Political Authority, Ethnic Rights, and the Ndebele Legacy

Having just examined the postconquest situation in Bulilima-Mangwe in the preceding chapter, which raised critical issues about the creation of identities on the margins of the colonial state, it is important that we also examine the issue of who speaks for the Ndebele “tribe” and the source of political authority among the Ndebele after the demise of the kingdom. This is another neglected issue in Matabeleland history that will yield important ideas about the contested nature of Ndebele identity. Taken together with chapter 3, this chapter helps us understand salient aspects of ethnicity, politics, and struggles in rural Matabeleland from colonization to the late 1940s.

Related to the question of who speaks for the Ndebele is the broader question of the source of political authority. Ndebele royals and most chiefs who were closely allied to the nineteenth-century Ndebele monarchy posed, in the early colonial period, as living heroes. Their move to restore the Ndebele monarchy—feared and obstructed by the colonial rulers—solidified the already existing division between commoners and remnants of the Ndebele ruling class. It represented another extreme reaction, one not expected by the colonizer, who thought that the Ndebele had been placated enough by the elevation of some of their chiefs into head chiefs and also by the payment of allowances for the upkeep of the Lobengula family. The“restoration movement, which is still an issue in Matabeleland today, aroused debates about the commoners' freedom and status should the aims of the ultraroyalists be achieved.