbabwe. Struggles within the Struggle,
 Salisbury, 1979 pp. 70-71.
 5. Claire Pally, Zimbabwe - Rhodesia. Should the present government
 be recognised?, London, 1979.
 6. Christopher Hitchins, Inequalities in Zimbabwe, Minority Rights
 Groups, Report No. 8, December 1979, p. 5.
 7. David Beach, The Shona and Zimbabwe, 900 - 1850, London, 1980.
 8. Hans Holleman, 'Some "Shona" Tribes of Southern Rhodesia1, in E.
 Colson and Max Gluckman, eds., Seven Tribes of British Central
 Africa, Manchester, 1951, p. 354.
 9. H.H.K. Bhila, Trade and Politics in a Shona Kingdom. The Man-
 yika and their Portuguese and African Neighbours, 1575 - 1902,
 London, 1982.
 1?* ibid., pp. xiv, xvi, 4, 5.
 11. ibid., p. 237.
 12. Native Commissioner, Umtali, 'History of Umtassa's People1, 18
 January 1904, NUA 2/1/5, National Archives, Harare.
 13. Native Commissioner, Inyanga to Superintendent of Natives,
 Umtali, 2 April 1910, NUA 3/2/1, N.A., Harare.
 14. S/N, Umtali to Chief Native Commissioner, 8 April 1920; minute
 by C.N.C.; NUA 3/2/1, N.A., Harare.
 15. Memorandum 'Mayinini', 20 December 1915. NUA 3/2/2, N.A. ,
 Harare.
 16. F.W.T. Posselt, A Survey of the Native Tribes of Southern Rho-
 desia, Salisbury, 1927, pp. 9-10.
 17. These citations are taken from the original early chapters of
 Maurice Nyagumbo's draft autobiography, now in my possession.
 The material was omitted from the text as published in Maurice
 Nyagumbo, With the People, London, 1980.
and the ManyMka 34
 18. Letter from Archdeacon J.H. Upcher, Eusape, 10 December 1902,
 Mashonaland Quarterly, XLIII, February 1903, p. 6.
 19. 'Diary from the Memorial College and Industrial Native Mission,'
 Mashonaland Quarterly, XXVII, February 1899, p. 17.
 20. Helen Springer's report, Official Record, A.M.E.C. Missionary
 Conference, 1905, p. 27.
 21. J.R. Gates' report, Official Journal. A.M.E.C. Missionary Con-
 ference, 1911, p. 15.
 22. H.I. James' report, Official Journal, 1917, p. 28; J.R. Gates'
 report, Official Journal, 1919, p. 33.
 23. 'Gospelizing the Greatest Continent' and 'And He Said Unto Me
 Write1, African Advance, 2 April-June 1981, No. 1.
 24. E.H. Greeley's report, Minutes of the first session of the East
 Central Missionary Conference, 1901, p. 48.
 25. Testimony of Mark Kanogoiwa, Official Record, 1909, p. 60.
 26. E.H. Greeley's report, Official Record, 1910, pp. 63-64.
 27. E.H. Greeley's report, Minutes, 1924, pp. 34-36.
 28. C M . Doke, Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects,
 Hertford, 1931, pp. 3-4.
 29. E.H. Greeley's report, Official Record, 1909.
 30. E.H. Greeley's report, Official Record, 1910, p. 63.
 31. E.H. Greeley's report, Official Journal, 1916, p. 29; E.H.
 Greeley's report, Minutes, 1925, p. 43.
 32. W.C. Gardiner's report, Official Journal, 1924, p. 43.
 33. H.N. Howard's report, Official Record, 1910, p. 55.
 34. 'The policy of the Rhodesia Conference of the Methodist Church
 in regard to facilities for the training of teachers,' October
 1953, Capital Box file, 'Education', Old Umtali Archives.
 35. Terence Ranger, 'Poverty and Prophetism: Religious Movements in
 the Makoni District, Zimbabwe, 1929 to 1940', Henderson Seminar,
 University of Zimbabwe, April 1981.
 36. Terence Ranger, 'Religions and Rural Protests: Makoni District,
 Zimbabwe, 1900 to 1980', in Janos Bak and Gerhard Benecke, eds.,
 Religion and Rural Revolt, at press. For Anglicanism in Makoni
 in particular see, Terence Ranger, 'Literature and Political
 Economy: Arthur Shearly Cripps and the Makoni Labour Crisis of
, fti.gA.antA and the. ManyUAa 35
 1911', Journal of Southern African Studies, October 1982;
 ?Medical Science and Pentecost: the dilemma of Anglicanism in
 Africa', in Terence Ranger and W. Shields, eds., Church, Sect
 and Healing, Oxford, 1982.
 37. J. H. Upcher's letter, 25 August 1893, Mashonaland Quarterly,
 VII, January 1894, p. 15.
 38. Douglas Pelly to his parents, 14 July 1892, PE 3/1/1, National
 Archives, Harare.
 39. Doublas Pelly to his parents, 19 May 1893, ibid.
 40. 'The Bishop's Letter1, 9 January 1894, Mashonaland Quarterly,
 VIII, April 1984, pp. 5-6.
 41. 'The Bishop's Letter', 26 November 1895, Mashonaland Quarterly,
 XV, February 1896, p. 4.
 42. Pelly to his parents, 6 December 1895, PE 3/1/1, National Arch-
 ives, Harare.
 43. Pelly to Frank Ziqubu, 4 March 1897, PE 3/1/3, N.A. , Harare.
 44. H.M. M'tobi's letter of 17 August 1896, Letters for the Child-
 ren, 4, November 1896, pp. 2-3.
 45. Bishop Gaul's letter, 1 March 1897, Mashonaland Quarterly, XX,
 May 1897, p. 4.
 46. Ronald Alexander's letter, 15 December 1898, Letters for the
 Children, 13, February 1899, p. 3.
 47. Ronald Alexander's Journal, Letters for the Children, 19, August
 1900, p. 2.
 48. A.S. Gibson's letter, 31 July 1904, Mashonaland Quarterly, L,
 November 1904, pp. 14-16.
 49. W.J. Roxburgh's letter, 17 September 1904, Mashonaland Quarter-
 ly, LI, February 1905, p. 10.
 50. Edgar Lloyd, 'Mission of the Epiphany, Rusape', Mashonaland
 Quarterly, Lll, August 1905, p. 19.
 51. Edgar Lloyd, 'Mission of the Epiphany, Rusape?, Mashonaland
 Quarterly, L1V, November 1905, p. 21.
 52. 'Letter from Canon Hallward', St Augustine's, 17 March 1914,
 Mashonaland Quarterly, LXXXVIII, May 1914, p. 9.
 53. C M . Doke, Report on the Unification of the Shona Dailects,
 1931, Map II. Doke wrote: 'Practically every large Mission in
 the country has extended its work outside the dialectical area
and the ManyU-ka 36
 in which it began, and in doing so has employed the medium of
 the first dialect for preaching, instruction and the use of
 books . . . Perhaps the most convincing example of this ... is to
 be found in the spread of Manyika. Map II appended to this
 report shows convincingly how Manyika books, issued by the
 Church of England Mission from St Augustine's and Rusape, and by
 the Methodist Episcopal Mission from Old Umtali, are being used
 . . . not only in the Manyika area but in practically every other
 Shona area as well1, p. 77.
 54. E.H.E. Etheridge's letter, 21 September 1909, Mashonaland Quar-
 terly, LXX, November 1909, p. 13.
 55. S.J. Christelow's letter, 3 December 1914, Mashonaland Quarter-
 ly, XC1, February 1915, pp. 10-11.
 56. H.V. Oldfield's letter, Selukwe, 23 June 1914, Mashonaland
 Quarterly, LXXXIX, August 1914, p. 18.
 57. E.H. Etheridge's letter, 7 April 1916, Selukwe, Southern Rhode-
 sia Quarterly, XCVI, May 1916, p. 11.
 58. 'Letter to the Children1, Selukwe, Southern Rhodesia Quarterly,
 CXIV, November 1920, p. 10.
 59. G. Broderick's letter, Bulawayo, 21 March 1917, Southern Rhode-
 sia Quarterly, C, May 1917, p. 9.
 60. B.H. Barnes, 'The Progress of the New Shona Orthography', Native
 Affairs Department Annual, 12, 1934, p. 31.
 61. Borther Aegidius, 'History of Triashill1, n.d., Box 195, Jesuit
 Archives, Mount Pleasant, Harare.
 62. Notes by Father W. Withnell, n.d., Box 195, Jesuit Archives.
 63. Abbot Wolpert to Monsignor Sykes, 22 August 1911, Box 260, file
 5, Jesuit Archives.
 64. Father M.A. Fleischer to Monsignor Sykes, 22 August 1911, Box
 260, file 5, Jesuit Archives.
 65. Father C. Bert to Monsignor Sykes, 1 October 1911, Box 260, file
 5, Jesuit Archives.
 66. Father Withnell to Father Johanny, 30 January 1932, Box 260,
 file 2; Withnell to Johanny, 19 May 1931, Box 260, file 3,
 Jesuit Archives.
 67. Triashill teachers to Father C. Bert, 26 February 1923, Box 260,
 file 1, Jesuit Archives.
 68. Father Richartz to Pro-Prefect, 15 July 1922, Box 260, file 1,
 Jesuit Archives.
MiA4i.on.cvu.eA, ?<\JjgA.antA and the. ftanyika 37
 69. Father Withnell to Father Johanny, 16 June 1930, Box 260, file
 3, Jesuit Archives.
 70. Monsignor R. B. Brown's circular letter, 25 August 1923, Box 13,
 Jesuit Archives.
 71. Monsignor Brown to Father Johanny, 23 September 1924, Box 195;
 entry for 4 October 1924, Chronicle of Triashill; Father Ig-
 natius Arnoz to Monsignor Brown, 4 and 12 October 1924, Box 26,
 file 1, Jesuit Archives.
 72. Monsignor Brown to 'Your Excellency', 8 August 1927, Box 139,
 file 2, Jesuit Archives.
 73. The fullest evidence of this imbroglio is to be found in Box
 139, Jesuit Archives, which contains a useful summary by Father
 Rea, 'The Mariannhill Dispute'.
 74. Father O'Hea to Monsignor Brown, 20 March 1930, Box 195, Jesuit
 Archives.
 75. Father O'Hea to Monsignor Brown, 11 September 1930, Box 195,
 Jesuit Archives.
 76. O'Hea to Brown, 11 September 1930, Box 195.
 77. Admin. Apost. to Deleg. Apost., 18 March 1931, Box 195.
 78. Ibid.
 79. O'Hea to Brown, 11 September 1930, Box 195.
 80. Ibid.
 81. H. Buck's letter, St Augustine's, September 1914, Mashonaland
 Quarterly, XC, November 1914, p. 18.
 82. T.A. O'Farrell's report, Official Journal; 1935, p. 252.
 83. R. C. Gates' report, Official Journal, 1935, p. 247.
 84. Annual Report, Inyanga, 1929.
 85. Charles Bullock, The Mashona and the Matabele, Cape Town, 1950,
 p. 25.
 86. For a vivid account of how a young Makoni migrant activated
 these networks see Maurice Nyagumbo, With the People, London,
 1980.
 87. Interview with Chief Tandi and elders, Tandi, 27 February 1981.
 88. Manyika workers to Native Commissioner, Umtali, 19 September
 1913, NUA 3/2/1, National Archives, Harare.
V
 and the. ManyiMa 38
 89. Roger Howman, 'An intensive survey of the history and social
 background of boxing among the natives of Salisbury', 29 June
 1931, S.1542. S12, 1936 - 1939.
 90. Native Commissioner, Inyanga to Chief Native Commissioner, 20
 November 1930, S.138.22.1930 - 1931, National Archives, Harare.
 91. Superintendent of Natives, Bulawayo to Chief Native Commission-
 er, 12 August 1935, S.1542. S12, 1934 - 1935, National Archives,
 Harare.
 92. S/N/Bulawayo to C.N.C., 12 December 1930, S.138.22.1930 - 1931,
 National Archives, Harare.
 93. Native Commissioner, Inyati to S/N/Bulawayo, 17 December 1930;
 Native Commissioner, The Range to Acting C.N.C, 12 December
 1930, S.138.22. 1930 - 1931, National Archives, Harare.
 94. Interview with Augustine Kwesha, St Xavier's, Manyika, 28 Feb-
 ruary 1981.
 95. Red note-book, 'Written by Patrick Kwesha. 1943. Johannesburg',
 in possession of Augustine Kwesha.
 96. 'Tribalism Running Down the Muzorewa's Group', Zimbabwe Star, 6
 December 1975.
 97. Terence Ranger, 'Religions and Rural Protests: Makoni District,
 Zimbabwe, 1900 to 1980', in Janos Bak and Gerhard Benecke,
 Religion and Rural Revolt, at press.
 98. James MacManus, 'The bullies in the bush', The Guardian, 8
 February 1980.
 99. Terence Ranger, 'The Church and War: Holy Men and Rural Com-
 munities in Zimbabwe, 1970 to 1980', in B. Shiels, ed., The
 Church and War, 1983.
 100. 'Angola and Zimbabwe: the Parallels', Zimbabwe Star, 17 January
 1976.