Decolonising through Rubusana

IAM fascinated by a chapter titled AbaMbo nezibongo zabo (AbaMbo people and their clan lineages) in Walter Rubusana’s 1911 collection of history texts, Zemk’iinkomo Magwalandini.

The chapter is fascinating not because of the genealogies recorded in it from oral history, but because of a vignette on precolonial mining embedded therein.

The chapter records as follows, with a loose translation from myself: “This ‘Mbo’ they call themselves by is not the name of a king, nor the name of their land, it is the name of a rock. It is not a name, it refers to them being ‘people of the rock’.

This “rock” explains the author, is what they dug up. In Nguni, to dig is ukumba, the word for diggers is ngabeMbi.

According to the author (my translation), “the people roamed and reached the vicinity of Swaziland, near some holes that were deep crevices, these (digs) are called Zimbabwe (Zimbyebye or Zimbabwe ruins). They arrived there and set-up shelters, and dug up from those holes a rock that was gold and they called it yimbo (something dug up). This rock they then wrapped up with reeds and went to sell it to the Portuguese in exchange for calico (a form of textile)”.

The explanation states that the word abeMbi, meaning “diggers”, came to be distorted to abaMbo. But the story does not stop there. It describes what happens when abaMbo arrived in the land of the amaXhosa, with their beautiful glittering metal.

The author writes that “the beauty of this rock, and its scarcity among amaXhosa, brought about an idiom – Ungazilahleli imbo yakho ngoPhoyiyana, kuba uPhoyiyana uyemka ngomso – which loosely translated means, “do not throw away something precious for something that is temporary”.

The idiom is much deeper in meaning, of course.

Now, I read this with fascination because even Mkhizes fall under the larger collective of AbaseMbo and I never ever associated the origins of the clan name with such an explanation.

Yet, there in Rubusana’s book, this is the implication.

I am not entirely convinced that the name eMbo is entirely related to the functional work of being diggers.

I cannot assume this source to be completely accurate as amaXhosa may have invented their own colourful explanations of who abeMbo were.

However, that is a point I will fully explore later.

The main point of this article has to do with the university curriculum and the necessity of bringing in the African language oral and written histories into the classroom for students to grapple with.

I used this particular example at the University of KwaZulu-Natal recently, as it was in the grip of #FeesMustFall. I had a small workshop with students, youth political leaders and a few emerging academics.

In that workshop I presented on the history of the South African economy, in which I insisted that we start with precolonial global trade and modes of life.

To my shock, most of the room had never heard of the Indian Ocean trade that tied places like Great Zimbabwe, Mapungubwe and Thulamela to gold mining in the middle ages by Africans.

One student remarked that they really did not know Africans had a history of extensive precolonial trade, and said they felt robbed by their elite schooling.

I informed the students of the reference from Zemk’inkomo to illustrate that southern Africans mined gold and traded it along the Mozambican coast.

I deliberately used a source from their own African lineage histories, to demonstrate the point.

But I also used it to make the students realise that the work of decolonising engages beyond the writings of Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon.

Decolonisation means adding more rigour because grappling with African history and using African sources is quite difficult but it is highly enjoyable and intellectually affirming for black people.

It is tragic that most students go through Eastern Cape universities never having encountered Rubusana’s work.