Immortalising African valour to counter historical whitewashing
PRESIDENT Mnangagwa will today commission the Pupu Battlefield national monument in Matabeleland North in a development aimed at immortalising the country’s national memory by re-correcting, re-affirming and re-asserting a historical trajectory largely tainted by distorted colonial narratives.
Former colonists have for long controlled Zimbabwe’s historical trajectory about their confrontation with indigenous people during conquest. The colonial narratives are blatantly skewed in favour of colonialists and puts them on a higher pedestal of valour while indigenous people are portrayed as lacking agency.
A common pervasive narrative in most colonial books is that of a landscape that was largely empty and inhabited with the few indigenes occupying the land being presented as uncultured and unorganised beings.
This sort of narrative was deliberately crafted by colonial writers and historians to erase a sense of guilt in the immoral and brutal conquests of other people’s land. In reading colonial texts one gets the sense that Africans were generally a docile lot who willingly allowed foreigners to conquer and dominate them without any resistance. The whole colonial project was about erasure and moulding different parts of Zimbabwe into the image of what they called “Mother Country”.
But far from being a docile lot, indigenous Zimbabweans valiantly fought against white invaders and in many cases vanquished them despite having inferior weaponry.
It is that erasure of African valour that the Second Republic led by President Mnangagwa is seeking to restore by taking a deliberate effort to initiative to rescue the future through a re-correction of the past. One such maladjusted historical narrative is that Battle of Pupu, which took place on December 4, 1893 on the shores of the Shangani River.
The invading column of 34 colonialists led by Major Allan Wilson were all annihilated by a 3000-strong Ndebele force led by General Mtshana Khumalo and yet all colonial records celebrate this battle as if they were the victors.
Until now, a monument at the site of the battle eulogised the vanquished white invaders instead of King Lobengula’s Imbizo led by Gen Khumalo. A tapering stone pillar had names of the 34 soldiers of the British South African Company (BSAC).
In their brutal conquests, the colonialists enacted statues and memorials serving their interests. In fact, one British artist John Tweed was hired to make sculptures of Cecil John Rhodes for display in the then Salisbury in 1904 and in Bulawayo in 1906. He was also tasked to do a sculpture of Rhodes’ very close associate Alfred Beit in the same year.
The most prominent of these memorial sites erected by colonialists was the Shangani Memorial at the Matopo Hills to commemorate Allan Wilson Patrol who died during the Gwaai-Shangani battle in 1893. None of the Ndebele warriors who died in the same battle were commemorated by the colonial state.
This memorialisation of colonial figures was meant to enforce colonisation of the mind, domination of the landscape and its people by changing them into miniscule versions of places in Britain. The memorials stood as reminders of the dishonour or humiliation of the colonised.
In reconfiguring the country’s historiography, President Mnangagwa post-humously conferred National Hero status to General Mtshana Khumalo. The conferment was huge in permanently engraving the national psyche of present and future generations about the glorious contributions of our forefathers in inspiring natives to fight for liberation and freedom. Until 1920, white settlers used to commemorate the Battle of Pupu as a national holiday as if they were the victors.
The reconfiguration of the country’s historical trajectory is crucial in building a generation of proud citizens with concrete historical inspiration reference points. President Mnangagwa’s Government must be commended for resolving that going forward, the country should “celebrate, honour and immortalise our heroes, especially those from the First and Second Chimurenga.”
Speaking in Gweru three years ago, President Mnangagwa cited the glaring disparities between the grace of King Mzilikazi and that of Cecil John Rhodes. Whereas King Mzilikazi lies in what would pass as unmarked grave, Rhodes lies atop Matopos on the World’s View where every visitor appears to be “paying homage” to the British plunderer.
Besides Pupu, there are other places of significance in both the 1896/7 uprisings and the Second Chimurenga of the 1970s that are still yearning for national recognition and preservation. One such place is Altena Farm in Centenary, Mashonaland Central. It is at Altena Farm that the first bullet to herald the tentative start of the Second Chimurenga.
Although the initiative to reclaim and preserve places of historical significance in the fight for independence started way back in 2004, it is President Mnangagwa who hastened the whole programme in order to preserve collective national memory for future generations.
In 2004, the Government launched what was called “Capturing a Fading Memory”, a project whose aim was to collect and preserve memories of the 1896/7 uprisings and the Second Chimurenga. The project was spearheaded by the National Archives of Zimbabwe in collaboration with the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, and the History Department at the University of Zimbabwe.
Twenty-years later, the project has taken a new impetus and it is hoped that the education sector would also incorporate issues to do with immortalising our historical heritage in both the First and Second Chimurenga. Incorporating issues to do with places/sites of historical importance is a positive development in inculcating a sense of pride and a recognition of the important contribution made by indigenous people in the fight against colonial conquest.
The documentation undertaken by colonial historians and writers though skewed against blacks is enough legitimation of the indigenous people’s heroic fight against colonial conquest characterised by their commitment to a genuine cause to protect their birthright.
This programme to preserve all sites of historical importance in the fight for Uhuru is crucial in ensuring that future generations will know that far from being docile, our forefathers frantically resisted conquest and it is their valour that inspired future generations of freedom fighters in the Second Chimurenga.