Law, Language, and Science: The Invention of the Native Mind in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1930

Law, Language, and Science

Recent Titles in Social History of Africa Series Allen Isaacman and Jean Allman, Series Editors Slavery and Beyond: The Making of Men and Chikunda Ethnic Identities in the Unstable World of South-Central Africa, 1750–1920 Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman Paradoxes of Power: The Kano “Mamluks” and Male Royal Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate, 1804–1903 Sean Stilwell Re-creating Eden: Land Use, Environment, and Society in Southern Angola and Northern Namibia Emmanuel Kreike Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Guinean Nationalist Movement, 1939–1958 Elizabeth Schmidt Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895–1912 Richard Roberts Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900–1960 Nwando Achebe The End of Chidyerano: A History of Food and Everyday Life in Malawi, 1860–2004 Elias C. Mandala Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe Beverly Carolease Grier Practicing History in Central Tanzania: Writing, Memory, and Performance Gregory H. Maddox with Ernest M. Kongola Fipa Families: Reproduction and Catholic Evangelization in Nkansi, Ufipa, 1880–1960 Kathleen R. Smythe “Girl Cases”: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890–1970 Brett L. Shadle Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century East Africa Stephen J. Rockel

Law, Language, and Science The Invention of the “Native Mind” in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930

Diana Jeater

Social History of Africa Allen Isaacman and Jean Allman, Series Editors

HEINEMANN Portsmouth, NH

Heinemann A division of Reed Elsevier Inc. 361 Hanover Street Portsmouth, NH 03801–3912 www.heinemann.com Offices and agents throughout the world © 2007 by Diana Jeater. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. ISBN: 0–325–07108–X (Heinemann cloth) ISBN: 0–325–07109–8 (Heinemann paper) ISSN: 1099–8098 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jeater, Diana. Law, language, and science : the invention of the “native mind” in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1930 / Diana Jeater. p. cm. — (Social history of Africa, ISSN 1099–8098) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–325–07108–X (alk. paper) — ISBN 0–325–07109–8 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Linguistics—Zimbabwe—History. 2. Translating and interpreting—Zimbabwe—History. 3. Language policy—Zimbabwe—History. 4. Zimbabwe—Race relations—History. I. Title. P81.Z55J43 2007 306.44'96891—dc22 2006031039 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 07 06 05 04 03 EB 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Law, Language & Science: the invention of the ‘Native Mind’ in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930. Diana Jeater, UWE, Bristol, UK Keywords: Zimbabwe, Southern Rhodesia, Law, Language, Science, Anthropology, Translation, Epistemology, ‘Native Administration’, Orality and Textuality, Colonisation, ‘invented tradition’, hegemony.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

xiii

1.

Hegemony and Translation: Law, Language, and Science in a Colonial Context

2.

Historical Background, 1820–1897

1 21

PART I: FIRST ENCOUNTERS, 1890s–1900s 3.

Points of Contact, 1895–1909

37

4.

And the God Was Made Word: Translation in the Mission, 1895–1909

55

5.

“An ordinary palaver”: Laws and Courts

77

6.

“Out from the smoky hut”: Heathenism, Rationalism, and Uncomfortable White People

103

PART II: TRANSLATION, 1910s–1920s 7.

“Can you not give the thing a name?”: Translation, Ambiguity, and Codification, 1910s–1920s

125

8.

“The sanctity of a contract”: Translating “Civilized” Values, 1910s–1920s

145

9.

“Thinking black”: Text and Translation, 1915–1925

165

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CONTENTS PART III: SEPARATION, 1920s–1930s

10. “ChiBaba”: Turning Language into Linguistics

187

11. “I do not want the opinion of a native”: Native Law and Custom, 1920s

205

12. “The meddlesomeness of professors”: Theories of the “Native Mind,” 1923–1935

215

Conclusion

233

Selected Bibliography

237

Index

245

Acknowledgments

This research was funded primarily by my faculty at the University of the West of England. However, the U.K. Humanities Research Board contributed to a semester’s initial research in 1995, and the Scouloudi Foundation and the British Academy funded short research visits to Zimbabwe in 1994 and 1998, respectively. I am grateful to all these institutions. In Zimbabwe, I received support and good ideas from many colleagues in the Department of History of the University of Zimbabwe and in particular from Professor Ken Manungo. I am grateful to staff in the Research Council of Zimbabwe for their assistance in sorting out research clearance for me. The staff at the National Archives were, as ever, polite, helpful, and extremely efficient. They are heroes who do not always get the recognition they deserve. In particular, I would like to thank Ian Johnstone, who was an engaged and approachable director of the Archives and continued to be an invaluable source of advice and assistance after he left that post. Many others in Zimbabwe provided me with support, friendship, and excellent conversation. Above all, thanks must go to Arthur Chikuwa, universally known as “Sekuru Arthur,” who has the most generous heart, most calm demeanor, and most extraordinary patience of any man I know. Without him, I would have been lost. Equally important, Philda Weale has always been my “Mother in Zimbabwe.” I owe a debt to all her family. Her daughter, Daphne, grew into a beautiful wife and caring mother. I used to stay in her home in Harare, which was full of her love and vivacity. Tragically, Daphne died in February 2004, a victim of the crisis in Zimbabwe’s health services. Another family to whom I owe a great debt are the Pearces. Carol and Mick Pearce provided me with a lovely place to stay and, along with their daughter Anna and her husband, Dave Brazier, supplied excellent food and stimulating thoughts. For thought and food, I must also thank Ingrid Sinclair and Simon Bright, and

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Megan Allardyce and Olley Maruma. Of these eight people, four are now living outside Zimbabwe. The number of places that feel like home there seem to be shrinking all the time. For providing me with day-to-day support and friendship, I depended on Otilia Sande and Tabeth Munhupedza. They have also been scattered by the ongoing economic problems, and I no longer know whether they are still alive. But they looked after me and shared my joys and sadnesses, and I hope that one day we will meet again. In the United Kingdom, I must thank Terry Ranger above all. I am grateful to Terry for so many things they cannot possibly be itemized. But mostly, I am grateful to him for his lifelong contribution to Zimbabwe studies and his example of how to combine intellectual curiosity with practical action. He has always been willing to comment on the ideas that I tossed about in working on this book and make them seem as though they mattered. I am also extremely grateful to Chenjerai Shire, who was always ready to talk about linguistics and lexical issues, whatever the time of day or night, and who contributed enormously to my analysis of the Mashonaland Quarterly. A few people were generous enough to read my work and make suggestions. In particular, I am indebted to Julie Livingston, Luise White, and Carol Summers, who read more than most, and each saw different things. I am really grateful to them all for the time and intelligence they invested in my work and regret that I have not even begun to do justice to their insights. I am also grateful to Darren Cole for doing the maps, to Paul Landau for asking the difficult questions, to Glen Elder and his fellow organizers of NEWSA in Vermont for providing the most inspiring intellectual environment anyone could wish for, and to Shula Marks and William Beinart, who provided significant encouragement at key moments. Many people said things that helped me think about what I was doing, and some of them were generous enough to share research notes with me, too. These include Jocelyn Alexander, David Anderson, Marieke Clarke, Matthew Engelke, Marc Epprecht, David McDermott Hughes, Liz MacGonagle, JoAnn McGregor, Stephen Lubkemann, Sinfree Makoni, David Maxwell, Allison Shutt, Randal Smith, Wendy Urban-Mead, Richard Waller, Dick Werbner, and Tapiwa Zimudzi. There are, no doubt, others whom I have omitted and to whom I offer mortified apologies and the promise of a meal. Of course, none of these people bears any responsibility for the final result. Finally, I would like to thank the people around whom my everyday life revolves and who provided practical help in many different ways. These include my colleagues in the Department of History at UWE, some the finest and friendliest people one could ever hope to work with; my insightful daughter Taru for accepting that sometimes writing had to take priority; her uncle Joe for always thinking about what other people might need; her aunt Judy for never giving up; and my superbly supportive parents, who were ever willing to be useful, or just to sound interested, as appropriate. Among my friends, I want to thank Miranda BonhamCarter and Wren Sidhe for understanding the importance of a night out; Ruth Summers for combining companionable conversation with a seemingly endless

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willingness to invite Taru to her house; Ilana Nevill for being a true healer and, with her husband Tim, for maintaining spiritual hope and ethics; Yuki Honjo and her husband Paul Scalise for valuing friendship and enjoying ideas; Martin Summers for paying the rent and feeding the cats; and Camilla Gugenheim, Judy Tucker, Fiona Macaulay, Shelley Couper, and Richard Pantlin for being the mates who are always there at the bottom line.

Introduction

I began to work on Southern Rhodesian history soon after Zimbabwe ended its liberation struggle and gained a democratically elected government. At that time, there was a broad leftist alliance in the United Kingdom that supported national liberation struggles against colonial and white minority rule. Displaying an academic interest in what we then called “Third World countries” was a way of showing solidarity with those struggles. But by the time my first book was published, U.K. politics had changed, and, as a result of my time in Zimbabwe, so had I. Politically, the 1980s saw the rise of identity politics; solidarity with national liberation struggles had become less important than defining and defending minority communities in the United Kingdom. Separate organizations for people of African and Asian descent exposed the predominance of white people in the leadership of leftist movements and forced me to reassess my role as a white person speaking about African issues. Meanwhile, my growing awareness of the disparity of resources for researchers like me from wealthy universities and for my colleagues from poor African universities made me question the foundations of my status as an “expert” on Zimbabwe. Whereas once I had believed that developing an expertise in African history would contribute to African liberation, I now began to suspect that I was part of the problem. I no longer felt comfortable about defining Zimbabwe’s history to the world when African researchers found it so hard to raise research resources or to get their work published. And yet I was, undoubtedly, a “Zimbabwe expert.” I had served my apprenticeship through long, rainy afternoons in the dark basement of the library at SOAS in London, reading Holleman on Venda kinship and Bullock on Shona totems, before ever I set foot on Zimbabwean soil. In the identity politics of the time, this was my identity. So, I reasoned, if there was one group in Zimbabwe’s history that I was entitled to comment on, it was surely other whites—other outsiders—who had claimed to know about Africans in the past. Thus, this book

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was born. It is the history of a small group of white people who produced some of the “expert knowledge” about Africans that I had imbibed in the United Kingdom and that I carried back to Zimbabwe with me. The book investigates the nature of their knowledge about African communities, and the power relationships that such knowledge represented. It thereby questions my own claims to expertise and perhaps those of the academy itself. Expertise and knowledge about another culture require the ability to translate. Translation begins as a conceptual skill: even the average monoglot English speaker can understand the principles underlying foreign words such as “schadenfreude” or “kitsch.” However, translation involves more than understanding—it involves the ability to transfer and re-present ideas in a new linguistic framework. The first chapter of this book examines translation and the ordering of ideas. Understanding another culture involves experiencing how concepts are put together within that culture. However, the process of recording what has been learned requires more than experience; it involves translation and ordering. Chapter 1 demonstrates that translation and ordering necessarily involve power relationships in which one set of concepts will be adapted and mutated so that they can be accommodated by the vocabulary and syntax of another. In this sense, translation stands as a metaphor for the hegemonic projects of the white settlers who wanted to mold African societies to fit into an Anglo-American definition of “civilization.” The knowledge that informed my first conversations with people in Zimbabwe came from English-language texts in British libraries. All the things that I knew about Zimbabwean culture derived from my white predecessors and their interactions with local people. Those whites had translated what they heard into text and ordered it as “knowledge.” To understand how this happened, I began to look at a small corner of Southern Rhodesia, the Chimanimani mountains, where missionaries and native administrators began this process back in the 1890s. Much of the early work of recording and understanding local culture revolved around legal disputes. Hence, “law” is an important focus of this work. Like language, law required translation of ideas. The presumption of a mutual understanding about what was being discussed in a legal dispute—and why it mattered—was extremely important. That is why the law forms a major focus in the case studies in this book. Moreover, law is an expression of cultural norms, and for European societies, law was expressed through legalism—the application of rules. The rulebased nature of European political thought, in its concepts of fairness, liberty, and citizenship, played a significant role in whites’ self-representations of their legitimacy. The rational application of rules was seen as a guarantee of fair play and a limit on arbitrary behavior, whether by the state or by white settlers. The urge to rationalize and codify was a defining feature of colonial states. Consequently, this book is also interested in “science.” This is primarily science not in the sense of technology but in the sense of a rationalist and empirical epistemology, peculiar to the European intellectual tradition. The whites who settled in the Chimanimanis in the 1890s all shared in a self-perception of themselves as “rational/scientific” and Africans as “irrational/superstitious.”

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The idea of “science” is important on two levels. On one level, it was a significant element within the European worldview. Africans needed to understand it in order to understand a large part of what motivated whites; whites needed to recognize that it limited their ability to understand what motivated Africans. However, on another level, “science,” particularly in the form of ethnographic investigation, provided a way to step outside the whole project of mutual understanding and engagement with another’s worldview. It offered bemused whites a tool to cut through some of the dilemmas that more humanistic, interactive methods of translation and understanding failed to resolve. It was no longer necessary to understand what Africans meant by their concepts, merely to understand what function these beliefs played in their societies. So this is a book about law, language, and science. It is, however, also a story about people and their relationships with each other. Chapter 2 examines who those people were and why they all came to be in the Chimanimani mountain district at the end of the nineteenth century. The underlying narrative that follows is a tale of encounter, translation, and separation. This story begins, at the end of chapter 2, with the arrival of white settlers in the western borders of Ngungunyana’s Gaza Empire. Initial encounters between the whites and the local people were unsystematic and unstructured. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the white settlers and the local Africans were concerned primarily with their own internal matters and ignorant of the societies from which the others came. Communities remained largely within their own worldviews and assumed that the others were operating on broadly the same principles. Chapters 4 and 5 look at why it became necessary for ideas about religion and about law to be translated and consider how people strove for mutual understanding. Chapter 4 looks in detail at the translation projects at Mt. Silinda, the local mission. Both missionaries and Africans attempted to translate the belief systems of the other. The missionaries attempted to understand local cosmology sufficiently to insert their own words and concepts into it. Meanwhile, Africans made their own interpretations of Christianity. Some conflicts resulted, but so did much mutual learning. Chapter 5 considers a similar process in the hearing of legal disputes by local administrators and magistrates. The native commissioners attempted to administer justice according to their own legal principles but based on their growing understanding of local law. Magistrates simply administered the criminal law. Plaintiffs and defendants, meanwhile, came to court and behaved as though it were at an African legal hearing. Most of the time, interestingly, the white adjudicators seemed not to notice. Finally in this section, Chapter 6 examines how whites in general and the missionaries in particular assumed that their material culture was intimately bound up with their materially based rationalism, or “science.” They expected that Africans, in adopting modern culture, would necessarily abandon their beliefs in spirits and supernatural influences. This was arguably the period in history with the largest gap between the material conditions of people from America, whence

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the missionaries came, and the material conditions of local people. Chapter 6 considers how encounters across that material divide affected understandings of each other’s culture. Overall, Part I of this book demonstrates how, throughout this period, the white state was steadily building up a vast amount of knowledge about local language and culture. This knowledge was all acquired through the questioning of local people, who were, clearly, the experts. This learning process heralded what is presented here as a translation phase, a period of constant interaction in which different elements within the different communities worked with and made sense of each other. Chapters 7 to 9 focus on the 1910s and early 1920s. They consider the work of court interpreters, the codification of the law, the steady adoption of material culture from white society by Africans, and the growing mastery of the vernaculars by white linguists. Chapter 7 focuses on the law. It demonstrates that the white settlers who acted as court interpreters frequently failed to translate concepts from African culture into English; instead, they adopted those concepts themselves, blurring the boundaries between white and African culture. Attempts to codify aspects of African law and administration, meanwhile, imposed new concepts that were not so much translations, as redefinitions, of local culture. These new concepts were accepted as formal legal terms, but local practices, as ever, were changed and adapted through African agency without regard for the letter of the law. Chapter 8 focuses on science, technology, and education. It considers how far, during the 1910s and early 1920s, the white communities managed to translate their social and economic values so that they were successfully communicated to local people. The mission stations provided literacy and access to English as well as practical training and initiation into Christianity. The state championed new farming methods and new forms of measurement. However, it seems that all these things could be accepted by local people without accepting the package of normative values that the white communities associated with them. Chapters 7 and 8 suggest, therefore, that “translation” was very limited in its effects. There was a mutual failure to recognize and make sense of difference. Even more fundamentally, I argue that the failure to translate was so profound that people were not always aware that effective communication had not taken place. Chapter 9 looks at the consequences of whites’ growing mastery over local languages. As textual translation projects gathered momentum, so did white claims to expertise in the vernaculars. At this point, the story pulls out from a tight focus on Melsetter District and begins to consider the territory as a whole. Across Southern Rhodesia, the missionaries worked hard to codify the vernaculars, increasingly moving away from using Africans as informants and advisers and speaking increasingly to each other. The forms of the local languages that they developed worked well at reflecting a Eurocentric worldview but were not capable of allowing Africans to discuss government plans and policies in the vernaculars. Chapter 9 demonstrates that, as the vernaculars became more standardized and white linguists began to communicate more with each other than with African advisers, so the range and focus of possible conversations began to narrow.

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This failure in translation led to the separation phase, which was a state-led initiative of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was inspired by two concerns. On the one hand, there were white anxieties about cultural transformations within the African communities and the autonomy with which Africans had embraced modernity. On other hand, white administrators had failed to offer legal and employment structures that translated properly in African terms. Insofar as white institutions and procedures (such as registering the payment of bridewealth) seemed to chime with “tradition,” this was often not because they were gaining hegemonic acceptance but because they were not fully understood or were open to other interpretations. Africans could ignore, resist, or reappropriate these attempts to translate their societies into forms that made them more malleable to white rule. In the “separation” phase, “native experts” retreated from attempts to translate indigenous ideas and chose instead to observe and record them with “scientific” detachment. The recognition of difference became much more significant. Boundaries between white and African society became increasingly policed; even the boundaries within African societies were inscribed as rigid lines on the map. The state in the 1890s had encouraged interactions between Africans and whites as a means of learning about and understanding African society. However, by the 1930s, it did not even allow its recruits to the NAD to interact with Africans but required them to acquire their knowledge from sanctioned “experts” instead. Moving away from the local case study, part III of this book examines how the state attempted to re-create images of Africans as inaccessibly “other” through the standardization of language, the institution of examinations to demonstrate sanctioned knowledge, and the development of ethnographic expertise. Chapter 10 looks at the standardization of language and the creation of a “correct” version of chiShona, one of the main vernacular languages. It suggests that this process served primarily to address white anxieties rather than to facilitate communication and translation. By rationalizing and categorizing the languages, turning them into Christian text, and fencing them in with examinations, an illusion of containment and control over African society was created. Chapter 11 looks at a similar process in the legal sphere. Africans were no longer to be regarded as the approved source of information on “native law and custom” any more than they were to be regarded as experts on the “correct” version of their own language. Expertise in local law could be demonstrated only by success in the Native Customs Examination, introduced in 1922. The knowledge tested by the examination—like my expertise acquired in SOAS library—could be acquired without any direct experience of Africans. They became the topic, not the participants, in conversation. The “native experts” who had spoken with chiefs and spiritual leaders in the 1890s, attempting to translate what they had learned into principles of administration, were no longer engaged in conversing or translating; they were merely recording their dated knowledge so that others could be tested on it. The final chapter looks at the systematic distancing of Africans from whites, through the development of a body of ethnography that excluded local Africans from modernity. Attempts to explain and understand African culture over the

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preceding decades had foundered when white society became anxious about developing too close a proximity to African ways of thinking. White translators had failed to harness the vernaculars to gain mastery over African modes of thought and so had reinvented the vernaculars and retreated toward internal conversations. Consequently, communication between whites and Africans in which whites tried to learn about local culture was replaced by the hand-washing claim that there was a “native mind,” inaccessible to rational analysis but that could nonetheless be described and organized through ethnographic study. The “native mind” was invented because the state had failed to control the real thoughts, actions, and beliefs of real Africans. As well as telling this story, I have tried to introduce two new items to the body of Zimbabwean history: a history of the birth of Zimbabwean ethnography in the 1920s and a detailed case study of the early years of a mission. In moving toward my conclusions about the “native mind,” I looked for an analytical study of Zimbabwean anthropology, comparable to Henrika Kuklick’s study of British anthropology or Lyn Schumaker’s work on the Rhodes Livingstone Institute.1 I failed to find one. So the final chapter of this book is a prolegomena to such a comprehensive history of anthropology in Zimbabwe (which someone else will have to write). My study ends in the early 1930s, long before Hilda Kuper’s work brought a professionalism and maturity to the discipline.2 Nonetheless, I have tried to highlight the local characteristics of Rhodesian anthropology, notably its anecdotal and ethnographic nature, by comparison with its neighbors to the north and south, and I have rooted this in official resistance to indirect rule strategies and settler fears about African modernity.3 I also include here a detailed case study of a mission in the early years of white settlement. It adds to the case studies of early mission work in David Maxwell’s work on Mt. Darwin, Ngwabe Bhebhe’s on Matabeleland, and C.J.M. Zvogbo’s Wesleyan Methodists.4 Mt. Silinda Mission was different from the missions considered in those studies because it was situated in a district with an early and thorough uptake of literacy; significant involvement of women in waged labor; and extensive involvement of men in migrant labor, which preceded the arrival of missionaries. My account provides much more detail than the other case studies about how texts were used by the mission in early years of evangelism and analyzes the interfaces between text, translation, and local interpretation.5 Using this lens, I attempt to consider what African evangelists believed, how this differed from what the American and Zulu evangelists believed, and how it influenced local understandings of Christianity. These interests lead directly, of course, to an engagement with broader theoretical issues of translation and hegemony. Inevitably, such work toils in the long shadow of the Comaroffs, and I have tried to address some of those issues in chapter 1. However, studies of language also conjure up the specter of “imagined communities” as defined by Benedict Anderson and redefined as invented ethnicities in Zimbabwe by Terence Ranger and Herbert Chimhundu.6 They convincingly argued that standardization of language contributed to the formation of ethnic

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identities, which in turn provided the foundation of political identities. However, as Derek Peterson points out, there are problems with their argument that “the standardization of shifting oral languages was the intellectual bridge across which the commerce of political imagination could pass.”7 Peterson’s excellent study is on the uses of literacy and the standardization of language in the politics of central Kenya. He concentrates on the activities that took place around the margins of official, standardized literature and on the politics at its center. He vividly demonstrates how junior men and aspirant cash-based entrepreneurs exploited literacy and translation projects to establish new definitions of social relationships and how elders resisted their attempts. For Peterson, then, the difficulty with the argument that standardization of language produced political identities is that standardization was constantly contested. It was the contestation over standardization—rather than the standardization itself—that helped to define political identities. A similar case can certainly be made for Zimbabwe. Indeed, such contestations are implicit in Ranger’s classic study on Manyika identity. In this study, however, I am interested not so much in the political struggles over language as in the conceptual interchanges. It is not the standardization per se that interests me but the idea of an “intellectual bridge.” People were imagining not just communities in their languages but entire worlds. In looking at translation as a conceptual (rather than a linguistic) issue, I am interested not only in words and syntax but also in the mutual understanding of practices and perceptions. There is a growing interest in consciousness, in translation, and about how people ordered their conceptual world in colonial Africa.8 It is clear that there was an enormous amount of intellectual exchange going on between African and white communities, particularly mission communities. For example, a collection of work is currently being produced on missionaries’ attempts to understand and translate Zulu concepts in the late nineteenth century.9 Elsewhere, translation projects had widespread influence on perception and consciousness.10 Concepts of spirits, ethics, and sickness from different traditions became entwined and hybridized.11 Initial research on these issues focused on how Africans responded to imported ideas. Paul Landau and Lamin Sanneh, for example, suggested that Africans indigenized Christianity without the understanding or approval of white authorities. Peterson, by contrast, suggested that Africans bought into a European form of Christianity but used their own choice of words to express their rejection of indigenous forms.12 However, rather than asking how far Africans bought into a European consciousness, I became more interested in how far—and when—white people engaged with an African consciousness. Clearly, this needed periodization. And so my book became a narrative, a story. The extent to which white interventions affected structures of consciousness depended partly on how much they genuinely sought dialogic communication and partly on how much African participants wanted to take part in that conversation. Both these things changed over time. I am looking at the “bridge” between European and African epistemology. I suggest that, in Southern Rhodesia, the bridge

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was closed sometime in the mid-1920s with the emergence of Southern Rhodesian ethnography and the invention of the “native mind.” NOTES 1. Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 2. Hilda Kuper, The Shona and Ndebele of Southern Rhodesia (London: International African Institute, 1954). 3. See also my “Imagining Africans: Scholarship, Fantasy and Science in Colonial Administration, 1920s Southern Rhodesia,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (2005): 1–26. 4. Ngwabi N. Bhebe, Christianity and Traditional Religion in Western Zimbabwe, 1859–1923 (London: Longman, 1979); David Maxwell, Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People c1870s–1990s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); C.J.M. Zvobgo, The Wesleyan Methodist Missions in Zimbabwe, 1891–1945 (Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press, 1991). 5. Terence Ranger has previously examined the nature of the interaction between Methodism and African beliefs in this region in “Protestant Missions in Africa: the Dialectic of Conversion in the American Methodist Episcopal Church in Eastern Zimbabwe, 1900–1950,” in Religion in Africa, eds. Thomas D. Blakely, Walter E. A. van Beek, and Dennis L. Thomson (London: James Currey, 1994), 275–313. 6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1995); Terence Ranger, “Missionaries, Migrants and the Manyika: The Invention of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe,” in Creation of Tribalism, ed. Leroy Vail (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 118–50; Herbert Chimhundu, “Early Missionaries and the Ethnolinguistic Factor during the ‘Invention of Tribalism’ in Zimbabwe,” Journal of African History 33, no. 1 (1992): 87–109. 7. Derek R. Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004), 8. 8. The founding text for this line of investigation is probably Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989). 9. See, for example, William H. Worger, “Parsing God: Conversations about the Meaning of Words and Metaphors in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa,” Journal of African History 42, no. 3 (2001): 417–48, and Iain S. Maclean, “‘The Twin Pillars of Heathenism’: American Missionaries, Bishop Colenso and Converts in Conflict—Polygamy and Ukulobola in Nineteenth-Century Natal and Zululand, South Africa,” in The Eye of the Storm: Bishop John William Colenso and the Crisis of Biblical Inspiration, ed. Jonathan A. Draper (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark Publishers, 2004), 265–92. Rachael Gilmour and Kaori Nagai have also worked on this material. 10. See, for example, Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). 11. Birgit Meyer, Translating The Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); Julie Livingston, Debility and the

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Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); see also the forthcoming Special Issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies 33, no. 2 (2007), on medical hybridity, edited by Lyn Schumaker, Diana Jeater, and Trudy Luedke. 12. Lamin Sanneh, Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process: The African Dimension (London: Marshall Pickering, 1993); Paul Landau, “Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith,” Journal of African History 37, no. 2 (1996): 261–81; Derek Peterson, “Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries,” Journal of Religious History 23, no. 1 (1999): 31–50.

1 Hegemony and Translation: Law, Language, and Science in a Colonial Context

This book is about what happens when humans encounter each other’s societies in circumstances where they each find the other’s behavior strange and potentially threatening. Specifically, it is about white people coming into the territory that they named Southern Rhodesia and attempting to assert authority (or, failing authority, power) over the peoples already living there. Two thought systems, as well as two systems of authority, came into contact with each other, each with strong incentives to try to understand the other, even if only to reject the other’s beliefs and perceptions. The first occupation force of white people into Southern Rhodesia was in 1890. By 1894, the British South Africa Company (BSACo), a private concern, claimed the right to administer the whole territory of the modern state of Zimbabwe. For the next 90 years, the whites struggled to find an effective means of controlling the African population. This book is interested in the first half of that period and in particular the period up to the 1930s. An under-resourced and thinly staffed white state struggled to assert authority and economic dominance over local Africans throughout this period. This book focuses on how the white administrators tried to make sense of the African societies, but it is also about how the local peoples tried to make sense of the white people’s interventions into their lives. In both cases, the interpretations that the communities put on each other were informed by how they understood themselves. And, in both cases, this book will argue, their perceptions were faulty, and there were material consequences following from those misperceptions. The story takes place largely in the eastern district that the white newcomers named Melsetter, now known as Chimanimani. Initial encounters were unsystematic and unstructured and, for Africans at least, understood largely in terms of a much longer history of Nguni invasion and of Portuguese trade in the area. The white settlers and the local Africans were concerned largely with their own internal

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matters and ignorant of the societies from which the others came. There was a mutual lack of recognition and understanding, expressed through both goodwill and hostility. The “other” was potentially a fellow but potentially an enemy or a savage. There was room for uncertainty. Interactions succeeded or failed; people learned from their interactions. This story starts, then, with the first encounters between members of the white occupation and the Africans whom they intended to govern. Let us begin with a specific encounter. In January 1896, high up in the mountains between the high central plateau of south-central Africa and the long, low plain running down to the Indian Ocean, a young white man was cooking his lunch over an open fire. This was Llewellyn Meredith, a scout and local trader of Welsh descent, who two years previously had taken up work with the BSACo as a hut-tax collector and “nigger tamer” (his words). He was, somewhat reluctantly, on his way to take up a new posting among Dutch-speaking trekkers from the south who had settled in these mountains. An African man from a nearby white farm homestead approached Meredith as he cooked his lunch. Meredith greeted the man in the language he habitually used to speak to local Africans, a language that was later called “chiShona.” The man replied in Shangaan, a version of Zulu that had become common in the district following recent periods of overrule by the Nguni Gaza Empire. Meredith was annoyed by this use of Shangaan and responded brutally: “I knocked him down and booted him about the place, which soon made him speak in his own tongue.”1 This was Meredith’s first act as native commissioner in Melsetter District and his first encounter with local Africans. What type of communication took place here? What did the use of Shangaan or chiShona signify to the white man and to the African? And why did Meredith have such a violent response to a linguistic mismatch? Meredith had been invited to join the BSACo’s service because he had some fluency in speaking with local Africans; he had been posted to Melsetter because he spoke Dutch. The London-based company needed to appoint people who could begin to establish some kind of order and system in its African territory, and its employees at the grassroots had to be able to communicate with the other people living there, both white and African. Meredith would soon find himself acting as adjudicator between Africans in disputes over bridewealth and land settlement and as interpreter in the magistrate’s court. He developed a detailed understanding of local legal systems and became one of the Native Affairs Department’s best linguists—as well as one of its least violent officials. About 40 miles south from the place where Meredith so forcefully announced his arrival, some other whites from the United States were making a home for themselves amidst a forest granted to them by Cecil John Rhodes. These were congregationalist missionaries, hoping to bring Christianity to the territory. In January 1896, the three white men and their families, one white woman, and one African American woman at the site were struggling with simple survival and were resentful at the lack of support they had received from Boston.2 They had been at their site, which they named Mt. Silinda (a mis-hearing of the local name), for just over

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two years, during which time they had lived in huts built for them by Africans. In January 1896, they were just beginning to build themselves two brick houses. They felt very isolated, “so far removed from civilization and civilized man as to render it imperative that a civilized being must attend to work of all sorts—not only overseeing it but doing it with his own hands, unless he is able to import civilized assistance.”3 These whites rarely met others with whom they could speak in English. They were accompanied by siZulu-speaking African evangelists from their parent mission on the Natal coast and used siZulu to communicate with local Africans. It was many years before they began to use a version of chiShona rather than Shangaan in their work. In time, however, their mission was to pioneer a new agricultural development program, in partnership with local African cultivators, which was to transform cultivation and class relationships in the African communities. The Dutch-speaking farmers were also struggling in early 1896. Many of them had died of malaria the previous year, isolated from each other by their wish to own huge tracts of land, and isolated from the support of the African communities around them. They had been trading with local Africans, but by February they reported, “We cannot barter any more food from the natives, because they have nothing, the locusts have destroyed it all. The rivers … are in flood and so our wagons cannot get through to fetch our provisions … many days we had no food in the house.”4 In March, rinderpest began to destroy their cattle. Such vulnerable people surely needed to cultivate the goodwill of the Africans around them, yet they seemed barely to register their vulnerability: “the Lord has always made provision to supply our needs.”5 They seemed to share Meredith’s views about appropriate communication between whites and the local people. When, that January day, two of them saw that a newcomer had beaten a local man, they went to investigate. Meredith told them that “as Native Commissioner of the district I expected all natives to speak to me in their own language and to show me due respect.” This seemed to please them, because, reported Meredith, “my explanation had instantaneous effect and they thanked me for punishing the boy.”6 Language, it seems, was important in encounters between whites and Africans in the Chimanimani mountains. It was important not only as a form of communication but also as a marker of power relationships. Shangaan, as the language of the Nguni overrulers, was associated with authority and also with regional influence. As far as it is possible to tell, most local African men were fluent in this local variant of Zulu and had been using it routinely during the nineteenth century in their dealings with traders and with labor recruiters for the mines to the south, both African and white. Women were less likely to use Shangaan, but, as white farmers settled during the 1890s, they learned to understand chiLapalapa, the “kitchen kaffir” that the whites from the south used to command their servants. Some white children became fluent in the language of their African playfellows, a variant of chiShona called chiNdau. Some local Africans became interpreters of their world for the whites: as “native helpers” assisting in mission translation and evangelism at Mt. Silinda; as “native messengers,” “native police,” and “native interpreters,”

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enabling the work of the administration; and as “native informants” trying to explain their laws and culture to white “experts” commissioned by the state. In these first encounters, we see Africans and whites trying to find languages in which to communicate with each other. Language use, interpretation, and translation all require people to recognize that there are different ways of understanding and describing the world. These differences need to be negotiated and boundaries crossed if effective communication is to take place. I am interested in how communication interacted with the exercise of power and how these first encounters between people laid the foundations for the economic and cultural transformations of white rule. Meredith’s initial encounter with a man who spoke the “wrong” language raises questions about communication, language, and punishment, and their importance in the setting up, and maintaining, of a white minority state. It is now generally accepted that the BSACo’s administration in Southern Rhodesia was not a powerful state, although it came into existence at an opportune historical moment for its long-term survival. The white regime was vulnerable. This was a weak colonial occupation, understaffed, answerable to the Crown and shareholders, threatened by Portuguese interests to the east, and dependent on shaky alliances with local African authorities and disgruntled white settlers. Knowledge of local languages was important for purely pragmatic reasons. The BSACo needed to gather information about local systems for organizing inheritance, property transfers, and warriors. Warfare was an integral part of the BSACo’s early years, notably during the conquest of the Ndebele Empire in 1894 and then during the widespread outbreak of hostilities between white occupation forces and African armies during 1896–1897. On the second occasion, the imperial army was persuaded to intervene on behalf of the BSACo, but both the Crown and the company directors were very unhappy about the affair. The long-term investments of the company’s shareholders were best protected by avoiding armed hostilities and attempting to rule with the acquiescence of the territory’s inhabitants, white or African. Hegemonic manipulation promised to be more effective than outright coercion in ensuring a steady return of profits. My question is whether such manipulation was possible or successful. In its classical formulation, “hegemony” entails acceptance of the sectional interests and values of the ruling class, as natural and immutable forms of social order, by the rest of the society. The difficulty in talking about “hegemony” in a colonial context is that colonial rulers are clearly of a different culture, and their norms and values are easily recognized as not part of the “natural” social order of the society at large. Hegemonic projects in a colonial context normally required the participation of a ruling class within the colonized society, supporting the benefits of capitalist enterprise and the values of investment in industry, rationalism, and “progress.” Such indigenous capitalist classes were thin on the ground in nineteenth-century central Africa. Studies of hegemony in colonial Africa have tended to focus on the missions as the agents of assimilation to the capitalist project, as the institutions that provided the most material rewards for Africans who engaged with market-oriented production, westernized lifestyles, and imperial hierarchies and who adopted its values as their own.

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However, some years ago, John and Jean Comaroff proposed that interaction with agents of European culture forced Africans to engage with European mentalités. In being obliged to formulate their arguments about power, ritual, and belief on terrain defined by the missionaries, Africans absorbed European ways of interpreting the world, without the mediation of an African capitalist class.7 Such epistemological transformations have been presented as evidence of a successful hegemonic program on the part of the colonizing powers. The analysis presumes that Africans were obliged to move toward European conceptualizations, rather than whites moving toward African conceptualizations, because of the power imbalance between communities. It is open to question as to whether the white state or the missionaries in Southern Rhodesia in the 1890s or 1900s were powerful in this way. We can see that the whites in Southern Rhodesia were able to exert physical coercion over Africans, but it is less clear that their worldview could be imposed on Africans by virtue of this power imbalance. When Meredith beat up a local African for speaking the wrong language, he was using coercion in a crude and overt way. (Maybe it was because language was so important as a hegemonic tool that it was worth using physical force to establish rules about it.) The use of physical force over subject peoples is usually an indication of underlying hegemonic weakness. This is not to deny that the “civilizers” of the BSACo expected to make their rule seem natural and unchallengeable, especially as it undoubtedly seemed that way to the whites themselves. Clearly, one can query whether colonial societies are hegemonic without denying that they have a hegemonic project. However, the fact that the BSACo managed to collect taxes and raise labor without meeting constant physical resistance does not, in itself, demonstrate the success of its hegemonic project. Not all rule by consent or all capitalism is hegemonic.8 Assessment of the extent of white hegemony in Southern Rhodesia depends partly on where and how we look for it. Our beliefs about the natural order of things are manifested and constituted in our everyday relationships with the material world and with each other. Hegemony, like class, exists in historical agency, not in abstract reasoning. It is inherent in the actions and behaviors of people going about their daily business. We can seek white hegemony in moments of communication when Africans and whites attempted to understand and influence each other, thereby consciously or unconsciously exposing—and imposing—their conceptions about the natural order of things. At the most fundamental level, we can seek it in the way that people ordered their world through the cognitive categories that they used. These categories were expressed through language. Language and translation are interesting, then, because they could be tools in a project to get Africans to accept European values and European rule. This did not even have to be a conscious project. Languages are a product of cultural life and social interaction and reflect the values and mentalité of the peoples who use them. Nineteenth-century mission societies placed a particular importance on command of the vernacular because, as Edwin W. Smith of the British and Foreign Bible Society memorably observed, “Every language is a temple in which the soul of the

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people who speak it is enshrined.”9 In opening their mouths to use their mother tongues, late nineteenth-century Europeans conveyed their cultural norms, including their belief in their superiority to Africans. In speaking of an “extended family” as if a smaller family were normal and a larger one needed qualifying; in using gendered pronouns; in describing contemporary Africans’ institutions as “traditional” as if they were somehow in a different, earlier time than Europeans; in contrasting “Christian” lifestyles with “heathen” lifestyles even while insisting on the universality of Christian belief; and in speaking of the “sale” of labor and goods as if economic life were self-evidently based on commercial exchange, so the European soul was revealed.10 Africans could not use Europeans’ languages without also reflecting these values.11 However, using another language does not necessarily entail acceptance of the norms and values it encapsulates. When Africans and whites attempted to communicate with each other in the Chimanimani mountains in the late nineteenth century, they often tried to use something of each other’s tongues. The use of a European language required some engagement with European culture, and the use of an African language required some engagement with African culture—but it did not require much. Sufficient insight could be derived from everyday interaction. It was possible to recognize the role that a concept played in another’s culture without having to consider whether this had any parallels in one’s own culture. Everyday language use could cope with radical cultural differences, even if this led to occasional misunderstandings. In the Chimanimani mountains of the 1890s, misunderstandings could be painful, even dangerous. But the lessons to be learned from such communication failures did not necessarily involve a deeper understanding of the other’s culture. It was enough to remember that there were cultural oddities in other societies that needed careful negotiation. Translation, however, is a more demanding exercise than simply finding a way to be understood. It involves searching for meaningful cultural parallels. For missionaries and administrators, it was not enough to speak local languages; it was also necessary to translate key concepts from European culture into them. Missionaries wanted to convey their religious beliefs. Administrators needed to convey their judicial beliefs and systems of sanction for disobedience. Translation represented the critical moment at which African and European worldviews came into contact, when the whites sought ways to insert their ideas into the local culture. It might be argued that translation serves as a model of the colonial relationship, when colonized people found their very selfhood reflected back to them as the property of the colonizers. Translation is much more than simply understanding another language: it involves finding a way to express that understanding in a second language. Translation requires the ability to remove a word, an idea, a system of beliefs from its cultural context and resituate it within another cultural context as if that was where it had belonged all the time. In George Steiner’s words, “It is only when [the translator] ‘brings home’ the simulacrum of the original, when he recrosses the divide of language and community, that he feels himself in authentic possession of his source…. Appropriation … shades … into expropriation.”12 It

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could similarly be said that the colonizers took local culture, reformulated it to reflect a set of power relationships in which all things local were defined in terms of the colonizers’ culture (as “Other” to the colonizing “Self ”), and reinscribed local culture as the hegemonic property of the colonizers themselves. “Translation,” then, can act as a metaphor for the molding of indigenous cultures to support and reflect European hegemonic ideas. As translators privilege the language into which they translate, so colonial powers privileged their ways of interpreting the world. But the concept is more than a metaphor. In these encounters between whites and Africans, involving many languages and interpretations, there was a literal as well as a metaphorical translation going on. The extent to which Africans and whites understood and accepted each other’s cultural practices and beliefs depended on their ability to understand each other’s words as much as on the underlying epistemology or the overt force accompanying them. By looking at how translation worked in practice, we may learn more about the hegemonic project and be better placed to assess its relative effectiveness. The process of translation raises big questions about epistemology, about how we know what we know and what we mean by what we know. Direct parallels between simple object-words are fairly easy to draw—though even these may carry significant cultural baggage that suggests alternative ways of seeing the world. An English “potato,” for example, is, on some levels, a rather different thing from a French “apple of the earth.” When it comes to translating abstract concepts, values, and beliefs, however, direct parallels are harder to identify. The connection between language and mentalité cannot be avoided. The “weak” version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that language underpins and structures cognition, is broadly accepted in psychology and raises questions about the possibility of translation. As Sapir himself put it, “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”13 Contemporary theorists of translation take for granted the link between language and mentalité and acknowledge that there are fundamental problems in attempting to express concepts in a language where those concepts are alien to the culture encompassed by that language. The translation theorist Todd Jones makes two basic observations about the process of translating alien belief systems.14 First, he observes that the translation of beliefs from a radically different culture into one’s own language normally begins with attempts to find parallels in the “home” culture. Second, he argues that this procedure restricts translation to a re-presentation of the “home” culture rather than a true representation of the alien belief system. In translating alien beliefs and values, we tend to draw parallels with mental states that are already familiar to us. This process is based on the cognitive structures that we have available to us from our own culture, through which we have learned to interpret the world. Jones calls this the “middleman move,” the characterization of an unfamiliar mental state as a form of a more familiar mental state. The unfamiliar mental state can then be translated into the “home” language, which is already organized to express that familiar mental state.

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We can see this process happening in translations of the concept of “rainmaking” from African languages into European languages. Within European cognitive structures, rain is a natural phenomenon that is subject to scientific investigation, but that may also be understood as part of a holy creation. African belief in rainmaking might be understood in terms of an already familiar belief that a spiritual power, the Creator God, has control over weather systems. Rainmaking becomes a readily comprehensible variant of “We plough the seed and scatter …” Consequently, beliefs in rainmaking might be discussed in terms of familiar debates about the relative roles of science and religion in explanations for natural phenomena, as David Livingstone famously did in his conversation with a rainmaker.15 John and Jean Comaroff have noted that missionaries could present themselves as “rainmakers of a competing power” by combining their beliefs about science and about their Creator God. However, such representations of rainmaking did not involve the missionaries moving beyond concepts already available to them from their own Enlightenment culture. Closer engagement with African cognitive systems would have revealed that “rainmaking” could refer both to precipitation and to the exercise of legitimate authority. It expressed not only the vagaries of weather, but also the political and moral universe in which rain would fall.16 “Making” is far too crude a word to encapsulate these complexities. Political metaphors overlapped with literal descriptions in ways that were hard for whites to understand. As Jones puts it, “The act of trying to translate an alien utterance, to figure out what beliefs lie behind an act of verbal behavior, will be done better by knowing something about the types of cognitive structure that guide and constrain beliefformation.”17 Anthropologists and professional translators are usually involved in translating an alien culture into their mother tongues. Theories of translation tend, therefore, to focus on translation into mother tongues, and this provides us with the metaphor of colonial powers reinscribing local cultures in terms of colonial norms. For colonial officers and missionaries, however, translation was more often about converting European ideologies into local vernaculars, away from their mother tongues into an alien culture. This was, in some ways, an even more overtly hegemonic project: the inserting of European norms and values into African cultures. Here, too, effective translation required a detailed knowledge of the culture into whose language the words were to be translated. The great theorist of Bible translation Eugene A. Nida observed that, “almost every sentence of a translation will bear the mark of the translator’s anthropological training,” because “every sentence is a set of symbols for the behavior and thought patterns of one culture translated into another set of symbols representing different behavior and thought patterns.”18 Even if not anthropologically trained, translators needed to appreciate local idioms. For Nida, translation involved finding ideas within the unfamiliar culture that could encapsulate ideas within Christian texts. A phrase such as “white as snow,” for example, in communities that had never seen snow could be translated in a variety of ways that carried the same message: “‘white as egret feathers,’ or ‘white as fungus’ …; or … a nonmetaphor … such as ‘very, very white.’ The

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point is that snow as an object is not crucial to the message.”19 Translation of key concepts from European society into the local vernaculars involved a search for comparable meaning, not for precise cultural matches. The difficulty lay in recognizing a comparable meaning, which requires an understanding of the cognitive systems of another culture. John Peel long ago observed that true understanding of African beliefs requires an engagement with unfamiliar cognitive systems.20 Effective translation similarly requires an engagement with unfamiliar cognitive systems. As Sapir suggested, there can be no exact equivalence. But equally, translation theorists broadly agree that anything can be communicated by means of another language if enough care is taken. In Steiner’s words, “no entirely undecipherable or entirely untranslatable body of speech has ever turned up.”21 With enough detailed knowledge available, translation should not require one culture to be bent into a reflection of another culture before understanding can emerge—provided that the aim is simply to translate and not also to transform that culture. The “middleman move” in translation introduces misunderstandings, however much it might initially appear to shed light. It represents alien ideas as if they were versions of familiar ideas. This has various implications for the spread of colonial hegemony. It is possible that where white translators used their own, familiar, concepts as translations for African concepts, this assisted in inserting key hegemonic principles about law, religion, and the exercise of power into African societies. This seems a proposal worth investigating. Conversely, however, where white translators used this “middleman” approach to translating African ideas, they might not have realized that Africans meant something different from them in using the same words. This problem lay at the heart of E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Theories of Primitive Religion, in which he observed that missionaries and Africans could have fundamentally different understandings of the meaning of the term that both used for “God,” and “the two parties continue blissfully ignorant of the misunderstanding.”22 In this case, Africans might appear to whites to be operating in accord with European ways of interpreting the world but appear to themselves to be operating in accord with local principles. This would not bode well for a hegemonic project. Third, as we have seen, effective translation requires a radical move away from familiar cognitive structures, whereas hegemonic power requires keeping to a broadly coherent single master narrative about how the world is organized. Effective translation and effective hegemonic power may, therefore, be somewhat at odds. So it seems that although translation may work as a metaphor for colonial penetration and hegemonic penetration, in practice the odds might be stacked against translation as a tool in transforming African hearts and minds. In the colonial context, then, we should perhaps investigate how far white officials and missionaries succeeded in translating their core values into local vernaculars before we try to assess how far those religious, commercial, or judicial principles became embedded in African culture. This is, in part, what I hope to achieve in writing this book. There were hegemonic consequences for successful

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translation but also for “middleman moves.” If whites did not engage fully with African cognitive structures but merely found words that they thought mapped onto European vocabularies, then their “translations” of European religious or judicial ideas into local vernaculars were unlikely to carry much hegemonic influence. For historians, there is an additional methodological challenge in raising this possibility. If whites were not aware that they were talking at cross-purposes and that what Africans meant by their words was different from the meanings that the whites had ascribed to them, how would we know? How can we tell this from the archives, which were written by those whites? It is only when records of interactions between Africans and whites reveal a disjuncture in communication over terms such as muroyi (“witch”?) or muti (“medicine”?) that we can begin to find evidence of what Africans meant by their own words at that time.23 The question of whether Africans adopted the European concepts underlying the meanings of words is, of course, a question of power relationships. In colonial contexts, it may seem that translation always involves an encounter between a weak language and a stronger one. In such encounters, the weaker language has to accommodate to the stronger. The stronger language does not need its assumptions to be explained, its concepts of justice to be dissected, or its folk heroes and its God to be identified. These provide the cultural capital that its audience is expected to share or, at least, to aspire to share. The weaker language, on the other hand, needs to have its cultural references explained, if it is to have meaning in the stronger language.24 It may even seem that the weaker language will have its cultural references reinvented in the mouths of colonial officers, to mean something significantly different. Translation is a vehicle of power, which can push weak languages to the periphery, or demand that they explain themselves on the strangers’ terms. It is easy to see that the languages of the colonizers in Africa—English, French, Portuguese, German—became doorkeepers that allowed only an elite to wield power. Indeed, in many parts of Africa, the colonial powers doubted whether the hegemonic project required the locals to acquire the colonial language. There was a fear that the relative power that access to this “strong” language would bestow on Africans outweighed the benefits that would follow from inducting them into European modes of thought.25 However, this typology of weak and strong languages fails to capture the complexity of colonial language use. Africans, as well as whites, could erect boundaries that kept the strangers from appropriating too much.26 This tendency may have become more rather than less pronounced as white influence on African society increased. Günther Renck has observed, in a non-African context, that local people may become more protective of their vernacular as they experience increasing pressure to engage with new concepts: Languages other than the local vernacular are often regarded as being more powerful in achieving contact with the new and foreign powers, of which Christianity is one. But one’s own language is necessary as a kind of “safeguard,” so that one can

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always go back to the old powers which remain intact because the language remains untouched, and remains unknown and a secret to outsiders.27

This approach works in contexts, particularly ritual contexts, where local people don’t want or don’t need to be heard or understood by outsiders. In our encounters in the Chimanimani mountains in the 1890s, whose language was the weak, and whose was the strong? Was Dutch “stronger” than chiNdau for the isolated white child who could not understand what all the other children were giggling about? Was English “stronger” than Zulu for the Africans at Mt. Silinda mission? Was Shangaan, the language of the erstwhile Nguni overlords, “stronger” than chiLapalapa, the language of the impoverished Dutch farmers? The unequal relationship was not between languages but between people whose use of a language empowered or disempowered them, depending on the circumstances.28 This, perhaps, was one of the reasons why Meredith wanted to be spoken to in chiNdau. His grasp of Zulu was not, in any sense, very strong in a district where the Nguni Empire was still influential and where whites were represented by a handful of traders, hunters, and starving farmers. The relative “strength” of a language in a translation situation depends largely on who wants to do the translating and why. Translation in order to understand is a different project from translation in order to convert or to command. Understanding requires a crossing over into a different culture. Conversion requires others to cross back. Command does not require understanding but only that one should be understood. However, it may require others to cross over to the one commanding, to learn what she or he means in using their words. Whites in Southern Rhodesia might have learned to speak local languages for a variety of reasons, but in general they needed to translate them only in situations where they were attempting to wield power or exert influence: to convert or command. Such situations were not necessarily intended to be exploitative. Lamin Sanneh has observed that Bible translation projects could be of mutual benefit to missionaries and their African collaborators. In practical terms, whites wanted converts, and Africans wanted to improve their literacy. In addition, missionaries got Africans to engage with Christianity, and Africans got white translators to engage with their culture. But even where there was such reciprocity between Africans and missionaries, the whites wanted different things from the translation. For Africans, translation was an end in itself, enabling them to interpret Christianity in their own terms. For the missionaries, however, it was primarily a tool to serve their larger aim of gaining converts. The point for the missionaries was not to reinterpret Christianity, but to reinvent Africans.29 Nonetheless, the power relationships inherent in translation are not straightforward reflections of the power relationships between communities. Significantly, translation requires indigenous help. The translator seeking parallels in another’s culture must admit ignorance of that culture, and be ready to learn. As Nida admonished, in capital letters, “DO NOT ARGUE WITH THE INFORMANT ABOUT HIS LANGUAGE.”30 When Sanneh suggested that Christian conversion

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in Africa was a form of “translation,” he did not mean that indigenous beliefs had been reinterpreted within a Christian framework—or, at least, he did not only or primarily mean that. He meant that Christianity had been reexpressed within an African framework and was much more powerful as a consequence. Because Africans owned their own languages, they had an advantage over the missionaries when it came to vernacular translation.31 Rather than Africans having to learn the European version of Christianity, Christianity had translated very effectively into an African version. The indigenous expression was “stronger” than the European expression, at least within Africa itself. The crossing over and bringing back was not in the direction that most missionaries had originally anticipated. Clearly, then, as well as looking at whites translating African languages into the mother tongues and translating European ideas into local vernaculars, we also need to look at Africans involved in translation. Here, again, we have problems with sources: most of what we know about African translation is exposed where Africans worked in close contact with whites. Here, too, the same epistemological issues arise about how far Africans succeeded in entering the whites’ mentalité, how far they succeeded in inserting their ideas into white cultures, and how far there were assumptions of shared meanings where none existed. Africans were translating European concepts because it was important for them to understand what made Europeans tick. They were involved in the cultural transformations that white settlement was bringing about. Their societies were subject to new power relationships and opened to new opportunities that had to be described and understood; hence the need to translate these foreign concepts into mother tongues and not merely to communicate using them. Of course, Africans translated using words and concepts from within their own cultures, even as those cultures were being transformed. Lamin Sanneh has argued that, in Bible translation, there were limits on the new ideas that could be imposed by the missionaries because vernacular words were always more effective than neologisms. The concept of the deity was more likely to reflect an African idea than a European one because the words used for the deity came with a history and set of meanings already attached.32 Sanneh notes the irony of the eighteenth-century missionary George Schmit searching for a name that would serve as a translation of “God” and carefully quizzing the Khoi-Khoi people about their beliefs in “Tui-qua,” of whom he seemed entirely ignorant, only then to announce that he was there in order to reveal the truth about Tui-qua to them.33 So there were limits on how far the vernaculars could be made to express entirely new ideas. Nonetheless, when whites and their African collaborators translated European beliefs and laws into local vernaculars, they provided Africans with a vocabulary to reflect how whites perceived the world. These translations had meaning and relevance because they described significant and material new experiences in Africans’ lives—in the church, the law court, the market, and the town. Translation theorists suggest that, in these circumstances, there may be cognitive as well as linguistic consequences. Old words can be used to refer to new things, in new configurations, which is to say that life may be interpreted in a new

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ways: “indigenous lexemes are used according to structural models from another language to coin new semantic units or idiomatics.”34 European beliefs and values can transform the meanings of the local words used to translate them. In such circumstances, a genuinely hegemonic transformation is taking place. Conversely, however, European beliefs and values may undergo change in the translation and take on new meanings, as Sanneh argues happened to African Christianity. This should be a mutual and interpenetrative process, as true for the European communities as for the African ones. It is generally assumed that this was not the case because of the imbalance of power between white intruders and local people. Nonetheless, the white state required at least some of its servants to have mastery of local languages. To speak and interpret fluently, they had to try to enter the mind-set of Africans and understand the concepts underpinning local African societies. Boundary crossing was inherent in the project of translation. Assessment of the hegemonic impact of white rule must consider how far men like Meredith, too, altered the ways that they interpreted the world as a result of their communication with Africans. It has long been fashionable to deny the possibility of dialogue between African and colonial concepts about the world. Whites speaking about Africa have been presented as having a conversation with themselves, in which the “African” contribution was ascribed to Africans but derived entirely from white beliefs about Africans in terms that reflected white epistemology more generally.35 It is clearly the case that whites in the early twentieth century perceived a fundamental divide between themselves and Africans and developed a variety of discourses that set out dichotomies between these two groups: civilized/uncivilized, Christian/heathen, moral/immoral, rational/superstitious, open/closed, and individual/collective. The dichotomies could be contradictory: Christianity, for example, was in an uneasy alliance with rationalism. The missionaries’ belief that their technical/medical missions provided witness to an alliance between the Bible and science was consistently challenged by Africans’ readiness to embrace biblical stories that seemed to reinforce a “superstitious” worldview.36 Moreover, the actual meanings attached to these labels were fairly fluid. “Civilization,” in particular, was a highly contested ascription, used to apply to any set of values that the speaker held to be a good. These values could be in stark opposition: yeoman farming or proletarianization, literacy or unskilled manual labor, individual personal freedom or collective social responsibility, and male authority or women’s rights were all offered as definitions of a “civilization” that Africans were deemed to lack in early Southern Rhodesia.37 Clearly, the construction of these dichotomies tells us more about the tensions and conflicts within the white communities than they tell us about Africans, or about African cultures in dialogue with white cultures. Nonetheless, the fact that whites were having a monologic conversation within their own communities in which they ascribed certain roles to “Africans” does not necessarily exclude the possibility that there was also a dialogic interaction, or “conversation,” with real African communities. Studies of translation give us the opportunity to suggest the forms that such a conversation might take.

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The argument that African conceptions of the world were silenced by the colonial relationship assumes that only the powerful were in a position for their discourses to have effective meaning. This interpretation explains why whites appear to be involved in hermetically sealed, self-referential discourse, but it leaves us without any information about how Africans were constructing meaning for themselves. The educated Africans who engaged in dialogue with whites are presented as “mimics” or “hybrids.” Their interventions created anxiety in white society precisely because they appeared to represent not an authentic African discourse but a parody of white discourse, empty of the cultural grounding or political power that gave it meaning. Such interventions are important to examine, because they reveal fractures and fault lines within the master narrative of the colonizers; but they still exist within that master narrative.38 This analysis is frustrating politically as well as intellectually—lines of enquiry are closed down before they can begin, and Africans are written out of their own history. In recent years—and largely in resistance to these agnostic conclusions—historians have begun to search for evidence of genuine dialogia, that is, of African contributions to the construction of meaning in colonial societies. Both Derek Peterson and Paul Landau have argued that Africans took religious ideas from white culture and made use of them in ways that clearly reflected local, rather than hegemonic, interests. Landau’s study of Christianity in Botswana illustrated how women converts and Ngwato rulers indigenized Christianity and how this was not clearly understood or approved by white missions and administrators.39 Significantly, Landau also argues that African relationships with “a Europeanist domain of meaning” were complex and situational: it is not always easy to identify the point at which translations of ideas such as “individual,” “salvation,” or even the symbolism of healing by tooth pulling reflect genuine hegemonic shifts in African thought.40 Peterson has illustrated that the possibilities for dialogia in translation depended on local power relationships. His case study of Barlow’s 1914 Gikuyu dictionary describes conditions where the missionary was relatively autonomous from the influence of local African leaders and where junior African men were rebelling against the constraints of rule by African elders. These junior men embraced Christianity as a way of asserting their independence and used their own choice of local words to translate the key Christian concept of “sin,” expressing their rejection of indigenous forms of authority in the process. Such translations, suggests Peterson, represented a genuine dialogue with the white evangelist.41 In Landau’s study of African Christianity, as in Sanneh’s, we see Africans themselves indigenizing the religion as a means of engaging with new ways of ordering society. In Peterson’s case, we see a missionary who was profoundly influenced by Africans in his translation of Christian concepts, again reflecting new ideas about how African society might be ordered. In both cases, it was the incoming culture that was reworked and retranslated, but it was the local culture that was seeking new forms of expression. However dialogic the interaction, the impact on white society more generally was minimal.

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My examination of translation in day-to-day secular encounters prompts me to seek evidence about whether white society more generally remained in a hermetically sealed, self-referential discourse about Africans. The Dutch farmers in 1890s Melsetter regularly depended on local Africans for food. The American missionaries felt profoundly isolated from “civilization.” How far did they have to adjust the way they lived, the pace of their lives, and the ways that they greeted others in order to live in those environments? Translation was bound up with the exercise of power but also with the crossing of boundaries. Is there evidence that native commissioners and magistrates in Southern Rhodesia changed their worldview as a result of their interactions with Africans? And, if not, was the failure to engage with other worldviews due to other discourses being excluded by white hegemony, or was it because genuine attempts at communication and translation resulted in misunderstandings, at cross-purposes, for reasons that had as much to do with Africans as with whites? Derek Peterson has observed that language is supposed to be understood. Normally, the speaker takes his or her perceptions of the listener into account before speaking. This is a historical, not a psychological, process: meanings are constantly being reviewed and reinterpreted. “Language is populated—indeed, overpopulated—with the intentions and meanings of others because it is already ‘under way’ when speakers enter into discourse.”42 The meaning of words and phrases in a language cannot be reduced to the meanings intended by the speaker, because meanings are part of a larger social process. There is a fundamental fluidity to language use and the communication of meaning, which transcends the boundaries that hegemonic discourse might try to impose. This is not to deny that attempts to limit and restrict meaning may have occurred as part of the hegemonic project, but we need to specify, periodize, and explain them rather than assume that they are always inherent in the dichotomous colonial worldview. There were undoubtedly occasions and contexts when whites in Southern Rhodesia fervently wanted to understand Africans and be understood by them. The exercise of power includes the power to make oneself heard, not just the power to speak in a self-referential monologue. The power to be heard depends on the cooperation and consent of the audience, a willingness to listen, and an attempt to understand. It is a very conditional form of power. Whites in 1890s Southern Rhodesia needed to be understood, not least because their survival depended on it. Moreover, if they were to endure and make any serious attempt at administration in African communities, they needed to understand African societies. There was a deluge of questions from the central administration to the native commissioners in the first decade of white occupation seeking the most basic of information: What do the Africans where you are believe about God? What language do they speak? How do they organize marriage and inheritance? What do they eat? Do they have enough to eat? What do they think about us? In later decades, similar questions can be interpreted as part of a conversation between whites, in the construction of an ethnographic “expertise” about Africans. In the 1890s, they seem more like a desperate fumbling around in the dark—in which only Africans themselves could

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shed any light or provide any answers. Translation entailed not only a desire to convert or command but also a wish to be heard and a need to understand. If there were moments of genuine translation, of mutual communication and dialogue, between Africans and white settlers, they must have arisen within real, lived situations. Law often provided the context for these encounters. Africans and whites regularly interacted with each other in legal forums, even if the situations were not recognized as legal forums by all those taking part. Meredith heard cases of “native civil disputes” in the outdoors beside his pole-and-dagga office. The American missionaries consistently inferred in local arrangements about the disposal of land, daughters, and other goods. The white farmers were often called on to act as arbiters in local disputes. In these circumstances, different ideas about how societies should be structured, and about how power should operate, had material applications and material consequences. Africans argued their cases in terms that made sense to them, and whites argued in terms that they understood. Like language, law required translation of ideas. The assumption that there was a mutual understanding of what was being discussed—and why it mattered—was extremely important. That is why law forms a major focus in the case studies in this book. Law is an expression of cultural norms, and, for European societies, law was expressed through legalism—the application of rules.43 The rule-based nature of European political thought, in its concepts of fairness, liberty, and citizenship, played a significant role in whites’ self-representations of their legitimacy. The rational application of rules was seen as a guarantee of fair play and a limit on arbitrary behavior, whether by the state or by white settlers. V. Y. Mudimbe has observed that white discourses of Christian conversion followed a pattern of first deriding African institutions and rituals, then “demonstrating” the superiority of European religious institutions, and finally imposing rules of orthodoxy and conformity on converts.44 Christianity was as much about conforming to rules of behavior as it was about believing in personal salvation, but, significantly, the rules were the end product of a process of demonstration, designed to convince intellectually and not merely emotionally. Rationalism was an important part of the “civilization” that whites offered to Africans and underpinned the white hegemonic project. With their appeal to a higher authority, namely, “science,” rational rule-making and arbitration provided white rule with an apparently unchallengeable claim to legitimacy, even where it did not appear to be delivering much by way of material benefits.45 The urge to rationalize and codify was a defining feature of colonial states. This urge was expressed epistemologically, as in the attempts to “explain” rainmaking, as well as practically, as in the codification of African languages and legal principles. Consequently, this book is also interested in “science.” This is science not in the sense of technology but in the sense of a rationalist and empirical epistemology peculiar to the European intellectual tradition. The whites who joined or followed the Pioneer Column into Southern Rhodesia all shared in a self-perception of themselves as “rational/scientific” and Africans as “irrational/superstitious.”

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The idea of “science” is important on two levels. On one level, it was a significant element within the European worldview. Africans needed to understand it in order to understand a large part of what motivated whites; whites needed to recognize that it limited their ability to understand what motivated Africans. However, on another level, “science,” particularly in the form of ethnographic investigation, provided a way to step outside the whole project of mutual understanding and engagement with another’s worldview. It offered bemused whites a tool to cut through some of the dilemmas that more humanistic, interactive methods of translation and understanding failed to resolve. It was no longer necessary to understand what Africans meant by their concepts; merely to understand what function these beliefs played in their societies. Part of the investigation here is to assess the role that “science” played in providing an alternative to the tortuous problems of boundary crossing to obtain information about African societies. The growth of “science” is closely linked to the development of textuality and written communication, and opposed to orality and verbal communication. Textuality, like “science,” limits negotiation about what is agreed to be true. It turns belief into object, and confers a sense of fixity and certainty about what is known. The corollary of “science” is not simply “superstition” but an alternative epistemology, which places more emphasis on the negotiability of what is known and raises the possibility of several ways of understanding the same thing. Local African societies in the early twentieth century placed significance on oral testimony and negotiable claims about what was known to be true. This is seen clearly in witnesses’ statements to court and in negotiations around chiefships. Much of the period covered by this book may be viewed as an attempt by the white administration to make what was negotiable into something that was textual: to enforce “scientific objectivity” not only as a way of thinking but also as a system of rule. The “scientific method,” with its taxonomic hierarchies of language and its anthropological labeling of “tribes,” distanced the “knowers” from the “known.” The “native informant” had been a partner in gathering knowledge or working on translation; the “ethnographic subject” had no independent voice and was not a “subject” at all but rather the object of study by the “native expert.” The growth of ethnography in Southern Rhodesia took place slowly over a number of decades, lagging behind the development of the discipline in London and Paris. It seems to me that there is a narrative to tell here, a story of how “translation” became a monologic rather than a dialogic process; the need to be understood became simply the need to be obeyed, and the “scientists,” rather than the Africans, became the “experts” on African societies. It seems to me that first encounters were followed by years of genuine attempts at translation but ended up, for the whites at least, with a situation where translation stopped, and “experts” talked about Africans among themselves. The interesting question is not whether there was a dialogic interaction between Africans and whites but when and why such interactions stopped and whether the hegemonic project to influence African hearts and minds stopped with them. The story, in essence, is the story of the invention of the

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“native mind”: an ethnographic substitute for dialogic engagement with real African thought processes—thought processes that threatened to intervene in, and disrupt, the hegemonic project of the white state. This topic is not of purely academic interest. It is part of a self-reflection on my own position, as someone attempting to interpret/translate African societies. The project raises hard questions for me about who has a right to claim expertise about Africans and what kind of expertise they can claim. My privileged position as a white academic in a rich country and a monoglot “expert” on Zimbabwean society requires me to ask questions about my white precursors. This is not a question of liberal guilt, but a question of examining the material reasons for, and consequences of, white attempts at appropriation of knowledge about Africans. Understanding this process is as important for its contemporary consequences in Zimbabwe’s current crisis as for the history of Zimbabwean society. As I began to write this book, President Robert Mugabe had just withdrawn Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth, blaming British imperialism and claiming that white people have no community of interest or understanding with African peoples. Part of my project here is to examine how such claims have credibility in modern Zimbabwe and what they tell us about perceptions of fundamental difference between white and black Africans and their cultures. In such a political context, what is the nature and validity of the expertise I want to claim? I cannot be certain that I have answered this question; but as I see increasingly numbers of my colleagues at the University of Zimbabwe abandoning the profession, I am certain that it is a question whose urgency will not diminish. NOTES 1. Llewellyn Meredith, Memoirs, typescript c1941, ME 4/1/4, 168. 2. Rev. F. W. Bates to Judson Smith, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Boston, 10 January 1896, UN 3/2/1/2. 3. Dr. W. L. Thompson to Smith, 17 July 1895 (emphasis in the original), UN 3/2/1/2. 4.Quoted in C. P. Olivier, Many Treks Made Rhodesia (Cape Town: Howard Timmins Press, 1957), 118. 5. Ibid. 6. Meredith, Memoirs, 168. 7. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa; Vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 1997). 8. Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks, eds., Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India (London: British Academic Press, 1994); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), esp. fn 17, 39. 9. Cited in Eugene A. Nida, Bible Translating (New York: American Bible Society, 1947), 32. 10. Examples inspired by Abiodan Goke-Pariola, The Role of Language in the Struggle for Power and Legitimacy in Africa (Lampeter: Edwin Meller Press, 1993), 166, 169; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia

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University Press, 1983), 32; V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (London: James Currey, 1988), 47; and John L. Comaroff, “Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa,” in Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, 163–97. 11. Once Africans began to use European languages more routinely, they could also begin to make those languages behave in new ways. During the nineteenth century, however, European languages were still closely linked with European modes of thought. 12. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 399. 13. Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a Science,”: in E. Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality, ed. D. G. Mandelbaum. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 69. The strong version of the hypothesis proposes that language determines cognition. 14. Todd Jones, “Translation and Belief Ascription: Fundamental Barriers,” in Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology, ed. Paula G. Rubel and Abraham Rosman (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 45–74. 15. David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London: Murray, 1857). 16. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Oxford: Westview Press, 1992), 242–43. 17. Jones, “Translation and Belief Ascription,” 68. 18. Nida, Bible Translating, 62. 19. Eugene A. Nida and Charles R. Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation (Leiden: E. J. Brill for United Bible Societies, 1974), 4. 20. J.D.Y. Peel, “Understanding Alien Belief Systems,” British Journal of Sociology 20 (1969): 69–84. 21. Steiner, After Babel, 372. 22. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 7. Some commentators, following Godfrey Lienhardt, have referred to this parallel use of language as “linguistic parallax”: R. G. Lienhardt, “The Dinka and Catholicism,” in Religious Organization and Religious Experience, ed. John Davis (London: Academic Press, 1982). 23. Emmet V. Mittlebeeler, African Custom and Western Law: The Development of the Rhodesian Criminal Law for Africans (New York: Africana Publishing,1976), 157ff, has a detailed discussion of the meaning of muroyi as it was contested in the courts. Compare Carlo Ginzburg, “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” in Myths, Emblems, Clues (London: Hutchinson, 1990), 162–63. 24. Maria Tymoczko, “Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation,” in Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London: Routledge, 1999), 28. 25. Ali A. Mazrui, “Language in Military History: Command and Communication in East Africa,” in The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 135; Charles Pike, “History and Imagination: Swahili Literature and Resistance to German Language Imperialism in Tanzania, 1885–1910,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 19, no. 2 (1986): 220, both on Germans in Tanganyika; Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 63ff, on Belgians in the Congo; Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui, The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (Oxford: James Currey 1998), 141, on British in Kenya.

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26. Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 326, notes the reticence of Africans to talk about God and the consequent absence of the Xhosa word for God in the written records of white translators before the 1870s. 27. Günther Renck, “Contextualization of Christianity and Christianization of Language,” Erlanger Monographien aus Mission und Ökumene 5 (1990): 141. 28. Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss, eds., African Languages, Development and the State (London: Routledge, 1994). 29. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989), 172ff. 30. Nida, Bible Translating, 74. 31. Lamin Sanneh, Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process: The African Dimension (London: Marshall Pickering, 1993), 86ff. 32. Sanneh, Translating the Message, 171. 33. Ibid., 161. 34. Renck, “Contextualization of Christianity and Christianization of Language,” 59. 35. I am thinking here of commentators including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Gauri Viswanathan as well as the Comaroffs. 36. Hastings, The Church in Africa, 327. 37. Diana Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 35–63. 38. Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 163–84; Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in Politics and Ideology: A Reader, ed. James Donald and Stuart Hall (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), 198–204. 39. Paul Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (London: James Currey, 1995). 40. Paul S. Landau, “Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith,” Journal of African History 37, no. 2 (1996): 261–81. 41. Derek R. Peterson, “Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries,” Journal of Religious History 23, no. 1 (1999): 31–50. 42. Ibid., 38. 43. Diana Jeater, “‘Their Idea of Justice Is So Peculiar’: Southern Rhodesia 1890–1910,” in The Moral World of Law, ed. Peter Coss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178–95. 44. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, 52. 45. Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks, “Introduction: Hegemony in a Colonial Context,” in Engels and Marks, Contesting Colonial Hegemony, 7.

2 Historical Background, 1820–1897

This chapter explains why people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds came to be living in the Chimanimani mountain region at the end of the nineteenth century. In particular, it illustrates how the incursions by white people fitted into an established pattern of incursion, which helped to frame local responses to them. Although the chapter is an empirically oriented narrative about a particular moment in Zimbabwean history, it highlights issues that may have wider resonance. It illustrates how spirits, healing, and fertility were bundled together in a conceptual package that often had a symbiotic relationship with local political power but could at other times be oppositional. The story of the Musikavanhu shrine in this chapter offers a counter to the functionalist tendency to see ancestral and territorial cults as supportive of indigenous political power, at least until the disruptions caused by the alternative epistemologies of Christianity and rationalism. It also explains why the shrine was already set up to provide an alternative to the narratives of power offered by missionaries and state officials. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates that understanding and using the language of invading powers, and making strategic decisions about incorporating aspects of the invaders’ culture, was an established survival tactic for local people. About 200 kilometers inland from Beira in southern Africa, there is a range of steep, waterfalled mountains that form the watershed for several large rivers flowing west into the Indian Ocean and east into the Zimbabwe plateau. The mountains are characterized by a deep cleft through the range, giving rise to their present name of Chimanimani, meaning “pincers.” To the west, running parallel to the mountain range, runs the Save River, which sweeps around the south of the mountains and across the plains into the ocean. Beyond the Save lies the great central plateau where gold and ivory provided the foundation of successive trading empires, one of which gave its name to the present-day nation of Zimbabwe. Much of the trade was international, buying and selling from Arabs working up

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and down the eastern coast of the African continent and across the Indian Ocean. From the sixteenth century, Portuguese traders also founded trading posts on the coast between the mouths of the Buzi and the Zambezi. It seems that traders tended to skirt the highest peaks of the Chimanimani range and used river routes to the north or south to carry goods to and from the coast.1 The region to the east of the Save, up into the mountains and the headlands of the Buzi, was marginal to trading activity and was not densely populated. Nonetheless, from at least the sixteenth century and probably earlier, successive waves of settlers began to cross the Save from the west and move into the district now known as Chimanimani. Many were trying to move beyond the reach of the big inland states of the Mutapa, Torwa, and Changamire dynasties, which laid claim to tribute and wives. Others were sent by those states to act as local chiefs and agents of empire. By the start of the nineteenth century, there were several distinct polities founded by incomers from across the Save to the west.2 The Mutema chiefship seems to have been the most recent, as well as the most influential, dynasty in the nineteenth century. J. Keith Rennie has argued convincingly that this state was established as an outrider state of the Changamire Empire in the mid- to late seventeenth century but had managed to become independent under Mutema by the early eighteenth century.3 That other states pre-dated the Mutema state is indicated by the traditions that other groups, notably the Musikavanhu people, are “wives” to the Mutema, indicating that they were earlier settlers.4 Rennie similarly suggests that the Garahwa and Mapungwana chiefships pre-dated Mutema. In all three cases, the chiefs became politically subordinate to Mutema but asserted significant rain-calling and ritual authority to indicate prior ownership of the land.5 Despite arriving in a series of successive migrations, the peoples in the Chimanimani mountains shared a culture and developed a local version of their language. Interactions based on tribute, trading, transport routes, and rain-ritual networks fostered and maintained cultural similarities, not only between these communities, but also with the peoples inland beyond the Save and eastward toward the coast.6 The oral histories of these polities indicate that loyalties to local chiefs were periodically overlain by tributary relationships with states in the west and north as empires “expanded, competed and splintered.”7 Internally, dynasties were riven by succession disputes and lineage splintering. The legitimacy of dynasties was demonstrated by reference to history and to spiritual/symbolic authority. Historically, oral traditions recounted direct lines of succession back to the dynastic founders, providing stories that accounted for the original seizure of land from the original inhabitants and for apparent breaks in the dynasty. These stories, of course, are most fruitfully interpreted as reflections of shifts in power rather than as literal records of events. Spiritually, dynasties guaranteed fertility through their relationships with the ancestors of the land. Succession in Musikavanhu (and probably in other chiefships) was influenced by masvikiro, the spirit mediums of past members of the chiefly lineage.8

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The economic power of dynastic chiefs and aristocrats seems to have been rooted in control over trade, particularly ivory trade. However, their wealth also depended on levying charges for the administration of justice.9 Local authorities acted as arbiters in disputes between families, and had significant powers of punishment. Paramount chiefs heard serious cases, particularly those where there were spiritual implications for the land’s fertility, such as the accusation that one family was using charmed potions to undermine the harvests of another.10 Perhaps most importantly, however, chiefs presided over rain-calling rituals. It seems that all chiefs were responsible for rain calling.11 However, by the late nineteenth century, the Musikavanhu chieftaincy was the premier rainmaker. This chieftaincy appears to have originated as an oracular cult on the far side of the Save.12 Dating back to before the sixteenth century, the cult was presided over by a male shrine keeper and a female ritual leader whose power to call rain was embodied in the possession of magic rain stones. It seems that sometime in the seventeenth century, the male shrine keeper took the stones and established a new shrine in the mountains, from where, having thus separated himself from the powerful priestess, he began to make secular claims as a territorial chief, Musikavanhu. The Mutema dynasty, which also claimed rain-calling powers, asserted its independence from the Changamire Empire during the late eighteenth century and allied itself more closely with this Musikavanhu chieftaincy-cult. Conflicting claims to ritual authority between Mutema, who was politically more powerful, and Musikavanhu are reflected in stories that Mutema was the original rainmaker but that his wife, the priestess, stole the rain stones and bestowed them on her male relative, Musikavanhu.13 The stones themselves seem to have disappeared in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The Mutema dynasty favored a secular succession to the Musikavanhu territorial chieftaincy, separate from leadership of the cult. Succession to leadership of the cult was transformed from a ritual position into a charismatic role based on possession by the spirit of Mabota, the last Musikavanhu to own the stones. However, Rennie argues that, thereafter, dynastic leadership alternated between territorial claims based on secular descent and cultic claims based on charismatic possession. About 1830, a powerful charismatic claimant, Munjakanja, established himself as Chief Musikavanhu, despite intervention from Mutema. By the midnineteenth century, Munjakanja had established a major independent regional shrine based around a Great Tree near Chikore, in the southeast of the mountains, maintaining some links with the Mwari rain cult in the Matopos.14 During the early nineteenth century, the center of power in the region shifted from the west to the east. Nguni offshoots of the Zulu polity in Natal were working their way north up the eastern seacoast. Most significant of these, for the people in our story, was Soshangane, who gained control of the Portuguese garrisons at Inhambane, Sofala, Vila de Manica, Sena, and Tete, plus their hinterlands, in the 1820s. Also working their way up the coast, in the wake of the Nguni expansions, were a group of Americans from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. These Boston-based Congregationalists established a mission in Natal in

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1835 with aspirations to develop a network of American Board missions across southeastern Africa. Soshangane expanded his empire inland from the coast and in 1836, apparently as part of an inland offensive, moved his capital to the highveldt in the middle Save. It may have been at this time that the people living there were first called “Ndau” by outsiders. Soshangane’s presence in the highlands was brief, for he returned to his previous southern location by the Limpopo River in 1839. Nonetheless, the peoples living in the middle Save valley and the mountains were to spend the rest of the century under sporadic Nguni overrule as part of Soshangane’s Gaza Empire. Gaza overrule was enforced by local representatives backed up by warriors organized into military age sets. The Gaza economy was oriented to cattle rather than agriculture, but in the highveldt and the middle Save valley, the state had more interest in tribute extraction than in cattle. Whereas the inland empires in the past had installed local outposts, such at Mutema’s, the Gaza state left local authorities intact. It appointed its own ndunas, who often had kinship links with ndunas at the court, to oversee groups of five to six villages.15 These ndunas supervised indigenous chiefs, ensuring the regular payment of tribute and obedience to Gaza law. Whites had to purchase permissions to hunt; Africans had to obtain the king’s permission to carry out hunting rituals. All ivory had to be traded through the king, and the majority of animal skins gained from hunting were taken as tax.16 Taxes on the products of hunting and trading were significant sources of income for the Gaza Empire, and local ndunas commanded patrols to police the borders and monitor these activities. These patrols appropriated food and cattle supplies from local people, putting added strain on the economy.17 Gaza influence in the highlands increased significantly in the mid-nineteenth century because the imperial capital was moved back inland to near the Buzi headwaters, in the Ndau heartland, in 1862. The relocation of the capital involved the relocation of entire villages from the Buzi lowlands into the highlands.18 Shosangane had died in 1858 and, after a succession dispute, was replaced by Mzila. Mzila himself was succeeded by Ngungunyana, who kept the court in the highlands until 1889. Mzila’s decision to move the capital back to the Buzi headwaters precipitated resistance from local chiefs. Prior to the relocation of the capital, they had been fairly secure. They had been answerable to Gaza ndunas, but were safely situated at the outer limits of Nguni raiding, either from Shosangane to the east or from Mzilikazi, the Khumalo ruler of the Ndebele, to the west. Reaction to the Gaza occupation was a defining choice for local chiefs. Rennie has suggested that at least six out of the 10 chiefly polities established new dynasties during this period.19 The most prolonged resistance was led by Ngorima. In his youth, Ngorima had trained in Nguni battle skills, while living with a relative under Ndebele overrule, south of the Save. During the 1860s and 1870s, he established a crescent of military posts in the mountains to resist Gaza incursions. However, following renewed Gaza assault, and a failed appeal to Mzilikazi’s successor Lobengula, Ngorima’s people were forced to settle across the Save, with Gutu. Ngorima’s

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son moved his people back to the banks of the Risitu and accepted Ngungunyana’s rule, but they did not return to their ancestral homelands until 1912.20 Munjakanja, the Musikavanhu paramount, was associated with ritual resistance to Gaza overrule. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Gaza Nguni had absorbed significant elements of local spirit-based practices, including healing practices and practitioners, and Nguni spirits could possess local mediums.21 Nonetheless, the Gaza state was afraid of spiritual threats to its authority. Oral testimonies from this period recalled the inhuman murder of suspected witches, which seem to reflect acute anxiety about those thought to be targeting the ruler.22 This was not peculiar to Gaza rule: Ngorima, for example, had also ordered the blinding of three men suspected of witchcraft against him.23 However, Gaza responses seem to have been exceptionally deadly and gruesome. Nonetheless, the Big Tree cult near Chikore remained influential. The Gaza rulers do not seem to have sought legitimacy from the cult in the way that Ndebele rulers sought legitimacy from the Mwali shrines in the Matopos. Even so, gifts for rainmaking were sent to Chikore from peoples as far away as the coast. By the 1890s, knowledge of Munjakanja’s power over rain stretched from the coast to the Tokwe, far to the west of the Sabi, and as far north as Mutasa.24 Ngungunyana clearly regarded Munjakanja as a threat, arresting him on at least two occasions. Stories were widely circulated that, on both occasions, Munjakanja used magic to ensure that no harm came to him. This indicates a wariness about attacking Munjakanja directly, based in a fear of his ritual power. Despite such resistance, local authorities were undermined by the Gaza presence. Ngungunyana, in particular, is remembered in oral traditions for his usurpation, and harsh application, of judicial power.25 Moreover, Gaza overrule not only put local rulers in a subordinate position but also provided alternative sources of patronage for young men. Rennie has argued that age-set recruitment into the military loosened local ties of loyalty for young men, and encouraged identification with Nguni interests. There were continuing calls on the military, and although non-Nguni subjects were not conscripted, they were welcomed as volunteers into the regiments. Indigenous people could even become nduna. Women, meanwhile, were drawn into the Gaza political identity through marriage. Elizabeth MacGonagle has drawn attention to the number of Ndau women taken as wives by highstatus men in the Gaza court.26 Many young men and women moved away from their home areas, and young men, in particular, became focused more on developing their interests through Gaza patronage than on supporting their own lineage interests.27 The loss of young men’s contributions to household production and planning undermined the kin-based economic relationships that held local communities together. Political economy during this period was founded on crops and livestock, some hunting and trading, and the effective manipulation of marriage alliances. There was a significant difference in cultivation potential between the lowland valleys beside the Save and the Odzi, which had limited rainfall, and the steep highlands, which were well watered.28 The wetter areas tended to attract malarial

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mosquitoes during the rainy seasons. However, the valleys were thick with forests, which were good for hunting and whose timber potential would later appeal to white settlers. Maize and millet appear to have been the staple crops, and there were reports in the 1890s of Africans growing pumpkin, sweet potatoes, lemons, bananas and even tobacco, which, it was said, “they seemed to have cultivated … even better than did the Free State farmers.”29 Nonetheless, white memoirs, and accounts of bridewealth arrangements agreed later, at the turn of the century, suggest that this was not a wealthy district, perhaps a reflection of Gaza appropriations. Cattle holdings seem to have been limited, with a much greater prevalence of small stock. Bridewealth agreements indicate a surprisingly high number of arrangements in which no goods were exchanged, suggesting a widespread scarcity of valuable bridewealth goods. In muranda arrangements, for example, men were tied to a household by their obligations to provide a service in exchange for a wife or wives. Chief Mapungwana provided his svikiro with five wives for whom no bridewealth was paid. The chief kept guardianship rights over the offspring, including the right to bridewealth for the daughters and the obligation to provide a wife for the sons. The svikiro’s son rejected this patronage and claimed that he did not want the chief to give him the bridewealth from the marriage of his sisters to provide himself with a wife, as this would make him also muranda to Mapungwana. He preferred to earn his bridewealth in the mines at Kimberley. This implies that a muranda relationship was a restrictive form of clientage, offering limited upward mobility even for a high-status official such as the svikiro.30 Service marriages were common not only for specially skilled men but also for the poor throughout southern Africa. Similarly, the women they married were often attached to wealthy households not by birth, but because their fathers had made a service or pledging arrangement with that household. In times of hardship, a girl or young woman could be pledged “in marriage” to a patron, or “big man,” in exchange for the patron’s taking responsibility for meeting her family’s immediate needs, particularly grain. The “big men” might take the girls as wives but were equally likely to arrange for them to be married to someone else (to fulfill or to create an obligation) when they reached maturity. The point about pledging was not to marry off young women to old men (although this happened) but to transfer rights to their bridewealth, in exchange for food and protection. The Chimanimani district is striking in how many claims on women from this period seemed to be based on clientage, obligation, or outstanding debt.31 It even seems to have been common during the 1890s simply to exchange women, in a mutual shamwari agreement: In most Native marriages the lobolla becomes a matter of exchange, and a man who has a marriageable daughter will in the majority of cases demand a girl in payment as lobolla.32

Accounts of marriage arrangements formed at this time often involved seizure of women to settle debts; others refer to the adoption of women found destitute:

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“My father obtained the mother of Hambirenyi … when she came in a starving condition and asked my father to save her;” “He found a woman in the veldt and took her to wife.”33 It appears that the majority of recorded cases from the late nineteenth century did not involve a bridewealth negotiation.34This probably reflects the contested nature of such arrangements (they are recorded because they were subject to subsequent dispute) but also indicates the disrupted state of the kinbased economy following Gaza incursions. It provides a context for the attractions of military service under Ngungunyana, and alternative sources of patronage. This steady erosion of young men from participation in family politics and economics turned into a catastrophic tsunami at the end of the nineteenth century, when Ngungunyana took his capital back to Bileni in 1889, forcing tens of thousands of Ndau people to march with him. Thousands died en route. The relocation took the Gaza capital back into the lowlands, blocking a resurgence of Portuguese interest in the coastal hinterlands in response to British expansion into the interior from the south. The removal to Bileni had a significant impact on the political economy of the highlands. The retiring Nguni took many fertile women and young men with them. Bridewealth agreements and rights over children were utterly disrupted. A generation later, men were still trying to reconstruct their rights to cattle and people scattered by these losses.35 The relocation also took young Ndau men nearer to the mines in South Africa. The Gaza Empire’s economy was based on control over trade and tribute, but it also contributed to the new industrial economy in the south. By the late nineteenth century, regular parties of Shangaan workers were going to the mines. Shangaan men were well regarded, in the odd ethnic economy of white settlers, as “splendid miners.” William Longden (who will play a major role in this story) first visited lowland Gaza in the early 1890s, having noticed that it was a good source of labor, to recruit for struggling mining interests in Barberton, across the Limpopo to the southwest of the Gaza capital.36 This was just after thousands of people from the highveldt had been forcibly removed to the lowlands by Ngungunyana, and although we cannot be sure that some of the migrants were Ndau, it seems likely that they were. Certainly we know that the relocation to Bileni instigated a regular pattern of mine migration among the Mossurize and Machaze (a.k.a. Madanda) areas to the east of the mountains: Since the withdrawal of Gugunhanna all those belonging to the tribes that emigrated to Inhambane (Bilene) have become accustomed to seeking work on the Transvaal and even though they have returned to their former lands now … they maintain the habit of migrating to the Transvaal in order to obtain [bridewealth].37

Moreover, when the white administration attempted to recruit labor from the Chimanimani communities in the 1890s, it found that men were already accustomed to choosing for themselves the best employment opportunities: Boys [sic] showed an indisposition to come to Umtali to work, as they could get more money in Bulawayo and Johannesburg. The Shangaans are consequently going in the direction of these two centres of mining activity.38

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Clearly, people from the middle Save valley and Buzi headlands were involved in labor migration to the mines in South Africa at an earlier date than most other peoples in the interior, and this seems to have been connected with their removal to Bileni. Gaza overrule had also transformed gender identities. Masculinity was closely associated in Nguni cultures with the military age sets into which young men were conscripted. The notion of the Nguni warrior as the quintessence of masculinity, popular within Victorian romanticized ethnography, seems to have had some local currency, too. By the late nineteenth century, Nguni languages had been adopted across the region by young men as a mark of warrior masculinity, while women continued to speak local vernaculars.39 MacGonagle has demonstrated that young men in the Chimanimani communities, whether in the Gaza military or not, adopted Nguni ear piercing as a marker of masculinity.40 Like going to war, going to the mines was associated with masculinity and with Nguni ethnicity. “Shangaan” workers attracted higher pay, so Ndau migrants represented themselves as Shangaan.41 Warriors had returned from campaigns with stories of their bravery and resourcefulness as well as with women and wealth acquired in raiding. Mine workers returned with similar stories and with wealth that gave them access to brides, and they, too, tended to adopt Nguni languages and ear piercing as a mark of having gone through this rite of passage.42 It seems that it was during the period of Gaza occupation that a specific Ndau identity emerged, partly in contradistinction to Nguni identity and partly as a result of selective adoption of Nguni cultural traits.43 This identity did not displace earlier distinctions between subsequent waves of migration from the west, but it did overarch them. The “Ndau” label was subsequently used by ethnographers to include the lowland and coastal peoples to the east, as part of a process of classification based on history, phonetics, and language.44 However, in the nineteenth century, the highlanders did not extend their sense of identity to include all those under Gaza overrule but made distinctions between themselves, the Save valley peoples, and the peoples to the east in the lowlands and at the coast.45 The relocation to Bileni was to affect the highlands in yet another way: it led directly to the arrival of the Dutch-speaking white farmers from the south and the American missionaries from the east. Both arrived under the auspices of Cecil John Rhodes, following encounters between petitioners at the new capital. Coastal Gazaland at the end of the nineteenth century was awash with white adventurers, in competition with each other, seeking to establish control over territory in the interior. The Portuguese, in particular, wanted control of the coastal hinterlands and regarded the Gaza ruler as an obstacle and an enemy. In response to these pressures, Ngungunyana not only moved his capital but also strengthened his diplomatic links with the Zulu Empire to the south and the Ndebele Empire to the west, confirming the Save as the boundary between Ndebele and Gaza spheres of influence. Meanwhile, white petitioners were regarded by Ngungunyana as potential allies against his challengers and as potential suppliers of arms and ammunition, which his people lacked the technology to produce for themselves. His court

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hosted an assortment of white supplicants, all in competition with each other, seeking permission to trade, recruit labor, exploit natural resources, and expand mission work into the interior.46 One of the most persistent petitioners was the Reverend G. A. Wilder of the American Board Mission, who wanted permission to establish a mission in the highlands of the interior. In 1881, Ngungunyana’s negotiator requested gunpowder technology from the mission in exchange for such permission. The deal was refused, but the mission kept on negotiating.47 In 1882, it established a coastal branch under Portuguese auspices at Inhambane; in 1888, Wilder again requested permission to establish a highveldt mission from Ngungunyana and was again refused. Undeterred, he continued his petitioning and stayed at the capital when the court relocated to the lowlands the following year. It was there that Wilder met a delegation from Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (BSACo) in 1891. Rhodes seemed to Ngungunyana to offer a very useful alliance against the Portuguese. The BSACo had already established its Pioneer Column in territory on the far side of the Save, and this might have inspired caution. Nonetheless, in March 1891, Ngungunyana made an agreement with the BSACo representative, Denis Doyle, that the company could have mineral rights in the empire in exchange for 1,000 Martini Henry rifles, 20,000 rounds of ammunition, and a £400 annual subsidy. The agreement conferred no rights on Rhodes to allocate territory or grant titles, but this seemed a minor detail to opportunistic whites keen to move into the interior. Wilder, tired of constant refusals from Ngungunyana, recognized the value of the new player on the block and transferred his petitions to Rhodes, who indicated a potential site for a highland mission to him on his sketchy map of the interior. Whites were not supposed to take African land, but the site was in Chief Mapungwana’s territory. Mapungwana had resisted the relocation to Bileni, and many of his people had been scattered by Nguni raids, some taken to Bileni, and others in refuge across the Save river.48 Dunbar Moodie, an adventurer from the Orange Free State who had assisted in the delegation to Ngungunyana, was also impressed by what he saw of the interior and negotiated an agreement with Rhodes to bring white farmers from the south to settle there. However, in June, the British government agreed a treaty with the Portuguese that defined the Gaza Empire, up to the Save river, as under the Portuguese sphere of influence. This invalidated Gazaland agreements made by Britishregistered companies. In October, two ndunas from the court were dispatched to the United Kingdom to confirm to the British queen that Ngungunyana stood by his agreement with Rhodes regardless of any arrangements between the British and Portuguese governments. William Longden, traveling by boat up the east coast, chanced on this party returning from the United Kingdom and, having mentioned to Rhodes his visit to Gazaland as a labor recruiter, was immediately contracted to accompany the ndunas back to the court and to remain there as Rhodes’s representative, guaranteeing the agreement between Ngungunyana and the BSACo.

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Longden remained at the lowland capital from December 1891 to June 1892, paying over another £400, and communicating with the king in limited Zulu and through a Zulu interpreter. During that time, he witnessed Musikavanhu Munjakanja being brought to the court and sentenced to death for refusing to relocate his people to Bileni but subsequently released amid stories from the execution party that their bullets had turned to water.49 Meanwhile, inland in Chief Mapungwana’s territory, Wilder and two colleagues visited their highland site “under grant given by Mr Rhodes” and planted some seed before returning to Natal to get their families.50 In May 1892, Dunbar and Tom Moodie left the Orange Free State with the first of what was to become a great exodus of white farmers, heading for the territory indicated by Rhodes as suitable for settlement. In June 1892, Longden left Ngungunyana’s court, bowing to Portuguese pressure on the British government to have him removed; but by then, the Moodie Trekkers were on the road, heading for the Chimanimani mountains. They arrived at their destination in January 1893. This perhaps forced the hand of the British government, which, the following month, recognized Rhodes’s concession, but only for the territory between the Save and the watershed along the spine of the mountains: a tiny proportion of the Gaza Empire as a whole. Ngungunyana’s patrols were still active, and “an impi of four hundred armed soldiers” intercepted the Trekkers as soon as they crossed the Save. The Gaza captain and two ndunas negotiated through Tom Moodie’s interpreter, explaining that the farmers would have to regard themselves as subject to the captain if they wished to settle. This was unacceptable to Tom Moodie, negotiations became heated, and Moodie ordered the men in his party to grab the captain and beat him. The Trekkers’ version of this story is intriguing. We are told only that “the matter was soon settled. After the cheeky Captain had been well ‘dusted,’ as Moodie put it, he was much more humble.”51 What happened to the “four hundred armed soldiers” or even the other two ndunas and why they allowed their captain to be “dusted” is left unexplained, as such incidents usually are in white mythology. In any event, Ngungunyana’s captain appears to have cooperated with the Trekkers thereafter and assisted them in settling in the district. Dunbar Moodie worked quickly to establish himself as a new nduna, touring the area, staying with local headmen, and trying cases brought to him for adjudication.52 He treated the entire area as a personal fiefdom, pegging out farms far in excess of the allocations agreed as acceptable between the company and the British government. More parties of Trekkers, including African employees, arrived in quick succession and settled around Waterfalls, the homestead established by Moodie’s father, Tom, toward the southern end of the mountains. They founded a town named Melsetter, after the ancestral Moodie homestead in Scotland. The missionaries arrived in September 1893 and immediately entered into disputes with Moodie about who “owned” the land, which Moodie was pegging on behalf of a speculative private company, Swanapoel. Moodie was also concerned about rumors of a Portuguese invasion in October 1894, but nothing occurred, perhaps because of the timely arrival of the very large Martin Trek.53

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Meanwhile, Ngungunyana was regretting his arrangement with Rhodes. Despite another £800 delivered by Longden during 1894, Ngungunyana wrote a formal repudiation of his agreement with Rhodes to the British government and attempted to stop the white settlement in Melsetter.54 He also, according to Dr. Thompson of the American Board, sent out two (unsuccessful) warriors to capture Dunbar Moodie.55 White farmers continued to pour into the area throughout the year, including the numerous Martin Trekkers, who settled farther north, shifting the center of white settlement from Mapungwana’s territory into Mutema’s territory and meeting no opposition from Gaza patrols. Musikavanhu Munjakanja made direct negotiations with the newcomers regarding allocations of land, allowing Wilder to open a new station at Chikore, possibly as a potential ally against Gaza rule. Ngungunyana’s empire was under assault on all fronts. In 1895, he was forced to confront the Portuguese without any help from white allies, suffered defeat, and was forced into exile. The Gaza state faltered. By 1897, the Portuguese had defeated the remaining Gaza commander, Maguywane, prompting mass returns to the highveldt of Ndau people who had been forced to Bileni or who had sought refuge beyond the Save. BSACo officials somehow persuaded themselves that they deserved the credit for rescuing these local people from the despotism of Gaza rule. The late 1890s, then, saw the simultaneous arrival of white farmers, missionaries, company employees, and African returnees into the Chimanimani highlands. Rights to land, tribute, labor, and women were hotly disputed, both within and between these groups. There were new opportunities for trading and production and, for local people, the experience of life without Nguni overrule. It was a time rich with potential for Africans as well as for whites but also a time when political, spiritual, and family relationships were being renegotiated and old debts were being called in. African communities regrouped in new political and economic circumstances. The old ndunas left, although some of the Nguni warriors remained with their Ndau wives.56 Longden assisted Mphungu, a refugee Gaza aristocrat whom he had known at Ngungunyana’s place, to resettle with about 50 followers in Garahwa, at the southern end of the mountains, in a (failed) attempt to bring large numbers of “splendid” Shangaan laborers into the new territory.57 Also in the south of the district, Munjakanja died in 1895, the same year as Ngungunyana’s defeat by the Portuguese, and a Musikavanhu succession dispute between secular and charismatic claimants commenced. At about the same time, in mid-1895, the first native commissioner was appointed and stationed in the south. So, too, was a police patrol consisting of a white commander, a few white troopers, and several Xhosa policemen who had come north with the early pioneers.58 The native commissioner, the missionaries, and the farmers all began to demand tribute (“tax,” “rent,” “employment”) from local Africans, collected largely in goats or labor.59 Many whites also exacted payments for hearing cases.60 The new ndunas had arrived.

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NOTES 1. Save, Buzi, and Zambezi rivers and Chimanimani mountains are all used here for convenience, as the contemporary geographical names for these features. The Save was called the Sabi by white settlers in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) during most of the twentieth century. 2. Much of the information here on the history prior to the 1890s draws heavily on two unpublished doctoral dissertations: J. K. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism among the Ndau of Southern Rhodesia 1890–1935” (Northwestern University, 1973) and Elizabeth MacGonagle, “A Mixed Pot: History and Identity in the Ndau Region of Mozambique and Zimbabwe 1500–1900” (Michigan State University, 2002). Both make extensive use of oral data and of Portuguese records dating back to the sixteenth century. 3. J. K. Rennie, “Ideology and State Formation: Political and Communal Ideologies among the South-Eastern Shona, 1500–1890,” in State Formation in Eastern Africa, ed. Ahmed Idha Salim (London: Heinemann Educational, 1984), 168. 4. Carin Vijfhuizen, “Rain-Making, Political Conflict and Gender Images: A Case from Mutema Chieftaincy in Zimbabwe,” Zambezia 24, no. 1 (1997): 48. 5. Rennie, “Ideology and State Formation,” 175. 6. MacGonagle, “A Mixed Pot,” 62. 7. Ibid., 63. 8. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 76–77; Vijfhuizen, “Rain-Making.” 9. Rennie, “Ideology and State Formation,” 171. 10. MacGonagle, “A Mixed Pot,” 156, 166. 11. Ibid., 155–56. 12. What follows is a slightly simplified version of a complex history that J. K. Rennie carefully reconstructs in “From Zimbabwe to a Colonial Chieftaincy: Four Transformations of the Musikavanhu Territorial Cult in Rhodesia,” in Guardians of the Land: Essays on Central African Territorial Cults, ed. J. M. Schoffelers (Gwelo: Mambo Press, 1979), 257–85. 13. Vijfhuizen, “Rain-Making,” provides this version of the story, which comes from the Mutema traditions. There are other versions with different relationships between the protagonists. 14. Tree shrines were a feature of the district. In 1900, Meredith reported that, “At almost every village of any size will be found a sacred tree which is carefully kept clean of all weeds or grass and a wide path is made from the village to the tree. Occasionally a pot of beer is place on the cleaned place near to the tree to ensure good crops.” NC Annual Report, 1900, N9/1/6. 15. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 144. 16. Ibid., 137. 17. MacGonagle, “A Mixed Pot,” 179. 18. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 147. 19. Ibid., 140. The dynasties in question were Mutambara, Chikukwa, Ngorima, Muwushu, Mapungwana, and Garahwa. 20. N. G. Young, “The Legendary History of the Hodi and Ngorima Chiefs,” in Native Affairs Department Annual (NADA) (Salisbury, 1970); Shirley Sinclair, The Story of Melsetter (Salisbury: M. O. Collins, 1971), 14–15. Ngorima’s new dynasty was named after his assertion that he was “hoeing with his spear,” when challenged about his decision to spend time in military training rather than cultivation.

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21. MacGonagle, “A Mixed Pot,” 178; Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 158. 22. MacGonagle, “A Mixed Pot,” 186; see also Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 151. 23. Statement from Dzotsera, 19 April 1900, enclosed in letter from Longden to Public Prosecutor, 26 April 1900, DM 2/4/1. 24. Rennie, “From Zimbabwe to a Colonial Chieftaincy,” 271. 25. MacGonagle, “A Mixed Pot,” 185–86. 26. Elizabeth MacGonagle, “‘Ngungunyana Was a Problem’: Memory, Identity and a Legacy of Overrule in the Ndau Region of Mozambique and Zimbabwe” (paper presented to the 45th annual meeting of the African Studies Association, Washington, D.C., 7 December 2002), 7–8. 27. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 145–50. 28. In July 1907, the native commissioner reported that the Sabi and Odzi valleys had had three bad seasons out of four because of drought. 29. C. P. Olivier, Many Treks Made Rhodesia (Cape Town: Howard Timmins Press, 1957), 99. 30. Mapungwani v. Chigumunda, 21 April 1909, native civil disputes, Melsetter, S1069. 31. Examples from cases that seem to date back to the 1890s include Mucheke v. Payani, 29 October 1908; Kwayedza v. Chingwingwi, 20 February 1909; Matsoni v. Chikowiro, 26 April 1909; Magutukusa v. Buviro, 6 May 1909; Chikukuwa v. Mawonganidze, 3 June 1909; Hlanguyo v. Mudzinganyama, 10 June 1909; Chawa v. Maparadza & Mutema, 20 August 1909; Dambarimine v. Masenga, 24 December 1909; Indaputa v. Pachiti, 29 December 1909; Mafukidze v. Nemaramba, 9 February 1910; and Madonge v. Mutohira, 22 December 1909, S1069. 32. Native Commissioner, Melsetter (NC) quarterly report, 30 September 1897, NUE 2/1/2, 300 (spelling in original). This observation is supported by the native commissioner’s records of “native civil disputes” heard by him. Examples include Kuwatawingwa v. Keta, 9 July 1909; Faniso v. Nyamazani, 27 August 1909; Katsawara v. Dumdisha, 24 February 1910; Shashetire v. Magora, 5 August 1910; and Mudzingo v. Chingamonani, 26 January 1911, S1069. 33. Murawo v. Magwaza, 7 May 1909; Chiduma v. Marwendo, 2 October 1911, S1069. 34. It is difficult to establish exactly when these agreements were reached, but those that date back to the 1880s and 1890s can be identified by reference to adult children. See also South Africa Native Affairs Committee (SANAC), testimony of Rev. G. A. Wilder, §34,144, 30 August 1904. 35. For example, Mapungwani v. Chigumunda, 21 April 1909; Matsoni v. Chikowiro, 26 April 1909; Murawo v. Magwaza, 7 May 1909; and Muchada v. Hemaramba, 24 June 1909, S1069. 36. H.W.D. Longden, Red Buffalo: The Story of Will Longden—Pioneer, Friend and Emissary of Rhodes (Cape Town: Juta & Co., 1950), 45–46. It was Longden who described the Shangaan men as “splendid miners”: NC Annual Report (AR), 1909, N9/1/12; see also General Report for the half year, 31 March 1900, DM5/1/1/1. 37. Mozzurize Annual Report, Document 42, 1906. Quotation kindly supplied by Stephen Lubkemann from his doctoral dissertation “Situating Wartime Migration: Gendered Social Struggle and the Transnationalization of Polygyny” (Brown University, 2000), 79. My abbreviation to “bridewealth.” 38. “Gazaland: All Quiet Now, but Boys Scarce,” Rhodesian Advertiser, 5 November 1897; see also NC Half-Yearly Report, 30 September 1907, NUE 2/1/6; AR 1909, N9/1/12. 39. Note from Chimanimani district, Dr. Lawrence, Mt. Silinda Mission, to Enoch F. Bell, Assistant Secretary, ABCFM, Boston, 2 February 1910, UN3/2/1/4; see also Rennie,

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“Ideology and State Formation,” 186; from the Gwelo district by Charles Bullock, Acting Superintendent of Natives (SN), Victoria, in letter to C. M. Doke, 17 September 1929, BU1/1/1; and from the Mberengwa/Zvishavane district in Chenjerai Shire, “‘Men Don’t Go to the Moon’: Language, Space and Masculinities,” in Dislocating Masculinities: Comparative Ethnographies, ed. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne (London: Routledge, 1993), 147–58. 40. MacGonagle, “A Mixed Pot,” 183. 41. Ibid., 195. 42. Ibid., 184; Shire, “‘Men Don’t Go to the Moon,’” notes a similar trend among young men across the Save to the west. 43. This is the main argument of MacGonagle, “A Mixed Pot.” 44. Henri Philippe Junod, “A Contribution to the Study of Ndau Demography, Totemism, and History,” Bantu Studies 8 (1934): 17. 45. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 88. 46. These included William Longden, representing the BSACo; Rev. G. A. Wilder representing the American Board Missions; the Portuguese Intendente; and G. Lièngme, a Swiss missionary. 47. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 143. 48. Mapungwani v. Chigumunda, 21 April 1909, Native civil disputes, Melsetter, S1069; Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 149. 49. Longden, Red Buffalo, 95. The detail that Munjakanja’s arrest was a result of his refusal to relocate comes not from Longden but from George A. Wilder, “The White African,” (Bloomfield, NJ: Morse Press, 1933), 86, cited by Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 149. Longden thought that the problem was that Munjakanja had not been paying tribute. Wilder was fluent in Zulu; Longden was not and often seemed a little unsure about what was going on at the court. 50. Fred R. Bunker, Secretary, Mt. Silinda, Gazaland, to Mr. Duncan, Surveyor General of BSACo, Salisbury, 6 October 1893, UN3/2/1/2. 51. Olivier, Many Treks, 48. 52. Dunbar Moodie’s Diary, 5–14 July 1893, MO 11/2/5. 53. Umtali Advertiser, 29 November 1894. 54. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 221. 55. Ibid., 222. 56. MacGonagle, “A Mixed Pot,” 187. 57. Longden, Red Buffalo, 203–4; Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 202. 58. Longden, Red Buffalo, 200. The native commissioner was originally based at the original Melsetter township, soon to be named Chipinge, about 25 miles northeast of Mt. Silinda mission. The police camp was based at a farm named Kenilworth. 59. Moodie’s Diary, 5–14 July 1893; NC Melsetter (Meredith) to RM Melsetter (Longden), 25 February 1896 re goats collected as tax, DM2/9/1. The issue of how to exact labor from Africans is endemic to writing by whites in the district in the 1890s. 60. Correspondence with Chief Native Commissioner (CNC) and Administrator (Jameson) re claims by whites to be JPs, September 1895, NUE1/1/1.

PART I FIRST ENCOUNTERS, 1890s–1900s

There was much for the whites to learn about the Africans in the district between the Save and the peaks of the mountains; there was also much for the returning Africans to learn about the whites who were demanding tribute from them and settling on their land. Initially, however, people generally expected others to behave in ways that made sense to them. There were no pristine encounters here; the missionaries came from Natal, the white farmers from the Orange Free State and Natal, and the administrators from other jobs within the region. While many Africans had not had previous dealings with whites, many others had, particularly as migrant laborers. So there were no big surprises in store: just many readjustments of expectation, as routine contact led to reappraisal of stereotypes. Although there were no big surprises, there were many areas of ignorance. This part of the book looks at how whites and Africans came to realize that their preconceptions did not neatly fit into the new situations in which all found themselves. It begins by looking at the points of contact, the reasons why whites and Africans came into contact with each other, and what they expected to get out of those encounters. The rest of the part focuses on the hard work that was put in by some sectors of the white communities to build up more detailed information about the communities that they claimed to control. This examination begins with a study of the missionaries at Mt. Silinda and their gradual movement toward feeling comfortable with the local vernacular. This is presented alongside a study of the work of the converts and their gradual movement toward feeling comfortable with Christianity. The consideration of the missionaries and their engagement with language is followed by a consideration of the native commissioner’s department and its engagement with the law. In particular, it looks at how much work the local administrators had to do with local people in order to garner essential information about their legal systems. This work laid the foundations for a local ethnography and ultimately for the anthropological

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study of local peoples. At the time, however, it was purely instrumentalist work, designed to assist in the administration of law and thereby demonstrate the value of white rule to African communities. Chapter 3 then assesses how far Africans were aware of differences between the administration of law by these whites and that by any other local arbiter. Finally, this part of the book looks at science and at the claims for rationalism and scientific truth that were taken for granted within the white communities. It examines how the missionaries linked science and Christianity, how the native commissioner (NC) linked science and orderly administration, and how all members of the white communities appealed to rationalism as a distinctive marker of their cultural heritage that set them apart from the African communities. A closer examination, however, reveals that the whites were not as rational as they liked to believe.

3 Points of Contact, 1895–1909

The varied communities that were establishing or reestablishing themselves in the Chimanimani mountains in the second half of the 1890s inevitably interacted with each other. Most of these interactions were connected with political economy: with patronage relationships, taxation, mining and farming, and ways of acquiring cash. There were no existing rules about how they should interact in these new circumstances or how they should communicate with each other. However, there were plenty of previous experiences to draw on. Unless circumstances forced a reassessment, people tended to assume that the world was working in ways that they already understood. They continued to produce, trade, and make alliances according to what seemed to them their best chances of success. The disparities between rich and poor seemed to be founded on established, hegemonic norms. People used languages that they had already found to work as a means of communication—unless they were forced by circumstances to adopt new words or new languages—to describe new things or to understand people who had no other way of speaking to them. Beliefs and stereotypes about other communities, whether within or between ethnic/racial groups, framed and limited their contacts. People remained largely within their own worldviews and assumed that the others were operating on broadly the same principles, within the same cosmology and jurisprudence. It seems that Mapungwana’s and Musikavanhu’s people, returning into the southern end of the district, initially bore the brunt of the new rulers’ exactions. However, by mid-1897, fleeing from malaria, the white farmers surveyed a new township, some 35 miles further north, between Mutema’s and Mutambara’s people. This new Melsetter became the location of the government offices, the gaol, the courthouse, and the new, state-run judicial system. The police and the NC remained in the south, at Kenilworth and at Chipinge, the new name for the old Melsetter. The state’s officials, most notably the resident magistrate (our old friend

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William Longden) and the native commissioner (our other old friend, Llewellyn Meredith), tried to establish a state monopoly over rights to extract tribute and to hear cases. They struggled to wrest away from the Dutch the authority to peg farms, hear court cases, and raise labor and tax and to concentrate these powers within state institutions. Meredith also tried to prevent the forced raising of labor and began to collect the £1 hut tax in cash. The ritual and political authority of local chiefs continued into the new era. Clearly the alliances between masvikiro and chiefs remained important since in April 1896 Meredith complained about the excessive influence of diviners in advising paramounts during judicial hearings.1 However, for some chiefs, such as Mapungwana, the relationship between ruler and svikiro had been disrupted by Gaza incursions. Four of the svikiro’s wives, and his son, had been taken to Bileni; the svikiro fled with a fifth wife across the Save; Mapungwana remained in place and tried to defend his people against the Nguni.2 In any event, we do not seem to have evidence of chiefs following a secular route as local agents under white rule, while senior spirit mediums took on more populist leadership roles as guardians of fertility, as Terence Ranger and David Maxwell suggest may have occurred elsewhere.3 However, as elsewhere, it seems likely that chiefs were challenged by the dispersal of their people over much larger areas than previously. People had been scattered by the Nguni, and it was not until after the Portuguese defeated Maguywane in 1897 that the dislocated Ndau people returned in numbers to the highlands.4 Moreover, close settlement, as a defensive measure, was no longer necessary against Gaza incursion and was ineffective against white incursion. Ranger argues that more dispersed settlement in Makoni district helped people to avoid paying their crop and labor tribute to chiefs, enabling the entire household to become involved in peasant production.5 However, there is no evidence that such dispersal in the Chimanimani district was driven by incentives to produce independently for the market—partly because much of the dispersal was into the less fertile Save valley and partly because there was very little by way of markets for agricultural produce. Moreover, tribute relationships had already been undermined by recent upheavals and scattering. The early twentieth century, with the return of Ngorima, for example, probably saw renewal of chiefly power rather than its further disintegration. Once white settlement began, Africans and whites drew on their previous backgrounds and experiences in their perceptions of each other. It would be a mistake to overestimate the effect of European hegemony over routine activities during this period. Certainly, the whites thought in terms of a money economy, waged labor, and private property in land and behaved accordingly. Their actions gave a material reality to these ideas, to which Africans had to develop material responses. Nonetheless, the fact that Africans had to respond to what whites were doing does not necessarily mean that they fully recognized or accepted the underlying ideas that caused whites to behave in those ways. Relationships with the incoming white groups were initially treated as normal interactions, based on past experience of how people behave. However, some whites

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fitted these existing models better than others. For local people, the missionaries were perhaps the group that was hardest to accommodate within established norms. On the one hand, they behaved as the Gaza ndunas did: they spoke in SiZulu; they demanded labor contributions from the people on the land they had seized; they took young women and resisted attempts by their fathers to reclaim them; they felt threatened by the Big Tree shrine; and, like local headmen, they provided food in exchange for clientage when there were shortages. On the other hand, there was much that was new. For those people living on the land that they had claimed, contact with the missionaries was difficult to avoid. The mission intervened actively and extensively in their lives. Missionaries insisted that children—boys and girls—living on their land should come to the school and that adults should come to the church; they interfered in marriage arrangements; and they did not respect chisi days, when it was sacrilegious to work in the fields. They also introduced new farming methods and provided training in marketable skills, including bricklaying, literacy, carpentry, and needlework. Indeed, the entire purpose of the mission was to get Africans to accept new ideas and to reject the established norms. The new state had more obvious continuities with the Gaza state. There was a local overseeing nduna, the native commissioner who punished local chiefs for disobedience. Makuza, the secular claimant to the Musikavanhu succession, was sentenced to two weeks in prison in 1895 for refusing to supply 100 laborers for the mines in Salisbury; in 1896, Mutambara, who was distrusted by the state officials, was fined two head of cattle and 10 bags of corn for disobeying an order from Meredith to come to his office (some 55 miles distant) and was kept in custody until it was paid; and in 1904, Ngorima fought with a policeman when he was (wrongly) accused of harboring a woman to whom he had no rights and refused to be handcuffed. The secretary of the Law Department commented, “An induna is just a liable to arrest as any other inhabitant of this Territory, either European or Native…. Should he shew the slightest opposition to such orders or any disinclination to obey them he has only himself to thank should he be handcuffed.”6 The state also heard cases, determined who had the right to own firearms, enforced payment of tribute, and raised impis. There was a reason for these similarities with the Gaza state. The native commissioner was instructed to “regard yourself as a Native chief ” and to settle any civil cases using local law, or “native custom,” as the British South Africa Company (BSACo) called it.7 Meredith readily embraced the concept of himself as a paramount at the apex of a system of chiefs and subchiefs. As well as collecting tax/ tribute, he also took on the judicial functions of African authorities, holding regular hearings in the open outside his offices in Chipinge. He had distinct ideas about African polities and appropriate forms of rule. Between 1899 and 1900, in response to central requests to identify local authorities, he worked hard at “concentrating the Natives and forming larger villages under sub-chiefs.”8 This was not only because he thought that larger communities would facilitate tax collection and labor

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migration but also because it suited his ideas about restoring “traditional” systems of power, “under headmen who are by right indunas and entitled to the office.”9 However, Meredith’s understanding of “entitlement” did not encompass spiritual entitlement, and he intervened in the Musikavanhu succession to favor the secular candidate, explicitly rejecting charismatic claims to leadership. Moreover, his list of chiefs and subchiefs noted that “Mapungwans’ not quite complete until large kraals are fixed up…. When I have all the Natives living in large kraals I shall be able to make the list more complete.”10 In other words, Meredith saw chiefdoms primarily as administrative districts, and overlooked their deeper sources of spiritual and political authority.11 In practice, however, local ideologies of authority and Meredith’s ideologies of authority produced much the same experience for the people being ruled. Meredith’s position as supervisor over other chiefs paralleled Gaza systems of rule and provided support for local authorities as they reestablished themselves after years of Nguni and white incursion. In many ways, the incoming white farmers were also remarkably similar to the outgoing Gaza rulers. They did not raid for wives, but they did want a monopoly on hunting. They were engaged in extensive trading networks. They demanded tribute labor of the peoples whose land they occupied—but they also provided them with patronage in the form of loans to pay taxes or raise bridewealth, although, unlike the Nguni, they did not incorporate local men into their power structures. They exploited the labor of their wives and children in farming their land. They were largely illiterate and did not send their children to school. And their views on cattle were thoroughly African: Cattle—to eat and trample down the long rank grass: Cattle, to break the land and carry their transport: Cattle, whose diseases and nature they understood better than those of any other animal tried in Africa. Cattle was the secret password which promised success in African agriculture to their children if not to themselves. No wonder, therefore, if for ten years every shilling these farmers made has gone into the purchase of stock, and every other form of farming has been regarded as, for the present, a waste of time. Cattle have been to them the one thing worth putting money into and all the other methods of farming seen in their neighbourhood has only provoked a smile from the quiet grim faces of these men whose forefathers have farmed in Africa for generations. Cattle first, wheat, corn, fruit afterwards.12

These new rulers accelerated the introduction of cash into the district, but otherwise their ideas of economic success were familiar and recognizable to the people already living there. African people, whether returnees or existing residents, had various points of contact with the white farmers. Most of these were based on labor rather than on trade. It does not seem that people significantly increased food production to supply the white settlers, unlike what Terry Ranger found in Makoni district or Betsy Schmidt in Goromonzi district.13 Admittedly, in 1895, the newly arrived white farmers had been rendered destitute by locust attacks in April and were offering their clothes, and other manufactured cloth, in exchange for local millet.

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Cloth, especially that known as “limbo,” was a valuable currency in the African communities and played a growing role in bridewealth agreements. Those whites who could get access to carriers or transport riders to Fort Victoria were able to exchange beads, copper armbands, and salt, as well as limbo, and would offer a quarter pound of salt in exchange for a basketful (five pounds) of mealie meal.14 In general, however, the fortunes of the Dutch farmers and the African farmers rose and fell together, both subject to rainfall, crop pests, and stock disease. Neither community had good access to markets or to imported goods for exchange. Both could provide enough food for themselves most of the time and had few reasons to buy from each other. Indeed, the white farmers seemed often to be awash with produce and no one to sell it to. The 1908 Melsetter Agricultural Show, for example, was a showcase for jams, jellies, bottled fruits, and dried fruits: all preserving produce that would have rotted long before it reached the nearest sizable markets in Umtali and Fort Victoria, over a hundred miles away on almost unusable roads. In other years, such as 1902, when disease killed all their cattle and prevented the movement of oxcarts in or out of the district, the white farmers lived on “Kaffir food” and lobbied hard for improved transport links. Yet in the 1908–1909 season, it was Africans who bought green mealies from the whites, whose irrigated crops had survived the drought that year.15 So, although there was regular trading, there was no “peasant boom.”16 Moreover, selling produce seems to have been less important to African men than stockpiling it. In 1909, Longden observed that Africans were replenishing their granaries rather than selling grain, even though there was a local market.17 Power relationships were being rebuilt within the African communities through the traditional means of acquiring clients and manipulating bridewealth agreements. Crops failed often, particularly in the Save and Odzi valleys. Consequently, building up food reserves (and thus opportunities for patronage) remained more important than markets. Sometime in early 1900s, for example, Magora rescued Vumbara’s family from starvation by supplying them with two goats, two hoes, and up to 10 bags of grain.18 The mission similarly supplied food, bought in from considerable distance, during times of food shortage. The fact that there was no food market for African produce does not mean that white settlement offered no local economic opportunities, particularly for women. Men had been involved in waged migrant labor for some time, but women had stayed at home. It seems that with local white settlement, women began to take part in waged work, too. It is widely argued that peasant production intensified the workload for African women.19 I have suggested elsewhere that this is why the BSACo plans for women to be employed as domestics failed: women were too important to peasant production, and they were prevented by men from taking up waged work in urban areas.20 In Melsetter district, however, there was limited peasantization and limited intensification of female agriculture, and, uniquely for Southern Rhodesia, young local women regularly took up waged work as domestic workers and nannies.21 Unfortunately, we know very little about how these women disposed of their earnings or whether their incomes forced a reappraisal of established gender roles.

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Men, however, were unwilling to work locally, knowing that they could get much better rates further afield. This drove the Dutch farmers to fury, as their experiences in the Transvaal and Orange Free State led them to expect local labor to be available for them. Farmers’ demands on African labor were rooted in a shared African past. The burghers from the Boer republics assumed that their seizure of land gave them the right to demand labor as rent payment from the Africans on that land.22 Their expectation of bonded labor had been carried with them from the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, where it had developed over centuries of slavery and interaction with African systems of labor tribute. Their demands were not significantly different from the demands for labor tribute already well established within local communities. People whose land had been seized by the white farmers were forced to provide labor (as rent for the land) and were treated “more like slaves than free subjects.”23 In addition to cultivation, the burghers wanted people to work as bearers and messengers, for, despite their claims to “civilized technology,” it was clear that “the old style of native transport … is a cheaper and quicker means of transport than by wagon.”24 These demands ate into the time available for cultivation or migrant work and produced significant differentiation in local wealth: Africans on unseized land were much better able to pay their taxes.25 However, particularly once the NC stopped the practice of forcing labor, the white farmers struggled to get enough laborers. Their economic position was precarious, and the pay they offered was poor. As well as working for the burghers, Africans were initially also required to work one month for the state on road building, again as tribute rather than paid labor.26 Moreover, the native commissioner was expected to raise waged laborers for the farmers and for the mines. His labor-recruiting tours were built on the assumption that headmen had the power to deliver labor, and the NC’s demands were, in effect, an extension of existing labor obligations.27 However, there was no consistency about the labor demands made by the new rulers. It was unclear what made a person a ruler: control over land or position within the state. This was unclear because the whites themselves were fighting it out between them. The problem for Africans was not that they had to absorb new ideas about political economy or buy into a new hegemonic system of labor. The new rulers (or inkosi) behaved in much the same way as the old. The problem, rather, they said, was that there were “too many Inkosis and they do not know whom to believe.”28 The new overrulers made conflicting labor demands, and Africans were potentially endangered if they misunderstood who had the real power. There were different views between various white constituencies about the labor obligations of local people. Farmers, as patriarchs, claimed the labor of entire families on the land they occupied. This led in 1895 to a spat between Mt. Silinda mission and W. N. Odendaal, a South Melsetter farmer. Odendaal claimed the labor of local man Jonas Hlatcwayo because “his father lives on my farm,” even though Odendaal had pegged his farm after Hlatcwayo had engaged to work at the mission. Dunbar Moodie, who had deemed himself to be a local justice of the peace (JP),

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supported Odendaal’s view of bonded labor, above the mission’s claims based on waged labor contracts. Hlatcwayo was severely beaten for “desertion.”29 It is not recorded what he made of this, but the idea that the overrulers had the right to call on local labor would no doubt have been familiar to him. The white farmers also argued with the state over rights to draw on labor. Meredith stopped men working on the road in lieu of tax but still expected men to do military service when called on. Chief Mapungwana found himself caught in the middle of conflicting demands during the 1897 Chimurenga. Meredith wanted, in his words, to raise an impi, but the white burghers in South Melsetter refused to allow men to leave their work in the fields. Meredith lost his temper with Mapungwana when told this and wrote that he “was mighty wild & told him that the next time I heard of him listening to any orders but mine I would strike him.”30 Meanwhile, Meredith himself was caught in the middle of conflicting demands from white farmers to deliver labor to them, and from the state to deliver “Shangaan” labor to struggling mines.31 Local men clearly resisted and resented white overrule as they had resisted and resented Gaza overrule, but they also, as with Gaza rule, exploited its opportunities. When African men did accept local work, they were hard negotiators: during the rinderpest epidemic in 1897, which prevented the use of draft cattle, it was claimed that Africans doubled their charges for bearing yet carried lighter weights.32 Building skills were marketable: in 1898, the missionaries fretted over the “extraordinary high price of comparatively unskilled labour,” and in April 1899, while wages for bearing or farmwork were about 10/- (10 shillings) plus food per calendar month, bricklaying attracted 15/- plus food.33 By December 1908, wages for essential road labor were raised to £1pcm, but this still compared poorly with mine wages, which, at Selukwe in 1904, allowed a man to save £2/10/- per month.34 It is easy to see why mining appealed to young men and enhanced their sense of their masculinity, at least once they got back home. Employment for the state, as police, messengers, clerks, and interpreters offered comparatively good pay, especially for those with a skill. The native messengers could gain status as agents of the new authorities, but the state had a rather instrumentalist view of them: Meredith commented that “whenever a messenger leaves, his successor receives the same name to prevent confusion”!35 The NC’s messengers were normally paid only £1/10/-pcm, rising to a maximum of £4pcm, but this was still a competitive rate for local work.36 Good interpretation was a much more valuable—and much rarer—skill. A “Coloured interpreter” in the 1890s was paid £7/10/0 pcm.37 He was sacked for fraud, so a student from the mission was appointed at the same rate in November 1900—but Wilder negotiated his salary down to £2pcm to stop him from being “spoiled.”38 The official “native” rate of £7/10/- stood up well against the “white” rate of £10pcm.39 The mission also employed skilled workers, as teachers, evangelists, and other “helpers,” but its pay was much lower than that offered by the state: a teacher’s salaries was £1pcm until 1905, when it was raised to £1/5/- for married men. Moreover, this was paid for only nine months of the year, and teachers had to negotiate translation work or

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similar to tide them over the long holiday.40 To put this in context, at this time in the district, on average a goat cost between 10/- and £1, a bag of grain £10/-, a stretch of limbo about 6/-, and a cow between £4 and £5.41 One of the most common reasons for whites and Africans to come into contact with each other, then, was because white people wanted Africans to work for them. This was not a new idea for local people, who were accustomed to paying tribute in labor, and to men working for wages at the mines. However, African strategies to get better pay, and the involvement of women in the labor market, suggest that some of the established ideas about labor allocation were beginning to change. Meanwhile, the white farmers (and initially the white state) demanded that local Africans labor for them in ways that paralleled established labor-tribute practices. Increasingly, however, the state required that cash wages were paid for local work, too. The state wanted cash wages because cash was needed to pay taxes. The payment of taxes was another significant point of contact between Africans and the state. The native commissioner sent out African employees to collect taxes but also personally visited many villages and set up his tax collector’s table. He held family heads responsible for the taxes of junior men and held the local authorities—village heads and ward heads— responsible for ensuring that taxes were paid. Again, this relationship could be interpreted in terms of a tribute payment: existing strategies were adaptable to meet obligations. After 1903, taxes were £2 per annum, payable by adult men, plus extra for each of their wives.42 To meet the new tax demands, men developed a cycle of migrant labor and harvesting. Male activities of hunting and trading were reduced. Instead, men, particularly young men, undertook waged labor for limited periods, as a means of raising cash. This built on the established labor pattern of young men going to the mines on short contracts to raise bridewealth. Both bridewealth and tax effectively relieved the young men of their cash once they got home; but at least, in the former case, they got a bride, and the senior men consolidated their position as patrons. Tax demands, however, like tribute payments to the Gaza state, benefited primarily the invaders. Taxes were due in July. New crops were sown with the rains between December and February, so men were busy harvesting green mealies between February and April, and other grain through until June. Wage earners usually left between April and July, many returning in September/October, with others staying away until December. Consequently, taxes were rarely collected on time and often were delivered later than the three-month grace period. In 1906, the NC reported that the gaol was overcrowded because of nonpayment of taxes.43 Senior men had to find cash locally to cover for absent junior men, increasing intergenerational tensions: “kindly inform Dimbana, Tazireka, Mufara and Muwengwa, natives of this District, that Head man Marwendo wishes them to repay the money (£4) that he has had to borrow in order to pay their tax. The natives in question are working at the Mutonono mine.”44 Meredith noted that many men needed loans to pay their taxes but couldn’t raise them because they had no cattle as collateral.45 Private loans seem to have

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been a way out of this problem, sometimes from white landholders but increasingly from other Africans. For example, in 1904, Taguta, who worked for the British South Africa Native Police, borrowed £6/10/-, plus 4/- worth of limbo; in 1907, as noted previously, £4 was borrowed by a headman to cover absent men’s taxes; during 1909, prison warder Chikukwa lent £5 to a “subchief ” of Mutema (which is interesting because it shows that a regular local salary trumped older forms of power), and Moses lent Zawaya £8/3/0. In 1910, Mapungwau lent Mujumeya £3, and Mutiguri claimed he’d lent Muswazaenda £14/10/-.46 These loans were often linked to some form of clientage, including pledging of women: Chasata lent £11.10.0 to Chinyana in exchange for the right to dispose of his daughter in marriage, Indaputa was unhappy that her father had pledged her to marry Marimandia in exchange for a cash loan, and Kungerwa similarly refused to marry Zingwanda, who had provided her father with £4/10/- and a goat “to get over a difficulty”. 47 The new ndunas’s cash tribute, then, created hardship and consolidated a pattern of debt-based patronage and marriage arrangements. However, on the bright side, the new ndunas’s seizures of fertile African women were minimal, creating some opportunities for disrupted marriage alliances to be revisited and resettled.48 Records from the late 1900s indicate a shift towards bridewealth negotiated in consumer goods or cash and away from shamwari or muranda arrangements. This is interesting in three ways. First, it was just at this time that other rural communities saw an increase in men from poor families agreeing to service marriages, reflecting increased rural differentiation, as the market began to dominate peasant production.49 Second, cattle have a largely symbolic role in these bridewealth agreements: they are talked about a lot, but not many are exchanged. For example, in June 1909, a claim against an original payment of goats, cash, hoes, and limbo was expressed as a claim for four head of cattle.50 The absence of the beast themselves was partly because of the scattering and impoverishment of the Gaza years, which had made goats much more prevalent than cows. It was also because there were strict restrictions on cattle movements, following the rinderpest and redwater, so a man could indicate the cattle that would form the roora payment, but had to hand over cash if actual payment was required.51 But it was also—and this is the third interesting thing about bridewealth payments in this period—because cash and commodities were playing a growing part in the local economy, despite the district being such an isolated backwater within the white economy. Limbo, cash, and hoes appear in almost every disputed bridewealth agreement, but so, too, do shirts, brass wire, guns, or bags of grain with a cash value attached. The influence of the mining industry is clear in all of this. As early as 1897, Meredith reported that “the Natives of this [district] have very few cattle and to lobolla they resort to money in a great many cases … this is alright and less trouble then the cattle lobolla would be, as a man desiring to marry must first go to work for the money, therefore the idea fits very well, and is rather an advantage.”52 Men who met at the mines sometimes made marriage arrangements with each other. Bridewealth cash was even transferred, there and then, without approved

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witnesses—causing problems when the folks back home (particularly the women) found out.53 Tax demands, then, did not require fundamentally new forms of behavior or thought. Nonetheless, the new state had brought innovations in the nature of tribute it demanded and the ways it was collected. Rather than a tax on the products of hunting, hunting was prohibited, and so too was grass burning. Seizures of fertile women ceased. The customs border that had been policed at the Save disappeared. African men were required to pay cash rather than labor, skins, or goats, and tribute was based on wives, albeit not immediately and not effectively at first. Prison was introduced as a means of punishment. It was difficult for people to predict what was likely and what was unlikely in the NC’s demands for payment: in March 1907, a rumor about a tax on small stock sparked off systematic slaughter until Meredith intervened to deny the rumors.54 And unlike under Gaza overrule, the extensive seizure of land by whites made it impossible to escape tribute payment by relocating to new land. In their forced encounters with these changes, local people, particularly men, were beginning to engage with different modes of thought and new ideas about government, administration, and law. Meanwhile, conversely, whites had difficulties in understanding or predicting African behavior. White people liked to think of themselves as rational, but they could be very irrational in their fears and beliefs about Africans. Some suspected that Africans had access to a kind of arcane knowledge unavailable to whites. For example, in September 1895, the Rhodesian Advertiser advised its readers that “from preparations being made by the natives of the kraals around this district, it is anticipated that the coming rainy season will be a heavy one.”55 The whites were notably jumpy about African spirit rituals, particularly after the Chimurenga wars against the white settlers during 1896–1897, which the state believed to have been coordinated by the Mwari cult.56 The Melsetter burghers largely disregarded the Chimurenga, partly because Longden’s Nguni informants assured him that local chiefs were unlikely to get involved and partly because they did not have adequate stores of food or ammunition to go into laager, even had they felt at risk.57 However, in August 1897, during the Portuguese war with the Gaza commander Maguywane the inhabitants of South Melsetter convinced themselves that they were on the brink of an Nguni incursion from the east: The witch-doctors had told the natives that they must rise and murder the whites. They would get certain signs which they must interpret as signals for action. The first sign would be when the fowls went to the apex of the huts and made nest and laid eggs. The next sign would be a darkness spreading over the land for two weeks. That would be the signal for all natives to leave their employment and join the impis.58

Other reports stated that, during a three-day darkness, “lions and leopards and bees would destroy the people.”59 Longden hurriedly raised a Boer commando group that rode furiously around the district—but nothing happened, prompting

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the missionaries and local burghers to write a sycophantic letter to Longden “to express our gratitude and appreciation of the prompt manner in which you have done all in your power to safe-guard the lives of the inhabitants from the rumoured native rising.”60 Meredith, however, investigated the matter and decided that the whole business was founded on someone overhearing African boys discussing the Passover story that they had been taught by missionaries.61 Despite Meredith’s rationalizations, whites persisted in seeing Africans as mysterious people, involved in strange, and potentially dangerous, rituals. The movements of the defeated charismatic claimant to the Musikavanhu succession were monitored warily for years. In 1904, Meredith found one Melsetter burgher fretting because Africans might be “cutting knobberries” (they turned out to be hoe handles) and another worried by refusals to work for white men (they had gone off to get better wages elsewhere).62 The farmers’ ignorance and their anxiety about the “unknowableness” of Africans in these cases are striking. Eighteen months later, there was a flurry of concern about a widespread ritual involving the cleaning of villages, bagging of grain, and making offerings at pools to ancestors. Meredith investigated and decided there was no political significance or hostility to government involved and that the object of the ritual was to “appease the spirits and cause them to stave off sickness and send plenty of rain.”63 Whites dealt with African strangeness by romanticizing and fictionalizing it. Longden recounted a yarn about how he cowed a delegation of chiefs, angry at the loss of the Musikavanhu rainmaking spirit, by claiming he could make rain just before the onset of the rainy season. He then promised to stop it when it became particularly heavy: “As it happened the rains ended rather suddenly with the natural conclusion of the wet season. The new ‘rain-maker’s’ reputation was firmly established.” His story of tricking Africans with his rational predictions comes straight out of the Rider Haggard genre. On another occasion, Longden claimed, he frightened people into paying their taxes on time by threatening them with “a sign in the sky,” having noticed in a 1910 copy of Scientific American that Halley’s Comet was due to appear.64 By portraying Africans as mysterious, credulous, and superstitious, whites reinforced their own sense of themselves as rational, scientific, and, thereby, in European terms, superior people. Longden’s stories, or the newspaper’s folklore about African behavior as a predictor of weather, show how white settlers made sense of African society by reference to stereotypes about “heathens” that were already familiar to them: Africans as savage, irrational, and mysterious. The missionaries, too, made use of popular stereotypes. Whites liked to believe that African men were lazy nomads who purchased their wives and then made them do all the work. In his evidence to the South Africa Native Affairs Commission in 1904, Wilder exhorted, “Make him give up his polygamy, give up his ‘lobolo,’ give up being supported by his wives, and make him support his wife, make him give up his nomadic tribes.” Yet Wilder had only minutes before asserted that local people were not nomadic, that men worked “side by side with their wives” in the fields, and that the need to raise lobolo (bridewealth), if combined with access to decent grain markets, would provide

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a strong disincentive to drunkenness.65 Wilder fell back on the stereotype, even though it directly contradicted the evidence of his own experience. In these first encounters between local people and the white occupiers, the whites had much to learn. The missionaries and the native commissioner, in particular, had strong incentives to learn more about the people with whom they worked. Their initial stereotypes did not preclude the possibilities of gathering knowledge about Africans from Africans and recognizing them as the experts on their own laws, traditions, beliefs, and languages. However, the stereotypes did create a context for hearing this information: new information had to be accommodated within what was already believed, and only slowly challenged existing paradigms. Previous backgrounds and experiences also affected how whites saw each other. For all their cultural similarities, the whites did not constitute a unified hegemonic assault on local culture. Their backgrounds and interests were diverse and conflicting.66 Within the administration, Meredith regarded Longden as a fool, especially because he did not speak local languages and was consequently defrauded by the police and interpreter.67 The state regarded the burghers as disloyal and untrustworthy: Longden was appointed as resident magistrate primarily to keep an eye on the Dutch on the eve of the Jameson Raid. After the crisis, the burgers freely admitted to Longden that they had had a plan to kill him and Meredith to defend the Boer Republics against Rhodes.68 For their part, the burgers, many of whom had chosen to leave the Boer republics in search of greater independence, found the state restrictive and unhelpful. Not only did the native commissioner interfere in labor-rent arrangements and connive in Africans swanning off to work in distant mines, but the resident magistrate brought prosecutions for brutality, grass burning, and poaching.69 The missionaries, meanwhile, continually fell out with Meredith, because they defended young women against fathers or patrons who had arranged legitimate, legal bridewealth agreements for them, physically preventing them from taking the women away. The missionaries were generally well thought of by the white farmers because they provided an essential medical service and participated in the South Melsetter Farmers’ Association. But they were of a different religion from the Anglican administrators and the devotedly Dutch Reform Church (DRC) farmers. When they opened a school for the white children—who were less able to read and write than the African children attached to Mt. Silinda—there were suspicions that this was an attempt to impose British hegemony over the Dutch. It was very important to the Dutch farmers that they maintained their language and traditions. Whatever their differences, the missionaries and the administrators shared a language, and schooling in that language threatened the continuation of Dutch culture under British rule. This suspicion about English-language schooling reveals the importance of language in determining perceptions and alliances within and between the disparate communities. The Nguni had expected the Ndau to use their language, Shangaan. However, the whites did not expect, or even want, local people to speak to them

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in their own languages. Ali and Alamin Mazrui have suggested that in Kenya, the need to maintain boundaries between white and African society led to some hostility toward Africans becoming too fluent in English. This, they suggest, was characteristic of settler societies: in Uganda, which had few white residents, there were fewer reservations about teaching English in schools.70 In Melsetter district, the boundaries between white and African communities were not so easily defined by language. The majority of white settlers did not speak the same language as the state administrators, and many of them struggled to produce fluent English. Nonetheless, European languages, whether Dutch or English, were not generally used to speak with Africans. Africans were expected to master chiLapalapa, or “kitchen Kaffir,” instead, a language that was developed on the mines as a lingua franca for the issuing of orders. African men involved in the mines or the mission acquired or consolidated a portfolio of languages, both local and European; African women acquired chiLapalapa in white homes. But African women were given few opportunities to speak English or Dutch, and even men who went to the mines were more likely to speak Shangaan than to speak European languages. Boundaries between the communities were thus maintained in much the way that Mazrui and Mazrui describe. The missionaries taught some English in their schools, but their medium of teaching and evangelism was siZulu. They wanted to use siZulu for inspirational purposes, not just to issue orders: they wanted to teach and to convert. They prided themselves on their use of the vernacular. It was, then, unfortunate for them that the vernacular they had expected to use in Gazaland was not the language that local people actually spoke. Following the removal of the Gaza capital to Bileni, the missionaries found that Shangaan was dropped by people in the Chimanimanis, and “they had to practically beat people before they admitted they understood it.”71 This suggests that the missionaries were not initially seen as a threat: it was possible to refuse to communicate with them and to relish the freedom from using the language of the overrulers. The white settlers, both English and Dutch speakers, communicated with African employees using chiLapalapa. 72 Employers generally wanted simply to be able to communicate instructions to their employees, and knowledge of their language was not essential to this process. So, although white children on farms often picked up the local language, there was little systematic interest in language acquisition among the white settlers, not least because there was little interest in exchanging thoughts and ideas with Africans. As we have seen, this led to white farmers becoming easily scared by African behavior that they didn’t understand. It also opened the way for them to absorb African perceptions of the world.73 For the state, on the other hand, mastery of languages was very a useful attribute and played a major part in the appointments to both native commissioner and resident magistrate posts. Longden’s grasp of vernacular languages seems to have remained limited throughout his life, and he relied heavily on interpreters in both siZulu/Shangaan and chiNdau. However, he was fluent in Afrikaans and very popular among the farmers of South Melsetter, where he established his own

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farm. Meredith claims that the administrator told him that he was to be transferred, against his will, from Makoni district to Melsetter “because the majority of the settlers are Dutch and you are the only Native Commissioner who, I am told, can speak Dutch.”74 On the other hand, in 1895, his predecessor, who had failed to raise the number of African laborers expected of him, was dismissed from his post on the grounds that “the Native Commissioner for Gazaland should have a thorough knowledge of the Shangaan language.”75 It is ironic, in view of these demands from the state for fluency in Dutch and Shangaan, that most people in the district spoke chiNdau as their first language. Court cases under Longden and his staff were conducted in English, but Meredith collected taxes, raised labor, and heard civil cases in his version of chiShona, which was not quite chiNdau. However, using a language is not the same as communicating. A willingness to exchange ideas is what matters in communication, and although Longden used translators, he rarely showed any interest in what African people thought. Some white farmers, on the other hand, could enjoy conversation with Africans, even if they shared no language, particularly if they had interests in common. Some of the white farmers saw themselves as local “chiefs” and cultivated social relationships with other African authorities. It seems there could be genuine communication between these men, even where they did not share language. Jan Hendrick Brand Serfontein remembered from the early 1920s how Musikavanhu would visit his father, a white farmer within the paramount’s territory, and my dad would invite him on to the stoep, and he’d give him a chair on the stoep and they’d sit and they’d talk…. He couldn’t speak the Shona, and this old king couldn’t speak kitchen kaffir, but he had an interpreter [from “kitchen Kaffir”] all the time telling him what was happening.76

This Musikavanhu was Makuza, the secular claimant who gained his position in 1897 following help from Wilder and Meredith. He clearly enjoyed talking with the white landholders in the district, for in 1895 Wilder noted that he “does not pass the place without calling in to have a chat,” presumably in siZulu/Shangaan.77 A small number of whites and Africans, then, were “boundary crossers,” people who inhabited a world of translation. This was not the same as simply speaking another language which many white children learned to do. Translation involved converting ideas and could take place even without a shared language. It assumed a recognition that others did things differently, and thought differently. Such differences were not always immediately obvious, for much that happened could be understood within existing ideas about how the world worked. The native commissioner and his staff were sanctioned to make these crossings into an alien and mysterious African worldview, to issue instructions, but also to report back on whether all was well and safe for whites in that world. The missionaries, on the other hand, merely wanted local people to understand the Christian worldview. Their forays into translation were designed not so much to report back as to carry over. For this, they depended heavily on their “helpers.” The translators,

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interpreters, native messengers, and constables, whose names are rarely recorded (and that were frequently simply ascribed by their employers), were the active agents carrying the new state’s world into the everyday lives of the people. These encounters and crossings took place not on an intellectual plane but in material encounters about taxes, labor, bridewealth conflicts, or simply passing the time of day. And, of course, taxes, labor, bridewealth, and even ideas about how, and with whom, to converse were determined by the beliefs and expectations that people already had about each other, about what was rational and true, and about how power worked in the world. NOTES 1. NC Quarterly Report, 2 April 1896, NUE 2/1/1, 154. 2. Mapungwani v. Chigumunda, 21 April 1909, S1069; J. K. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism among the Ndau of Southern Rhodesia 1890– 1935” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1973), 149. 3. Terence Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerilla War in Zimbabwe (London: James Currey, 1985), 44; David Maxwell, Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People c.1870s–1990s (Edinburgh: International African Library/Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 53ff. 4. Rhodesian Advertiser, 20 August 1897. 5. Ranger, Peasant Consciousness, 32. 6. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 320; H.W.D. Longden, Red Buffalo: The Story of Will Longden—Pioneer, Friend and Emissary of Rhodes (Cape Town: Juta & Co., 1950), 186; R v. Mutambara, case no. 27/1896, 7 September 1896, D3/3/1; Sec, Law Dept., to Magistrate, Melsetter, 5 December 1904, DM2/4/1. 7. J. B. Hulley for CNC, to NC, 30 June 1895, NUE 1/1/1. 8. NC Quarterly Report, 6 October 1899, NUE 2/1/3, 123. This was in the context of reorganizing the Native Affairs Department under the 1898 constitution. 9. NC Half-Yearly Report, 2 April 1900, NUE 2/1/3, 257. 10. List of Chiefs and Sub-chiefs in Melsetter District, 28 February 1900, NUE 1/1/1. Spelling and punctuation in original. 11. Although he did acknowledge the spiritual importance to the Musikavanhu people of the original stone shrine where lineage ancestors had been buried. NC to Superintendent of Natives (SN), Umtali, 11 February 1908, NUE 2/1/6. 12. “Farming in Melsetter District. The Cattle Sickness. Poverty and Desolation,” Rhodesian Advertiser, 3 July 1902. 13. Ranger, Peasant Consciousness; Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasants, Traders and Wives. Shona Women in the history of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939 (London: James Currey, 1992). 14. Shirley Sinclair, The Story of Melsetter (Salisbury: M. O. Collins, 1971), 24; interview with Mrs. Maria Magdalena Moolman, 10 July 1970, NAZ collection, ORAL/MO2. 15. Rhodesian Advertiser, 16 April 1908; Rhodesian Advertiser, 3 July 1902; AR, 31 December 1908, N9/1/11. 16. With one possible exception: Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 526, states that, in 1900, irrigation was being used for maize, sugarcane, and onions by Africans in Musikavanhu district, and in 1909, Longden noted that these Africans in Chikore had been planting beans as recommended by the American Mission. NC AR 1909, N9/1/12.

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17. NC AR 1909, N9/1/12. Longden did note that Africans in Chikore had been growing beans, however. 18. Magora v. Vumbara, 26 November 1908, S1069. 19. Schmidt, Peasants, Traders and Wives, makes this argument for Southern Rhodesia, but it is widely applied elsewhere, too. A forceful and entertaining case is made by Helen Bradford, “Peasants, Historians, and Gender: A South African Case Study Revisited, 1850–1886,” History and Theory 39 (2000): 86–110. 20. Diana Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 95–118. 21. Mr. John Bill, born Melsetter early 1900s, interviewed April 2002. NC AR, 1909, noted that three women were employed as nannies; NC AR, 1910, noted that “Native women are being more and more employed as nurses and domestic servants,” N9/1/12, 13. In 1917, in his Annual Report, the chief native commissioner observed that “in the Melsetter District only do an appreciable number of native girls enter domestic service, about 150 being employed in that capacity.” 22. “The Three Plagues. Rinderpest, Locusts and Natives,” Rhodesian Advertiser, 5 November 1897. See also Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 184–85. 23. Half-Yearly Report, 20 October 1897, NUE 2/1/2, 316. 24. Rhodesian Advertiser, 9 September 1895. 25. Half-Yearly Report, 6 October 1899, NUE 2/1/3, 128. 26. Half-Yearly Report, 20 October 1897, NUE 2/1/2, 317. The road program’s recruitment was not helped by the overseer, who was eventually prosecuted in 1899 after repeated complaints by local headmen of his brutality. NC to Overseer-in-Charge, Road Party, 11 March 1899, NUE 2/1/2, 691; further complaints from Meredith to the Roads Overseer, 8 May 1899, 10 May 1899, NUE 2/1/3. 27. CNC to NC, 1 July 1895, NUE 1/1/1; Meredith, Memoirs, passim; Longden, Red Buffalo, 188. 28. NC to Sec, Native Dept., 23 September 1895, NUE 2/1/1, cited in Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 222. 29. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 185. Rennie, following Wilder, here refers to this man only as “Jonas,” but my identification seems sound. His surname is also rendered as Hlatymoyo (AR, Chikore Station, 1906, UN 3/20/1/1/3) or Hlatywayo (letter from Chikore Mission Station, 11 April 1921, UN 3/2/1/14) and is an Nguni-ization of the Ndau porcupine totem, Nungu. This spelling is from Rennie, 530. 30. NC to Civil Commissioner (Longden), 17 March 1897, DM2/9/1. 31. Lord Grey to Longden, 4 April 1897, in Longden, Red Buffalo, Appendix H, 231; CNC, H. M. Taberer, personal letter to NC, 14 January 1901, NUE1/1/1; “Exeter Hall Rampant,” Rhodesian Advertiser, 7 November 1901. 32. “The Three Plagues. Rinderpest, Locusts and Natives,” Rhodesian Advertiser, 5 November 1897. 33. Members of Mt. Silinda mission to Judson Smith, American Board, Boston, 8 February 1898, UN 3/2/1/2; NC statistical report, 1 April 1899, NUE 2/1/2, 725. 34. NC MR, 31 December 1908, NUE 2/1/6; Mabundi v. Maronzorenyi, 31 December 1904, S1069 There were 20 shillings to a pound. 35. NC to CNC, 26 October 1897, NUE 2/1/2, 331. 36. NC to Acting CNC, 10 February 1904, NUE 2/1/4. 37. Sec, Law Dept., to Magistrate, Melsetter, 22 April 1898, DM2/4/1.

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38. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 539. 39. W. Longden, Resident Magistrate (RM) to Legal Dept., 5 June 1903, DM 1/6/2; RM to Louis Ferreira, Esq., 4 November 1905, DM1/7/1. 40. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 539. Evangelists were paid comparable rates. 41. Reconstructed from equivalences offered for bridewealth payments during 1908 and 1909, S1069; South African Native Affairs Commission, (SANAC) 1904, §34,000; Resident Magistrate’s Annual Reports. 42. Tax was raised from £1 to £2 in 1903. White farmers hoped that this raise would force Africans to sell their sheep to them, but Meredith noted it was more likely to attract them to higher-paying work at the mines, at the expense of local farmers. 43. NC Monthly Report (MR), 28 February 1906. It was the poor rainy season of 1905– 1906 that resulted in many men being arrested for nonpayment of taxes; MR, 31 January 1906, NUE2/1/5. 44. NC Melsetter to NC Selukwe, 15 April 1907, NUE 2/1/6. There was a similar request to NCs Selukwe and Gwanda in December 1908, NUE 2/1/6. 45. Notes problems in borrowing in 1906, MR, 31 December 1906, NUE 2/1/6; also 10 November 1908, NUE 2/1/6, 9. 46. Half-Yearly Report, 6 October 1899, NUE 2/1/3, 128, for loans from whites; John v. Teguta, 4 November 1908; NC Melsetter to NC Selukwe, 15 April 1907, NUE 2/1/6; Chikukwa v. Mawondganidze, 3 June 1909; Moses v. Zawaya, 31 August 1909; Mapungwau v. Mujumeya, 5 January 1910; Mutiguri v. Muswazaenda, 9 February 1910. All civil cases in S1069. 47. Chashata v. Chinyana, 26 January 1910; Indaputa v. Pachiti, 29 December 1909; Zimgwanda v. Kungerwa, 23 March 1910, S1069. 48. White settlers elsewhere continued the Nguni practice of taking local women as wives, at least until more white women joined their communities, but it seems that the strong community and church bonds of the Dutch farmers, as well as the relatively high numbers of women and children among these settlers, meant that the practice was very uncommon in Melsetter district. 49. Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power, 71. 50. Mawonganidze v. Shati, 3 June 1909, S1069. 51. For example, Musoni v. Njichi, 9 February 1910, S1069, 133. 52. NC Melsetter, QR, 30 September 1897, NUE 2/1/2, 300–301. 53. And so, usefully for the historian, also causing court cases in the archives. For example, Muchatendi v. Chineni, 9 February 1910, S1069, 134: claimed £14/10/-, paid for bridewealth “when they were away at work.” 54. W. N. Odendaal to RM, 11 March 1907, DM2/2/2; MR, 31 March 1907, NUE 2/1/6. 55. “Heavy Rains Predicted,” Rhodesian Advertiser, 9 September 1895. 56. T. O. Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896–7 (London: Heinemann Press, 1967). The view that the cult was behind all the risings of the first chimurenga has been challenged by Julian Cobbing and by David Beach: Julian Cobbing, “The Absent Priesthood,” Journal of African History 18, no. 1 (1977): 61–84; D. N. Beach, “Chimurenga: The Shona Rising of 1896–7,” Journal of African History 20, no. 3 (1979): 395–420; and D. N. Beach, “An Innocent Woman, Unjustly Accused? Charwe, Medium of the Nehanda Mhondoro Spirit, and the 1896–97 Central Shona Rising in Zimbabwe,: History in Africa 25 (1998): 27–54. But the truth of the matter is less important here than the fact that the whites believed that the cult was to blame.

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57. Longden, Red Buffalo, 186–87; Rhodesian Advertiser, 17 July 1896, 2 October 1896. 58. Longden, Red Buffalo, 191. See also Rhodesian Advertiser, 1 September 1897, which noted, “The origin of the disquietude appears to be the witchdoctors.” 59. NC to CNC, supplementary letter, 31 August 1897, NUE 2/1/2. 60. Facsimile of original letter in Longden, Red Buffalo, facing 198 (incidentally, wrongly ascribed by H.W.D Longden to 1896 but clearly, from the content, referring to 1897). 61. Meredith, Memoirs. From the context, it seems that “boys” did really mean boys, not adult African men. 62. MR, prob. 8 August 1904, NUE 2/1/4. 63. NC Melsetter to CNC, 6 February 1906, NUE 2/1/5; Confidential Circular from Acting CNC, 5 February 1906, NUE 1/1/1: the acting chief native commissioner’s view was that “the cleaning up of kraals is laudable and worthy of emulation provided it is done for the sake of being clean, and not to work upon the superstitions of the natives.” Compare J. W. Posselt to Actg CNC, circulated to all NCs, re Mlimo messenger & sedition in Charter district, 17 February 2004, NUE 1/1/1. 64. Longden, Red Buffalo, 193–94. 65. SANAC, §§33,996–97, 34,007, 34,013, 30 August 1904. Nor was this Wilder’s only inconsistency. He also consulted a spirit medium when lost in Gazaland in 1888; Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 158. 66. A point well made regarding British colonialism in general in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 67. Meredith, Memoirs, 176, ME 4/1/4. 68. Longden, Red Buffalo, 183–84. 69. Criminal cases, Melsetter, passim, D3/3/1 through series. 70. Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui, The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), 141. Carol Summers, personal communication, points out that English was not generally welcomed, even in Uganda, and that English was taught primarily to powerful Baganda because they were able to mobilize Christians and missionaries against Swahili, a Muslim language. 71. Rennie, “Ideology and State Formation: Political and Communal Ideologies among the South-Eastern Shona, 1500–1890,” in State Formation in Eastern Africa, ed. Ahmed Idha Salim (London: Heinemann Educational, 1984), 187. 72. Interview with Mr. Bill, April 2002; see also Jan Hendrick Brand Serfontein’s memories, below. 73. See Chapters 6 and 7. 74. Meredith, Memoirs, 163. 75. Secretary, Native Dept, to A. Newnham, NC Melsetter, 30 July 1895, NUE 1/1/1. 76. Interview with Jan Hendrick Brand Serfontein, November 1977, ORAL/223. 77. Wilder to American Board, October 27 1895, cited in Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 320. Wilder had translated for him during his prosecution that year.

4 And the God Was Made Word: Translation in the Mission, 1895–1909

This chapter looks in detail at how texts and translations were used by the mission in the early years of evangelism. It analyzes the interfaces between text, translation, and local interpretation and attempts to uncover what the American and Zulu evangelists believed, how this differed from what African evangelists believed, and how translation influenced local understandings of Christianity. This reconstruction confirms that the Christians’ Word of God could be differently understood even within a single language. Moreover, words and texts had a symbolic and metaphoric value that operated independently of their literal message. People in the south of the Chimanimani district were forced to engage with the worldview of the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) because of the interventionist character of mission. There were two mission stations and various outstations. It was some years before the white missionaries moved out of mud huts and into brick buildings. They tried to convert the people on the land that they had seized, but there was no requirement for people to convert if they lived on the land. The mission was heavily dependent on local people for its supplies of grain, although it also steadily expanded its own agricultural output.1 The Mt. Silinda missionaries believed absolutely in their legal right to the land they occupied, and had clear ideas about the duties and obligations that followed from being landlords over the local people. In particular, they claimed the right to demand school attendance from the children, to collect fees from their “tenants,” and to preach wherever and whenever they chose. For their part, they provided education, medical services, and famine assistance. The struggle to win the hearts and minds of the young people of the district was robust. The schools at Mt. Silinda and Chikore, and the Sunday school, were consciously intended to draw in a captive audience and contribute toward the founding of an indigenous church.2 Attendance was compulsory. Already by February

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1899, there were over a hundred children attending the Mt. Silinda school, 60 of whom were boarders, both boys and girls, required to work four hours a day in farming and building for the mission in exchange for their board. The girls were not easy to obtain: “two years ago it seemed well nigh hopeless to think of reaching the girls. The idea met with the strongest opposition, but … with God’s help [we] have won the first victory in this as in other matters.” How the “victory” was won is indicated by the fact that “most of these girls are from our own farm at Mt Silinda.”3 Families who refused to allow their children to attend the school were threatened with eviction, despite the native commissioner’s advice that this was illegal without 12 months’ notice.4 Wilder similarly was dismayed to discover from the native commissioner that he could not legally compel the “tenants” at Chikore to send their daughters to school, but this did not stop the mission from making the demand.5 The children themselves suffered. The Chikore school had to provide 70 of the younger children with oiled cloth to protect them during their very long daily walk there.6 Nonetheless, the doctor noted that the requirement that children attend school early in the morning, before their families had eaten and in all kinds of weather, was making them sick.7 At Mt. Silinda, the children had to sit outside in the rain for classes while new buildings were completed, and conditions in the boarding school were so unsatisfactory that the students went on strike.8 Nonetheless, despite the hostility they aroused, the mission also attracted enough interest and voluntary participation from local Africans to satisfy their funders that they were making progress. In particular, the mission attracted young men and women from a huge catchment area to the east, who wanted to acquire language, literacy, and practical skills. Local people clearly resented the claims made on their children, particularly at Chikore. The doubling of taxes in 1903, from £1 to £2, quickly led to an increase in debt-related pledging of young women. Family heads argued that it was no longer their responsibility to send these girls to the school, as they were now under the authority of their husbands, and husbands had no obligation to send wives to the school. The mission rejected this argument, and Wilder became very exercised about the whole idea of marriage–debt relationships.9 The following year, five villages left the station rather than send their daughters to school, and several young men asked to be registered as taxpayers rather than attend school. By 1908, Wilder wrote that “I fear more kraals will have to be removed from the farm since they are unwilling to conform to school regulations.”10 There was, however, limited respite for those who left: in 1909, a new farm was added to the Chikore estate, including on its land many of the people evicted in 1908 for pledging their daughters and failing to send their children to school.11 The missions fought hard to hold on to the young people in the district: their job was to convert people to Christianity, and they were prepared to use whatever powers they had, legal or otherwise, to do so. There is no doubt that the missionaries, both American and Zulu, passionately believed that what they were doing was in the interests of local people. They were often bemused by how little their efforts were appreciated: “Perhaps you could

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search the world over and not find so ungrateful people for all that is being done for them as these.”12 The missionaries wanted to get on well with those around them and tried to cultivate good relationships through their medical services, famine relief, and holding church services in the villages.13 Warm invitations to attend the Sunday services did not get much response: “Few of the heathen people from the kraals attend in spite of the fact that they have been regularly visited and invited to do so.”14 For their part, local people felt that the mission was failing in its obligations to them. When men on the Mt. Silinda estate were told that Mr. King would be taking over as head of the station and asked whether they had any criticisms or requests, “they suggested that it would be a good thing if the missionaries would pay their taxes for them.”15 The concept of “landlord” did not translate easily. Local systems allowed for control over allocation land by local authorities and exaction of tribute, but “ownership” of land was deeply rooted in the hands of autochthonous ancestors. Local authorities had some responsibilities to help with organizing and meeting exactions from higher authorities. The missionaries were making a poor job of this while proclaiming themselves as “owners” of the land. The missionaries’ failure to fulfill local expectations was not because they were reluctant to talk with local people. Wilder had his regular chats with Musikavanhu Makuza, and spent all his time surrounded by schoolchildren and employees from the area. The problem was more that the missionaries quite literally did not understand the people around them. The first few years of the mission were a struggle to create a comfortable physical environment, but also a struggle to understand and translate the social and spiritual environment. The first missionaries at the station had long experience in southern Africa, but they also had specific interests that stood in the way of a deep engagement with local culture. They forced people on the mission lands to engage with their ideas, but they were themselves hostile to local ideas about legitimate authority, healing powers, and the importance of the Big Tree shrine near Chikore. Material conflicts of interest stood in the way of understanding the meaning of these things to local people. But beyond these difficulties, there was the problem that the missionaries spoke siZulu, not chiNdau. It was not only concepts that they failed to understand: they also, quite simply, did not understand the local language. The ABCFM had a strong commitment to using local vernaculars in their work, so one might have expected the Mt. Silinda missionaries to apply themselves to learning chiNdau and producing materials to help newcomers to the mission to learn it, too. From 1909, the policy of the ABCFM for all its missions worldwide was that every new missionary, “wives included,” should pass a detailed examination in the local vernacular before they had voting rights in the decisions of the mission.16 Despite this, the everyday work of the mission, including education, farming, and medical advice, was carried on in siZulu. Mt. Silinda did not get around to drafting examinations and a syllabus in ChiNdau until 1913.17 Even as late as 1923, a complete inability to speak ChiNdau was not a bar to the mission’s doctor taking over as acting head of an isolated substation of the mission.18 Only Wilder could express himself well

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in chiNdau before 1912, and, interestingly, this was not in order to be able to speak with local people but in order to produce texts. What were these texts for? The missionaries were very keen on producing texts. In March 1899, the mission requested funds for type, paper, and ink. The opening of the new road to Umtali had made it possible to transport a printing press, and the mission argued that “no other one thing … would bring as great returns for the same expenditure of money.”19 The importance of texts to evangelism made sense only because a link was already assumed between Christianity and literacy (despite claims that lifestyle and spiritual beliefs, not education, were the essence of Christian conversion). Indeed, literacy seems to have been a prerequisite for church membership. In the same letter requesting type, paper, and ink, the mission reported that “all of the present members [of the church] are able to read the Bible in their own tongue [siZulu] and the four about to join also can read.” It is notable, however, that this report described siZulu as the “own tongue” of local converts. So the link between evangelism and literacy cannot explain, by itself, why Wilder wanted to produce texts in chiNdau. Reverend Wilder’s texts were not language aids, even though he invested huge amounts of time in compiling vocabularies and grammatical notes. The texts to aid language acquisition by white people in Africa tended toward the utilitarian. Johannes Fabian has noted how vocabularies—lists of words—were far more frequently produced than grammars or primers that might aid in effective communication, indicating “an orientation towards using words rather than speaking.”20 Moreover, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, even where whites in Southern Rhodesia did produce primers and grammatical exercises, these were not generally oriented toward meaningful conversation with Africans. They were designed, rather, to initiate newcomers into the society they were joining and the “correct” modes of interacting with Africans.21 In Melsetter district, Meredith was asked to contribute toward a Native Affairs Department dictionary in 1905 but did not have time to spare for the task.22 Why, then, did Rev. Wilder spend hours on such work, despite the mission’s use of siZulu for routine communication with its flock? An obvious use of texts would be to help in educational work. A subsequent appeal for money for type, paper, and ink the following year indicated that the texts would indeed be used for teaching: “the literature in the Zulu language is very limited, … there is none whatever in the Chindao and … in order to do the most efficient work especially in the school we must prepare a great deal ourselves.”23 However, for the next 10 years, the mission did not actually produce chiNdau texts that were of use for teaching at all and in 1905 approached other missions to see what vernacular texts they might have.24 The government schools inspector complained in 1909 that there were no school textbooks in chiNdau, to which Wilder responded that he should soon have an enlarged and revised hymnbook and expected to have a complete New Testament by the new school year in August. These were hardly school textbooks, of course. The mission’s first reader in chiNdau was not prepared until 1914.25

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So the textual translations were not used as language aids or as teaching aids. Perhaps their importance lay in the fact that they were translations rather than that they were text. The missionaries were able to insist on certain behaviors as a condition for access to land, but their aim was to change hearts, not just behaviors. They needed to communicate their religious ideology in terms that were relevant and resonant for local people if the people were truly to absorb the mission’s message about the Christian lifestyle. How far did the translation of texts further this project? Wilder was clearly interested in formal translation of theological concepts. He explained the painstaking process, on which he spent about five hours a day, in his Translation Report for 1908: Perhaps you may not all realize how exacting is this work of translating the Scriptures in to Ndau. Parden [sic] me then if I take a little time to explain why so much time is required. First I must get at the exact meaning of the Greek, this alone often takes time, as the English Translation is very often only idiomatic English, and sometimes Greek may be idiomatic Greek; the Ndau may or may not require an idiomatic expression to translate this idiom. Again the English is not always correct, especially in the tenses. Having adopted Wescott and Hort’s text I must follow that and not be misled by the English translation. Having satisfied myself as to the meaning if [sic] the Greek, I translate it into the Ndau; this Ndau translation I have my Ndau Helper translate into Zulu. If I am satisfied I then explain the meaning of the Greek and ask him how he would express the idea in the Ndau not taking into account my translation. If I get new light, well and good. Then we compare the verse with the translation in the Nyika, Mashona and Kalanga versions and at times with the translation into the Senji. When finally satisfied that I cannot get any more light I type it. Each page as it is completed is carefully corrected, first by me and then read aloud to the Ndau Helper and finally handed to him to read over and make other corrections he may find. It is then sent off to Mr. Hatch by post who critically goes over each verse and returns his suggestions to me by post again. These I go over with Sombulana and finally after another careful examination it is ready for the final type writing.26

Three things are striking about this process: first, it is about the production of texts; second, it is entirely an exercise in comparative linguistics based on translation from the Greek; and third and most important, the “Ndau helper” was Wilder’s only contact with indigenous ideas as expressed in their language. The emphasis on comparative linguistics was not a peculiarity of Wilder’s. In her introduction to her 1905 ChiKaranga vocabulary, the Methodist missionary Mrs. H. E. Springer noted that I have … aimed at unity when putting down religious terms … [W]ith the translations of other societies from different parts of Mashonaland before me, I have usually given preference where two or more were agreed on one word. And when, as was not

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The importance of translation from canonical versions of the original Greek texts suggests that this detailed mastery of local languages was not cultivated so that missionaries could converse and exchange ideas with Africans. It seemed more important to know how to translate Greek, and to understand Middle Eastern culture of a thousand or more years ago, than to know how contemporary Africans understood spiritual life and morality. Translation of the Bible encouraged habits of looking for biblical equivalences in African culture, because Bible translation required understanding of cultural norms in biblical times as well as in the vernacular culture. The Bible was already familiar to the mission translators and required no extra work of understanding. This process distorted clear perception of local culture and encouraged a habit of seeing it in terms of another, more familiar culture, long ago and far away.28 Translating into the vernacular did not necessarily involve engaging with vernacular culture. Wilder certainly appears to have been more interested in formal translation of theological concepts than in a deep understanding of the concepts of chiNdau. By 1906, he had developed an extensive (6,000-word) vocabulary and detailed grammatical notes. These were intended to assist not in conversing or teaching but in the production of religious texts (Gospel of Mark; Matthew, chapters 5–7; John ,chapter 1 and part of chapter 2; several psalms; and the Ten Commandments), hymns, and a catechism that was translated from siZulu. None of these translations were published, and the school and church continued to use siZulu texts. There were hopes that “a small tentative hymnbook” might be issued, in collaboration with Mr. Hatch of the South African General Mission at Rusitu, 40miles to the north. A year later, the printing press was operational and the chiNdau hymnbook produced.29 By May 1910, a joint Hatch–Wilder translation of the four Gospels was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society. Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. King had begun translating Corinthians. This was part of the mission’s belated attempts to train all its members, including the Zulu evangelists, in the local vernacular—again demonstrating that “learning the language” was seen more in terms of textual translation than in terms of verbal communication.30 Clearly, the act of translating sacred texts was regarded as a vital part of the ministry. This was not, it seems, so that the Gospels could be read by local people because the missionaries’ evangelism was conducted in siZulu. The value of translating sacred texts lay in the process of translation itself. It required the translator to engage directly with the question of how indigenous ideas about spiritual matters might be mapped onto Christian theology. As their Jesuit counterpart put it in 1893, The more we can enter into the habit of thought of natives, the more perfectly we shall speak their language…. The more exactly, then, we can represent to ourselves

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the ideas of the natives, the greater will be the precision with which we shall express our thoughts in their language31

Finding a word for “God” or “sin” or “spirit” in a local vernacular that did not do damage to the concept as understood by Christians was a powerful method of forcing missionaries to think deeply about the spiritual ideas of those they hoped to convert and so to identify points of connection—“entry points”—between the cosmologies. It is no coincidence that, alongside reporting his translation work, Wilder noted, “I have also compiled an account of the religious superstitions of the Ndau.”32 His textual translation work was important not because it helped missionaries to converse with Africans but because it might enable them to appropriate African languages and reinvent them within the Christian tradition. Effective translation requires the ability to cross over into another way of thinking; more limited translation may simply involve finding adequate parallels from within one’s established ways of thinking. Wilder appears to have been more interested in formal translation of theological concepts than in a deep understanding of the concepts of chiNdau. His sympathy with and insight into Ndau beliefs seems to have been fairly superficial. He called them “superstitions” and equated them with beer drinking, offering sacrifices to spirits, and asking a blessing on food.33 He showed little interest in the concept of Mwari, the term used by the mission to translate “God.” Had he done so, he might have felt that there were unfortunate resonances with shrine cults presided over by dedicated priestesses, such as the cult on which the Great Tree shrine was originally founded.34 Wilder was, of course, surrounded by mother-tongue chiNdau speakers with whom he could have discussed theological ideas and immersed himself in local ways of thinking. But the missionaries were very reluctant to engage with the “native mind.” This “native mind” was not a racial but a cultural attribute: it applied not to educated Africans such as the Zulu evangelists but only to “heathens.”35 The missionaries imagined the “native mind” as a contaminated (and contaminating) influence and expressed concerns that “close contact with the heathen people” had instilled in local white children “a knowledge of evil.”36 Instead, Wilder worked with a handful of Christian converts who could help him to compare his chiNdau translations with his siZulu. Wilder was deeply dependent on his “Ndau helper” to carry out these translations. His search for “more light” was based partly on comparative linguistics but definitively on what his “helper” had to say. The “helper’s” renderings of the translations into siZulu were Wilder’s benchmark to assess the accuracy of his translation. Given that his collaborators were already familiar with the siZulu texts, there seems to be an interesting kind of hermeneutic loop here. When Wilder was trying to learn the correct chiNdau word or idiom, he asked for advice from an associate who was already very familiar with how it was rendered in the siZulu text and then asked that associate how he would render it in siZulu as a way of checking the usefulness of the word or idiom he had offered. The entire conversation could be conducted without breaking out of the textual context or asking how people would actually render the word or idiom in real-life situations.37

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Moreover, by the time Wilder came to produce his Gospels, the local men had been involved in evangelism based on their own renderings of the siZulu texts for many years. They had already developed their own ways of expressing the Christian message and their own understandings of these texts that were once in Greek. Wilder’s use of siZulu as a checking mechanism might not have exposed theological gaps where their understanding of a translated concept was different from his because they could all be using the same siZulu words to mean different things. Presumably this is why Wilder also tried to explain the meaning in the Greek; but again, there was opportunity here for local men to understand his explanations in terms of ideas that they had already formulated. The importance of his exchanges with Hatch—an internal conversation between whites—was that they offered a means of assessing how local interpretations of Christianity differed from those elsewhere. They could not, however, guarantee theological precision. The words and phrases Wilder needed to say what he wanted to say about Christ’s ministry were supplied by local men who had converted without a chiNdau version of the Gospels, with their own conceptions of that ministry and their own reasons for wanting to assist in the translation project. The relationships between the “helpers” and the missionaries were complex. Wilder rarely even names the “helpers,” but one of them was certainly Mhlanganyiso, one of the mission’s first converts, who came up with the pioneer mission party. In December 1911, the Translation Committee was authorized to “secure [his] assistance at a wage of 1:7:6 per month.”38 Mhlanganyiso had been employed in various ways by the mission over the years, originally by Rev. Bunker at the ABCFM’s Beira Mission. He was a trusted and experienced evangelist who carried out tours of the Buzi from Beira as far as Mt. Silinda. From October 1907, he was in charge of Mtanga outstation, from where he continued to lead successful evangelical tours.39 However, some of the missionaries felt that “Mhlanganiso [sic] is not as strong and aggressive a man as we ought to have at this outstation” because he seemed unwilling to challenge his predecessor’s “misrepresentation of the christian life.”40 In 1910, he was helping Mr. and Mrs. King in their translation of Corinthians, but it seems that soon thereafter he was evicted from Mtanga’s because he “gave way to sin, and had to get out”—which strongly implies that his concept of the good Christian life, like his predecessor’s, did not entirely match that of the missionaries.41 Another “helper” was Jonas Hlatcwayo, who, you may recall, was beaten for taking up a contract to work for Wilder at Chikore.42 Hlatcwayo was described as having “some little ability at writing Ndau hymns,” and Wilder declared that he had “got out of him as much in that line as I could” for inclusion in the hymnbook. Hlatcwayo seems to have been producing the hymns for love, not money: he had to leave the mission soon after because “the wages he is paid by the Mission do not support him.”43 This “independent work” by Hlatcwayo involved original composition rather than translation. The missionaries had already lost control over the way in which Christian ideas were being expressed in the vernacular texts.

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So there is little evidence, from these accounts, that the missionaries made much inquiry into local beliefs when producing their translated texts. Initial forays into translation at Mt. Silinda were obsessed with textual precision, not cultural connection. The missionaries’ attempt to develop an expertise in chiNdau was initially an inwardly-looking, scholarly exercise rather than a means of connecting with the local communities. Their translations did not grow from local ways of seeing, and the vernacular was not generally used in conversation until the 1910s. Nonetheless, although this was not a dialogic interaction with the people around them, neither was it entirely an internal, monologic conversation within the missionaries’ own community. There was detailed interrogation of African “helpers” because only Africans themselves could shed any light on appropriate words to use: they were, at least, recognized as the experts in their own tongue. The interrogation involved ensuring that the “helpers” understood concepts in the Greek and could express them in the vernacular; it was not based on searching for points of cultural contact. Even so, despite the painstaking comparative linguistics, it seems that the mission’s chiNdau texts were influenced by the advice and creativity of local men who had their own ways of expressing and interpreting the Christian message. Local men had been involved in translating the Christian message into local terms for well over a decade before American and Zulu missionaries started to use the vernacular or publish textual versions of the Gospels. Although church members were often literate—able to read religious texts in siZulu and in some cases in English—they preached orally and in chiNdau. As soon as the church was established in 1897, its members (many of whom were in the boarding school) were exhorted to take part in evangelistic work in local villages, producing a handful of regular “kraal services.” The Annual Report for Mt. Silinda in 1907 noted six regular “kraal services” on Mt. Silinda station but the following year reported only five. Surprisingly, then, the statistical report in 1910 noted 40 “kraal services” at Mt. Silinda, which coincided with a new determination to use the local vernacular in mission work.44 Meanwhile, extensive tours into the lowlands to the east and west were undertaken regularly by paid African evangelists, including a significant number of Ndau men alongside the Zulu employees. Mhlanganyiso led a 10-day tour in 1911, with three “Christian school boys,” when they “walked about sixty miles and preached to some six hundred people, many of whom had not heard ‘The Good News’ before.”45 Tom Mapangisana toured among Mutema’s people in 1907 and again during the famine year of 1908, when he was pleased to discover that those he had converted the previous year had kept to that decision. Although they continued to drink beer (as a ritual practice?), they claimed to have given up making offerings to the spirits.46 Migrant workers also carried the Christian message by word of mouth: “Many of the older boys [i.e., men] come from long distances being usually influenced thereto by our former pupils whom they have met working at the mines or in the towns.”47 Entire villages claimed to want to relocate to the mission, or to have a resident missionary, as a result of persuasion or evangelism by local men and women.48

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Vernacular evangelism was the local project of local people. The mission was, of course, aware of the need to preach in chiNdau rather than in siZulu. In 1906, it was reported that “Especial emphasis has been placed on acquiring the Ndau. Much time at the monthly conferences has been given to this subject, at present all of the Helpers use Ndau more or less in preaching.”49 It seems that few of the Zulu evangelists were included in this definition of “helpers” because, in May 1910, Mr. King at Mt. Silinda noted that “another bond which unites us and brings us into closer touch with our Zulu Helpers is the Wednesday evening Chindau class which was begun in March.”50 The bulk of vernacular preaching and education prior to 1912, then, was based on translation by local people. Vernacular preaching took two forms. In some cases, the words of the preacher were translated into chiNdau. Mr. Fuller’s Sunday school at Mt. Silinda, to which adults as well as children were invited, saw a big increase in attendance in 1906 with the innovation of more than half the teaching being delivered in chiNdau rather than siZulu.51 Similarly, a Sunday school was started in Melsetter town in 1911, when it was found one of the “boys … at work on the new school buildings” was a good interpreter. Up to 60 people regularly attended.52 In many other cases, however, the preaching was entirely in the hands of local evangelists. Many of these evangelists were also salaried teachers at Mt. Silinda or Chikore; others worked at the outstations in Portuguese territory, usually under the direction of Zulu evangelists, organizing services and Sunday schools.53 Mhlanganyiso and Mapangisana directed their own tours. Ndhlondhlo was appointed by the Chikore Church in 1906 as an evangelist, at £1 per month, to work in the villages on the mission station’s property.54 Ndau preachers drew on imagery that had resonance for local people. In June 1907, Ndhlondhlo made the opening address to the Native Annual Meeting at Chikore. His audience was “about two hundred well dressed, decorous persons,” some Zulu but mostly Ndau, all of whom were involved in the mission’s work. His sermon, based on the subject of Pentecostal inspiration, suggests a different mode of preaching from that used by the Americans. Interestingly, despite the Pentecostal theme, the report of his sermon does not suggest that he talked overtly about spirit possession. Nonetheless, he made vivid use of an Nguni battle ritual, which apparently made a strong impression on his audience: He said as a boy he attended a gathering of Gungunyana’s braves who met to be doctored for war. He saw a prisoner killed and roasted and strips of his flesh strung on poles. At a signal the lined-up soldiers rushed at the meat and the bravest tore it down with their teeth and ate it. Then they were as men possessed and it was dangerous to cross their path. But the apostles, said he, did not come to get power to kill, but power to give life through Jesus Christ’s salvation.

The gory reference to Ngungunyana seems gratuitous, unless its contrast with Christian salvation was to compare the white missionaries favorably with the earlier

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invaders. However, the parallel with the Eucharist—the body and the blood—as a source of (martial) power was readily appreciated by Tom Mapangisana, who, after the meeting, went to Wilder, and, referring to Ndhlondhlo’s illustration said, “Well, I have partaken of the body and blood of Jesus Christ yesterday. Now I must go out and fight his battles. Where shall I go? To the Sabi Valley?” “By all means,” replied Mr Wilder,—and he went.

The ways in which these Christians drew on sources of spiritual power from within their culture and history can also be seen in their treatment of the Great Tree shrine. The day after Ndhlondhlo’s address, the assembly held a meeting under the Tree, even though only the shrine keeper was supposed to go within its shade. Unlike the Americans, they did not deny its power but, rather, “came boldly and claimed it in the name of Christ.” It seems worth noting that the following year saw a severe drought.55 The missionaries were delighted by the successes of their local preachers. Despite the painstaking care taken in translating texts, they seemed careless about the concepts encapsulated in verbal evangelism. The different cultural references inspired by the Eucharist, and the different approaches toward the Great Tree, appear to have escaped their notice. During this period of initial contact, it does not seem that the missionaries’ beliefs and values were making a significant impact on the meanings of local words. Rather, their religion appears to have been undergoing some changes and taking on new meanings. And the people making those changes were also the people who helped in the translation of their religious texts. The fact that local evangelists were involved in an oral ministry does not, of course, mean that they had no relationship with, or responses to, the missionaries’ religious texts. The catechism for church entry was based on texts in siZulu and, later, in chiNdau; the hymns were also written down. Literacy was an important aspect of participation in the churches. Many people engaged with the missions because they wanted to learn to read. This required them to engage with Christian texts because no other reading matter was available to them, particularly not in siZulu or chiNdau. Many others, including those in the Portuguese territories, came to Mt. Silinda because they wanted to learn to speak English.56 Schools that taught English also taught literacy and Christianity, so an interest in one led, perforce, to an engagement with the others. Even if the message of Christianity was interpreted in local terms, it is worth considering how far the engagement with texts was itself a significant factor in transforming local ideas about the world and bringing them closer to the hegemonic ideas of Western, Christian capitalism. Jack Goody famously suggested that the difference between “modern” and “savage” societies was not the ability to rationalize but the use of text. Texts fostered the ability to develop critical thought by recording ideas and arguments, giving them a critical distance, and allowing a body of knowledge to develop in dialogue with the ideas of the past.57 Reading, in itself, encouraged new modes of thought. However, notwithstanding very high percentages of children learning to read English (81

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percent at Mt. Silinda and 65 percent at Chikore in 1908), it does not seem that many Ndau readers developed a critical relationship with texts at this time.58 Local people in the 1900s seem mostly to have used texts, not to engage with critical thought, but to gain access to useful resources. Some texts, such as marriage certificates or labor passes, played a role in the creation of certain types of relationships. Texts also acted as proof of status, such as marriage, or church membership, or having paid one’s taxes. This need to use pieces of writing did not, however, stimulate a profound transformation in modes of thinking—there was a well-established system of tokens that performed much the same function. Texts in these cases could be treated as largely symbolic. Nonetheless, the very fact that texts were essential to forming and maintaining social relationships under the white rulers forced local people to think about how writing might be used. Literacy opened up a more innovative relationship with texts. As one early white settler observed, “The only use to which I ever knew an African native put his knowledge of reading and writing was the forging of white men’s names, usually with a view to obtaining liquor.”59 Literacy (and numeralbased numeracy) opened up possibilities for clerical employment or the running of small businesses. It also provided protection against being defrauded by those who used these technologies (and opportunities to defraud others). In this sense, engagement with texts smoothed the way for those who wanted to experience, and prosper in, the market economy.60 But despite compulsory attendance at the Mt. Silinda schools in the late 1890s and 1900s, few students went on to expand their literacy skills.61 Neither did the content of the texts make much impression on modes of thought. “Reading” in English seems to have been learned as a purely technical skill, rather than an engagement with meaning. Astonishingly, when the Wilders’ daughter, Clio, began teaching at Chikore, she found that “all the [third-grade] pupils could read the English, but had little, if any, idea of the meaning.”62 They had learned to read words but could not translate them. Wilder commented, “The books used in teaching English … are unsuited to the range of the native’s mind”: they referred to an alien culture that had not yet imposed itself on their everyday lives.63 The values of Western, Christian capitalism did not flow out from the page. In the same way that the missionaries did not understand local Africans, although they presumed to teach them, the schoolchildren did not understand the worldview of the missionaries, although they had learned to read their religious texts.64 The texts themselves, which were read but had no meaning, had the hollow emptiness of a well without water. This absence, where there should have been meaning, demonstrates the limitations of the missionaries’ translation project. Textual translations could have provided learners with something to read that they could understand. They could have provided the beginnings of a means to engage with the values of the Christianized market economy. Wilder’s translations, however, were not designed for the school. They were designed to fix interpretations of the Christian message. His texts represented the “routinization of religious authority”: they linked the

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orthodoxy of the original Greek to the expected orthodoxy of beliefs and concepts held by Christian converts in Southern Rhodesia.65 African exposure to religious texts was significant for the Mt. Silinda missionaries in other ways. Engagement with text, in the form of Bible study, was proposed as the necessary remedy for spiritual weakness.66 R. W. Niezen has pointed out that, where literacy is restricted to magical or religious uses, in which the textual object is revered rather than used as tool for the development of ideas, then it may act as a brake on critical thought.67 However, at Mt. Silinda there seems to have been no brake on the development of religious thought by converts who engaged with Bible study: their relationship with the texts was evangelical rather than mystical. Local converts actually got to read, and handle, the religious texts. This was encouraged by the missionaries. Bible study was an important aspect of Protestant tradition—even though historically this had tended to work against the interests of those who believed they already knew what it said. By 1907, there were at least 200 men and women from Mt. Silinda and Chikore who were interested in Bible study and hundreds of hymnbooks, Gospels, and catechisms, in both siZulu and chiNdau, in circulation.68 In 1908, Wilder set up a Bible study group in Chikore, which spent six months looking at the life of Christ and introductions to the Old and New Testaments, all based on texts and handwritten exegeses in siZulu.69 The nine men who attended had to meet high moral standards: one of the school attenders was advised to leave the mission as the only honorable way to extract himself from a marriage arranged years earlier; another was thrown out of the group. Wilder placed emphasis on the text as object. All the men were taught how to handle their Bibles. To Wilder’s dismay, he found that they did not fully appreciate the importance of treating the object with respect: “the progress made is most distressing.” The obsession with the Bible-as-object has still not found roots in some parts of Zimbabwe. Matthew Engelke has recorded the view within the contemporary Masowe Church: “Look, why would you read it? It gets old. Look again. After keeping it for some time it falls apart, the pages come out. And then you can take it and use it as toilet paper until it’s finished.”70 For the Masowe Church, the message must transcend the dead weight of the medium. For the Chikore Bible class in the 1900s, it is unclear how far the text, rather than learning to explain its message, appealed to them. Wilder noted that “they are none of them expert at taking notes.” Wilder claimed that the Chikore Bible School significantly improved the standards of prayer meeting talks, prayers. and preaching. It is interesting that he showed no concerns about whether it increased orthodoxy of interpretation. In any case, the intensive engagement with the text does not seem to have done much for the effectiveness of the men’s preaching, whatever the improvements in their learnedness or “spiritual force.” During 1909, the immediate neighborhood of Chikore station was “evangelized as never before” by the Bible School students, yet “not a single case [was] reported of even professed conversion as a result of these efforts!”71

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Nonetheless, literacy and Bible study opened up the chance to read the Bible independently. There is little evidence that the chance to read the Bible is what originally attracted Africans at the ABCFM schools to learn to read. However, once they could do so, they could begin to interpret it: after all, they had little other reading matter on which to practice. The critical thought associated with text was critical theology. The mission put enormous effort into preparing biblical texts in chiNdau as an exercise in theological translation, to create fixed statements of belief, preserved in written form. But, as we know, texts are interpreted by their readers, even without the Trojan horses of “native helpers” who inserted translations that came with a history and set of local meanings already attached.72 For missionaries, translation of the text was part of a project to translate the missionaries’ core values into local vernaculars. However, translation was not simply a matter of textual words but also of embedding Christian religious principles into local culture. In this context, Christian religious principles did not mean only items of faith but also modes of behavior. The point was not to reinterpret Christianity in the light of local spiritual ideas but to reinvent Africans as modern American Christians. Africans, however, were not too amenable to being reinvented. Despite the care over accurate translations, local evangelists exercised some autonomy in interpreting the Christian message, and local converts exercised some autonomy in how they read and understood that message. So what did Christian conversion mean? It is clear what the missionaries (both Zulu and American) intended it to mean. They conflated morality, Christianity, and certain lifestyle choices: no polygyny, no drunkenness, and no laziness. These were regarded as generic moral failings that spiritual strength and moral willpower would be able to overcome. Soon after the missionaries had arrived, Bates observed that local people were dissatisfied with “the old life” and would convert “but for the terrible struggle to give up some of their favorite customs, notably the drinking of beer and the taking of more than one wife.”73 The idea that beer drinking and polygyny might be essentials of social and spiritual life, rather than self-indulgent lifestyle choices, does not seem to have crossed his mind. Moreover, his belief that most local people were, at heart, anxious to convert but somehow just couldn’t muster the moral strength to give up beer drinking suggests a deeprooted contempt for them. As to laziness, in 1906, Dr. Lawrence revealed that “Natives do not want to be lazy.”74 He had noticed that a plant, locally believed to cause laziness if uprooted, was never weeded even if it invaded food plots. Maybe he suspected that his funders in the United States thought Africans were keen to indulge in indolence whenever the opportunity presented itself and he felt obliged to clarify the matter. So local converts were accepted into the church only if they could demonstrate “good evidence of a change in their lives.”75 These changes had to be outwardly demonstrable: they involved clothing (Western), housing (brick), attendance at school and/or church, no more beer, and no more polygyny or pledging of daughters.76 To maintain these new standards, which were so at odds with the spiritual and social obligations of the community at large, converts were often advised to

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move closer to the mission station, to “cut themselves off from old heathen influences.”77 Indeed, the term “leaving heathenism” was often a spatial as well as a spiritual description, and converts who married “heathens” could be suspended from church membership.78 The most important lifestyle change was in marriage relationships. Evidence of other changes, such as a new moral consciousness about market exchange, was treated with indulgence, almost with amusement, by Wilder when he recounted how a new convert had felt obliged to attempt to pay for a vest given to him in error by a shopkeeper years earlier.79 Evidence of rejecting polygyny, pledging, or bridewealth payments per se, however, was treated as a matter of utmost seriousness. A converted man, it seems, could have kept his ill-gotten vest without undue censure; he could not, however, keep his legitimately acquired second wife or the roora payments for his daughter. Conversion was therefore a big step for a senior man, and it is not surprising that the bulk of converts were among younger men and women who had more to gain and less to lose. The first polygamist to join the Chikore Church “finally gave up everything.” This was not an overstatement: he gave up his home (to build a brick one), his wives, and all his claims to roora.80 Approved forms of conducting heterosexual relations were equated by the missionaries with the highest moral virtues of truth and purity.81 For the missionaries, there was only one legitimate form of marriage practice. In his 1904 evidence to the Southern African Native Affairs Commission, Wilder implied that bridewealth negotiations were the outcome of a lack of proper planning and budgeting ability: he suggested that no marriage agreement should be permitted until the man had all the bridewealth already in his possession and, moreover, that it should not be given to the woman’s father but used by the man to support his wife! For Wilder, bridewealth should be like the “nest egg” that a young American man might try to accumulate before asking his sweetheart’s father for her hand.82 This raises doubts about how effectively the missionaries were able to translate local words and concepts when trying to talk about sexual morality. Wilder used the vocabulary of purchase and property rights when discussing bridewealth and pledging, again indicating that his translation work was more about formal correctness than cultural connection. He regarded bridewealth as a purchase, in which “the child was sold.”83 For the missionaries, bridewealth was “the curse of these people,” and polygyny was “the greatest curse of the country.” Although they recognized that polygyny was “as much a part of the native life as the hand is a part of the body,” they could not see it as a legitimate marriage system, but only as a sin: “The continued immorality of these people for centuries.”84 This concept of “sin” did not seem to translate well. There were continuing problems with the “morality” of church members and teachers/evangelists despite the intensive catechism examination as a basis for membership and the growing number of Christian marriages among converts. The converts had a strong sense of “ownership” of their local church: some migrant workers were sending $5 per month for the building of the church at Mt. Silinda in 1909.85 Despite this, members seemed ready to jeopardize membership rather than forsake old marriage

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practices. These early years of the mission were also the years when local people were reestablishing bridewealth arrangements and kinship networks that had been disrupted by the removal to Bileni and were developing debt-pledging arrangements to cope with the new tax demands. The mission may have been hostile to these negotiations, but it offered little that was feasible by way of alternative. By the late 1900s, the mission community in Mt. Silinda was in crisis. A report in 1908 noted concerns that “a very few cases of irregularities have occurred in the church.”86 By 1909, the tone was shriller: “We are at present passing thru a critical time in our church life and we cannot be sure how it is going to turn out.”87 The problem had started with “the immoral actions on the part of the wife of an Ndau teacher,” but it led to a review of the marriage arrangements of all members on the church rolls and the expulsion of eight church members, “as they have turned back to the old life of sin.” Meanwhile, Dr. Lawrence had the “exceedingly painful” task of disciplining two girls from Mt. Silinda school and suspending two boys, “among our best,” for unsanctioned trysts outside the station.88 He was, he confessed, at times discouraged by the “unworthyness and infidelity” in some of the converts.89 The African evangelists, however, seemed to have their own definitions of what “the Christian life” might entail. In 1908, King expressed concern about “Ndwandwe’s misrepresentation of the christian life” at Mtanga’s outstation. When Ndwandwe’s successor, Mhlanganyiso, was discovered to be “making love to one of the girls while he had a wife of his own,” King admitted that “we are bound to have wrong interpretations put upon the christian life by a people coming up out of such degredation as these have come.”90 But in what sense were these “wrong interpretations”? Whites elsewhere in Southern Rhodesia eventually recognized that Bible study might, in some ways, have contributed to these local definitions of morality and Christian lifestyle. Missionaries and administrators were trying to root out polygyny and witchcraft at the same time that they were asking Africans to respect the Christian Bible. In that Bible, polygyny and witchcraft were presented as important ancient institutions of the “chosen race,” and “with unanswerable logic the Natives point to this fact as a confirmatory proof of the inherent excellence of their own institutions.”91 Africans pressed the missionaries to explain their objections to polygyny and bridewealth. At the huge Native Annual Meeting in 1908, both “kraal people” and converts engaged the missionaries in a thorough discussion about the merits or otherwise of paying bridewealth. But at the end, the missionaries still considered it to be a “curse.”92 African transgressors seemed unmoved when missionaries presented them with clear evidence of their sin. The boys suspended from school “took their punishment in a very good spirit”; Mhlanganyiso was not dismayed by accusations of immorality, but “as usual he denied it in toto”; the people who were suspended for sustaining their “old life of sin” were “very slow to show any sign of repentance.” This was despite the fact that the missionary had put considerable effort into establishing their guilt, having “made several journeys to secure satisfactory evidence.”93 But seeking evidence of wrongdoing was surely beside the

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point. Mhlanganyiso was not lying with his denials, even though the evidence “has come out since he left,” nor did the “sinners” dispute the evidence against them. This was not a breakdown in morality but a breakdown in agreement about what “morality” meant. After 15 years of evangelism, the gulf between local and mission Christianity was having a direct impact on the effective exercise of white authority. The converts were not hostile to the missionaries, but they could not accept their definitions of sexual morality. The sanctions that were brought to bear against them were not spiritual, but material: expulsion from access to the resources of the mission. So the ways that ideas about morality were expressed, and how Africans made sense of them, were having material consequences. To communicate their message so that it reached into African hearts, the missionaries were beginning to realize that it was important to see things the way that Africans did. Translation needed to become a cultural, as well as a linguistic, exercise. The missionaries had been very resistant to the idea of engaging with the “native mind.” It was a largely uncharted territory. Now, however, they acknowledged the need to move beyond formal language translation toward conceptual translation. They recognized that local evangelists were more effective because of their command of local idiom and illustration: “The native is exceedingly rich in figure of speech and is able to put the truth in a way that the missionary cannot because of his limited knowledge of the native mind.”94 They were further urged to think in this way by Secretary Patten, from the mission’s headquarters in Boston, who visited Southern Rhodesia in 1911 and observed, “It was my first look into the face of a savage, heathen audience … it was intensely interesting, and I found myself wondering how I could adapt the gospel to such minds.”95 Interestingly, it was not the trained evangelists, but rather the missionaries appointed to the industrial training work who seemed best able to cross the cultural boundaries. Mr. Hirst was praised as “peculiarly gifted for working with the African. He is … full of sympathy,” while Mr. Fuller was noted for his “more than average ability in putting the truth in such a way that it appeals to the native mind.”96 But both were barred from becoming fully salaried evangelists.97 Fuller was told that he would have to make a formal study of the vernacular if he ever wanted to undertake evangelistic work. Whatever his skills in communication, the mission did not recognize this as expertise in translation. That, clearly, involved a knowledge of grammar and texts. The first 20 years of evangelism at Mt. Silinda saw a movement from a position where there were no texts in chiNdau and siZulu was used in all communication to a position where there was growing use of chiNdau in evangelical and teaching work and the mission was on the brink of having usable chiNdau religious texts in the school. Clearly, there had been a great deal of white learning and work involved to get to this position. This was a period of initial encounters when the missionaries had a huge amount to find out. They were not yet sure where their points of contact and difference with the local people were, and they relied heavily on local informants, and on the missionaries from Natal, for insights.

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The missionaries meant well, but they were poor at the “boundary crossing” that effective translations required. There was a lot of work by Wilder and his African collaborators in creating chiNdau translations of religious texts, but there was very limited communication in the vernacular. The missionaries made unreflective assumptions about the evident superiority of their moral codes and the identification of those moral codes with a Christian lifestyle. They were barely aware of the threat to those assumptions that an indigenous Christianity posed, and they fully approved of the local cultural references in the evangelism of local preachers. Local Africans were also involved in a huge amount of work in finding out and learning about the Americans and their church. They had long engaged with the labor market; now they engaged with Christianity and with texts. They made new spiritual claims and new spiritual alliances. But they did not necessarily mean the same things by these claims as the Americans did. They worked hard at showing evidence of lifestyle changes, but the “helpers” used their own imagery, and converts kept “falling into sin.” The growing awareness that Africans were interpreting Christianity in their own ways led the missionaries to move beyond formal language translation to using chiNdau as a means of communicating. Under pressure, too, from the Boston headquarters, the missionaries tried to shift from textual to spoken chiNdau. They wanted to be able to “put the truth” in the vernacular. This entailed not only learning to speak the vernacular but also beginning an exploration of the “native mind.” However, the white missionaries found this hard to do: their lives were based on rejection of “heathenism” and its African modes of thought. So, although they worked hard at learning to speak chiNdau, their method still involved textbased exercises in grammar and translation, designed by fellow missionaries. Wilder’s translations of hymns, catechisms, and the Gospels were prepared for publication. The mission entered its third decade confident that the missionaries were now settled in, with everyone communicating together in the same language and (quite literally) singing from the same hymnbook. NOTES 1. Annual Report (AR), Chikore School, 1908–1909, UN 3/20/1/4/3, reported how during the famine year 1908, the missionaries “realiz[ed] as never before the need of being in a measure independent of the native grain market.” 2. Judson Smith, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Boston, to Mrs. Bates, Mt. Silinda, 1 June 1897, UN3/2/1/2. 3. Rev. F. W. Bates to Smith, 13 February 1899, UN3/2/1/2. 4. NC, Melsetter to Thompson, Mt. Silinda, 23 December 1905, UN 3/2/1/3. 5. AR, Chikore Station, 1906, UN3/20/1/1/3. 6. AR, Chikore School, June 1908, UN3/20/1/3/4. 7. Dispensary Report, Chikore, 1908–1909, UN3/20/1/4/3. 8. AR, Mt. Silinda School, July 1908–July 1909, UN 3/20/1/4/2. 9. AR, Chikore Station, 1906, UN3/20/1/1/3.

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10. AR, Chikore School, 1906–1907, UN 3/20/1/2/1; AR, Chikore School, 1907–1908, UN3/20/1/3/4. 11. AR, Chikore Station, 1908–1909, UN3/20/1/4/3. 12. Fragment of correspondence, 1909, UN 3/2/1/3. 13. Report on tours, Chikore Station, 1905–1906, UN3/20/1/1/4. 14. AR, Mt. Silinda Station, 1906–1907, UN3/20/1/2/1. 15. AR, Mt. Silinda Station, 1906–1907, UN3/20/1/2/1. 16. Boston Headquarters of the United American Board of Missions, Letter to all Missions, 27 August 1909, UN3/2/1. 17. Report of Committee on Exams in Chindau, Temporary Syllabus for Examinations in Chindau, June 1913, UN3/20/2/5/5. 18. Report of Gogoyo Station, June 1, 1923, to May 3, 1924, UN3/20/1/19/6. To his credit, Dr. Thompson himself opined that his lack of language skills made him “quite unfit for the position.” 19. Bates to Smith, 23 March 1899, UN 3/2/1/2. It is clear that the language referred to is siZulu because there were no chiNdau Bibles for them to read. 20. Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 19 (emphasis in the original). 21. Diana Jeater, “The Way You Tell Them: Language, Ideology and Development in Southern Rhodesia,” African Studies 55, no. 2 (1996): 1–15. 22. NC, Melsetter to CNC, 8 August 1905, NUE 2/1/4, 898. 23. Bates to Smith, n.d., 1900, UN 3/2/1/3. 24. Rev. Springer, Old Umtali Mission, to Lawrence, 6 September 1905; Rev. A. A. Louw, Morgenster Mission, to Lawrence, 29 September 1905, UN 3/2/1/3. 25. AR, Chikore School, 1908–1909, UN 3/20/1/4/3; Report of the Printing Dept., June 1 1914, UN 3/20/1/9/6. 26. Translation Report, 1908, UN3/20/1/3/8. I have been unable to identify Sombulana. 27. H. E. Springer, A Hand-Book of Chikaranga or the Language of Mashonaland. (Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham for the Methodist Episcopal Mission, 1905), 4. 28. Diana Jeater, “Imagining Africans: Scholarship, Fantasy and Science in Colonial Administration, 1920s Southern Rhodesia,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (2005): 1–26. 29. AR, Chikore Station, 1906, UN 3/20/1/1/3; Report from Industrial Dept., Mt. Silinda, 1906–1007, 8 July 1907, UN 3/20/1/2/1. 30. Translation and Publication Report, May 1910, UN 3/20/1/5/3. 31. Rev. A. M. Hartmann, S.J., An Outline of the Grammar of the Mashona Language (Cape Town: n.p., 1893), 1. 32. AR, Chikore Station, 1906, UN 3/20/1/1/3. 33. Report on Chikore Evangelical Touring 1908–1909, 22 May 1909, UN 3/20/1/4/3. 34. Terence O. Ranger, “The Meaning of Mwari,” Rhodesian History 5 (1974): 5–17; also villagers in Chimanimani district, personal communication, March 1987. 35. See various correspondence regarding the “non-Native” status of the Zulu evangelists, for example, Civil Commissioner (Longden) to the Chairman, American Mission, Mt. Silinda, 11 January 1908, UN 3/2/1/3. 36. Report on Chimanimani School for white children, Melsetter, AR, Mt. Silinda, 1906–1907, UN 3/20/1/2/1.

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37. The concepts embedded in the siZulu texts did not clearly represent either Western or indigenous concepts of a supreme deity, and were muddled between ideas of a first ancestor with no continuing role in the world, a creator, and a supreme ruler with the power to judge. See William H. Worger, “Parsing God: Conversations about the Meaning of Words and Metaphors in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa,” Journal of African History 42, 3 (2001): 417–48. 38. Wilder to Gilson, 5 March 1912, UN 3/2/1/6. 39. Bunker to Gilson, 6 May 1902, UN 3/2/1/3; AR, Mt. Silinda, 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/1; Gilson to Bell, 6 January 1911, UN 3/2/1/5; AR, Mt. Silinda, 1911, UN 3/20/1/6/1. 40. AR, Mt. Silinda, June 1908, UN 3/10/1/3/1. (lowercase “c” in the original). 41. Gilson to Barton, 18 August 1911, UN 3/2/1/5; Wilder to Gilson, 5 March 1912, UN 3/2/1/6. 42. See chapter 3, p. 41. There were other “native helpers” working on chiNdau texts at Chikore, such as the report in 1908 that there was “another Ndau teacher and assistant translator, whose salary is paid by the school fund and by the Translation Fund.” AR, Chikore Station, 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/3; see also AR, Chikore School, 1907, UN 3/20/1/2/1. 43. AR, Chikore Station, 1906, UN 3/20/1/1/3. He did not return until 1908, when he was employed as a teacher in Mt. Silinda school while learning the more lucrative skill of carpentry. In 1912, he opened the first African-owned store in the district. By 1921, he was attempting to convert Chief Musikavanhu and get land from local farmer Mr. Steen for a mission to Musikavanhu’s people: AR, Mt. Silinda School, 1907–1908, UN 3/20/1/3/2; J. K. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism among the Ndau of Southern Rhodesia 1890–1935” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1973), 530; letter from J. M. Hlatywayo, Chikore Mission Station, 11 April 1921, UN 3/2/1/14. 44. All Members, Mt. Silinda Mission, to Smith, 28 February 1898, UN 3/2/1/2; AR, Mt. Silinda, July 1907, UN 3/20/1/2/1; AR, Mt. Silinda, June 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/1; Statistical report, 1910, UN 3/2/1/4. In Chikore, AR, Chikore, June 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/3, simply notes that “services have been held regularly at all the preaching places,” but in 1909 a determined effort to send local converts out to preach meant that “the district in the immediate neighborhood has been evangelized as never before”; Chikore Bible School Report, 1908–1909, UN 3/20/1/4/3. 45. Gilson to Bell, 6 January 1911, UN 3/2/1/5. Note also Mhlanganyiso’s 1902 Buzi tour to Mt. Silinda, Bunker to Gilson, 6 May 1902, UN 3/2/1/3. 46. Report of Bible Study Conference and Native Annual Meeting, UN 3/20/1/2/1; Chikore Touring Report 1908–1909, 22 May 1909, UN 3/20/1/4/3. 47. AR, Mt. Silinda, 1906–1907, UN 3/20/1/2/1. 48. AR, Mt. Silinda School, 1906–1907, UN 3/201/2/3; Chikore Touring Report 1908–1909, UN 3/20/1/4/3; Gilson to Wilder, 4 January 1912, UN 3/2/1/6. However, Wilder suspected that such applications might have been influenced by tax considerations, the mission fees being thought to be easier than the government levy on those occupying reserved government land. 49. AR, Chikore Station, 1906, UN 3/20/1/1/3. 50. AR, Mt. Silinda Station, 1909–1910, UN 3/20/1/5/1. 51. AR, Mt. Silinda Station, 1906–1907, UN 3/20/1/2/1. 52. Gilson to Bell, 6 January 1911, UN 3/2/1/5. 53. See, for example, Reports on Matanga’s and Mangundi’s outstations, 1906–1907, UN 3/20/1/2/1. 54. AR, Chikore Church, 1906–1907, UN 3/20/1/2/1. It seems that this was in addition to his employment as a teacher at Chikore School: Chikore Station Report, June 1908, UN

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3/20/1/3/3, refers to a “Ndau helper supported in part by the Chikore Church and in part by the School fund as he also teaches.” 55. Report on Bible Study Conference and Native Annual Meeting, 24–26 June 1907, UN 3/20/1/2/1. 56. AR, Mt. Silinda School, June 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/2. 57. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 58. AR, Mt. Silinda School, June 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/2; AR, Chikore School, 1908 UN 3/20/1/3/4. 59. Stanley P. Hyatt, Off the Main Track (London: Collins, 1911), 25. Hyatt was based in the western half of Southern Rhodesia, but his comments apply equally to Chimanimani district during the early years of white settlement, when there were several prosecutions of Africans for forgery. 60. This led one white farmer to complain that the missionaries were “liable to interfere with the farmers [sic] interests by stimulating unwarranted ambitions in the minds of the natives and making them less amenable to easy management as menial servants.” HalfYearly Report, Mt. Silinda Station, December 1906, UN 3/20/1/1/1. 61. AR, Mt. Silinda School, 1909–1910, UN 3/20/1/5/2. 62. AR, Chikore School, 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/4. 63. AR, Chikore School, 1909, UN 3/20/1/4/3. 64. Carol Summers (personal communication) suggests that this form of reading was more a case of “performance,” the use of esoteric phrases as a symbol of status, than an exercise in literacy. See also Carol Summers, Colonial Lessons: Africans’ Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918–1940 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), 18. 65. The phrase is taken from Matthew Engelke’s discussion of Johannes Fabian’s “Text as Terror: Second Thoughts about Charisma,” in Time and the Work of Anthropology: Selected Essays 1971–1991 (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1991), 65–86, found in Matthew Engelke, “Text and Performance in an African Church: The Book ‘Live and Direct,’” American Ethnologist 31, no. 1 (2005): 79. 66. AR, Mt. Silinda, 1907–1008, report on Matanga’s outstation, UN 3/20/1/3/1. 67. R. W. Niezen, “Hot Literacy in Cold Societies: A Comparative Study of the Sacred Value of Writing,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, no. 2 (1991): 225–54. Compare some of the attitudes toward Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, described in Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). 68. Report on Bible Study Conference and Native Annual Meeting, 24–26 June 1907, UN3/20/1/2/1; Chikore Statistical Report, 1908–1009, UN 3/20/1/4/3. 69. Report on Chikore Bible School, 1908–1909, UN3/20/1/4/3. 70. Engelke, “Text and Performance in an African Church,”76. (The Masowe church’s views on the Bible are not typical of contemporary Zimbabwe.) 71. Report on Chikore Bible School, 1908–1909, UN3/20/1/4/3 (emphasis in the original). 72. Lamin Sanneh,Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989), 171. 73. Bates to Smith, 23 March 1899, UN 3/2/1/2. As Carol Summers (personal communication) points out, Bates was accused of sexual relationships with a young female Zulu evangelist, which gives additional irony to his discussion of the difficulties of selfcontrol.

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74. Half-Yearly Report, Mt. Silinda Station, December 1906, UN 3/20/1/1/1. 75. Bates to Smith, 23 March 1899, UN 3/2/1/2. 76. Chikore Touring Report, 22 May 1908–1909, UN 3/20/1/ 4/3: re converts in Save Districts: “Some twelve of these people have moved during the year onto Chikore Station and have there made a public profession and are trying to change their environments in clothing themselves, learning to read and are planning to build durable homes.” 77. AR, Mt. Silinda School, 1907, UN 3/20/1/2/3. 78. AR, Chikore 1909, UN 3/201/4/3; Chikore Statistical Report, 1908–1909, UN 3/20/1/4/3. 79. AR, Chikore Station, 1906, UN 3/20/1/1/3. 80. AR, Chikore Station, 26 May 1910, UN 3/20/1/5/3. 81. AR, Chimanimani School (for white children), 1907, UN 3/20/1/2/1. 82. Wilder to SANAC § 34,0417 [sic], 30 August 1904. 83. AR, Chikore, 1906, UN 3/20/1/1/3; similarly, Lawrence, Half-Yearly Report, Mt. Silinda Station, December 1906, UN 3/20/1/1/1. 84. AR, Mt. Silinda, 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/1; Fragment of correspondence, 1909, UN 3/2/1/3. 85. AR, Mt. Silinda, 1909, UN 3/20/1/4/1. 86. AR, Mt. Silinda School, 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/2. 87. Fragment, 1909, UN 3/2/1/3 (spelling in the original). 88. Lawrence to Bell, 13 November 1909, UN 3/2/1/3. 89. Lawrence to Barton, 18 June 1910, UN 3/2/1/4 (spelling in the original). 90. AR, Mt. Silinda, 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/1 (Ndwandwe was one of the Zulu evangelists); AR, Mt. Silinda, 1909–1910, UN 3/20/1/5/1 (spelling and lowercase in the original. Mhlanganyiso was not specifically named in this report, but I think my identification is sound.). 91. F.W.T. Posselt, Fact and Fiction (Bulawayo: Government of Southern Rhodesia, 1935), 114. Matthew Engelke’s informants in the Masowe church cited the teaching that the Bible prohibited more than one wife, when manifestly it did not, as evidence of the mendacity of white missionaries: Engelke, “Text and Performance in an African Church,” 78. 92. AR, Mt. Silinda, 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/1. “Curse” is, of course, itself an interesting choice of word. Who did the cursing? 93. Lawrence to Bell, 13 November 1909, UN 3/2/1/3; AR, Mt. Silinda, 1909–1910, UN 3/20/1/ 5/1; Fragment, 1909, UN 3/2/1/3. 94. Report of Native Annual Meeting, Mt. Silinda, AR, Mt. Silinda, 1907–1908, UN 3/20/1/3/1. 95. Cited in Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism,” 288. 96. AR, Mt. Silinda, 1907–1908, UN 3/20/1/3/1; Bell to Fuller, 5 December 1911, UN 3/2/1/5. 97. Barton to Lawrence, 3 November 1909, UN 3/2/1/3; Bell to Fuller, 5 December 1911, UN 3/2/1/5.

5 “An ordinary palaver”: Laws and Courts

At the native commissioner’s (NC’s) office, some 55 miles north of the Mt. Silinda Mission, Meredith was also engaged in translation work. Whereas the missionaries were trying to turn their sacred texts into chiNdau, Meredith was trying to turn local beliefs and laws into English. Having exposed the court interpreter employed by Longden as a fraud in January 1899, he then found himself having to do the interpretation in criminal cases himself. Meanwhile, he was also spending considerable amounts of time hearing civil cases brought to him for adjudication. In legal hearings, the principles on which people were operating became very important. Misunderstandings and mistranslations could have very serious consequences. Translation was not at all an academic matter; it was, quite literally in some cases, a matter of life or death. The beginnings of Southern Rhodesian ethnography can be traced to these early attempts to understand and translate indigenous legal systems. However, this chapter suggests that the huge amount of work invested by the state in getting information about local laws, and administering them, produced a situation in which white adjudicators and African litigants largely ended up talking at cross purposes. This conclusion—which crept up on me and took me by surprise when I began to read the records of hearings as examples of translation rather than as examples of law—suggests another way of approaching our literature on African law. We all now recognize that “what colonial officials treated as immutable customary law was itself the product of historical struggles unfolding during the colonial period.”1 However, what struck me, from looking at the records from Melsetter district in the 1890s and 1900s, is how little this was recognized by the participants themselves. People who trekked scores of miles to take a case to the NC did so, it seems, not because they could exploit European forms of justice but because they did not accept that it differed significantly from their own systems of justice. What the NC or the magistrate thought he had heard and understood

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and what the litigants had heard and understood seem to have been two separate things.2 There may, in fact, have been far less hybridity and far more conservatism in African responses to white courts than we have generally realized. Meredith was expected, as an NC, to understand and utilize “native law and custom.” He had to engage systematically with the ideas that underlay indigenous jurisprudence and to provide effective translations for key legal concepts, including marriage, debt, justice, crime, and punishment. The practice of law threw the boundary-crossing paradox into stark relief because it required a wealth of ethnographic detail. It forced the state to amass huge amounts of detail on African thought about important social issues while at the same time trying to deny the validity of this way of thinking. Apart from when they collected tax, native commissioners engaged with Africans primarily when they agreed to act as adjudicators in disputes. Petitioners came to them with issues, and they took on the job of hearing those cases as if they were local chiefs. In these first encounters, NCs were identifying and translating local laws in terms that made sense to them. The task was not simply academic. They were using that information as a source of power. Consequently, they did not just encounter, rationalize, and record: they also had to act on what they had recorded. But they were acting in situations where what they thought they were doing—consistently and fairly applying a predefined set of fixed rules—was perhaps not quite what the other people involved in the hearing thought they were doing. When Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (BSACo) adventurers first claimed land west of the Save, the company had no judicial authority at all. However, in 1891, in order to underpin its position, the British Crown granted it judicial authority over the whites settled within the territory. Five years later, in 1896, the Crown extended this authority to cover Africans. These moves were somewhat premature, as suitable bureaucratic systems to administer criminal and civil justice were not firmly in place. In 1897, the Legal Department, staffed by official resident magistrates (RMs), was properly regularized. The RMs’ job was primarily to hear criminal cases and civil cases between whites. There were no official courts to deal specifically with Africans, but there was also no interest in banning Africans from using chiefly arbiters. Such a policy would have been impossible to enforce and had no obvious benefit for the state. The inclusion of Africans in the state’s criminal justice system, at a time when the state was still in a process of formation, was more to do with interwhite politics than with African criminality. It was aimed at halting the judicial entrepreneurship of men like Dunbar Moodie, setting themselves up as local indunas. Moodie had toured Melsetter district in 1893, hearing cases and taking payment, so that within 10 days he had amassed a holding of 32 goats.3 Two years later, Meredith’s predecessor as NC complained about local white farmers claiming to be justices of the peace and obstructing his work by hearing cases and forcing Africans to work on their land.4 Apart from violating the principle that the state should have the

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monopoly over justice, such cavalier white arbiters could disrupt BSACo agreements about tax or labor and, in the worst cases, produced calls on the company’s private army, the British South Africa Police, to restore law and order.5 Putting Africans under the state justice umbrella was an attempt to solve this problem, though it had the useful side effect that Africans could be arrested and tried in the criminal courts. The newly occupied territories were governed by the law of the Cape Colony, which was Roman Dutch law. It was to this legal tradition that the Southern Rhodesian legal department looked for establishing precedent in legal practice in its magistrates’ and higher courts. Because Africans, as well as whites, were deemed to come under this jurisdiction, part of the role of the police and hut-tax collectors (as the NCs were initially known) was to ensure that local people knew what wasn’t allowed and what would be prosecuted as a crime by the state. The offenses that could be prosecuted by the new state covered not only those that are deemed to be crimes in most societies—notably murder and theft—but also culturally specific crimes, such as grass burning, pass-law offenses, and perjury. Civil jurisdiction was more complicated. The civil codes of the Cape Colony were in force, but Africans were not required to operate under them. After 1891, it was conceded that, in the event of a civil dispute between Africans being heard in a BSACo court, judicial decisions should follow “the laws and customs of the natives concerned, in so far as they are applicable,” provided that this would not cause problems for good governance. If it did cause problems, then the civil codes that applied to whites should be used. However, by 1898, the instruction had changed slightly. Now it was clearly stated that “in civil cases between natives the … courts shall be guided by native law so far as that law is not repugnant to natural justice or morality.”6 Although the 1898 Order in Council assumed that this authority would be exercised by magistrates and the High Court in civil courts, in practice the task of hearing “native civil disputes” fell largely to the NCs, Neither NC nor chiefly courts were established under statute law. The Order in Council and the subsequent amendments to the regulations up to 1904 referred only to Magistrate and High Courts. Therefore, NCs who were not also justices of the peace had no legal powers to hear cases: “their duties and powers were of a purely executive nature, and no decision in any suit, by a Native Commissioner was legally binding on any Native, or in respect of any property.”7 Consequently, in legal terms, the hearing of these cases by the NCs was not significantly different from the hearings by chiefs and other local arbiters. They did not take place in the court houses, and the police were not used to enforce rulings: plaintiffs had to chase payments themselves. It is doubtful whether any of the NCs’ decisions could legally have been enforced by the state.8 So chiefly courts continued to operate, but NCs’ hearings were available as an alternative. In Melsetter district, it is clear that some cases came to the NC having previously been heard by a chief, which suggest that the NC’s court could be used as a court of appeal.9 However, we have no way of knowing whether this process

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worked the other way as well, so that people unhappy with a NC’s ruling went to a chiefly court for a second opinion. Certainly there were referrals in that direction. In 1899, Meredith remarked that “in most cases they come to me to decide their differences,” but when the birth of his son put pressure on his available time, he referred many plaintiffs to the chiefs instead.10 He continued thereafter to refer cases to the chiefs, noting in 1901 that “I have always as far as possible allowed the chiefs to settle their people’s petty disputes and I find that it gives them the greatest satisfaction, more especially as they look upon the settling of these disputes as their own special perquisites.”11 In 1912, assistant NC E. G. Lenthall washed his hands of a case that was already being dealt with by paramount chief Mutambara.12 There are also indications that local people did not make a hierarchical distinction between courts. In 1909, a seduction charge was brought to the NC simply because the subchief had already heard a linked witchcraft accusation case and was not interested in hearing any more about it.13 In the same year, a criminal case was taken to the NC because the chief was too busy to give it a proper hearing. There had been a horrible and incestuous rape of an 18-month-old girl by her father. The mother took the case to the paramount, not to the police, and the paramount later testified, As Chief, complaints by natives under me are usually referred to me…. When a case is brought to me by any of my people I usually investigate it. I did not investigate this case as I was just about to go on a visit.14

Sometimes, local judges referred cases to the NC for political, rather than pragmatic, reasons. This happened in 1908 when a headman referred a witchcraft accusation on the grounds that these had now been outlawed by the criminal law. This case had begun as a seduction case, which the “chief ” (as he is described in the record) was hearing in the routine way.15 So there seems to be no clear-cut evidence that local people regarded the NC’s court as a higher forum than others available. Moreover, there is certainly no indication that distinctions were made between criminal cases and civil cases, except where there were concerns about violating the white nduna’s specific injunctions, as in witchcraft cases. The NC’s office, it seems, was treated as simply one of several possible places where disputes could be heard. The state did not see any need to give NCs formal legal authority to hear civil cases under local law because it assumed that these local laws would soon wither away. The BSACo officials treated “native law and custom” as a temporary aberration, which would atrophy as Africans recognized the manifest superiority of “civilized” practices.16 Consequently, they did not want to codify it or in any way give it a permanent status. As the resident commissioner testified in 1904, codifying the civil law would be “stereotyping a state of law and custom which is naturally in a state of transition” and so, he concluded, would be “very unwise.”17 The Southern Rhodesian state saw itself as occupying a middle way between the Cape Colony and Natal in the way it dealt with local people’s legal position. In

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the Cape Colony, on the one hand, all categories of people came, as far as possible, under the same legal code. In Natal, on the other hand, there was a specific set of civil laws that applied only to Africans and that were supposed to be a codification of Zulu legal systems. In Southern Rhodesia, Africans came under the civil and criminal codes, but their civil cases could be heard, if they wished, according to their own, uncodified, legal systems, provided that the arbiter was an NC or an African who had permission to hear such cases.18 So BSACo legal officials did not try to force Africans to start thinking in new ways by making them engage with European civil codes. They allowed the existing rules regarding inheritance, bridewealth marriages, polygyny, and so forth to continue and did not, on the whole, attempt to impose the “axioms and aesthetics of an alien culture,” except where they felt that existing practices were either criminal or “repugnant to natural justice or morality.”19 Meredith was not the only white official to leave such hearings to local arbiters, reasoning that they were the experts on local law.20 Nonetheless, many officials felt obliged to take on such cases. They thought that, by administering indigenous law better than the Africans did themselves, they were hastening its inexorable decline. Africans, they believed, had strange ideas about time, truth, and evidence under oath. A better legal system would liberate them from despotism, woolly thinking, and superstition. As early as 1893, even before Africans were officially under the white criminal law, it was asserted that “the destiny of the white man is to be the law-giver to the black men of this country.”21 White arbiters prided themselves that they were fairer to women than African judges and less susceptible to bribery, corruption, or nepotism, having no stake in the compensation awarded. This view was graphically expressed by the NC Salisbury in 1897: a Mashona never misses a chance at enriching himself at anothers expense; in fact … his Motto is Let him take who has the power And let him keep who can … Before the rebellion “and even now”, no Native would willingly bring his dispute before a Paramount if he could get a Native Commissioner who was acquaint [sic] with the Mashona Customs, and language, to settle it for him instead. Which I think is sufficient proof, that they knew that they would get no justice from a Chief unless they could afford to bribe him.22

Even where the chief was not suspected of outright corruption, there was still a sense among NCs that they dispensed “better” justice than the local paramounts. Meredith, for example, declared that “Natives prefer to go to the Native Commissioners to have [cases] dealt with as they can seldom agree to any compromise among themselves.”23 The NCs believed that Africans would recognize that they got a better quality of justice from white arbiters, even when using the same old African legal codes. This would encourage them to engage more actively with

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European legal systems. As society changed, they believed, so Africans would abandon their old codes and judges, and move seamlessly into the shared world of civil statute law. The decision that NCs should set themselves up as “Kaffir chiefs” and attempt to administer justice according to local principles was partly influenced by the “Shepstone system” in Natal. Theophilus Shepstone’s method of administration involved “a limited number of white colonial officials crossing, as it were, into an African world, and ruling through the use of the cultural logic of that world.”24 Zulu systems of order, notably those associated with the power that senior men exerted over households, were formalized into a system of rule in which the state propped up the power of senior men, assisting them in the control over women and junior men, and insisting on the payment of bridewealth. Many of the recruits to the Native Affairs Department in Southern Rhodesia came from the Natal Native Department and expected to operate under the same principles. But the BSACo was probably not only drawing on Shepstone. There was also the experience of mine managers in Johannesburg to take into account. There, too, managers had found that it was useful to adopt the role of arbiter and thereby, in some ways, draw on the same sources of authority as those claimed by indigenous rulers: “Natives are decidedly litigious,” advised the native labor commissioner in Johannesburg, and “nothing … affords them greater satisfaction than being able to state their grievance to their ‘chief.’” So, he observed, “a Manager who will assume this position … will achieve a popularity that possesses a substantial value.”25 Taking on the role of judge for “native disputes” was definitely seen as an effective way of getting Africans to respect one’s authority. This was a system of direct, not indirect, rule. For the system to operate, a lot of work was required, by NCs and others to find out what the local systems of law actually were. In each district, the hut-tax collector/NC sought knowledge of local laws, not with an ethnographic interest in understanding them or the principles underlying them, but in order to apply them in court hearings. Their approach was instrumental, not academic. As one might expect, given the cultural background of these investigators, what they wanted to uncover about local legal systems were standardized rules and regulations, and what they wanted to do with them was to write them down. To a large extent, these NCs were learning from scratch, trying to find out really basic information about the territories to which they had been allocated: “I spent most of my life in the first years in this country on a horse’s back. As one of the first Native Commissioners it meant constant travel to learn something about the geography of the country and find out what natives were in it, and prepare the first rough map.”26 Admittedly, most of the newly appointed NCs had already spent a lot of time with Africans, either as administrators in Natal or locally as traders and prospectors. The traders and other adventurers who were recruited north of the Limpopo believed that what they lacked in administrative experience, they made up for in linguistic and local knowledge. Those

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who came from the Natal administration assumed that they already knew most that there was to know about bridewealth payments and the responsibilities of inheritance. Gradually, however, the realization dawned that what they knew from Natal didn’t necessarily apply to the peoples of Southern Rhodesia. As one prominent NC observed, “Many Native Commissioners were conversant with native customs in other parts of South Africa and the modes of dealing with them—all were learners of the local customs found in the country.”27 Southern Rhodesian ethnography had its beginnings in these early investigations. The state was awash with ignorance and needed to know the most basic things. It is indicative of how little was known that, late in 1894, the acting administrator, Col. F. W. Rhodes, asked hut-tax collectors to report on the following: “(A) the origin of Mealies into their country; (B) any history as to where the present tribes now occupying the country came from; (C) The religion pursued; (D) A general report on the habits and customs.” The responses were based largely on personal observation, with little evidence of research, even though a large part of what was reported, particularly about the histories, must have been provided by local people. Actual knowledge was limited, with much reference to “what appears to be” the case and baffled observations of “superstitious” practices. It does not seem that anything useful was done with all this information that the local officers had so willingly and enthusiastically scrawled down. Over the next few years, the same questions kept coming around again as the central state continued to try to get a grip on the “facts.”28 At an early stage, it was recognized that there were some laws that clearly counted as “repugnant.” These rules, which seem to have been strictly observed and policed by local authorities, included “the custom of native women destroying their twins at birth” and “an immemorial custom of our people that all children whose teeth appear first in the upper jaw must be killed.”29 It is notable that these practices were always translated as “customs,” and it would be interesting to know what Chief Muwusha actually said in the phrase recorded in English as “an immemorial custom of our people.” In any case, the term “law” seems to have been reserved primarily for those rules that resonated with European criminal codes (such as punishment for theft) or that the new administration wanted to see observed (such as payment of bridewealth). Knowledge of “repugnant customs” seems to have come from informants rather than from observation. Information was often confused and incomplete. In a memo circulated to hut-tax collectors and police in Mashonaland in 1894, Frank Rhodes referred to “a mass of evidence before me,” partly derived from his survey, that twin murder was prevalent throughout Mashonaland. Despite questioning of Africans about how and why they killed twins, the issue remained for whites as one of the frightening and unresolved mysteries of African culture. As one official pointed out, “The chiefs are very unwilling to talk about the subject and generally deny having had any personal acquaintance with a case of this sort.” It seems that officials tried to find out what was going on in African communities by talking to

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people but that they did not always get much help—especially when they touched on heavy matters of spiritual belief, witchcraft, or ritual murder.30 Rhodes did not even seem aware of the law about children cutting their upper teeth first. Knowledge of it developed piecemeal over the next decade, despite being reported by the NC Umtali as early as 1898.31 At the trial for such a case in Melsetter district in 1906, the headman, ward head, and paramount were all called to testify, alongside the midwife, parents, and a local elder, to confirm that such a practice really did exist and was required of the parents.32 The only way that NCs could find out about local legal systems was to ask Africans themselves. It put them in a position of interrogators but also of pupils. For example, the BSACo’s legal adviser was concerned that there was no statute law covering inheritance. He noted that there was a Native Code in Natal to cover such matters, but he did not have a copy of it, and in any case he needed specific local information. In 1897, he wrote to the CNC asking, “Is it possible to obtain authentic information as to the customs of Natives in regard to the succession of property.”33 NCs were duly dispatched to obtain such information. There was an undercurrent of feeling within the Native Affairs Department that all this data they were gathering should be organized into a Code of Native Law, despite the official position that such a code would be “undesirable.” The NC Chilimanzi argued that this would ease the NC’s work, by standardizing rulings: “The reason for this code would be so as to have a universal way of deciding the rights & wrongs and amount damage [sic] or compensation due.” Significantly, however, he also suggested that it would transfer some of the power to define local law from Africans to NCs: “This could be done by each Native Commissioner finding out from reliable natives in his district the original settlement in vogue before we came into the country and then giving his own opinion as to the settlement either agreeing with the native way or giving his reasons for differing.”34 In law, as in political administration, the pattern of investigation was to encounter, make sense of, rationalize, and record. Also, of course, in law as in political administration, it was the “reliable natives,” with their sectional interests, whose views were to be canvassed and amended as appropriate. In the absence of an official Code of Laws, NCs developed their own sets of “laws” that they believed to apply to the people they lived among. Some of these rules they believed to hold good through most of the territory, even most of the subcontinent: “Their law of inheritance is the same as most other south African tribes with a few minor alterations.”35 Given the influence from Natal and the patriarchal interests of their informants, it is no surprise that women were defined as legal minors.36 Regarding marriage, it was agreed that bridewealth should be paid. Regarding inheritance, women were described as property to be inherited, so that “there are no widows’.” Moreover, as property themselves, women could have no right to property.37 There was some awareness that heirs had an obligation to provide wives to other claimants, using the wealth of the deceased as bridewealth.38 It was generally accepted that European principles of succession of

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property should not apply, because, as S.N.G. Jackson carefully argued, it was not property, but the position of administrator of the family wealth that was inherited: “He is not regarded as owner of the property in our sense of the word.”39 The NCs tried to make sense of these legal principles by reference to what they already knew: Old Testament regulations regarding marriage and widow inheritance. T. B. Hulley, who was the senior NC for the eastern border of the territory, reported in 1898 that “the Laws and customs of the natives seem to be all more or less based on the Jewish code.” Jackson, writing around 1905, used the Pentateuch to explain and describe contemporary African rules of succession, inheritance, and marriage, as if it were part of the same legal system. He equated service marriage with Jacob’s service for Rachel (Genesis 24) and, of divorce, said that it “may be tersely and at the same time fully expressed in the words of the 1st and 2nd verses of Chapter XXIV of Deuteronomy.” At about the same time, another NC advised his colleague W. Edwards to “read ‘Leviticus’ & you’ll trace many customs to the original fountain.”40 On this basis, the NCs constructed a set of laws that they believed ought to apply to and be obeyed by local Africans. During the early years, then, the white “experts” on African society drew on what they already knew—the Natal code and the Pentateuch—and used local informants to produce their own interpretations of local laws. These did not constitute a “Native Code” but were the formulas that NCs used when making judgments in civil hearings—and on which they reported fulsomely, as “native law and custom,” when consulted by the central administration. Despite being based, to some extent, on local information, they were often crude translations into more familiar European modes of thought rather than accurate representations of local codes. Neither informants nor NCs had a clear sense of the other’s legal systems, and assumed that what they were describing or hearing would make sense. The NCs believed that they understood much of what they heard because it appeared to have a resonance with things they already knew. For example, the idea that women were “legal minors” reflected what whites expected to see. However, the concept of women’s legal minority was part of a specifically European legal system, not really applicable in the local context. The indicators that the NCs used to demonstrate the minority of women would have applied equally to large numbers of men. On the other hand, they would not have applied to senior women, notably the Vatete (father’s sister), in decision making about, for example, the distribution of lineage property. The whites didn’t see the “legal minority” of junior men or the “legal majority” of senior women because they weren’t looking for it and didn’t ask the right questions. Their assertions about the legal minority of women had been inherited from the codes in Natal, which reflected an attempt to cram fundamentally different systems of power and jurisprudence into a European model that didn’t fit. Moreover, by the early 1900s, a state version of African marriage law was beginning to creep into existence. The 1901 Native Marriages Ordinance was primarily

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an anti-pledging (and therefore antirepugnancy) measure. Using Natal-based rules about lobolo and marriage registration, it laid down £20 or four head of cattle as the maximum exchange in a normal bridewealth transaction and one year as the maximum length of time between arrangement of the marriage and payment of the bridewealth. This was intended not as a definition of “native custom” but as a means of preventing wealthy men from snapping up all the available women at the expense of younger men (who, from the BSACo’s perspective, needed to believe there was some point in trying to earn bridewealth cash at the mines). Nonetheless, it worked neatly as a rule of thumb when hearing disputes over bridewealth payments.41 Such regulations could not work as “the Law” on African marriage, however, because so many people simply did not get married in the way that the Native Marriages Ordinance described. Meredith, upset by shamwari exchange of daughters, had reported as early as 1897 that “a custom obtains in this District with regard to Native marriages, and I have not known such a custom in any other districts of Rhodesia.”42 Service marriages also fell entirely outside the Native Marriages Ordinance’s ambit. Some NCs felt that this was reason enough to outlaw service marriage, as the NC Sebungwe argued in a lengthy correspondence with the CNC: “I fail to realise why a native custom which is not a good custom should be fostered and I am doing my best in this district to … encourage [the custom] of lobolo which is recognized by the Government of S. Rhodesia.”43 There was no legal basis for such efforts, however, and the NCs simply had to work with whatever the Africans around them told them was the law. However, even when NCs had identified rules by which marriage contracts, inheritance, and labor agreements were governed, they found that the rules were not always applied uniformly or “properly.” Particularly in the western part of the territory, elders complained about the sexual promiscuity of young people, with reports of elopements, seductions, abductions, and problems with extracting payment of compensation or bridewealth.44 Some of the old Natal officers, familiar with Zulu discipline regarding sexual relations and celibacy of juniors, made disparaging comparisons with the Zulu communities under the Shepstone system: “The old approved methods of handling natives (… which owed their success to the character of the race to whom they were applied) will not work when brought to bear on a community such as we have here, which is yet to emerge from a state of chaos, to found a code of morals and to originate an elementary organisation.”45 Jackson stated that in Mashonaland, too, laws were regarded as challenges to be evaded rather than instructions to be obeyed and ascribed this to “chiefs being unwilling or unable to interfere in disputes between their subjects.”46 So NCs were concerned that Africans did not seem to be obeying their own rules. Were the NCs uncovering evidence of breakdown in a previously well-functioning system? Citing observations in Reis e Gama, 1796, MacGonagle suggests that in Melsetter district an eighteenth-century centralized system of rule-based law had subsequently disintegrated with a crisis in political authority.47 Certainly the

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evidence from the early twentieth-century court cases suggests that bridewealth and kinship networks had been disrupted by Gaza raiding in the late nineteenth century. It is indeed possible that the administration of law had partly unraveled: Meredith noted in 1896 that “the paramount chiefs have very little authority.”48 However, this seems to have been an observation more about the power of masvikiro than about the collapse of the rule of law. Ngungunyana’s ndunas seem to have had no difficulties in enforcing the law. Alternatively, were they observing the early stages in the disintegration of a heretofore-functioning system, only now thrown into crisis by white occupation? In the west of the territory, the BSACo seized huge numbers of cattle following their defeat of the Ndebele Empire, and no doubt this contributed to the problems with enforcing bridewealth payments that were reported from those districts. However, in the eastern side of the territory, the early period of white occupation seems to have been a time when bridewealth negotiations and kinship networks were rebuilt and stabilized. Longden remarked that “before the advent of the Whites each individual native appears to have been a law unto himself,” suggesting that contract formation was becoming less chaotic than it had been previously but also echoing Jackson’s comment that every man was “his own Magistrate.”49 So what was it about local judicial practices that led NCs almost universally to complain that people did not obey the rule of law? It is difficult to pin down what “the rule of law” means in the precolonial context. Rather than looking for the causes of crisis, it is worth considering whether the system was functioning well but was not actually based on the universal application of uniform rules at all. The universal application of uniform rules was the foundation of fair justice, as understood by local whites. But this was a culturally specific way of understanding the law. The Africans subjected to occupation by the forces of the BSACo had somewhat different ways of understanding the law. The idea that the state was the injured party in criminal cases was alien to local justice systems. Africans did not distinguish between criminal and civil law in this way, leading Longden to observe that they “desire that criminals should be dealt with as in Civil Cases.”50 There was no common ground between local and European legal practices regarding distinctions between fines and compensation or regarding who was considered a suitable adjudicator, mediator, or material witness. Hearings proceeded on different principles, and the adversarial system of Roman-Dutch and British courts had little room to accommodate the wider-ranging discussions typical of local litigation. In such a context, it is also possible to argue that local cases did not depend on “rules” in the sense understood by white arbiters.51 Uniform rules were fundamental to European concepts of jurisprudence. The law, in the eyes of NCs who were trying to learn about local legal codes, was a set of rules that were first established and then implemented. Because the rules were fixed, their application could—and should—be the same for everyone. This uniform approach to laws—which had its roots in the concept of “citizenship” championed by the French Revolution—was the primary reason why the NCs

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considered that their administration of the law was better and fairer than that of African arbiters. The negotiability of rulings from judges in African society was often cited as an indication of the inadequacies of local moral standards. The concept of the law as a set of fixed rules, waiting to be applied, was symptomatic of the text-based society from which the NCs came. Not only the rules but also the hearings were thought about in textual terms. “Due process,” in European ideas of law, included a written record of what had taken place during a hearing. The records of “native civil disputes” heard by the NCs in Melsetter were neatly ordered according to a predefined template, in two large red notebooks titled “native civil disputes.” They were not official legal documents. Nonetheless, they adhered to the principles of legal record, being set out as contests between named plaintiffs and defendants, with formal statements from both parties, the evidence of witnesses, cross-examination, and “judgment” (alternatively called “decision”). Every case, regardless of its individuality or context, was recorded in these terms.52 Local Africans, however, did not come from a text-based culture. Laws existed not as text but as modes of behavior. Court cases existed not as text but as hearings. The whites imagined the law as a set of fixed rules, with an independent existence, waiting quietly on the page to be applied as and when occasion demanded. Local people conceptualized the law more as a way of responding to situations, depending on context.53 Law existed not in books, as records of the past, but as behaviors, claims, and counterclaims —performances—in the present. And performance, by definition, is fluid. Even when there are fixed parameters and stylized conventions, performances always exist in a unique form in a specific moment. Past agreements provided the basis for the present, but, in the same way that memorized histories and praise songs were reinvented and re-created with each performance, so legal contracts provided a framework within which demands and negotiations could take place in the present.54 This provides another way to interpret complaints from whites about a crisis in the rule of law. The idea that the application of the law could be not a fixed thing but a fluid thing was alien to the Melsetter NCs. Longden reported that the Native Marriages Ordinance bestowed a “degree of definiteness … to the matter of lobola, hitherto enveloped in vagueness and uncertainty.” He seemed to think that this was something for which local people were grateful but which they had somehow never quite been able to manage for themselves.55 He entirely overlooked the possibility that bridewealth agreements were not simple exchanges of property, but were means of creating very long-term relationships in which many circumstances might change. Fixed contracts were hostages to fortune. Trying to define the bridewealth exchange as a definitive, non-negotiable arrangement was not something that sensible people even attempted. The administrators’ understanding of what they were doing, and the interpretations of the people involved, were not the same. The rule of law was not in crisis but in motion. We know about these legal encounters because they were recorded by clerks. The written record bestows a certain formality on NC hearings. Judged simply

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by the form of the records, the NC’s court was organized around testimony from plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses, with judgment based on the evidence presented in court. Evidence was supposed to be directly relevant to the matter in hand and presented in sequence. Hearing cases in this way was supposed to introduce Africans to the superior system of “due process,” which contrasted with the more open flow of discussion typical of indigenous jurisprudence. In a statement circulated to NCs in 1914, the attorney general observed, “They have an apparently ineradicable tendency to detail all the surrounding gossip of a case, … We cannot go back to Native methods but must attempt to educate them up to ours.”56 In practice, however, it seems clear that the NC’s hearings allowed much more open discussion than would be acceptable in an official civil court. Indeed, Roger Howman, whose father was NC in the neighboring Ndanga district at this time, recalled hearings under a local tree: “There was little difference between a civil case and an ordinary palaver about anything and everything and any little trouble used to expand in all directions.”57 After 1909, when Longden became NC, the records keep to a very strict formula of claim, counterclaim, witness statements, and judgment. But this does not mean that the hearings followed these strict principles in real life. The records were clearly omitting much of what when on. In many cases, a simple formula such as “evidence shows,” “it appears from evidence,” or “the weight of evidence is in favor” seems to disguise a long and complex exchange of views and stories, because no such evidence occurs in the record. Frequently, this phrase is replaced by the more revealing “after discussion”—or even “after argument.”58 In one case, a clarification of a detail of “native law” was recorded simply as “Remarked,” with no indication of who made the remark or the context in which the clarification was sought or offered.59 One gets the impression of somewhat noisy meetings, with people sitting or standing at the margins, ready to throw in their own comments whenever occasion and status permitted. It also seems that evidence was admitted that would be ruled irrelevant according to strict European standards of “due process.” For example, a typical case heard by Meredith in 1908 was about liability for the death of a cow. The record of the case includes enormous detail about the consequences of a seduction. Old sexual gossip might not seem immediately relevant to the poor animal’s death, but the cow had changed hands several times in the dispute over compensation for the seduction.60 In terms of African jurisprudence, the seduction details were important because they revealed who had claims on the cow, and why. In noting down the “gossip,” Meredith’s practice seems to be closer to that of the chiefly courts than of Chancery. “Civil cases” to a European legal mind involved adjudication between two competing claims. The sorts of issues brought to the NC’s court were rarely so straightforward. It seems that complex disputes were reduced to a clear “civil claim” for the purposes of the record but that the experience on the ground was rather different.61 One case, about bridewealth claims, was inadvertently written up twice, and the man whom the woman wanted to marry differed between these accounts—which

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seems rather an important detail to have got wrong.62 In another case, the judgment recorded at the end of the case made a ruling about rights to children, although there was no record of this issue being discussed.63 In other cases, it is unclear who was the plaintiff and who was the defendant. On several occasions, the court record is simply incomprehensible, with random details and no precise indication of claim or counterclaim, so that it is utterly unclear on what basis judgment was reached.64 The outcomes in such cases suggest that the process had been about arbitration and negotiation, not about establishing the truth between competing claims. Put all together, it seems that the habit of admitting “gossip” and open-ended discussion and arbitration were the normal process of hearings, whatever the form of the records might suggest to the contrary. So, although the NCs and clerks recorded cases in ways that reflected a European form of judicial process, it is unlikely that the people who turned up at the NC’s hearings would have noticed much difference from the procedures of the chiefly courts. The records of the criminal cases in the magistrate’s court, on the other hand, were formal documents that constituted a part of the due process of criminal law. The cases were heard according to the strict procedures of Roman Dutch law, and the records reflect a close adherence to protocol. Yet even the criminal records suggest that Africans and whites had different expectations of the criminal courts and different ways of interpreting events in the courtroom. Africans tended to treat the criminal law system as if it were part of their own system of justice. The fact that the magistrate’s court was a different type of hearing from a chiefly hearing does not seem to have been acknowledged, despite taking place in the courthouse. As one defendant noted, “I am before the Chief now.”65 During these early years of judicial encounters between Africans and white judges, the legal distinction between civil and criminal cases remained hazy to Africans, who did not use the same system of classification to distinguish between types of offence. The African system of restorative justice did not need to make a distinction between criminal and civil law. Crimes, as well as disputes over rights or property, could usually be settled by the payment of appropriate compensation. Africans seemed to regard the RM’s and NC’s courts as broadly comparable, so that, when summoned to a civil hearing before the NC, the defendant could complain about the plaintiff, “He now arrests me.”66 The confusion was compounded in Melsetter district by the fact that, from 1909, Longden, as RM, also took on the job of NC.67 Consequently, Africans continued to regard most cases, whether heard in the NC’s or the RM’s court, as occasions to negotiate about compensation. They brought them to the NC or his deputy for arbitration, even when they were officially criminal cases and should not have been heard in the NC’s court. Surprisingly, in many cases the white officials heard criminal cases as requested. Even crimes of theft were heard as civil disputes in the NC’s court, including a claim about harvested crops that had already been heard as a criminal case before the RM.68 This blurring between criminal and civil was also evident in rape cases. In the NC’s court, rape was treated not as a criminal offense but as “seduction.” In many

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cases, a significant payment was offered—often a cow or ox. The NC interpreted readiness to accept this “fine” as evidence that the offense was not serious but a minor misdemeanor that was not even criminal under Roman Dutch law. In such cases, the ruling by the NC was not about guilt, but about the terms under which the compensation should be paid.69 For example, in July 1910, a man turned up at the NC’s office in Melsetter demanding payment of compensation for what the clerk recorded as the “seduction” of his wife. She had been thrown to the ground and raped while walking home. She cried out for help, and the man was caught in the act. He offered goats in compensation but failed to pay up, so, some months later, the case was taken to the NC to enforce payment. The NC ruled that he should pay £10, and no move was made to institute criminal proceedings.70 For the Africans involved, the NC had behaved exactly as an African arbiter would do, and the European distinction between civil and criminal cases remained invisible. However, some of the cases that were taken to the NC for arbitration ended up in the magistrate’s court, as criminal cases. Africans who took such cases to the whites were not looking for a trial but an enforcement order. They were generally hoping that the authorities would confirm or enhance a compensation payment. For example, in 1905, a man whose wife had been raped refused the proffered compensation of seven goats, a hoe, 2/6d cash, plus a roll of tobacco and two shillings for the wife. He took the case to white arbitration, demanding the much larger compensation of “£25 or a girl.”71 In a rape case heard six years later, the accused was “a native foreigner,” and the husband had doubts about whether he would return if permitted to go to back to Portuguese territory to fetch compensation goods. The woman admitted, “I would have made no complaint, but he did not compensate my husband so we took accused that day to the Assistant Native Commissioner at Chipinga and there I charged him with having committed rape upon me.”72 The couple had expected their claim to be heard by the assistant NC and had wanted a compensation ruling, not a criminal trial. However, because it was a criminal, not a civil, case, the assistant native commissioner brought it to the attention of his boss, who referred it to the court of the magistrate, Melsetter.73 This also happened in other criminal cases. A prosecution witness in an attempted murder trial clearly stated, “The accused did not pay me the four head of cattle [to which he had agreed], that is why I have now come to the Police.” The accused seemed unclear as to how he could be undergoing trial for a second time, protesting that “this case has been settled before.”74 In none of these criminal cases did the plaintiffs, as they saw themselves, receive the compensation they sought. Instead, the accused men were sentenced to terms of imprisonment, and even the smaller sums of compensation that had been offered were lost. The RM behaved in accordance with European legal systems, to the evident frustration of the Africans, who had gone to the white authorities for assistance only because they expected, given previous experience, that white courts would operate according to local legal principles.

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The plaintiffs in these cases had gone to the courts not to establish guilt, but to renegotiate the details of compensation. This highlights another difference between local and European systems of justice, one that was not immediately obvious to those involved in the hearings. Rulings about guilt/liability in European courts were accompanied by rulings about punishment/payment, and (subject to appeal) both rulings were fixed and absolute. However, for Africans, decisions about liability, once acknowledged (usually by the exchange of tokens and/or admission of guilt), were fixed and absolute, but rulings about payment were not. These could routinely be revised in the light of subsequent events. It appears that, in the early years, Africans treated rulings about payment in the NC’s court as if they were such rulings in chiefly courts. Cases were routinely returned to the NC’s court for further negotiation. Having heard a case, the NC or his deputy usually set out precise details of reparation, relying on textual records to fix the rulings. The local people, however, regarded social relationships as too complex and changeable to be set in stone or even in ink. The idea that the NC had passed down a definitive judgment, to the last penny of what was owing, was not recognized by the disputants. Indeed, if the detail of certain rulings had been obeyed to the letter, then injustice would have been done. A ruling might be made for cash when a man was entitled to livestock, as in 1908, when Mucheke wanted the balance of 10 goats owed out of 25 agreed in bridewealth and seized a woman from his in-laws’ household until payment was made. Meredith’s ruling was for 10 pounds sterling, with no mention of goats.75 In other cases, the ruling was for cash or livestock when a man was entitled to a woman. For example, in 1909, a man made a claim against his brother for two women and a girl from his deceased father’s household. Both the adjudicator (probably Longden) and the defendant acknowledged that the defendant should have provided his brother with a wife or wives from the father’s estate. However, the ruling was instead for 20 pounds, paid in installments, to be used as bridewealth.76 The ruling that “twenty pounds or four head of cattle” should be paid in claims over women was imposed with mechanical rigidity by Longden, even where there was no evidence that this was the amount in contention.77 Where people brought cases back for further arbitration, we can see that they treated the NC’s rulings about payments as renegotiable. A regular source of contention in local disputes was whether a man had paid seduction compensation or the first installment of bridewealth.78 Given local conditions and upheavals, there was normally no hurry to settle this issue. It was largely decided by whether the man, over time, proved himself a suitable son-in-law. So, where the Native Affairs Department (NAD) man recorded that he had heard a case and made a ruling about bridewealth, the disputants could be more open minded about what had been ruled on. For example, in 1910, Chief Chikukwa, who made a habit of bringing cases to the NC, claimed that his sister had been seduced by Masenga and was granted a ruling that Masenga should marry her and pay bridewealth within three months. No bridewealth was paid. Six months later, Chikukwa returned to

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claim five pounds’ seduction compensation instead. He had happily overlooked the specific detail of the previous ruling. But he stood by its general principle, that Masenga was in the wrong.79 There was a less happy outcome for another man, Tambudza, who, early in the century, received a written ruling from NC Meredith that he was owed cattle by Makaripa, who had taken his daughter and accepted bridewealth for her from another man. Tambudza accepted three head of cattle from Makaripa. Many years later, he claimed that he had accepted the cows as compensation for the abduction but had been prepared to wait for Makaripa to refund the bridewealth that he had illegitimately taken for himself. Meredith, however, had intended his ruling against Makaripa to close the matter. Assistant NC Lenthall decided that Meredith’s ruling had referred to bridewealth, not compensation, and that, at most, Tambudza could claim an extra cow. To the official, Meredith had made a final ruling about bridewealth. To the litigants, the ruling had simply established liability, after which further negotiations would have to take place, depending on what happened next. Far from being the end of the matter, the hearing before the NC had been merely a stage in an ongoing process.80 There are many other cases in which, following an initial ruling, the parties returned to the NC for further negotiations about payment.81 It is not surprising that sometimes the NC’s ruling did no more than set out the general principle on which restitution should be made, apparently to the satisfaction of the litigants.82 For the local people, it seems that a hearing before the NC was a forum where culpability was established. The details could then be worked out over time by the parties involved, with a return to arbitration if necessary. The NC, of course, interpreted his role differently: as hearing civil disputes under “native law and custom” and making rulings accordingly. African litigants and white administrators experienced the same hearing and heard the same rulings, but understood them in different ways. The translation across cultures was incomplete, with both sides believing that they had communicated effectively but, in reality, talking at cross-purposes. Similarly, the criminal court was treated by Africans as a forum where liability was established, and compensation agreed or renegotiated. As proof of guilt, prosecution witnesses highlighted offers of compensation and the handing over of tokens, and this mode of argument creeps into the archival record despite being, in white terms, irrelevant and potentially misleading evidence: “Ndasikwa offered to pay me a goat, a small pot of salt and the brass ring produced [in court] … I accepted the things to hold as evidence in case the crime was denied later on” (rape); “Yes you did offer [my father] a goat & a fowl as compensation & my father refused to accept” (attempted murder); “I want a witness and a token” (assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm); “A[ccused] came before [the chief and] gave me the ring produced [in court] & said he would return the things belonging to me” (theft).83 Defense statements display a similar approach. Where compensation had already been agreed, the issue for the defense revolved around whether he had

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paid enough or quickly enough, not around whether he was guilty.84 In cases where Africans acknowledged guilt, they offered to pay compensation, both at the time and in the courthouse: “I have nothing to say, I am prepared to pay” (abduction); “I wish to say that I am willing to pay for the damage done” (arson); “If I am told what I am to pay for the goat I will try and pay for it” (theft).85 Even a generation after the white occupation, Africans were still treating white courts as if they operated on local principles of justice. There had clearly been a profound failure to translate European jurisprudence into local terms. This failure reflected the fact that European systems of punishment had little to offer local communities; compensation remained the predominant mode of thinking about how to deal with transgression. Conversely, there was a failure to translate local jurisprudence into European terms. The white arbiters persisted in attempting to maintain the universal application of uniform rules. Consequently, they provided very poor justice. Not only did they fail to ensure that compensation was paid and locked up the miscreants instead, they also used “rules” about bridewealth as blunt instruments to enforce the “law.” Native Commissioners treated bridewealth claims as branches of contract law, involving the transfer of property in exchange for payment in cattle or cash. This is particularly true of Longden, but even Meredith reduced the bridewealth relationship into a simple market contract in his annual report for 1900: ‘The price for a wife in this District is about £15., but I have known some cases where as much as £20. has been paid. The price varies according to the comeliness of the maidens.86 The ‘price’ became less variable, in the NC’s view, following the 1901 Natives Marriage Ordinance. The ordinance fixed maximum bridewealth at four head of cattle or their equivalent. Its purpose had not been to set a ‘recommended retail price’, or to establish a ‘customary law’, but to undermine the incentive to pledge pre-pubescent girls to wealthy older men in exchange for patronage. Nonetheless, the NCs in Melsetter District, and elsewhere, treated it as a price-fixing law, and made their rulings accordingly. So we see them consistently requiring that ‘£20 or four head of cattle’ be paid for a wife, either as ‘purchase’ where bridewealth had not been settled, or as ‘refund’ in cases of marital breakdown. Longden habitually spoke of the ‘value’ of a woman, defining this as twenty pounds sterling.87 There was a clear awareness within the NAD that bridewealth did not operate on a fixed exchange rate.88 It seems, however, that the Melsetter NCs chose to ignore this because it was both easier (especially for Longden), and more in keeping with their ideas of justice, simply to apply uniform rules. The neutral and mechanistic application of the rules of equal trading between contracting merchants typifies the administrators’ idea of what they meant by fair and impartial justice. In one case, Longden ruled that a widow had the right to return to her own family, but—and here we see just how unserviceable and inaccurate was his understanding of bridewealth—“lobola must be paid on her behalf.”89 He obviously intended that the husband’s family should be compensated for losing

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a wife for which they had (in his view) already paid in full. In effect, however, he had asked a family to pay bridewealth for one of their own women. This was offensive nonsense. The error arose because he was thinking of ‘lobola’ as simply the word used for the ‘price’ of a woman, and thinking of women as transferable commodities whose ownership passed absolutely to whomever paid the appropriate sum for them. The complex web of patronage and kinship that the bridewealth relationship encompassed was crudely misinterpreted as the open-ended transfer of disposable goods. Native commissioners applied rigid rules in other ways, too. They refused to hear certain bridewealth cases if they were “old” or ruled against someone on the grounds that “too long” had passed for their claim to be valid. Since bridewealth debts often carried over several generations, this was very odd indeed and not justice as locally understood. The justification for the NCs’ behavior was a clause in the 1901 Natives Marriages Ordinance that, in order to prevent pledging, outlawed the making bridewealth arrangements more than a year before the marriage took place. Consequently, if a family paid bridewealth but waited over a year for the wife, then the woman’s family was permitted to hold on to both the bridewealth and their daughter. This must have felt devastatingly unfair for those who had handed over the bridewealth. For example, in 1911, a man sued for return of 13 pounds, four blankets, and a hoe, which witnesses attested had been handed over by him as bridewealth many years earlier. This was a major investment, so it was not surprising that he was anxious to retrieve it. Nonetheless, Longden ruled, “It is admitted that the transaction occurred many years ago. As payment on account of lobola in the circumstances is not recoverable [because of the 1901 Ordinance], Judgement is for Defendant.”90 Similarly, in 1910, Longden had ruled, “Evidence shews that if money was paid it was given on account of lobola more than a year ago,” and dismissed the claim for refund.91 Throwing out such cases happened frequently at the NC’s court and demonstrated how unfair the justice handed out by the whites could be.92 The decision not to hear refund cases over a year old also seemed capricious since other sorts of cases were not limited by time. Even very old claims for unpaid bridewealth were heard, including, in 1911, a claim that was 22 years old.93 Claims for goods that were not part of a bridewealth settlement were also allowed, regardless of how old the case was, as Longden explained in the case of Mundiyetu v. Madzonga: “It appears that this money, if paid, was paid 14 months ago & therefore, as it is a claim for a refund of money paid o/a of lobola, cannot be considered. The claim for £3 for goods supplied can however be considered.”94 Such logic made sense in terms of Southern Rhodesia statute law but made no sense at all in local terms. The apparent capriciousness of the NCs’ rulings was compounded by Meredith’s personal decision to put an arbitrary cap of three years on any case he heard in an attempt to cut down his workload.95 Far from dispensing justice that might seem “fairer” to African litigants, then, NCs were actually less fair than other arbiters. Nonetheless, this difference was not immediately apparent to the

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people who brought cases to the NC’s court because they reinterpreted the rulings according their own ideas of justice. The courts of the resident magistrate and the native commissioner, then, provided early sites of encounter between whites and Africans, but limited hegemonic translation. The worldview encapsulated in the European justice system did not cross over into African experience of the law. Administrators, defendants, and litigants occupied the same space, experienced the same events, and even, via interpreters, heard the same words, but what they believed was happening was not the same. It seems that they were talking parallel languages and did not, at first, recognize that they meant different things. Both local people and the white officials explained and practiced the law under the illusion that others shared the principles on which those practices were based. The practice of law in Melsetter district illustrates that it was possible for Africans and whites to talk at crosspurposes for some decades. The BSACo state was busy recording “native law and custom,” but Africans were not following the script: they did not occupy a world of uniform, text-based rules. However, because the BSACo officials saw only part of the performance, they remained unaware of how much improvisation was taking place on another stage. Nonetheless, the state’s need for rules to apply in the NC’s courts resulted in the early gathering of detailed ethnographic knowledge. This, in turn, created at least the possibility of hegemonic translation, as white officials began to engage more systematically with African perceptions of the world. Significantly, however, they began to move knowledge about African culture away from oral tradition and lived experience into textual sources based on informants’ advice. The early surveys of African worldviews did not use “scientific” methods of inquiry. They were based on commissions of anecdotal opinion/inquiry. But anecdotal inquiry as a means of establishing knowledge was deemed superior to appeals to “tradition,” which, whites assumed, was how Africans validated their knowledge.96 Simply by carrying out these surveys, regardless of their findings, the whites were defining themselves as more “scientific” than Africans. These first records of local beliefs and their underlying epistemology were the work of men who often could not even speak the local languages. Their ability to find out anything worthwhile was limited: “I have again to plead ignorance, knowing nothing of their laws or customs: they seem to have none and say when asked ‘I don’t know.’”97 The findings were understood largely in terms of what the enquirers already expected to hear and what they already knew about biblical legal systems. The BSACo’s vast store of information about African worldviews was, as Paul Hountondji has observed, ethnography, not African philosophy or jurisprudence.98 The picture of African modes of thought and beliefs that emerged from these investigations was the creation of external observers. Already, when they knew so little, they were using their own observations to set themselves up as “experts” on African culture and beginning to marginalize African expertise. Nonetheless, they were, as yet, still learning and still depended on Africans to teach them.

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NOTES 1. Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts, eds., Law in Colonial Africa (London: James Currey, 1991), 21. 2. David William Cohen, “‘A Case for the Basoga’: Lloyd Falkers and the Construction of an African Legal System,” in Mann and Roberts, Law, 241, finds a similar distinction between litigants’ and judges’ recognition of “appropriate, relevant and correct facts and arguments.” 3. Dunbar Moodie’s Diary, 5–14 July 1893, MO 11/2/5. 4. NC Melsetter to the Administrator, 1895, NUE 1/1/1. 5. Terence Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–7 (London: Heinemann Press, 1967), 62ff. 6. High Commissioner’s proclamation, 10 June, 1891, section 9; Order of Council of Southern Rhodesia, 1898, section 50. 7. S.N.G. Jackson, “Notes on the Administration of Native Law in Southern Rhodesia,” pres. 1905, JA 5/2/2, 6. 8. It was not until 1910, under Order in Council Proclamation no. 55, that NCs were given the power to try both criminal and civil cases where no magistrate was available. 9. For example, S1069, Kufeni v. Matari, 5 August 1910, 179; Maziwabuyi v. Gwarega, 12 November 1910, 190. 10. NC Melsetter, Annual Report (AR), 1 April 1899, N9/1/5; Half-Yearly Report, 6 October 1899, NUE 2/1/3, 131. 11. NC Melsetter, AR, 2 April 1901, NUE 2/1/3, 574. 12. Chibuwe v. Mazuwiki, 17 July 1912, S1069, 379. 13. S1069, Kufandada v. Maweni, 23 April 1909. 14. R v. Dhliwa, PE 164/1909, 22 November 1909, D3/3/3. The man had to be acquitted because the only witness was the wife, who cannot, in Roman Dutch law, stand as a witness for the prosecution against her husband. The woman would have had a better hearing before the chief. 15. R v. Mboko, PE 77/1908, 20 March 1908, D3/3/3. 16. Compare V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (London: James Currey, 1988), 52, which attributes similar motives to missionaries in their derision of local beliefs and their attempts to demonstrate the manifest superiority of Christian ethics. 17. Evidence to the Southern African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC), 31 August 1904, §34,980. Compare Brett L. Shadle, “‘Changing Traditions to Meet current Altering Conditions’: Customary Law, African Courts and the Rejection of Codification in Kenya, 1930–60,” Journal of African History, 40, no. 3 (1999): 411–31. 18. Jackson, “Notes on the Administration of Native Law,” 8. 19. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4; Order of Council of Southern Rhodesia, 1898, section 50. 20. Interview with Roger Howman by Murray Steele, 10 and 26 August 1971, ORAL/ HO3. 21. Dennis Doyle, “Rise and Fall of the Matabele Nation” (paper read before the E.P.Lit. and Scientific Soc., Bulawayo, 1893, Royal Commonwealth Society Collection, Cambridge).

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22. NC Salisbury to CNC, 24 December 1897, N1/2/3. A little Christmas celebrating may excuse the grammar, if not the sentiment. The “rebellion” was the Chimurenga of 1896–1897. 23. NC Melsetter, Half-Yearly Report, 6 October 1899, NUE 2/1/3, 131. 24. Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 89. 25. William Grant, Native Labour Commissioner, Chamber of Mines, Johannesburg, to Frank Rhodes, Acting Administrator, Southern Rhodesia, “Suggestions for Mine Managers on the Treatment of Natives,” 18 September 1894, A15/1/1. 26. Biography and Reminiscence of Alfred Drew, unpublished, 1929, SA12/1/6. 27. Jackson, “Notes on the Administration of Native Law,”, 6. 28. Responses to Rhodes’ memo, December 1894, A15/1/1; request for details on “Native Laws and Customs” in NCs’ ARs for year ended 31 March 1900, N9/1/6; CNC circular 741/00 requesting Special Report on history and oral traditions of paramountcies. Meredith responded very fully in 1894 (when he was in Makoni district) and again in 1897 when he provided a detailed report on “laws and customs” in his Half-Yearly Report, 20 October 1897, NUE 2/1/2, 320, but by 1900 he was clearly bored with the questions on beliefs and just rehashed his old reports, NUE 2/1/3, 270. He was much more interested in the oral history, on which he quizzed the local paramounts in some detail, NUE 2/1/3, 331, 350, 351–68, 369. 29. Francis Rhodes, Acting Administrator, Memo to hut-tax collectors and police in Mashonaland, 11 December 1894, A15/1/1; Rex v. Chakayengeni @ Jack and Siyanze, PE 30/1906, 28 November 1906, D3/3/2. 30. Rhodes, Memo, 11 December 1894, A15/1/1; H. Thurgood of Umfuli District, (Hartley Hills to Sinoia), Quarterly Report, 30 December 1894, A15/1/1. 31. NC Umtali, AR, 1898, N9/1/4. 32. Rex v. Chakayengeni @ Jack and Siyanze, PE 30/1906, 28 November 1906, D3/3/2. 33. Thomas Scanlen (?), Legal Adviser BSACo to CNC, 21 October 1897, N1/2/3 (emphasis added; punctuation in the original). 34. NC Chilimanzi, AR, 28 March 1898, N9/1/4. 35. NC Umtali, AR, 31 March 1898, N9/1/4. 36. NC Melsetter, AR, 31 March 1900, N9/1/6. 37. Acting CNC to NC Melsetter, 1 November 1904, NUE 1/1/1. 38. See, for example, responses to query from Thomas Scanlen, Legal Adviser, BSACo, October 1897–July 1898, N1/2/3. 39. Jackson, “Notes on the Administration of Native Law,” 11–12. 40. NC Umtali, AR, 31 March 1898, N9/1/4; Jackson, “Notes on the Administration of Native Law,” 17. See also pp. 12, 16, and 18; letter to Edwards, no date, but clearly early 1900s, ED 6/5/1/2. 41. Diana Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), chap. 3. 42. NC Melsetter, QR, 30 September 1897, NUE 2/1/2, 300. 43. NC Sebungwe and CNC Matabeleland, 17 June, 20 June, 14 July, 3 November, 8 November 1906, N3/23/3; direct quotation from NC Sebungwe to the Collector, Buni, NWR, 8 Nov 1906, N2/23/3. 44. Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power, chap. 5. 45. NC Gwelo, AR, 1904, NB6/1/5.

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46. NC Lomagundi, AR, 31 March 1898, N9/1/4. 47. Elizabeth MacGonagle, “A Mixed Pot: History and Identity in the Ndau Region of Mozambique and Zimbabwe 1500–1900” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2002), 168. 48. NC Melsetter, Quarterly Report, 2 April 1896, NUE 2/1/1, 154. 49. RM Melsetter, AR, 31 March 1901, DM 5/1/3; NC Lomagundi, AR, 31 March 1898, N9/1/4. In 1971, Roger Howman noted that “old H.M.G. Jackson said of the Matabele that every man was his own divorce court…. That’s often quoted. ‘Every man is his own divorce court.’” HMG was SNG’s brother; Howman may have confused the provenance, or the brothers may have shared these catchphrases. Interview with Roger Howman by Murray Steele, 10 and 26 August 1971, ORAL/HO3. 50. RM Melsetter, AR, 31 March 1906, DM 5/1/3. 51. For a detailed discussion of these differences in jurisprudence, see Diana Jeater, “‘Their Idea of Justice Is So Peculiar’”: Southern Rhodesia 1890–1910,”’ in The Moral World of Law, ed. Peter Coss, 178–195. Past and Present Series (Cambridge University Press, 2000). 52. Native Disputes, Melsetter District, vol. I, 1908–1913; vol. II, 1914–1926, S1069. These records begin toward the end of Meredith’s administration, in 1908, and continue into the 1920s. An earlier volume may be missing or may never have existed. 53. Mazrui and Mazrui have observed that text-based law depends on decontextualization, whereas oral-based law is context specific: The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), 121. 54. Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Power and the Praise Poem (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), have an excellent discussion of the difficulties that people from text-based cultures have in understanding how memorized conventions and formulas provide the preconditions for creativity in oral cultures. 55. RM Melsetter, AR, 31 March 1907, DM 5/1/3. 56. Statement by the Attorney General on Rex v. Mjera @ Mganda, 17 March 1914. N3/15/6. 57. Interview with Roger Howman, conducted by M. C. Steele, August 1971, 47, ORAL/ HO3. 58. For example, S1069 Muchanda v. Hemaramba, 24 June 1909; Mapeto v Manyera & Mabuya, 25 August 1909; Tambera v. Mukungatu & Mahosa, 3 November 1909, 101; Katsawara v. Dumdisha, 24 February 1910, 145; Mutemangaro v. Rupago, 4 March 1910, 150; Mutohira v. Kududu, 15 February 1911, 210; Marumbi v. Nasqui, 26 April 1911, 227; Zwekoni v. Manzowo, 26 May 1911, 240; Nyema v. Ddhlovana, 5 July 1911, 267; Karimasora v. Gachika, 4 August 1911, 282; Masasi v. Mabfumo, 30 March 1912, 326; M’randa v. Chinoza, 19 June 1912, 358; Marambeni v. Musiokufa, 19 June 1912, 361. 59. S1069, Nyama v. Chinoza, 9 May 1912, 336. 60. S1069, Mabundi v. Maronzorenyi, 31 December 1908. See also Kufakwapedu v. Jirayanengwe, 3 August 1912, 389; Muchatameyi v. Zanzayiko, 16 August 1912, 405; S1069/2, Guryanga v. Nezirizi, 23 July 1913, 19. 61. For example, S1069, Mandiwonesa v. Chifamana, 5 July 1912, 370; Tinawapenyi & Muchada v. Fembergwi, 12 November 1912, 420; S1069/2, Muzwangowenyro v. Chidzuwo, 18 June 1913, 10. 62. S1069, Bhanga v. Marutsa, 10 December 1912, 432, 434. 63. S1069, Chiduma v. Marwendo, 2 October 1911, 296.

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64. For example, S1069, Muramgwa v. Matsikanyire, 21 April 1909; Majingwa v. Tendi, 5 July 1912, 369; S1069/2, Munguni v. Hlangabeza, 6 August 1913, 25; Mufanawenhleya v. Jemevere, 17 October 1913, 49; Gotchi v. Chigidini, 6 November 1913, 55. 65. R vs. Murikwaveni, PE 53/1900, 9 March 1900, D3/3/1. 66. Bomeza v. Mungayi, 25 November 1910, S1069, 192. 67. See also H. M. Jackson, NC Gwelo, Memorandum on Public Service Board of Enquiry Report, 25 October 1909: “in most cases the Magistrate and the Native Commissioner are one and the same person, and it can be stated positively that Natives do not distinguish between administrative and judicial capacities.” A3/3.18 68. Moyowakafa v. Makadza, 18 June 1912, S1069, 357. In another instance, the case was brought by a white employer who clearly preferred to get compensation for the theft of money and eggs than to see his employee tried in the criminal court: Mr Pritchard v. Pangeyi, 14 May 1912, S1069, 342. Other cases of theft being heard by the NC as “native civil disputes” include S1069, 333, 346–47, 350. 69. See, for example, S1069, 175, 184, 228, 327–28, 332, 335. 70. Maguya v. Sipangwe, 27 July 1910, S1069, 175. Similar cases may be found in S1069, 184, 228, 327–28, 332, 335. 71. Rex v. Hlaya, PE 50/1905, 23 October 1905, D3/3/2. Similar cases where an offer of compensation was ignored by the Crown prosecution include PE 53/1900 in D3/3/1; PE 5/1905, PE 45/1905 in D3/3/2; PE 64/1907, PE 141/1909 in D3/3/3; PE 139/1912 in D3/3/4. 72. R v. Kuboya @ Nikis, PE 203/18, 13 May 1918, D3/3/6. 73. R v. Kuboya @ Nikis, PE 59/1918 Chipinga, D3/14/1. 74. R v. Pikanine @ Fife, PE 139/1912, 9 November 1912, D3/3/4. 75. Mucheke v. Payani, 29 October 1908, S1069, 1. 76. Tshabeni v. Mesimunguri, 3 November 1909, S1069. Other cases in the file, where the claim was actually for a woman (or, failing that, compensation) but where the woman was not recognized as the claimant’s wife, include Zaramba alias Chizamkuri v. Chyokwe & Mutangi, 9 September 1909; Gumirepi v. Ndararana, 10 September 1909; Juba v. Jeye, 14 October 1909; Marwiro v. Mukunga & Madzeni, 15 October 1909; Kuwatawingwe v. Siyawacho, 11 February 1910; Kufandada v. Mawenu, 8 June 1910; Chikukwa v. Zwinera, 27 July 1910; Bongana v. Mapomba, 4 May 1911; Mapanga v. Mpanzi, 22 May 1911; Chitemba v. Chinovo, 26 May 1911; Muhlaba v. Chidembo, 19 June 1911; Kari v. Magava, October 1911; Dzavamakani v. Sikiro, 13 July 1912; Zano v. Simoumi, 19 July 1912; Demba v. Garipi, 1 August 1912. The trend continues throughout the rest of the records. 77. For example, S1069, Kufemi v. Matari, 5 August 1910, where Longden ruled, “It is clear that plaintiff paid some lobola the amount is uncertain so must be taken as £20.” The amounts disputed in the case were actually £11 cash and four head of cattle. 78. For example, S1069, Muchanda v. Hemaramba, 24 June 1909; Dafukwa v. Hlangabiza, 9 July 1909; Chakoma v. Matihash, 22 December 1909, 113. 79. S1069, Chikukwa v. Masenga, 17 February 1910, 143; Chikukwa v. Masenga, 18 August 1910, 183. 80. S1069, Bako v. Tambudza, 15 May 1911, 343. There is no evidence about whether Tambudza then took his case to another forum for arbitration, but this seems likely. 81. For example, S1069, Forum v. Mutizhe, 7 April 1909; Muchatendi v. Chineni, 9 February 1910, 134; Dapona v. Gonona, 16 March 1910, 152; Chenu v. Nechiona, 12 May and 5 July 1911, 231, 266.

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82. For example, S1069, Juba v. Jeye, 14 October 1909; Macandene v. Mapanyana, 8 March 1911, 215; Zayisa v. Majiya, 3 August 1912, 390; Hambudzo v. Tandamizi, 7 August 1912, 393. 83. R v. N’dasikwa, Twitswi and Makari, PE 6/1909, 28 January 1909; R v. Usiwana @ Jack, PE 141/1909, 4 October 1909; R v. Romeza @ Baranda, PE 81/1910, 7 March 1910; R v. Tafiraushe @ Dirikwi, and Gezazo, PE 236/1910, 21 December 1910, D3/3/3–4. See also 19 October 1897; PE 53/1900, 19 February 1900; PE 5/1905, 18 February 1905. 84. For example, R v. Hlaya, PE 50/1905, 23 October 1905; R v. Usiwana @ Jack, PE 141/1909, 4 October 1909, D3/3/2–3. 85. R v. Mangwende & Matipedzi, PE 64/07, 18 June 1907, D3/3/3; R v. Gwendere, PE 86/1912, 17 May 1912, D3/3/4; R v. Mwanera, 251/1917, 3 December 1917, D3/3/6. 86. AR, NC Melsetter, 31 March 1900, N9/1/6. 87. For example, S1069, Faniso v. Nyamazani, 27 August 1909; Dambarimine v, Masenga, 24 December 1909; Musoni v. Njichi, 9 February 1910; Kuwatawingwe v. Siyawacho, 11 February 1910; Mapanga v. Mpanzi, 22 May 1911; Chiwanere v. Nzoriro, 2 June 1911. 88. Jackson, “Notes on the Administration of Native Law in Southern Rhodesia,” 15: “The definition [of bridewealth “contract” in the Native Laws and Customs Commission Report, Cape Colony, 1883, also adopted by SANAC 1903–1905] seems to imply consideration of an ascertained amount, but, by pure native custom the contract, if it may, properly speaking, be called a contract, does not specify a given value, although the number generally contemplated is ten—in cattle, goats, sheep, hoes etc.” 89. Chigonya v. Seve, 22 July 1911, S1069, 278. 90. S1069, Guti v. Musevi, 26 April 1911, 221. 91. S1069, Jubau v. Ndakude, 1 October 1910, 185. 92. Other cases in S1069 include Mufanawendhlela v. Kanakanyi, 26 April 1911, 226; Dzengeni v. Masabana, 17 May 1911, 235; Mundiyetu v. Madzonga, 15 June 1911, 254; Magabeya v. Rwosa, 24 June 1911, 260; Ziapapa v. Magengwa, 19 July 1911, 273; Machiyeni v. Sigobo, 17 August 1911, 284; Bowerimwe v. Chikukwa, 6 October 1911, 303–4; Bingwana v. Nduna, 20 October 1911, 307; Mandiwonesa v. Chifamana, 5 July 1912, 370. 93. S1069, Manyateya v. Cabani, 13 July 1911, 268. 94. S1069, 15 June 1911, 254. 95. Meredith, Memoirs, 191. 96. “That abstract respect for anything established by long usage which is a most striking feature of this most conservative and backward nation”: Jackson, “Notes on the Administration of Native Law in Southern Rhodesia,” 7. 97. ANC Southern Mazoe, AR, 31/03/00, N9/1/6. 98. Paul Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 52ff.

6 “Out from the smoky hut”: Heathenism, Rationalism, and Uncomfortable White People

All the white invaders into the Chimanimani district made assumptions about the evident superiority of their rationalism over local “superstition.” People from their culture had explored the planet and knew all its secrets. They had “passed from the chaos of conjecture into the cosmos of science.”1 The absence of text and the limited range of technology in the African communities fostered the idea that they were simple societies, with simple modes of thought: “you say the people that we have to do with are exceedingly simple and primitive, yes they are but they are sufficient to tax the most pedagogical and psychological mind.”2 References to “heathenism” and “rationalism” were a way of defining the “Other.” But this was not simply a conceptual distinction: the lifestyle and modes of thought of the “Other” were genuinely, as well as discursively, different. As this chapter demonstrates, there were economic and political reasons for adopting rationalist modes of thought, but there were cultural and religious reasons for rejecting them. Africans in the early twentieth century were both “rational” and “superstitious,” but so too were the whites. The hegemonic project to “rationalize” was not entirely successful even within the white communities. In the forests of Mt. Silinda, the difference between the lifestyles that missionaries had known in America—or even in Natal—and the lifestyles of those around them must have seemed very stark. The dichotomies between “civilized” and “heathen” were not just found in the discourses of the missionaries: they were an everyday physical experience. What is interesting is how these differences in physical experience were related to moral states, so that Christian conversion involved physical as well as moral transformations, and rationalist as well as spiritual approaches to the world. For Mt. Silinda missionaries, “civilization” meant physical comfort and industrial manufacture; consequently, “heathenism” was equated with local crafts, and physical discomfort was an affront to moral standards. The white missionaries’

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obsession with the physical conditions in which Africans lived was probably not unrelated to their obsession with their own physical discomfort. They complained vigorously about their dislike of living in mud huts (“no hut was ever built that even in its best days was fit for human habitation”) and the work involved in building brick housing (“It would be a true economy if one or more men could be sent out who could look after the manual labor”). They emphasized how the mission provided the only “civilized” medical services “in a region larger than the State of Massachusetts” and pointed out that they had to use the dining table or the ground to carry out operations. They regretted their lack of good milk cows and drew attention to their need to keep pigs in order to make lard and soap: “Being so far from the source of supplies it drives us to invent ways and means that otherwise we would not think of doing.”3 Certainly the missionaries had no doubt that one of the major benefits that they were bringing to the district was their knowledge of how to change the physical environment, which, via a few mental leaps of which they seemed unconscious, they equated with knowledge of Christianity. For the Mt. Silinda missionaries, changes in the physical environment could not be disassociated from changes in the moral environment. The “good life” was both physical and moral, and the proof of the missionaries’ moral superiority was their material superiority. One important indicator of difference was European clothing. By 1908, 12 years after the founding of the mission, Clio Wilder felt she should insist that the girls in Chikore School acquired European markers of domesticity, even if they did not intend to wear them: “to begin with, I required each girl, whether she wore clothes, or not, to make for herself an apron out of white limbo, or barter cloth.”4 Her father, Rev. Wilder, could draw a clear distinction between, on the one hand, “the heathen on the farm” who were “unwilling as ever to listen to the Gospel,” and, on the other, “the Boarders and Dressed natives,” about 50 of whom attended services at Chikore Church and made “a very respectable audience.”5 “Dressed” here seems to stand in lieu of “Christian,” or “converted,” marking the “Dressed natives” out very clearly from the “heathen” on the mission farm. Unsurprisingly, there is nothing in the Mt. Silinda 1915 English-Chindau vocabulary that gives quite this translation for “dress,” and it is significant that the translations for the phrase “to dress in best clothes” are of Dutch and siZulu origin. The only chiNdau word offered for the phrase means something closer to “putting on airs.”6 So the meaning that the missionaries put on the wearing of European clothing by their converts was not a meaning that had ready translation within the local culture. The meaning of European clothing was also disputed among the white settlers. While the missionaries saw it as a sign of Christian respectability, Stanley Hyatt opined that “the sense of being clothed seemed to bring out all the immoral instincts in the native girls.”7 Similarly, Longden (who, by 1909, had replaced Meredith as native commissioner) commented that “the adoption of European clothing has proved here as elsewhere pernicious.” Longden’s interpretation seems closer to the concept of “putting on airs” than to moral improvement. His hostility to the adoption of European dress suggests that he felt threatened by Africans beginning

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to eradicate the external, physical markers of Otherness. It is telling that, in the next paragraph, he linked the wearing of clothes to empirical reasoning or, rather, to Africans’ lack of it. Noting that variation in altitude in the district meant that travelers encountered many changes of temperature, he declared, “Natives … suffer severely, owing to their inability to realize the necessity of wearing clothing adapted to the changed climatic conditions.”8 Claims about rationalism could be maintained as evidence of difference, even when the physical manifestations of “heathenism” were disappearing. Nonetheless, material benefits provided the carrot for conversion. Arguing for funds to cover a new appointment to found an industrial mission at the Mt. Silinda site, the mission asserted, “If we cannot put before them the possibility of a better physical life than they will find in the kraals about them, there is little use of striving to incite them to a better spiritual and mental life.”9 The missionaries wanted local people to aspire to “a better physical life,” but these material aspirations had to be accompanied by spiritual changes. Converts who merely wanted to better themselves materially were treated with condescension bordering on contempt. For example, Mtamkuni was one of two Ndau men who staffed Mangundi’s outstation in Portuguese territory. In 1907, it was reported that he “left for the mines, the love of gold becoming as is so often the case with our Christian boys stronger than the desire for the Kingdom of God.”10 Moreover, for the American missionaries, material improvements had to be of the right sort, based on the right sort of technology, that is, industrial manufacture. In 1911, by which time the Mt. Silinda mission had a working industrial loom, the mission sent examples of its products to an industrial exhibit in Durban, organized by the Natal branches. The organizer welcomed the contributions but then asked, “Cannot you send also a small exhibit of heathen native basket work, and such other articles as are characteristic of Mashonaland native industry.”11 “Heathen,” in other words, referred not to a system of belief, but to a system of manufacture, about which an ethnographic nostalgia appears already to have been emerging. Industrial manufacture at Mt. Silinda mission was, therefore, seen as an explicit challenge to “heathenism.” Like Western marriage systems, it was equated with the higher virtues: “a man has been taught that there is something else to do besides putting beer down his gullet and sleeping with women. He must have some means or power at his disposal … which will enable him to maintain standards of moral life, truthfulness, and so forth. Consequently, we give him training in industries.” Foremost among the industrial skills that the missionaries associated with moral improvement was building straight lines in brick: “we believe it is necessary for any man, if he is going to be at all elevated, to live in a permanent, upright house, with a chimney in it.”12 It was not just important that the house should be square, brick, and with a chimney; it should also be built by a man for this wife, and be part of a nuclear family arrangement with individualized plots. Koziboni, whose pangs of conscience about taking a vest without paying for it were discussed in Chapter 4, was a respectably married convert who worked as a builder at Chikore Mission

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Station. He was held up as an example of moral righteousness first because he built “beautiful houses,” second because he built for himself and his wife, and only lastly, with some humor, because wanted to return a vest that he hadn’t paid for.13 The report from Chikore Church in 1907 noted that “all the Church members who are married have built permanent houses for themselves and planted banana groves.”14 Having built a “good ant proof building” with a chimney, Gwabuya, the first senior man to convert at Chikore, was reported to be “lately out from the smoky hut” because he “last year came out of heathenism.”15 There seems to be no distinction here between “heathenism” and “the smoky hut.” The straight lines of the brick building represented a mode of thought, not just a method of building.16 Straight lines were associated with the linear logics of empirical science, and these, in turn, were equated with “truth.” “Truth” was a concept that could slip easily between the post-Enlightenment/pre-Kuhnian “truth” of scientific “fact” and the “Gospel truth.” Better moral and physical conditions were equated with technologies that were underpinned by science, which in turn was linked to truth, which led, inexorably, to Christianity. Dr. Lawrence saw himself as a missionary for science and rationalism as much as a missionary for Christ. He pointed to “the imperative need of definite, persistent effort to bring to these people, not, alone, the truth as recorded in Scripture but also ‘all truth’ into which ‘the Spirit of Truth’ has guided us.”17 The medical mission was at the center of this attempt to convert Africans to scientific rationalism. Local people were described not just as “ignorant” but as “helplessly ignorant” because they did not have Western medicine.18 In 1908, Dr. Thompson launched a series of lectures for the students at Mt. Silinda School on “physiology, hygiene and disease.” Reading between the lines, the lectures seem to have been inspired, in part, by the crisis over “morality” among the converts and almost certainly touched on venereal disease. But sexual morality was not the only issue. The lectures were based on empirical demonstration, using experiments that “brought the truths taught within the comprehension of most of the scholars.” Thompson was convinced that he was offering something new, not just in terms of information but also in ways of thinking: “[Some] of the older pupils … told me they had heard wonderful things which they had never thought of before. This, certainly, was most literally true.”19 The lectures were repeated for the Bible School at Chikore, and a new series of lectures was presented the following year. This time there was an emphasis on mechanics (lectures by Mr. Orner from the industrial department) and on physics and chemistry, as well as biology (again from Dr. Thompson). The focus was on the contribution of these sciences to “civilization.” “Civilization,” in this context, was scientific rationalism, expressed in the physical environment. Reflecting on this, Dr. Lawrence suggested that a physical environment that is informed by technology, in itself, inculcates modes of thought that assist in leading a good life: “The greatest lack in the life of the pupils is the education which comes to children in civilized countries from the contact in the home and in society with those broadening influences which prepare them for meeting the great problems in life.”20 In

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a similar vein, Longden suggested that going to mines stimulated new modes of thought: “No marked physical improvement is noticeable in those natives who return from work, but there is no doubt that they all gain intellectually.”21 The belief in their own rationality, as expressed in their physical environment, was important to the white settlers. The concept of rationality was based on the scientific principles of observation, empirical reasoning, and organization by abstract principle, recorded in textual form to allow repetition and modification. The scientific methodology, as it developed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, emerged alongside political movements that opposed canonical authority. Claims that knowledge was based on empirical reason, not on established authority, gave a special place to individual thinkers in dialogue and conflict with “tradition.” Of course, this was not how white settlers in early Southern Rhodesia constructed their beliefs in practice, but they clung to the idea that individualism was more conducive to progressive thinking than chiefly authority.22 The discipline of science, as it developed in Europe, also involved the construction of a separateness between lived experience on the one hand and observed and recorded “knowledge” on the other. The lived encounter was reduced and rationalized to principles that were not part of immediate experience but that existed as ideas in text. With the distance that text conferred, the idea of “objectivity” could develop. Textuality conferred a sense of fixity and certainty about what was known, which remained “true” outside any particular social context. This idea of science as a body of objective truth justified the white settlers’ belief in the rightness of their worldview, as against that of the Africans around them. Jack Goody has argued that textual ways of organizing the world also impose particular forms of problem raising and problem solving. Lists, formulas, and tables require “special forms of linguistic activity.”23 They enable the collation and comparison of large amounts of data, and provide a system of order based on abstract principles. Quantifiable information became an administrative tool. During the nineteenth century, a “sea change” in epistemological assumptions took place in southern Africa, and “measurement became the hallmark of intellectual authority and the very condition of knowledge itself.”24 When whites began to occupy the Southern Rhodesia territory, commercial interests dictated that their first acts were to survey and peg land to measure and quantify it. Very quickly, however, the urge to survey, quantify, organize, and list was directed toward the social environment. This was partly in order to impose a system of rule: we have seen that Meredith compiled a list of chiefs, villages, and so forth in order to clarify hierarchies of responsibility and tax liabilities. But there was a more general interest in lists and surveys of data intended to rationalize and “tidy up” African society, with the assumption that such rationalizations would contribute toward the “civilization” of African people. Were whites seeing chaos awaiting order, when they carried out their investigations, or did they see order that was simply awaiting classification? The question of whether African societies were fundamentally ordered or disordered had extensive political ramifications. Native commissioners were required to find out how

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power was organized in their districts and to produce clear lists of hierarchies so that district boundaries could be drawn and legitimate authorities could be held responsible for tax payments. The task was based on the assumption that there were such clear hierarchies waiting to be written down. In fact, as has been demonstrated across the continent, the project to regularize and record the legitimate authorities—and their systems of succession—involved the imposition of rules and rulers that had not, previously, been fixed in quite that way.25 The system of rationalizing, measuring, and listing was not suited to dealing with the ambiguities, flexibility, and negotiation of many local compromises. The usual pattern of investigation in establishing hierarchies of administrative power was to encounter/make sense of/rationalize—in both senses of “rationalize,” that is, “to make logical sense of ” but also “to organize more efficiently.” David Maxwell found that, in Inyanga district, the encounter was with the spirit mediums, who “provided the state with the normative rules of chieftainship” in their accounts of extended genealogies, the myths on which succession was founded, and the rituals of power.26 The state interpreted these accounts as formal rules rather than as sectional interests and streamlined the recognition of chiefs and their powers accordingly. In Melsetter district, the native commissioner turned to chiefs, not mediums, for this information, but the methodology was much the same. Earlier in 1900, Meredith produced his detailed “List of Chiefs and Sub-chiefs in Melsetter District,” where he noted that larger villages would need to be “fixed up” before the list was “complete.”27 Later that year, the chief native commissioner circulated a request for reports on the history and oral traditions regarding the origins of peoples and paramountcies in each district. Consequently, Meredith spent several days in June and July in extensive discussion with local chiefs, including Mutema, Ngorima, Chikukwa, and “Southern chiefs,” presumably including Mapungwana and Musikavanhu, questioning them about their “tribal history.” The stories that he was told by the chiefs were clearly post hoc myths and reworkings of genealogies to reflect current political allocations.28 Nonetheless, the accounts produced by Meredith match the histories to the list, creating a neat and ordered system based on rational allocations of power. However, it is important to note that there were limits on the order that could be imposed. Lists based on abstract principles represented a mode of thought rather than a mode of rule. Meredith’s lists and histories, like his “rules” about bridewealth payments, were static records, while the relative power of chiefs was dynamic. The departure of Ngungunyana, the return of Ndau exiles, and the arrival of the whites had created many possibilities to renegotiate power. The discussions with Meredith were an opportunity to make and contest claims to authority. The quest to bring rationalist, list-based order to African societies was clearly a hegemonic project, but it is doubtful whether it was a plausible or consistent project during the early period of white settlement. Nonetheless, when Meredith tried to reorganize villages into larger, more concentrated settlements, this was not only to make a neater “fit” with his rationalized

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lists. He was also motivated by the idea that more “rational” patterns of settlement would inculcate more rational modes of thought. Rationalized settlement was, he believed, in itself an assault on “superstition” and, in particular, witchcraft beliefs. Meredith disliked the influence of witchcraft beliefs in African communities. He couched his objections in rational-scientific terms. The scientific concept of causation did not allow that sickness and misfortune might be caused by malevolent influence alone. Nor did it allow that there must always be a conscious will behind such calamities. Meredith’s primary objection to “witchcraft,” therefore, was not against the practice of witchcraft but against the attempts to blame putative witches for unhappy events and the practice of identifying witches through divination.29 He warmed powerfully to this theme in his monthly report for February 1900, where he stated that “the bone-throwers should be suppressed.”30 Village reorganization was intended to contribute to this suppression. Meredith appealed to notions of empirical proof, which were central to the Western scientific method, to frame his objections to “witchcraft.” He considered that belief in witchcraft was susceptible to rational argument and could be demonstrated, in practice, to be founded on false premises. Consequently, in his quarterly report for the second quarter of 1901, discussing his village reorganization, he declared, The Natives object to be[ing] herded too close together on account of their belief in witchcraft and by allowing them to continue living in a scattered way we are encouraging their belief in witchcraft, whereas if they are made to live in villages of a fair size they will have plenty of opportunities of accusing each other of being the cause of death or illness by means of witchcraft and this will give us the opportunity of stamping out the ridiculous belief.31

Meredith seemed to believe that a few successful prosecutions would demonstrate the limited powers of diviners, while the continued presence of “witches” in the community without further calamity would demonstrate the falseness of the original accusation and so the falseness of witchcraft beliefs. The physical environment would, itself, militate against superstition. Meredith’s most politically important appeal to rationalism occurred during the contest for the Musikavanhu succession in 1897. The best account and analysis of this episode is found in various publications by Rennie that examine the meaning of the Musikavanhu chiefship and the principles on which claims to the chiefship were founded.32 Mbonyeya was a junior member of the chiefly house of Musikavanhu. He claimed the Musikavanhu rainmaking power soon after Munjakanja’s death; implicitly, this also gave him a claim to the paramountcy. Wilder intervened in the succession process and rushed the mediums and elders into appointing Makuza, the secular candidate.33 However, Mbonyeya continued his claims, which clearly posed a threat to white authority, especially as he was taking tribute from Mutema and other local authorities. With the outbreak of the Chimurenga, Meredith was persuaded to intervene. This led to an alliance between Mutema, Mbonyeya, and Mapungwana; the removal of Makuza; and a showdown at the

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Great Tree shrine, where Wilder halted the installation of Mbonyeya at gunpoint and demanded that Meredith be consulted. Longden and Meredith agreed with Wilder that Makuza was the more reliable ally. They arranged a meeting with all the other chiefs in the district, at which they insisted that they would not accept “the rainmaker.” Makuza was duly restored to power. The important point for our purposes is to examine how Meredith presented his case to the other chiefs. It seems significant that he dealt with this threat not as a confrontation over the political authority of the white state but as a battle between rationality and madness. In a letter, he observed that Mbonyeya had “demanded homage in shape of women and girls from Mutema who though twice as powerful would submit because of the supposed supernatural influence of the usurper.” Meredith presented this “supernatural influence” as a form of madness: “It is a well known fact that Natives are extremely superstitious, and should they continue any length of time under the influence of this madman, they may be influenced to do any amount of mischief.” Claims about spirit possession were interpreted by Meredith in this context not as a belief system but as the ritualization of insanity.34 Meredith was not a fanatical rationalist. In a later account of the history of the chiefship, he recounted how, according to oral tradition, the Musikavanhu paramountcy came to have the power to make rain. There was no suggestion of madness in this account. Possession by the rain spirit was presented as a source of strength and legitimacy. Yet in the very same report, Meredith went on to describe Mbonyeya’s claim to the chiefship and concluded, I then found it necessary to interfere and had all the Chiefs in the District present at an interview with the Magistrate and myself, and after the situation was thoroughly explained to them they agreed that one who was mad during a portion of his time could not be a chief so Neseni was declared chief by them all.35

The appeal to rationality was based on political concerns, not scientific ones. Meredith was happy to use charismatic history as part of formal “tradition” rules about chieftaincy, as long as that claim did not conflict with political interests.36 When it did, the rhetoric of science was brought in to counter it. Meredith omits to explain why Makuza’s chiefship was accepted by those at the meeting. Rennie suggests that it was a matter of realpolitik. However, in his own account, Meredith implies that his arguments about insanity were the defining factor. But it is difficult to know how these were presented. The chiNdau words for “insanity,” from the root “-penga,” all have connotations of restlessness and, in contemporary words, “losing the plot.” They are very different from the words associated with spirit possession, which have connotations of the need for care and respect while possessed. Meredith’s ideas of “rationalism” and “sanity” had not developed out of indigenous society but were introduced fully formed from elsewhere. His concepts of what was sane or otherwise did not, therefore, interact with “vulgar” knowledge in the same way as scientific ideas had done in Europe but were received in different and specifically African ways.37

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The doctors at Mt. Silinda similarly found that their evangelical message about medical science met with local reinterpretation. The medical mission contributed to conversion partly by simply increasing the contacts and reputation of the mission and so offering opportunities for evangelism.38 More than this, however, “scientific” medicine was expected to encourage rationalist modes of thought. This had ramifications that extended way beyond the immediate issues of healing. Thompson’s lectures on physiology, hygiene, and disease were praised for the contribution they made to all the mission’s work, not only by “teaching principles of right living” but also “by imparting such items of knowledge as will tend strongly to overcome the dense superstition which clings so tenaciously, even to those who have professed to renounce the old life and accept Christianity.”39 As well as insisting on bridewealth payments and arguing about polygyny, it seems that converts also clung to a “dense superstition”: the belief that healing was more than a mechanical matter of physiology. Healing science, then, was more than a physical practice: it was also an epistemological challenge to “heathenism.” The medical mission’s challenge does not seem to have been too effective. Some of their reports make the reader wonder why Africans asked the white doctors for help at all. On one occasion Dr. Lawrence was called to attend to a man on an adjoining farm: “I found a man dying of old age, we might truly say, and yet he and his friends were certain that he was being bewitched by his neighbors because they were jealous of the good crops in his garden.”40 If the local people believed that the cause of the illness was witchcraft, why did they send for the white doctor? The very fact that they did so casts doubts on the effectiveness of the medical mission as a mighty weapon against “dense superstition.” Indeed, it was this gloomy thought that prompted Lawrence to report the event. Local people did not believe that the white doctors could cure dysentery. Despite epidemic levels of death in 1910, even the converts maintained “great confidence in the treatment of their native doctors” and declared that, as the disease was peculiar to Africans, the whites could not know anything about it. The huge chasm that the missionaries perceived between “heathen” methods of healing and “scientific” ones was not shared by their converts, who used their own methods of treatment or used both. Dr. Thompson was dismayed by the strength of “the hold of heathen ideas upon those, even, who have come out from heathenism.”41 He was also dismayed by how empirical evidence was used against the medical mission’s claims to a monopoly on effective healing. One woman with dysentery, despite having lived with missionaries for several years before her marriage, traveled a long distance to see a healer, and subsequently died. Thompson was bemused that “we have no evidence that any wavering of her Christian faith accompanied this strange lack of faith in us.” However, he was more dismayed by her husband’s response to her death: “[he] said the native doctor told her, when she arrived that it was too late (which may have been true) ‘but,’ he added ‘he cured three others while we were there.’ ”42 This was the trouble with rational empiricism as a foundation for faith, civilization, and the good life: it was something of a hostage to fortune. There was no

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guarantee that Western medicine would work or that “superstition” wouldn’t. In 1901, Meredith acted as interpreter in a fraud case involving the sale of a herb supposed to free prisoners from gaol. A “Native warder” had been charging prisoners 30 shillings for a piece of wild root, which, if chewed slightly and then spat out and rubbed over the face and forehead, was supposed to free them from punishment. Meredith’s assumptions about confronting Africans with concrete evidence of the failure of their principles of cause and effect seemed to be supported by the testimony of witnesses under cross-examination by the accused: Yes, I did change my mind about the efficacy of the medecine [sic], because I had to remain in gaol. I don’t now believe in your medecine, how can I when I am still imprisoned? If I had been released from prison I would have believed that it was done by the medecine.43

However, rather than supporting Meredith’s case, these comments actually illustrate how flimsy was the basis on which he hoped to “disprove” beliefs in the power of witches, diviners, and herbalists. Meredith’s assumptions about witchcraft were actually founded on a philosophy of science and not on a watertight and demonstrable natural law that guaranteed that certain effects would never follow certain putative causes. As the prisoner said, “If I had been released from prison I would have believed that it was done by the medecine.” In the event, he was not released, but he might have been. Meredith was constantly haunted by the possibility of events that would undermine his rationalist opposition to “irrational” African beliefs. When we look in detail at the cases where Meredith admits to such fears, we can see how vulnerable he was to being “proved” wrong. Two men in particular illustrate the shakiness of his ground: Gesifan, a diviner successfully prosecuted in 1900, and Mbonyeya the rainmaker. Even before he intervened in the Musikavanhu succession, Meredith felt uneasy about Mbonyeya’s claims to be able to make rain: It is no use attempting to purge the native mind, that he is a fraud they will not believe, they cling to the belief that he has the power to make rain, and in time of drought he could very easily cause mischief by his witchcraft [sic].44

After the installation of Makuza, Mbonyeya removed himself to Portuguese territory, and for some years afterward, Meredith remained wary about his influence: “if we have a dry season, they will attribute it to the absence of the Rainmaker”; “possibly if we have a good season [in terms of rainfall] next year the natives will ignore him and disbelieve in his power.”45 Fortunately for Meredith, the rains remained reasonably good—but his anxiety arose from the appeal to empirical evidence to assert the legitimacy, or otherwise, of Mbonyeya’s rainmaking powers. Of Gesifan, whom he variously described as “notorious,” “so greatly feared,” “noted,” and “renowned,” Meredith similarly reported,

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The question now is that if anything happens to any of the witnesses who appeared against “Gesifan” they will think it came through his influence or not. If nothing does happen to them the effect will be good and will cause other natives to inform on any natives who practice witchcraft [sic].46

As with Mbonyeya, Meredith’s opposition to “superstition” was based more in politics than in a disinterested desire to foster “rationality” among the local people. His fears about Gesifan’s influence over the local population are clear from the way he describes him. Equally clearly, Meredith was in the hands of fortune in appealing to rationalist empiricism to eradicate beliefs in rainmaking and divination. Meredith was uncomfortable about how easily people’s “irrational” beliefs might be confirmed by using rational induction, based on evidence. It had even happened to him: he had no “rational” explanation for Mbonyeya’s apparent powers. He reported, His screaming and howling really appeared to be more than acting … I was present at the kraal during one of his attacks and must confess that I was puzzled as to its reality.47

After witnessing the possession, Meredith discussed his puzzlement with Rev. Wilder. Soon after, in a letter to Meredith, Wilder stated, “Personally I take it to be supernatural and for a better term I call it demonical possession.”48 His explanation seemed to satisfy Meredith and is the one that Meredith repeated in his memoirs.49 This ready acceptance of “supernatural” explanation for the rainmaker’s possession reveals the soft underbelly of the rationalist attack on “heathenism.” Whites were superstitious too. The missionaries’ entire lives were devoted to a supernatural God. They believed that empirical demonstration might confirm supernatural as well as natural events if “the Lord chooses to make some visible display of his power.”50 As for the Dutch settlers, they came from a background where there was a long tradition of whites and Africans exchanging healing knowledge.51 Their children, growing up on the farms and even attending the mission school alongside Ndau children, were constantly exposed to African ways of seeing the world— much to the dismay of the missionaries. Missionaries and administrators throughout the territory puzzled over the apparently supernatural powers of Africans. Writing sometime in the mid1900s, the native commissioner W. E. Edwards, in Mrewa district, reported seeing a man endure trial through a boiling water ordeal in which “not the slightest harm” came to the accused, despite clear evidence that the water was boiling and his hand was plunged deeply into it. Edwards was determined that there must be some rational explanation—“it can be done, and there must be some reason for it”—but had no idea what it might be. However, when he shared his thoughts with a missionary, he was told that “he has also seen it done, and put it down to supernatural agency.”52

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So whites were not always as “rational” as their self-image would suggest. Many white settlers believed that Africans could do scary things, and they could be as susceptible as Africans to fears of witchcraft. This was clearly illustrated in a criminal case of assault with intent to commit rape in 1912.53 A white woman claimed that a man had entered her bedroom and touched her while she was sleeping. Much of the testimony hinged on the woman’s belief that she and her children had been stupefied by rufimbi, a generic term for a tree or plant (the translation is ambiguous), which “is ground up and if put in a hut those who sleep in the hut will sleep heavily and people may go in and steal.”54 The white woman explained why she was convinced that she had been the victim of rufimbi: I felt very drowsy and headachy and thought that the room smelled very close and stuffy…. My children are very early risers but on [that day] they slept very late. I had to rouse them myself…. One of them was so sleepy that I allowed her to stay in bed.

Her account was supported by a white man who had been a guest at the house and who was, in all other respects, an extremely practical and rationalist witness, describing how he had tracked the assailant by measuring his footprints in the dust outside the door. White settlers may not have been open to belief in the “supernatural” powers of Africans, but they could certainly be frightened by them. The ability to believe two contradictory things at once seems to be a common human attribute.55 The fact that the dichotomy between “heathenism” and “rationalism” was so frequently invoked—and violated—indicates that it had a polemical importance to the white settlers. The opposition was, of course, not a true opposition. “Heathenism” was a belief system, while “rationalism” was a mode of thought. Yet rationalism was elided with Christianity, and heathenism was elided with local technology. Industrial manufacture was seen as an explicit challenge to “heathenism.” A physical environment based on straight lines, which required application of Western technology, was thought by the missionaries to contribute toward conversion to Christianity. Meredith believed that more “rational” patterns of settlement would inculcate more rational modes of thought. But did straight lines and teaching on hygiene appear to Africans as an assault on “heathenism” and “superstition”? As the missionaries found out during the dysentery epidemic, a person needed to be already thinking within their rationalist epistemology for this connection to be made. Otherwise, it was easy to accept the validity of both ways of looking at the world. Indeed, the principles of empirical reason could be used to defend “heathen” beliefs as much—or as little—as they could defend Christian beliefs. It seems that “rationalism” and “heathenism” in these discourses were ways for whites to define opposing interests during transformations in politics and the economy. Politically, “heathenism” represented precolonial authority rooted in ancestral genealogies. White administrators claimed that, in contrast, their culture was founded on fairness, measurement, and abstract reasoning. The belief that

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the scientific method yielded objective, transferable, truths, regardless of social context, provided a justification for their claims to authority. “Rationalism,” meanwhile, was linked to attempts to develop bureaucracies of authority. The state had a taxonomic urge to classify, order, measure, and list. But Meredith had no objection to charismatic claims as part of the formal record of the Musikavanhu chieftaincy, provided that those claims did not conflict with political interests. There were limits on the degree of rationalization that could be imposed. Classification and ordering was a way of inscribing difference between colonized and colonizer rather than a way of transforming African systems of authority. Portraying Africans in terms of “heathenism” was also connected with transformations in the economy. White settlers perceived a link between rationalism and industrialization. They were keen to see industrial development for the sake of their own comfort, apart from anything else, and therefore championed the demise of “heathenism.” But industrialization of African society threatened to eradicate the physical manifestations of difference that were encapsulated in “heathenism.” For the white settlers who wanted to maintain that separation, claims about African irrationality could be offered as evidence of difference, even when the material markers of “heathenism,” such as clothing, round huts, or basket ware, were disappearing. Ideas about African irrationality affected how white people approached problems of translation. If “heathenism” and “rationalism” were fundamentally different modes of thought, with one being superior to the other, this meant that translation could not be a matter of seeking direct equivalences. The missionaries and the native commissioner were resistant to taking local ideas about healing or spirit possession seriously and so had a limited interest in finding meaningful translations. Instead, they drew on existing ideas about witchcraft and devil possession from pre-Enlightenment Christian demonology. Implicitly, this also placed Africans in a preindustrial age. Whites were internally divided about whether to engage Africans as active agents in technological change and industrialization. The missionaries were keen to achieve this because they believed it was necessary to challenge “heathenism.” Consequently, they involved Africans in their ideas on mechanics and science. White settlers, however, were worried about challenges to their economic and social power and preferred to think of Africans as inhabiting a world of superstition and magic. One effect of this was that they were susceptible to fears about African powers over the natural world and had to turn to local words (such as “rufimbi”) and to the explanations of their servants to find ways to speak about events that they did not understand. Rather than translating, they ended up engaging directly with African perceptions of the world. Clearly, neither whites nor Africans were entirely “rational” or entirely “superstitious.” Elements within both the white communities and the African communities were open to alternative epistemologies. In such a situation, meaningful translation should have been possible. But the heterogeneous white communities still shared a perception of Africans as “Other,” which, however defined, included

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a self-perception of themselves as rationalist. Meanwhile, although educated Africans had nothing to lose by subscribing to both “science” and “superstition,” they had to conceal this from the missionaries. So even those whites in the farming communities, who were closest to Africans, were in denial about how much of their worldview they shared with their African neighbors, and those Africans who were closest to the white missionaries had reasons to conceal significant elements of their worldview from their landlords. Denial and concealment pulled against the possibilities for genuine communication and translation, and, as we shall see in Chapter 10, the disincentives to engage with alternative epistemologies grew more pressing for both administrators and poor whites over the subsequent decades. However, in these early years, many whites, at all levels of society, needed to make sense of how local Africans saw the world. For farmers, this was a simple matter of communication. The state and the missionaries had more complex agendas. They wanted to find ways of translating their own ideas so that they could insert them into African culture, as statute laws, moral principles, and common sense. Their classifications of “heathenism” and “rationalism” meant that they began this task working on the principle that Africans did not think like them. This was a question not of whether their cultures were different—which manifestly they were—but of whether their basic approaches to understanding and classifying the world were different. And yet, of course, despite the whites’ readiness to inscribe themselves as rational and Africans as irrational, or “heathen,” these boundaries were constantly being violated. The challenge was not always whether the translators and interpreters could understand the concepts underpinning African society; sometimes it was whether they could distance themselves from those concepts enough to transform them into servants of a rationalist hegemony. NOTES 1. James Bryce, The Relations of the Advanced and Backward Races of Mankind, 2nd ed., Romanes Lecture, Oxford, 7 June 1902 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 6. 2. Fragment of correspondence, Mt. Silinda, 1909, UN 3/2/1/3. 3. Bates to Smith, 18 January 1898; Bates to Smith, 18 January 1898; All Members to Smith, 28 February 1898; Bates to Strong, 27 April 1898, all UN 3/2/1/2; Annual Report (AR), Mt. Silinda, 7–8 June, UN 3/20/1/3/1. 4. Report on Sewing Dept and middle grades in English, Chikore School, 17 June 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/4. 5. AR, Chikore Station, June 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/3. See also Randall M. Packard, “The ‘Healthy Reserve’ and the ‘Dressed Native’: Discourses on Black Health and the Language of Legitimation in South Africa,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989): 686– 703. 6. Rhodesian Branch of American Board Mission in South Africa, Chindau-English and English-Chindau Vocabulary, with Grammatical Notes (Binghamton, N.Y. : Kennedy Morris, RBABMSA, 1915). 7. Stanley P. Hyatt, Off the Main Track (London: Collins, 1911), 27. 8. NC’s AR, 31 December 1909, N9/1/12 (emphasis added). Kirsten Ruether, “Heated Debates over Crinolines: European Clothing on Nineteenth-Century Lutheran Mission

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Stations in the Transvaal,” Journal of Southern African Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 359–400, indicates how the meaning of European dress changed over time. 9. Bates pp Mission to Smith, 13 November 1899, UN 3/2/1/2. 10. Report on Mangundi’s outstation, 1906–1907, UN 3/20/1/2/1. 11. James Dexter Taylor, Natal Mission, to Gilson, 13 February 1911, UN 3/2/1/5. Punctuation in original. 12. Wilder to SANAC, § 33,986, 1904. 13. AR, Chikore Station, 1906, UN 3/20/1/1/3. 14. AR, Chikore Church, 1906–07, UN 3/20/1/2/1. 15. AR, Chikore Station, 1908, UN 3/20/1/3/1. 16. The hegemonic importance of straight lines, as a means of imposing new ways of living and thinking, has been discussed at length by, among others, the Comaroffs and Kate Crehan and in depth by Jessica Dubow in an unpublished paper, “Sedentary Fields, Somatic Conversions: Space, Race and the Colonial Mission Station” (presented at a conference on the historical geographies of southern Africa, University of Sussex, April 2002). 17. AR, Medical Dept., Mt. Silinda Mission, 1909–1910, UN 3/20/1/5/5. 18. Thompson to Smith, 17 July 1895, UN 3/2/1/2. 19. AR, Mt. Silinda School, 1908–1909, UN 3/20/1/4/2. 20. AR, Mt. Silinda School, 1909–1910, UN 3/20/1/5/2. 21. NC’s AR, 31 December 1909, N9/1/12. 22. Wilder to SANAC, § 34,035, 1904. Wilder recommended individual land tenure because it would break the unprogressive power of chiefs by making “the individual a chief.” Chiefly power was not only “heathen” but also, with its links to ancestral authority, “superstitious.” 23. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 162. 24. Deborah Posel, “A Mania for Measurement: Statistics and Statecraft in the Transition to Apartheid,” in Science and Society in Southern Africa, ed. Saul Dubow (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 117. 25. Texts that interestingly discuss the extent and limits of such reinventions include Martin Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Richard Rathbone, Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993); Sara Berry, Chiefs Know Their Boundaries: Essays on Property, Power and Past in Asante (Oxford: James Currey, 2001); Olufemi Vaughan, “Chieftaincy Politics and Communal Identity in Western Nigeria, 1893–1951,” Journal of African History 44, no. 2 (2003): 283–302; and a useful overview from Thomas Spear, “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa,” Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (2003): 3–28. 26. David Maxwell, Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People c.1870s–1990s (Edinburgh: International African Library/Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 56. 27. List of Chiefs and Sub-Chiefs, 28 February 1900, NUE 2/1/3. 28. NC Melsetter out-letters, Weekly summaries, 2 July 1900; 16 July 1900; 25 July 1900, NUE 2/1/3, 331, 350, 369. 29. NC Melsetter to W. Exeter Esq., Assistant Native Commissioner Ndanga, 26 November 1897, NUE 2/1/2, 350. 30. NC Melsetter Monthly Report, 28 February 1900, NUE 2/1/3, 224. 31.NC Melsetter Quarterly Report, 2 July 1901, NUE 2/1/3, 643.

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32. J. K. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism among the Ndau of Southern Rhodesia 1890–1935” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1973), 240– 52; “Ideology and State Formation: Political and Communal Ideologies among the SouthEastern Shona, 1500–1890,” in State Formation in Eastern Africa, ed. Ahmed Idha Salim (London: Heinemann Educational, 1984); and “From Zimbabwe to a Colonial Chieftaincy: Four Transformations of the Musikavanhu Territorial Cult in Rhodesia,” in Guardians of the Land: Essays on Central African Territorial Cults, ed. J. M. Schoffelers (Gwelo: Mambo Press, 1979). Rennie places particular significance on the interventions by Meredith, first by supporting Makuza in 1897 and then, when he returned briefly as native commissioner in 1923, by supporting Mbonyeya’s succession following Makuza’s death that year. Meredith’s rulings established new principles of succession, based on recognition by the native commissioner, and created a long-term imbalance by validating both secular and charismatic claimants within a single generation. 33. Mbonyeya is also known as Munotswa and Makuza as Neseni in Meredith’s records. I have followed Rennie’s naming. 34. NC Melsetter to RM Melsetter, 4 July 1896, DM2/9/1. 35. Special Report on Natives (response to CNC circular 741/00 CNC), July 1900, NUE2/1/3, 355 (emphasis added). 36. See also AR, 31 March 1900, N9/1/6, which describes Musikavanhu as the “second most important paramount” and adds, “It appears that all the religious work used to be done through the Musikavanu (Saviour of the people) who was the great and famous rainmaker of this part, and who was supposed to have supernatural power to cause the fall of rain.” 37. The Musikavanhu chief is still respected today as a rainmaker, while the meaning of “insanity” has been anatomized in the light of African experiences: Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Jock McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and “the African Mind” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Wulf Sachs, Black Hamlet, with a New Introduction by Saul Dubow and Jacqueline Rose (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Jonathon Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Sally Swartz has suggested that “black” and “insane” were converged categories in colonial treatment of mentally ill Africans: “The Black Insane in the Cape, 1891–1920,” Journal of Southern African Studies 21, no. 3 (1995): 399–415; “Changing Diagnoses in Valkenberg Asylum, Cape Colony, 1891–1920: A Longitudinal View,” History of Psychiatry 6, no. 24, pt. 4 (1995): 431–51; “Colonizing the Insane: Causes of Insanity in the Cape, 1891–1920,” History of the Human Sciences 8, no. 4 (1995): 39–57; Lynette A. Jackson, Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908–1968, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 38. Bates to E. E. Strong, Boston, 9 July 1898. 39. Report of Mt. Silinda Medical Dept., 1909, UN 3/20/1/4/5. 40. AR, Mt. Silinda, June 1905–1906, UN 3/20/1/1/1. 41. AR, Medical Dept., Mt. Silinda Mission, 1909–1910, UN 3/20/1/5/5. 42. AR, Medical Dept., Mt. Silinda Mission, 1909–1910, UN 3/20/1/5/5. 43. Case no. 16/1901. Preliminary examination (PE), 15 March 1901, D3/3/2. 44. NC Melsetter to Chief Native Commissioner (CNC), 31 August 1897, NUE2/1/1, 6. 45. NC Melsetter, Half-Yearly Reports, 20 October 1897; 31 March 1899, NUE 2/1/2, 316, 713.

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46. NC Melsetter, Monthly Report (MR), 30 November 1900, NUE 2/1/3, 488. The descriptions of Gesifan’s fame and influence come from the Half-Yearly Report, 9 October 1900, NUE 2/1/3, 426; MR, 31 October 1900, NUE 2/1/3 460. 47. Special Report on Natives, 16 July 1900, NUE2/1/3, 355. 48. G. H. Wilder to NC Melsetter, 19 May 1896, DM2/9/1. Wilder’s reaction that this was devil possession echoed the views of the Portuguese commentator Dos Santo from way back in the 1580s: George McCall Theal, ed., Records of South-Eastern Africa: Collected in Various Libraries and Archive Departments in Europe, vol. 7 (Printed for the Government of the Cape Colony, 1898–1903), 197. 49. Meredith, Memoirs, ME4/1/1 p173. 50. Fragment, 1909, UN 3/2/1/3. 51. Sandra Swart, “‘Bushveld Magic’ and ‘Miracle Doctors’—An Exploration of Eugène Marais and C. Louis Leipoldt’s Experiences in the Waterberg, South Africa, c.1906–1917,” Journal of African History 45, no. 2 (2004): 237–55. 52. W. E. Edwards, “Short Notes on Native Witchcraft and Superstition” (no date but clearly pre-1909), ED6/5/1/5. 53. Rex v. Matiwona @ Penny, 21 February 1912, PE 41/1912. 54. Testimony of Moyomuti, the maid in the household, reporting the words of the young boy who also worked in the house. 55. Depending, of course, on the degree of practice. The White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass asserted that, with practice, one could believe up to six impossible things before breakfast.

PART II TRANSLATION, 1910s–1920s

Twenty years after their first encounters, the various white and African communities of Melsetter district believed that they had quite detailed understandings of their neighbors’ languages and belief systems. The period of the 1910s and 1920s was one of constant interaction in which different elements of the different communities used established ways to understand and make sense of the others. Missionaries, administrators, and farmers had settled into everyday means of communicating with Africans and with each other. Africans could use the vocabulary of the state bureaucracy. Their everyday lives required them to make sense of the demands and opportunities offered by the white communities. Meanwhile, Africans were representing Christianity in their own cultural contexts at the same time as the whites were representing African values and beliefs in their law courts. This was a period of routine translation. The questioning and creative responses to new situations that had characterized the early encounters had passed. The Native Affairs Department no longer asked for basic information but attempted to apply the knowledge already acquired. In 1910, the Native Affairs Commission was established in Salisbury to consolidate existing knowledge of local Africans, and the following year its report set out a detailed and informed program for “native policy.” The missionaries no longer worried about funding for brick houses for themselves, but attempted to speak to their brick-dwelling converts in chiNdau. The settlers no longer starved or depended on African farmers for basic foodstuffs. Africans made less use of white arbiters and more use of the educational opportunities at the mission. Boundaries between peoples and cultures—and accepted contexts for crossing those boundaries—had become clearly established. The whites were representing their demands, values, and beliefs in translation into chiNdau and siZulu, and Africans were representing their demands, values, and beliefs in translation into English and Dutch.

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During this “translation phase,” the white communities were confident that they were inculcating their own values into African societies. This was not merely because they were explaining their beliefs in the local vernaculars, through their preaching and through their administration of “Native Affairs,” but also because they were requiring Africans to behave in ways that resonated with European economic, social, and moral values. Political and legal systems had been organized and classified; religious beliefs had been dissected and reinterpreted in Christian terms. Land had been secured and the occupiers’ laws enforced. Increasingly, the white settlers had begun to farm the land themselves rather than taking land rent from “Kaffir farming,” The old world of the Gaza Empire had gone, and local people were embedded in a new world, required to engage with its beliefs and values. Once the period of learning and seeking meaningful translations, which had characterized the intense period of initial encounters, was passed, there was a sense of stability in routine interactions. However, these were communities in transition, where beliefs and values were continuing to change. The new generations were born into a world where existing forms of labor relations, education, and Christianity were not new but part of an established order that was itself under pressure from new social and economic forces elsewhere in the world. Assumptions about meanings, beliefs, and values that were embedded in routine translations did not necessarily reflect the dynamic nature of the societies in interaction. In this part, I examine the effects of this “translation” phase. This period followed on from the initial encounters, when, as we have seen, there was limited understanding of African legal systems by whites and different understandings of Christianity by Africans. Africans could adopt ideas from European culture but carry those ideas over into their own cultural contexts and make their own meanings for them. This part questions how far there was mutual recognition in these everyday translations and how far people were able to make sense of difference. For the white state, translating African beliefs and laws into English, and state ordinances into terms understood by Africans, was part of a hegemonic system of control. Similarly, the missionaries were using chiNdau in education and evangelism with the intention of changing hearts and minds. These translation practices required the ability to express ideas from one culture in the language of another. It was not the same thing as talking in another language, which need not engage outside its own terms of reference at all. Translation required that one culture be reinterpreted within the vocabulary and modes of thought of another culture. As we saw in Chapter 1, effective translation assumes that there are meaningful parallels between cultures, and that people can make use of those parallels to move entirely outside their own culture’s ways of thinking. However, the routine translations used by white people in Melsetter district were not really intended to take them outside their own worldview but to bring Africans into it. Once routine translations had been established, the work of examining what words meant within African contexts lost its interest for whites. There was an assumption that the meanings that Africans ascribed to words, whether in European or in local

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languages, were the same as the meanings that whites ascribed to them. But, in the absence of a continued engagement with each other’s cultures, it is possible that people could use the same terms, but not mean the same things. If the failure to translate were really profound, would people even recognize that effective communication had not taken place? This part focuses on the codification of the law, the work of court interpreters, the development of new educational programs for Africans, and the translations in the missionary journal The Mashonaland Quarterly, to examine whether this period of routine translation was also a period of effective communication and hegemonic transformation.

7 “Can you not give the thing a name?”: Translation, Ambiguity, and Codification, 1910s–1920s

In July 1916, Clarkston Tredgold, the attorney general of Southern Rhodesia, asked the Native Affairs Department (NAD) to advise him on the defining action that constituted a recognized African marriage as opposed to a sexual liaison. The attorney general was attempting to draft a law that laid down specific procedures for marriage registration so that the process could be properly bureaucratized and enforced. This should have been a straightforward consultation: the NAD had been registering marriages since 1901. The native commissioners (NCs) duly flooded him with material on African marriage procedures, but, complained Tredgold, “I can find no assistance in the remarks.” The NCs’ reports indicated that African marriages did not depend on a single identifiable action that could be enshrined in law. Tredgold found this hard to comprehend: “surely there is some definite … condition which is recognised as binding in Native Law which precedes registration. Can you not give the thing a name?”1 There was not, and the NCs could not. The survey of all NCs was repeated in 1918, with similarly fruitless results.2 Whites regularly experienced such problems during the 1910s and early 1920s. Despite their extensive knowledge of African societies, they continued to encounter conundrums about how to translate the basic things that they dealt with every day. Tredgold’s bafflement at African marriage systems reflected his different mode of thought as well as different practices of law. African marriage, as has often been observed, was a process, not a legal event. Moreover, as we have seen in Chapter 5, the contract that underpinned marriage was not absolute and could be reviewed as circumstances changed. African legal ideas embraced orality and negotiability. Tredgold’s concept of law, on the other hand, required legal definitions set out in nonnegotiable textual forms, identifiable moments at which a person’s status in law was formally changed, and final and binding agreements. This chapter will highlight the difficulties that white administrators and jurists had in using legal terms such as marriage, adultery, and witchcraft in an African context.

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By the mid-1910s, the formulation of the principles on which “native administration” was founded had long been completed. Key concepts such as bridewealth and witchcraft had been long enshrined in law. Years before, NCs had written down procedures regarding marriage, inheritance, and chiefships that they had derived from what informants told them about their social systems. The NAD operated on the assumption that its employees understood local African culture, knew the meaning of African practices, and, on the whole, spoke the local vernaculars effectively. However, the NAD still lacked any formal training systems, and its first generation of officials, who had collected and recorded information about local Africans, were beginning to retire. By December 1919, there was widespread concern that a new generation of officials would have no access to the hard-won knowledge of those who had preceded them.3 Moreover, African culture was not only varied but also changing—“pure native custom” was not what it was. The “old hands” in the NAD suggested that new “traditions” were an adulteration of custom, and they questioned the value of younger Africans as informants. In 1914, Howman had pointed out that the 1898 Order in Council had required administration according to “Native Law and custom” and queried whether innovations since 1898 were admissible. Howman was clearly unsettled that his hard-won purist expertise was being rendered obsolete, and supported a codification of the law that would make his version of African law the definitive version.4 During 1920, the chief native commissioner (CNC) and the attorney general attempted to organize a standard reference work, drawing on the expertise of senior officials in the NAD.5 The CNC noted that years of administering justice in keeping with African law meant that senior NCs had now accumulated a huge amount of information. Clearly, many of the senior officials had kept extensive notes about local legal systems, which they later published in monographs and in articles to the Native Affairs Department Annual, launched in 1923.6 This ethnographic expertise within the NAD dated back to the 1890s and 1900s, a time when non-European peoples were widely regarded as “backward” and in need of transformation and nurturing toward “civilization.” The officials who had gathered that data and furthered that policy were, in the 1920s, being urged to record what they had learned. But now, for their expertise to remain valid, they had a stake in preserving African culture in an untransformed state. Their “game warden” approach was to dominate the development of ethnography in Southern Rhodesia at a time when administrations elsewhere were coming under the influence of functionalist anthropology and social science approaches to “native policy.” Nonetheless, the standard work of codification was never produced. Despite initially generous offers of support from the Law Department, it became clear that neither department could spare its senior officials for the work. Moreover, it seems that the NCs themselves wanted to hoard their data and publish it independently.7 Nonetheless, arguments in favor of codification did not go away. In earlier decades, the official line had been that codification was undesirable because it would ossify practices that were supposed to be withering away. By 1914, when senior

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officials had an interest in preserving the practices of the 1890s, that argument had been put aside. The CNC, Herbert J. Taylor, claimed that codification had simply been postponed because it was “impossible to lay down a set of rules which could be made applicable to the natives of the Territory, by reason of the numerous tribes varying considerably in their laws and customs.” For local detail, NCs were urged to make more use of “chiefs and headmen”—the salaried authorities recognized by the NAD—as informants.8 By 1920, Taylor commented that those years of administering the law and further use of informants had been expected to reveal an underlying uniformity, despite the superficial diversity.9 Clearly, then, the administration still thought of law in terms of unifying principles with universal validity, and had believed that, with adequate data, African legal systems would be revealed to fit this model. Use of vernaculars by NAD officials had not been accompanied by changed modes of thought about what constituted a rational legal system. So the administration was faced with a practical problem. Despite years of experience, NCs had not been able to identify a universally employable code of African law, yet there was a clear need for a workable uniformity in “native” administration. Pragmatic considerations—the huge diversity of practices—militated against strict codification, and logistical problems meant that a standard text, reflecting a range of practices, was never produced. Nonetheless, the NAD and the Legal Department needed guidelines that new recruits could operate and that legal officers could apply uniformly. Hence, in 1916, the research on how to define African marriages so that officials could assess when registration was required and failure to register could be criminalized. Registration had initially been introduced in 1901, simply as a mechanism for NCs to ensure that women were not being forced to marry against their will. However, with a taxation system that depended on the number of wives that a man had and with the growing capacity of the state to gather statistical data, registration of marriages had become an end in itself. In the absence of clear guidance from the NAD, the Legislative Council framed a law that betrayed the continuing tendency of the white settlers to think of bridewealth payments in terms of a discrete exchange of goods. In the Native Marriages Ordinance (NMO) of 1917, the “moment of marriage” was defined as the time after full bridewealth arrangements had been agreed but before the marriage was consummated. As the NC Belingwe commented, under the new ordinance, “the whole population is at present breaking the law.”10 While appearing to preserve the essentials of African marriage practices, the law had, in effect, codified a “native marriage” procedure that lost the key element of negotiability. By translating African marriage into terms that made sense within European culture, the Legislative Council’s ordinance imposed a different way of thinking about both law and marriage, founded on the inflexible application of universal rules. The 1917 NMO was unusual in that it defined an African legal procedure.11 However, as Tredgold’s appeal for a “name” illustrates, lexical translation in itself could work as a form of codification, particularly when it was inscribed in legislation. Some translations used by the state were simply intended to describe

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administrative roles: “chief ” and “headman,” for example. On an everyday level, the exact correlation between these terms and local titles could allow for some ambiguity. As we saw in Chapters 3 and 6, with Meredith’s rationalizations of local politics, the NCs worked with the recognized authorities or imposed their own candidates. The power relationships underlying these decisions were clearly understood, regardless of the actual terms used: “well if you don’t think I am headman let us go up to the Native Commissioner & hear who is headman.”12 However, the exact meaning of the English term “chief or headman” began to matter when it was used in Section 3 of the 1917 NMO to define the official witnesses at the registration of a marriage. Native commissioners had supposed the term to refer simply to local patriarchs who knew the contracting parties. They discovered, however, that in law it referred only to holders of officially salaried posts, whose numbers were too small to be adequate to the task. Consequently, the numbers of salaried posts had to be radically increased, with preference given to younger men, more able to make the regular journeys to the NC’s office. Meanwhile, urban immigrants had to seek out and petition rural authorities to act as witnesses for them. The meaning of the term “chief or headman” as it appeared in the ordinance was not what had been meant when the mapping of local terms onto English words began. The change of meaning in the translation resulted in a change of power relations in practice.13 The words used by the NAD to refer to local authorities also served to homogenize different types of authority. Meredith’s use of the title “paramount” to describe both Mutema and Musikavanhu, for example, obscured significant differences in the nature of their power and their roles in regional politics. Chris Lowe has noticed a similar process in Swaziland, where Hilda Kuper pointed out that the English term “chief ” was applied to three types of person: princes, governors, and clan chiefs: “Calling them all chiefs in English reflected [a] unified functional view and conscious efforts to build them into structurally similar positions as colonial bureaucrats.”14 Whites were translating terms from African culture into their own administrative culture and trying to rule according to these translations. In the process, they inscribed a symbolic order that classified authority in new ways. The meaning of words clearly had political, not merely epistemological, consequences.15 Other lexical translations appeared in the criminal code. We have already seen how failure to register a marriage became a criminal offense, with implications for the precise definition of what “marriage” meant. The 1917 NMO was instigated by the state, but another significant piece of legislation, the 1916 Native Adultery Punishment Ordinance (NAPO), was instigated as a result of pressure from “chiefs and headmen.” Even here, however, meaning changed in translation. African lobbyists had, for many years, been demanding a law that reinforced lineage authority by targeting male adulterers, regardless of race or origin, and helped senior men in the recovery of damages. The lobbyists succeeded in forcing the ordinance, with its legal definition of adultery, onto the statute book. However, as I have argued in extensive detail elsewhere, the concept of adultery embedded in the ordinance

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was a European notion, in which the offense was a moral matter of betraying one’s marriage vows and that consequently criminalized African women and fined African (largely immigrant) men. The law moved control over women out of the hands of senior men and into the hands of the state: “It was a case of power, as well as meaning, being lost in the translation.”16 So, despite the absence of a statutory “customary law,” aspects of African law were translated into English-language administration and legislation and altered by the process. Translation presumes that there are agreed meanings to things. Concepts in the criminal justice system—adultery, failure to register a marriage—had to be usable by magistrates. They had to be in English, and they had to be made universal and non-negotiable. Significantly, when Howman provided a model answer to a question about bridewealth payments, to help future candidates in their preparation for the 1923 Native Customs Examination, he noted that “in this question the word native ‘law’ is used where previously ‘custom’ has been used; presumably, therefore, this question must be answered according to ‘law.’ ”17 Howman proceeded to set out what was established by law rather than what he knew to be more usual practice. The ordinances were clearly restricting NCs’ modes of thought as much as or more than Africans’. When translated terms were used in official documents, they imposed a symbolic order, defining both how those practices were conceptualized and what people were expected to do in practice. Official translation codified both modes of thought and modes of behavior. Such codification required taxonomic modes of thought in which the world was not fluid and negotiable but bounded and rational. Johannes Fabian has noted how colonial lexicography and taxonomy depended on naming as a means of limiting fluidity and renegotiation. The compilation of vocabularies in the Congo expressed a minimal program in which the vernaculars were used not to communicate but to complete limited transactions: “using words rather than speaking,”18 Vocabularies and lexical items were privileged as “knowledge,” pinning down precise meanings in precise situations and ignoring the wider complexities of language interaction. Vocabulary lists, like language codification, were a means of imposing a constrained, rationalized order, facilitating control from above. In the Congo, Fabian argued, the urge to regularize multiple languages under an effective lingua franca was motivated more by a wish to find effective means to intervene in African governance than by any real difficulties caused by mutual unintelligibility: “the language question belonged to those problems of largely European making whose real importance lay in the fact that they legitimized regulation from above.”19 Naming languages was a means of erecting boundaries between them, reducing their plurality and interactions. It was also a way of asserting ownership over them.20 So, too, was naming things: within the Southern Rhodesian NAD, for example, the word “lobola” (a siZulu term for bridewealth inherited from the Natal service) was routinely used as a technical term in correspondence between Mashonaland NCs, even though the local word, which they presumably used in conversation with local Africans, was “roora.” Naming something involved defining its nature and

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appropriating it, as George Schmidt claimed ownership of the Khoi-Khoi deity Tui-qua once he had identified this as a name for his God.21 Lexicography and linguistics, then, were closely linked to both giving orders and imposing order. So it might appear that during the 1910s, a period of routine translation, the NAD officials used the vernaculars to transform African societies, imposing new concepts of order and rationalism. But white settlers did not experience things in this way. This was a period when the majority of white settlers remained uneasily aware that they did not understand Africans. They were still easily panicked by ritual cleansing movements. Native commissioners were regularly informed by settlers of strange behavior among Africans and urged to investigate: “Use only your best spies.”22 Africans were not widely perceived as capitulating to European modes of thought. Despite the statutes on paper, it is clear that Africans did not have to pay much attention to the ordinances that codified their legal systems. When the state took action under these laws, it was able to inscribe its meanings in physical terms, on the imprisoned bodies of the accused. But such cases were very rare: neither the 1916 NAPO nor the 1917 NMO was effective in practice. Recognizing the inappropriateness of the laws, the state rarely applied them.23 By 1929, Dr. Thompson at Mt. Silinda could complain that “there is no punishment for adultery.”24 The only detailed prosecution filed from Melsetter district under either ordinance happened 11 years after its promulgation. The charge was contravention of Section 10 (1) of the 1917 NMO, and the issue was not a failure to register but an attempt to deceive the NC. A man was prosecuted for persuading his niece to impersonate his real wife, who was pregnant, because “the Native Commissioner will not register a marriage when the woman is in the family way,” and “there would be a case against him for not registering his marriage.” The case is notable in its singularity but also in its cavalier attitude toward the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.25 It seems that Africans translated the English terms “adultery,” “chief,” and “marriage” into their own vernaculars without engaging much with what they meant in European culture. Family heads could use the threat of an NMO prosecution as a spur to get men to pay up the greater proportion of their bridewealth.26 But such threats reflected economic pressures, in particular the acute price rises of 1917–1922, and were driven by African interests, not European hegemony. Family heads did not actually believe that the marriage was invalid if it occurred outside the terms of the ordinance. On the other hand, officials could believe that when they spoke, for example, of lobola, they meant the same thing as their African interlocutors. But in practice, even the words in ordinances could be understood and acted on in varying ways. Nonetheless, in the criminal courts, people translated African words into English every day of the week and vice versa. The practice of law required performance, and, in particular, it required interpreters. Court interpretation was, of course, a different sort of task from textual translation. Unlike the lexical work of compiling a vocabulary or framing an ordinance, court interpretation involved using words embedded in complicated social contexts. Its immediacy illuminates

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processes of thought, as interpreters had to make immediate judgments, choosing appropriate words to convey ideas. A detailed examination of the actual practice of lexical interpretation in the courts demonstrates white officials grappling with differences in cultural practices, modes of thought, and means of classifying data. Analysis of how words were translated provides evidence about how far whites and Africans were really beginning to share a view of the world. From the start, the British South Africa Company state faced political and practical difficulties in employing adequate interpreters who could straddle African and white communities, having insight into both, and with the vocabulary to explain shades of meaning. Few people fulfilled this requirement.27 The difficulties in recruiting court interpreters were experienced particularly acutely in Melsetter district, where so many of the settlers had English as their second or even third language. Africans were not receptive to the judicial principles underlying the Roman Dutch criminal justice system and were not trusted as interpreters. A “colored” interpreter from the Cape was sacked in 1899, having been exposed by Meredith as deliberately misrepresenting testimony for personal gain.28 Among white settlers, fluency in vernacular conversation did not necessarily entail skill in reformulating concepts across languages and tended to indicate a lack of formal education. Nonetheless, in March 1901, William Webster, a semiliterate orphan from one of the original trekking families, was given the job, and the position (which was not full time and was poorly paid) thereafter effectively circulated between three of the prominent Dutch-speaking trekker families: the Steyns, Ferreiras, and Odendaals (Webster was married to an Odendaal). It is clear that William Webster, Johannes J. Steyn, Martinus L. Ferriera, Louis Ferreira, and Petrus J. Odendaal all learned the local language in the course of interacting with the local community, primarily in the context of establishing or growing up on white farms. None of them was a first-language English speaker; none of them was party to the ongoing discussions within the NAD about “native law and custom.” Yet all of them were expected to translate complex issues from within the African communities into clear Englishlanguage testimony. Accurate translation had immediate judicial consequences. For example, back in 1901, an entire case against a white man under the Game Preservation Ordinance revolved around whether he knew the local word for “eland.” Five years later, following another case against a white man for burning grass, an African witness was charged with perjury, and the case revolved around whether he had lied or simply misunderstood the events in court.29 However, the work of interpretation in the courtroom was not just about lexical translation but also about communicating the worldview that the language represented. The criminal courts were predicated on a European worldview. Roger Howman, who followed his father into the Native Department, came to recognize how the criminal courts turned complex and fluid concepts such as “witchcraft” into hard, rationalized absolutes: “it was a European mind that was directing the [court’s] enquiry, asking leading questions [to produce] something solid and legally presentable in court.”30 Africans grappled with different means of classifying

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time and space, as the court required specific measurements, based on abstract units of calibration.31 It seems that the court regarded measurement as a gendered skill. Women were deemed to have “no very clear idea of time” and could be required to indicate time or distance physically in the courtroom: age of children by indicating height; time of an event by reenacting the action, running up and down the courtroom; distance by indicating a nearby object or building. In all these cases, the result was then converted into an appropriate scale of measurement: years, seconds, yards.32 One old lady was asked to calibrate a child’s age against the time that the NC had been appointed—but she displayed a disappointing ignorance of NCs. Eventually a suitable European scale was identified: “I know the white man’s Christmas. Christmas may have come thirteen times since Ndaota was born.”33 Another woman was clearly aware of the need for precision in the court, as she could state that she had been assaulted “49 days ago—I have kept count on this string.”34 Of course, as the court records frequently illustrate, women and men were perfectly capable of precise practical measurements—defining the border with Portuguese East Africa, keeping chisi days, estimating distances, trading comparable goods. The difference was that the criminal court required them to use abstract units, aptly named “imperial measures,” to do so. Nonetheless, Africans constantly evaded such attempts to limit and codify their ways of classifying the world. Interpreters had to deal with testimony from witnesses who believed in the powers of witchcraft, diviners, and medicines to curse and to heal. They often had difficulty finding ways to translate these ideas into English. The dictionaries appeared to solve the problem, but, in practice, they also reflected ambiguity and fluidity of thought. One of the most important words about witchcraft to be used in the courts was, of course, the word “witch.” A first assumption would be that this was a fairly straightforward translation of the word “muroyi.” However, an examination of the dictionaries published by the 1910s reveals that whites’ use of the word “witch” and their understanding of the word “muroyi” were rather more complex and confused than this assumption would allow.35 As we saw in Chapter 4, the Mt. Silinda missionaries produced their dictionary comparatively late, in 1915, but, like Springer, Biehler, and Louw, they gave “muroi” (“muroyi” or “murowi”) as their translation of “witch.” In other words, if they wanted to discuss witches with Africans, this is the word they would use. (Significantly, Buck does not have a translation for “witch.” The Anglicans did not, it seems, want to discuss witches with Africans.) But when one looks at the opposite process, the translation of the word “muroyi,” it becomes clear that whites were rather unsure what they meant by the word when they used it and would be equally unclear about its meaning if an African used it to them. In several cases, there is evidence of confusion and slippage between the concepts of “witch” and “witchdoctor”; that is, between those who cause calamities and those who divine the reasons for calamities. Both the Mt. Silinda missionaries and Biehler, whose work was the standard dictionary used in the NAD, translated “muroi/muroyi” as “witch, sorcerer, wizard.” The word “wizard” is significant,

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as the Mt. Silinda dictionary translated this as “muroi” but also as “nyamusoro,” which elsewhere was clearly defined in the category of diviner: “witchdoctor who throws the dice.” “Sorcerer” is also significant since Biehler defined “nanga” as “witchdoctor, doctor, sorcerer, physician” (emphasis added). Louw made the same conflation, applying the word “sorcerer” to her translation of both “nanga” and “muroyi.” Buck, as noted previously, had no translation for “witch” but translated “muroyi” as “witchdoctor” and, conversely, for “witchdoctor” gave “muroyi”: a serious error that could have had severe consequences both for evangelism and for the administration of justice. Given that the experts who compiled these dictionaries seem a little confused about the meaning of the word “muroyi,” we must tread carefully when we see the word “witch” used by court interpreters in the transcripts of the hearings. By looking at the translations in the courts, it is perhaps possible to reconstruct something more of what the white farmers (as opposed to the missionaries who compiled the dictionaries) understood and believed about African “witchcraft.” The Witchcraft Regulations of 1895 and the Witchcraft Suppression Ordinance (WSO) of 1899 did not recognize the reality of witchcraft. A “witch” was never really a “witch” but the victim of false accusation. However, not all such accusations were worthy of prosecution. For the NC and the police, it was often difficult to distinguish between the serious accusations, likely to lead to severe consequences for the accused, and the more trivial accusations, reflecting no more than spite and dislike on the part of the accuser.36 The issue for the courts, then, was often not so much what was meant by a witch but what was meant by an accusation of witchcraft. By 1928, in the case of Rex v. Mujuchwa, the failure to have clear guidelines as to what counted as a genuine accusation led to a legal difficulty over what was actually meant by the term “muroyi.” In this case, the prosecution needed to “prove that non-natural influence had been associated with the use of the word ‘witch’ (muroyi)” in order to effect a conviction under the WSO (by then an act but still the same piece of legislation).37 This brings us back again to the question of the words that were used to translate these testimonies in the courts and what they tell us about shifting perceptions in the white administrative and farming communities arising from contact with African communities.38 As we have seen, the 1915 Mt. Silinda dictionary elided “witch” and “witchdoctor who throws the dice” under the term “wizard.” The word “wizard” was regularly used in the Melsetter courts in the 1890s and 1900s, but it then went out of fashion, suggesting a different understanding of indigenous ideas between the American missionaries and the Dutch-speaking farmers by the mid-1910s. Where the translation appeared in the courts, it seems that the vernacular source word was “muroyi” and that “wizard” was used simply as an alternative to the translation “witch.”39 The grounds for using the word “wizard” rather than “witch” seem generally to have been based on the gender ideology of the white communities. The term was used exclusively to refer to men.40 This gender differentiation

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was explicitly acknowledged in the quasi-official dictionary produced by the Rev. Bertram Barnes in 1932, which defined “muroyi” as “(male) wizard; (fem.) witch; anyone dealing in black (i.e. malevolent) magic.”41 However, the use of the term “wizard” as a translation for “muroyi” opened the way for potential confusion in English, where the word had a variety of meanings. In a 1908 case, the meaning behind the translation was made explicit: “M’boko jumped up and said to me ‘You are a Wizard (Muroyi).’ ”42 It seems that some clarification was required in court as to exactly what was intended by the interpreter when he used the word “wizard.” No doubt because of their gender associations, wizards seemed more powerful than and not necessarily as malevolent as witches. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic suggests that, in early modern England, the lower classes tended to distinguish between “wizards,” also known as “cunning” men or “white” witches, and “witches,” who were genuinely malevolent and evil.43 So, in English, the term “wizard” is broadly synonymous with the term “sorcerer,” which, as we have seen from the dictionaries, could apply to a diviner as much as to a witch. The term for a diviner was another crucial word for translation in witchcraft accusation cases. Diviners were routinely employed to identify witches, and so could be deemed criminally culpable in the trials of people accused of making an accusation. In 1900, a blind diviner named Dzotsera admitted in court that he habitually made his living from divination. His admission was translated as “I am a doctor … I have … got a living by being a doctor.”44 The word “doctor” was clearly a translation of some local word indicating a spiritual occupation. Despite this, Longden declared that the man was “evidently in the habit of practising witchcraft,” illustrating that he made no clear distinction between divination and witchcraft. A decade later, the court interpreters still had difficulty with this distinction. In a civil court case recorded in 1911, a complainant was said to want compensation for being accused of being a “witchdoctor,” that is, of being a healer and diviner. The only way to make sense of this case is to assume that the complainant had really been accused of being a witch and that the interpreter confused the words. A decade later, in a criminal case, an African policeman was recorded as describing a divination session by saying, “They were practising witchcraft.” It seems probable that the confusion was again the interpreter’s, as it is unlikely (albeit possible) that the policeman was giving his testimony in English.45 This conflation of diviners and witches under the broad heading of “witchcraft” exposes the huge gap between state and African perceptions of witchcraft in the 1910s and 1920s, despite decades of translation, court hearings, and dictionaries. The term most commonly used in the court cases for a diviner was a “witchdoctor.” This is significant on three levels. First, the term was not “witch-finder,” which would seem a clearer and more accurate description. The term “witchfinder” was used only once by Meredith, way back in 1899, and then not in a court case but in a quarterly report, noting that a woman had been prosecuted for employing one.46 To describe someone as a “witchfinder” implied that there were witches out there

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waiting to be found, a conclusion that the Southern Rhodesian state was anxious to resist. Second, the term was “witch-doctor.” This suggested that the main part of the diviner’s work was to do with witches and witchcraft and contributed to the conflation between witchcraft and divination. In fact, diviners were not primarily employed to find witches, but to find explanations—a very different task. Witchcraft was only one of many possible explanations for calamity; an aggrieved ancestor was just as likely to be responsible. Interpreters used the word “witch” in translations of testimonies where diviners had clearly had nothing to do with witches, suggesting a general conflation of witches with anything “supernatural” and a suggestion of malevolence in all encounters with the spiritual world. This was a clear legacy of the European witch hunts and bore very little relationship to the beliefs of local Africans. Finally, however, and perhaps most important the term was “witch-doctor.” As noted in the previous chapter, the white court interpreters came from a background with a long tradition of exchanging healing knowledge with Africans.47 This word implied some recognition of African belief in links between spiritual and physical well-being. Indeed, the 1895 Witchcraft Regulations made an intriguing distinction between “witch finder” and “witchdoctor,” suggesting an understanding that divination could involve more than simply witchcraft accusation. Spiritual practitioners ended up in court in witchcraft accusation trials not because of their healing role, however, but because of their divination skills. In the Mt. Silinda dictionary, Dysart and Orner defined the term “witchdoctor” more precisely as “witchdoctor who throws the dice,” and their translation— “chiremba”—placed far more emphasis on the use of hakata divination “dice” than on witches. “Chiremba” was translated back into English as “native doctor, skillful with hakata.”48 In the courts, too, the white settlers regularly used the idea of consulting hakata as an alternative translation to “witchdoctor”: they employed the term “bone throwers.” It is difficult to tell which word or words they were translating in this way, but at least the term acknowledged that it was divination rather than witches that lay at the heart of the work. However, the term “bone thrower” was even more replete with ideology than the word “witchdoctor.” Diviners did not “throw bones.” If they threw anything at all—and not all of them did—they threw hakata, which are wooden. There is something unpleasantly lurid in the fact that these were always referred to as “bones.” The “translation” (it barely merits the term) betrays how much local whites feared and exoticized African divination practices. The confusions that could arise from using “bone throwing” as a translation for “divination” are illustrated in the statement made by Dzotsera, the blind diviner arrested in 1900: “I am a doctor and I throw the bones … I have never thrown the bones.”49 Dzotsera had other methods of divination, including the “basket ordeal.”50 In his first sentence, the term “doctor” clearly means n’anga or chiremba, while the term “throw the bones” means “carry out divination.” Meredith interpreted this statement, but the regular court interpreters used the term in the same way.

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The term “bone-thrower” seems an odd translation for a practice that involved neither “throwing” nor “bones.” However, the term clearly had very wide currency in the white communities in Southern Rhodesia, and appears in official reports as well as in casual correspondence, so it was not a slang word. It was not exclusive to Southern Rhodesia but was also found in Botswana and South Africa. It seems likely that the trekkers brought the term into Melsetter district from South Africa, where practitioners may have used real bones as well as ivory in divination.51 While the term “witchdoctor” at least gave some indication of the status and role of the diviner in the African communities, the term “bone thrower” was a product of the white imagination. It lacked the implications of healing, knowledge of herbs, and support at times of calamity, which formed the mainstay of the work of the n’anga or chiremba. It was a highly emotive term, suggesting barbarism, savagery, and superstition. Court interpreters rarely used the term “doctor,” on its own, to describe a divination role.52 It was mostly used by Meredith and by the “colonial native” who was sacked in 1899. As a translation that comes close to the African conception, it seems significant that it was these two rather than the Dutch settlers who used the term. In defining n’anga, most of the dictionaries emphasized the “doctoring” or healing role and tended to downplay the spiritual aspects. Springer had “witchdoctor,” but Biehler added to this “doctor, sorcerer, physician,” while Louw offered both “doctor” and “sorcerer.” Buck did not appear to think of “nganga” as meaning “witchdoctor” at all but only “a doctor, a medicine man”; in other words, the divination role of the n’anga was simply disregarded. The Mt. Silinda dictionary similarly defined nanga only as a doctor and vice versa, noting that it was an imported word, not indigenous to chiNdau. Although divination was a specialized task—not all indigenous healers were primarily diviners, and some were more skilled in the use of healing herbs than in divination—yet this conceptual distinction between the physical and the spiritual still really made sense only within post-Enlightenment European concepts of health and healing. In European culture, one of the primary roles of the doctor is to prescribe medicines. Longden noted the healing work of the “witchdoctors,” but, like the Mt. Silinda missionaries, he had little faith in their efficacy: “Natives here readily accept medical attention and medicines from Europeans when offered, but they get very few opportunities and usually resort to their witchdoctors and their concoctions. ”53 There is a significant distinction implied here between European “medicines” and African “concoctions.” This is not a distinction we find among the court interpreters, however, where the term “medicine” was used as a translation for an interesting range of Africans’ “concoctions.”54 Unlike the missionaries and Longden, the white interpreters’ use of the term “medicine” seems to illustrate a significant African element in their view of the world. As we saw in the rufimbi case in Chapter 6, white settlers had a fear of African uses of “medicine.” But the interpreters also displayed a readiness to use the word “medicine” in a way that was very close to the African usage of the word muti or mutombo. Muti does not translate simply into the English word “medicine.” In

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fact, translated literally, it means “tree.” This literal meaning—and the translation to mean “medicine”—was spelled out very clearly in the records of the rufimbi case: “It is a tree, and the tree is medicine.”55 It is uncertain from this account, then, whether the rufimbi was actually made from a tree. Rather, it appears that some kind of clarification was being made by the court, glossed over in the record, about whether the word muti was being used to mean a type of tree or to mean something else, translated by the court interpreter as “medicine.” When we look at the range of contexts in which the word “medicine” was used, we see how far it drifted from the conventional English meaning of a nasty-tasting liquid, designed to have a symptomatic impact on an illness. Sometimes the word did at least refer to imbibed substances. In one court case, an emetic administered in ordeal was translated as “medicine” throughout the hearing.56 Poison, which was very closely linked to witchcraft, was also translated habitually as “medicine”—which is particularly striking given the easy availability of the English word “poison.”57 However, “medicine” was not necessarily liquid: the unfortunates in the fraud case who failed to effect their release from gaol through the use of “medicine” had first to chew the root but then to spit it out and rub it on their faces.58 “Medicine” did not even need to be consumed at all. In the rufimbi case, the “medicine” was inserted into plaster in the wall of the woman’s bedroom. In a shooting incident, the “medicine” was left in a gona (or “medicine horn,” as it is described in the record). A gona could be a bona fide container for healing herbs— “medicine” in a conventional sense—but it could also act as a charm and produce malevolent effects.59 In an abduction case, “medicine” was thrown on the fire to stupefy the inhabitants of a hut.60 In the record of this trial, the interpreter—or the clerk—eventually gave up translating muti as “medecine” (sic) and simply noted, “You just came into the hut & threw ‘muti’ on the fire.” It seems that there are two possible explanations for this cavalier use of the word “medicine.” One is that the Africans themselves were using a neologism based on the word “medicine,” so that there was no need for the interpreter to think of an appropriate English translation. Although this adoption and adaptation of European-language words was common, the evidence from the rufimbi and muti cases suggests that it was not what was happening here. In that event, the only other explanation is that the white interpreters included in their understanding of the term “medicine” a whole range of things that were not part of the post-Enlightenment European tradition. They had absorbed the African meaning of muti. The words used by the interpreters in court cases involving the “supernatural” tell us as much about the worldview of the trekker farmers as they do about the testimonies of the Africans. Officially, witchcraft was rejected by a rational-scientific epistemology that excluded such phenomena from its universe. Both the words and the actions of the whites involved in the courts suggest a greater ambiguity. There was clearly more in heaven than earth than could easily be accommodated within a rational-scientific discourse, as the white settlers in Melsetter were, it seems uneasily, aware. Their frequent and wildly inaccurate use of the word “bone-thrower” suggests a genuine disquiet and fear surrounding the practice of divination. Their

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emphasis on witchcraft accusation in divination, seen in the even more ubiquitous term “witchdoctor,” confirms this suggestion. So, too, does the phrase “sniffing out witchcraft” as a translation for divination practices, with its emphasis on the sensory ability that is more effective in other mammals than in humans, and on the connection with rotting corpses, which are most easily traced by their smell. The more neutral term “doctor” was rarely used, and the simply descriptive term “diviner” made no appearance at all. There was an insistence on the mysterious and supernatural in the translations, which suggests that this was primarily how diviners were perceived by the interpreters. We may infer that white settlers suspected that the rules of causation might genuinely be different in Africa. How far they appreciated the nature of that difference in Southern Rhodesia is illustrated by the white interpreters’ use of the term “medicine” in a way that clearly mirrors the African use of the term muti. Whatever the position in law, the language and testimonies of the local white settlers in the Melsetter courts imply a belief in—or at least a fear of—the power and efficacy of muti, witchcraft, and divination. However, their translations, which elided witchcraft and divination, also illustrate how little they actually understood of the broader epistemological foundations on which these things they feared were based. In conclusion, then, the 1910s saw an increasing interest within the NAD in standardizing relationships with Africans, based on senior officials’ comprehension of African societies and languages. The NAD’s ethnographic surveys became less about discovering information, and more about preserving it. In Weberian terms, the state had moved from a charismatic phase to a bureaucratic one.61 The NAD no longer needed pioneers to establish precisely what was meant by words translated as “adultery” or “witch” or whether there was a name for the point at which Africans become married. That information had already been collected and found to evade precise definition. Instead, the Legal Department needed a system that could operate uniformly. In ordinances about marriage and witchcraft, word translations used in everyday communication and in the administrative structure were precisely defined, with the effect of creating a de facto codification of elements of the African legal system. Translation of key terms became part of the attempt by the white administration to make what was negotiable into something that was textual—to enforce ordered rationalism not only as a way of thinking but also as a system of rule. But what was the effect of these translations? How far did Africans find themselves obliged to think of their legal systems in the terms laid down in the ordinances? The NCs had tried to engage with African cognitive structures, but the state merely mapped English words onto African practices. The power of men over women and of elders over juniors was altered as a result, encouraging new alliances and putting new pressures on gender relations. In the courtroom, the administration of justice depended on rigid universals. Africans were required to use imperial measures, follow inflexible procedures, and plead rather than negotiate. Outside the courtroom, they were expected to conform to the letter of the law, expressed in English terms such as “witchcraft,” “adultery,” “chief,” or “marriage.” However,

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it seems they could do these things—going through the procedures of registering their marriages, taking a man to court for adultery, or complaining about being accused of witchcraft—without directly connecting with what those terms meant in European culture. Meanwhile, ordinary white settlers were employed to turn these translations into meaningful statements in court. In many cases, there were no clear cultural parallels to link English words and African practices, no easy “middleman move” to be made in translation, representing alien ideas as if they were versions of familiar ideas. “Witchcraft,” in particular, was a difficult term to make sense of. In English, it came with a baggage of meaning derived from a very different historical context that was poorly understood by the whites themselves. As Barry Hallen and J. O. Sodipo have observed, “There is no reason to assume that … the English-language concept ‘witchcraft’ may serve as an accurate translation of its supposed African-language equivalents. ”62 Engaging with the laws on witchcraft was supposed to inculcate a more rationalist worldview among Africans, denying the reality of witchcraft or the powers of diviners. Instead, it seems that white interpreters, reaching into the testimonies of Africans and attempting to represent the meaning of words they heard there, found little in their own worldview that could encompass them. Sometimes, they conflated all these ideas into terms that simply expressed their own fears in the face of “superstition” and irrationality. But sometimes, their names for these things reflected a less rationalist, more ambiguous, indeed, a more African, view of the world. NOTES 1. Attorney General to Chief Native Commissioner, 17 July 1916, N3/17/4.1. 2. CNC circular letter no. 518/1918, 22 March 1918, N3/17/4.2.2. 3. Acting Attorney General (R. McIlwaine) to Sec., Dept. of Administration (SDA), 12 December 1919, N2/23/1. 4. NC Hartley (E. G. Howman) to SN, Sby, 1 July 1914, N3/23/1. 5. Acting Attorney General (R. McIlwaine) to Sec., Dept. of Administration (SDA), 12 December 1919, and subsequent correspondence, N2/23/1. 6. Charles Bullock, The Mashona (The Indigenous Natives of S. Rhodesia) (Cape Town & Johannesburg: Juta & Co., 1927); F.W.T. Posselt, A Survey of the Native Tribes of Southern Rhodesia (Bulawayo: Government of Southern Rhodesia, 1927); F.W.T. Posselt, Fact and Fiction (Bulawayo: Government of Southern Rhodesia, 1935). The Native Affairs Department Annual was designed to make the internal knowledge of the NAD more widely available to new recruits, to ethnographers, and to the white settlers who, after 1923, had control over the government budget that funded the department. 7. SN Bulawayo (H.M.G. Jackson) to CNC, 20 August 1920, N3/23/1; Wiri Edwards, 7 May 1923, ED 6/2/1/1 1b, f 217. See also Roger Howman (E. G. Howman’s son) describing how his father was offended that Bullock had incorporated in his 1927 book all the notes and papers left for him by Howman when he took over from Howman as NC Sinoia in 1926; interview with Roger Howman by Murray Steele, 10 and 26 August 1971, ORAL/HO3, 5–6. 8. CNC to SN, Salisbury, 16 July 1914, in response to Howman’s request for codification, N3/23/1.

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9. CNC to SDA, 3 January 1920 (1919 written in error in original), N3/23/1. 10. NC, Belingwe to SN, Bulawayo, 2 April 1918, N3/17/4.2.2. For an extensive and detailed discussion of the background, framing and consequences of the 1917 Native Marriages Ordinance, see Diana Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 197–226. 11. Unlike other territories under British administrations, there was no statutory codification of African laws in Southern Rhodesia. 12. R v. Tafiraushe @ Dirikwi and Gezazo, PE 236/1910, 21 December 1910, D3/3/4. Unfortunately, it is impossible to tell, from the context, what vernacular word the witness used for the term translated as “headman” in the court transcript. 13. Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power, 213–14. 14. Chris Lowe, , “REPLY: Houphouet-Boigny and Cult of Personality,” in H-Africa, , 28 February 1999. 15. A similar point is made in Paul Landau’s chapter “Transformations in Consciousness” in Cambridge History of South Africa, ed. S. Marks and B. Nasson (forthcoming). 16. Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power, 168. 17. E. G. Howman, “Replies to Some Questions in the Native Customs Examinations of 1923,” Native Affairs Department Annual 1 (1923): 84. 18. Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 19. 19. Ibid., 82. 20. Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss, eds., African Languages, Development and the State (London: Routledge, 1993); Sinfree Makoni, “From Misinvention to Disinvention: An Approach to Multilingualism,” in Black Linguistics. Language, Society, and Politics in Africa and the Americas, ed. Sinfree Makoni, Geneva Smitherman, Arnetha F. Ball, and Arthur K. Spears (London: Routledge, 2002), 132–53. 21. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989), 161. This was, of course, also understood by the sixthcentury b.c. writers who recorded the story of Adam’s naming activities in the Garden of Eden. 22. D. G. MacAndrew, New Buxton Farm, Shamva, to CNC, 16 March 1910, N3/31/1. See also Acting NC Sinoia to CNC, 11 March 1910, N3/31/1; CNC to Chief Staff Officer to the Commandant General, 9 March 1914, N3/14/4; extensive flurry of correspondence regarding a cleansing movement during March and April 1915, N3/14/5; Acting Attorney General (R. McIlwaine) to Sec., Dept. of Administration (SDA), 12 December 1919, N2/23/1. 23. In the Melsetter district, an initial flurry of prosecutions was effective in increasing the number of registrations: 10 prosecutions for failure to register under NMO produced 106 registrations in 1919, then 328 in the following year, that is, up to the end of 1920. But registrations declined again to 151 the following year, resulting in a suggestion from NC’s office that more prosecutions were needed. NC’s Annual Reports (ARs), 1920–21, N9/1/23–24. For a national picture, see Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power. 24. Report of Chargée, Mt. Silinda Mission Station, 1 June 1928–31 May 1929, UN 3/20/1/24/1. 25. R v. Karukayi and Margwenyi, PE 17/1928, 28 March 1928, S1071. The defendant was acquitted on the technicality that his offense was not actually a failure to register but impersonation, and so he could not be convicted under the 1917 NMO.

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26. R v. Murapu @ Tickey, PE 107/1917, 16 April 1917, D3/3/6. Elsewhere, in mining areas with high levels of prostitution, men made use of the NAPO to cultivate the state as an ally in controlling women: see, for example, NC, Shabani to Attorney General, 30 April 1923, N3/17/2. 27. Diana Jeater, “Speaking Like a Native: Vernacular Languages and the State in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1935,” Journal of African History 42, no. 3 (2001): 449–68. 28. NC Melsetter to RM and CC Melsetter, 29 February 1896 and 12 May 1897; Meredith, Memoirs, ME 4/1/4, 126. 29. R v. Robert Reece, case no. 15/1901, 12 April 1901; R v. J.A. Heyns, 15 June 1906 and R v. Bonani, 16 June 1906, D3/3/2. 30. Roger Howman, “Witchcraft and the Law,.” Native Affairs Department Annual 25 (1948): 7–18. 31. As Paul Landau notes in South Africa, “Time and space tended to disengage from seasonal cycles” under white systems of rule. “Transformations in Consciousness” (forthcoming). 32. R v. Arnold Trimbleby Price, PE 142/1912, Tambandini’s testimony, 28 November, Leslie Clifford Masterson’s testimony and Acting Assistant Magistrate’s comment, 29 November, Sanza’s testimony, 21 December 1912, D3/3/4; R v. Kuboya @ Nikis, PE 203/1918, Chirayarayo’s testimony, 13 May 1918, D3/3/6. 33. R v. Usiwana @ Jack, PE 131/1909, Pinimadzai’s testimony, 4 October 1909, D3/3/3. 34. R v. Marireri, PE 124/1913, Dedeya’s testimony, 29 October 1913, D3/3/5. 35. The dictionaries referred to are, in chronological order, Mrs. H. E. Springer (Methodist Episcopal Mission), A Handbook of Chikaranga or the Language of Mashonaland (Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham, 1905); Rev. E. Biehler, S.J. (Chishawasha Mission), A Shona Dictionary with an Outline Shona Grammar (Chishawasha Mission, 1905); H. R. Buck, C.R. (St Augustine’s Mission, Penhalonga), A Dictionary with Notes on the Grammar of the Mashona Language, Commonly Called Chiswina (London: SPCK, 1911); Mrs. C. S. Louw (Dutch Reformed Mission, Morgenster), A Manual of the Chikaranga Language with Grammar, Exercises, Useful Conversational Sentences and Vocabulary (English-Chikaranga and Chikaranga-English) (Bulawayo: Philpott & Collins, 1915); J. P. Dysart and A. J. Orner, Mt. Silinda ABM, Chindau-English and English-Chindau Vocabulary with grammatical notes (Binghamton, N.Y.: Kennedy Morris, 1915). For a broader discussion of the context in which these dictionaries can be used by the social historian, see Diana Jeater, “The Way You Tell Them: Language, Ideology and Development in Southern Rhodesia,” African Studies 55, no. 2 (1996): 1–15. 36. See, for example, NC Melsetter, MR, 31 December 1900, NUE2/1/3, 499; NC Melsetter, MR, 1 July 1901, NUE2/1/3, 634; see also Diana Jeater, “‘I Am Willing to Pay for the Damage Done’: Parallel Systems of Criminal Law in White-Occupied Southern Rhodesia, 1896–1923” (conference on Crime in Eastern Africa: Past and Present Perspectives, organized by the British Institute in Eastern Africa/Institut Francais de Recherche en Afrique, KWS Training Institute, Naivasha, Kenya, 8–11 July 2002), which examines the procedures (largely invisible to whites) that Africans recognized as constituting a serious witchcraft accusation. 37. Emmet V. Mittlebeeler, African Custom and Western Law: The Development of the Rhodesian Criminal Law for Africans (New York: Africana Publishing, 1976), 157; see also 146–49. 38. Some parts of what follows have been previously published in Diana Jeater, “Rethinking the ‘African Voice’: Language Interpretation in the Native Commissioner’s and

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Magistrate’s Courts, Melsetter District, Southern Rhodesia, 1896–1914,” in Rethinking African History, ed. Simon McGrath et al. (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh CAS, 1997), 379–402. 39. Springer, Biehler, and Louw all stated that “wizard” and “witch” have the same meaning. 40. See, for example, among the “native disputes,” Kufandada v. Maweni, 23 April 1909, S1069/I, and, among the criminal cases, R v. Masezi, PE 24/1898, 12 December 1898, D3/3/1, and R vs. Mboko, PE 77/1908, 20 March 1908, D3/3/3. 41. Rev. Bertram H. Barnes, CR, A Vocabulary of the Dialects of Mashonaland in the New Orthography (London: Sheldon Press, 1932). 42. Rex v. Mboko, PE 77/1908, 20 March 1908, D3/3/3. 43. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971). 44. Dzotsera’s statement, 19 April 1900, DM2/4/1. 45. Mayaweni v. Kanyisa, 14 July 1911, S1069, 271. R v. Bonezipi, PE 204/1921, 8 November 1921, D3/14/3. 46. NC Melsetter, quarterly report, 4 July 1899, NUE2/1/3, 77. 47. Sandra Swart, “‘Bushveld Magic’ and ‘Miracle Doctors’—An Exploration of Eugène Marais and C. Louis Leipoldt’s Experiences in the Waterberg, South Africa, c.1906–1917,” Journal of African History 45, no. 2 (2004): 237–55. 48. “Chiremba” is often used today to mean “doctor” or hospital orderly. Their other translation, “nyamusoro,” was given as “wizard.” Literally, “Nyamusoro,” “nya” (owner of) and “musoro” (head), means something more general, along the lines of “the person entitled to the head of a piece of game after hunting” or simply “a person to be respected.” 49. Dzotsera’s statement, 19 April 1900, DM2/4/1. 50. The normal procedure in witchcraft accusations was that those under suspicion (and in some cases also their accusers) underwent an ordeal under the supervision of a diviner. There were several accepted methods. Dzotsera used a basket: “I determine cases by ordering the accused parties to lift my basket and if they can do so they are free of any charge, but if the[y] cannot do so they are then regarded as guilty.” 51. Christopher Lowe, personal communication, and Paul Landau, personal communication. However, a Dutch graduate student suggested to me that the roots may be even deeper. At school, she was taught about shamanistic practices common in the lowlands in Anglo-Saxon times that involved divination using bones. Perhaps the term “bone-thrower” came with the Dutch to the Cape. It certainly seems more prevalent in Southern Africa than elsewhere in the continent. 52. Apart from the entirely separate case of the “rainmaker,” the only other word used for a spiritual role was “soothsayer,” used once by Meredith in recording a “native dispute.” It seems an appropriate term in the context to describe the svikiro who was attached to Mapungwana’s household. Mapungwau v. Chigumunda, 21 April 1909, S1069/I. 53. NC Melsetter, AR, December 1909, N9/1/12. 54. Looking at the uses of the word “medicine” as a translation in the courts draws attention to a word that is notably absent as a translation for n’anga in both the courts and the dictionaries. This is the term “medicine man.” However, unfortunately I do not know enough about the uses of the term elsewhere in the English-speaking world during this period to say anything very intelligent about this observation.

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55. Rex v. Matiwona @ Penny, Testimony of Moyomuti, PE41/1912, 22 February 1912, D3/3/4. 56. Rex v. Nguta, case no. 31/1896, 8 December 1896, D3/3/1. 57. For example, Kufandada v. Maweni, 23 April 1909, S1069/1; Nyadsani v. Mabudiseni, 7 June 1913, S1069/2, 12. 58. Rex v. Pofana, case no. 16/1901, 15 March 1901, D3/3/2; NC Melsetter, weekly report, 19 March 1901, NUE 2/1/3. 59. Rex v. Mashlanga, PE23/1898, 5 September 1898; Rex v. Masezi, PE24/1898, 12 September 1898, D3/3/1. 60. Rex v. Mangwende & Matipedzi, PE64/1907, 18 June 1907, D3/3/3. This case is also notable in that the charge was “man-stealing”; it was two women who were abducted. You may draw your own conclusions about what this use of language tells us of the ideology of the white state. 61. Murray Cairns Steele, “The Foundations of a ‘Native’ Policy: Southern Rhodesia, 1923–1933” (Ph.D. diss., Simon Fraser University, 1972). 62. Barry Hallen and J. O. Sodipo, Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy (London: Ethnographica, 1986), 97–98 (emphasis in the original).

8 “The sanctity of a contract”: Translating “Civilized” Values, 1910s–1920s

In the previous chapter, we saw how the white administration translated aspects of African culture into English and then tried to rule according to those translations. We also saw how men from the white farming communities, when required to find ways to express ideas from African culture, ended up adopting those ideas in their own use of words. However, for most white people in Southern Rhodesia, the point was not for whites to engage with African ideas but for Africans to engage with the values and practices of white society. By 1910, after two decades of white occupation, there was an expectation that Africans were familiar with white values and ought to be aspiring to live up to them. This chapter looks at how far values from white culture were inculcated into African society over the following decade and a half. The 1910s and early 1920s are the years immediately preceding the well-studied consolidation of a Christianized, educated, “righteous” African middle class in Southern Rhodesia.1 In those studies, middle-class Africans appear to have absorbed—and, of course, adapted— European economic and religious values. It is clear that there were material as well as spiritual rewards for doing so. However, a decade earlier, at least in Melsetter district, it seems that changes in economic and educational conditions influenced African perceptions of the world, but they did not, in themselves, require the adoption of white values. African entrepreneurs could embrace new technologies, new crops, and new standards of measurement but still maintain their own ideas about contracts, fair exchange, and fertility. Educated men could embrace new forms of etiquette and abandon some of the old Nguni forms of status, yet still defend chiefship and established protocols. And Africans throughout the territory could embrace literacy and mission education without abandoning “heathenism,” not least because sanctions against “witchcraft” and “superstition” were expressed so crudely in translation that they did not clearly refer to what people actually believed.

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The 1910s and 1920s saw notable changes in the social and economic position of Africans, in Melsetter district as elsewhere. By the early 1920s, there was a community of remarkably literate and skilled Africans in the district, especially in the south, where Mt. Silinda exercised a powerful influence. This was not a community of rural entrepreneurs—there were no stock breeding programs, and despite huge famine in 1912 and again in 1919, there was no significant interest in enhanced agricultural production before 1918. Even when plow ownership began to creep up after 1918, local people showed much less interest in agricultural innovation than did people in other areas. This was an area deeply involved in waged labor and in exporting skilled laborers as the main way of raising cash. The mission had accelerated this proletarianization. Local people had a longstanding reputation as “excellent miners,” but mission training, whether literary or technical, had significantly enhanced employability in towns and mining centers. This did nothing to benefit the local white farming economy, of course, which continued to suffer acute labor shortages. Nor did it benefit the missionaries, who found in the early 1920s that they couldn’t recruit African teachers, despite having educated many local people up to the relevant standard. It did, however, benefit the local people, both women who took up local domestic jobs and skilled male migrants who left the district in large numbers. By 1911, the growth of white settlement had improved the flow of consumer goods into the district. Africans were regularly using their cash incomes to invest in bought goods rather than local manufacture: “Native industries such as pottery, iron and brass working and smelting, wood carving, cloth making etc. are dying fast, if they are not already practically dead.” New cultural forms, such as square brick houses with glass windows and furnished with chairs, tables, and beds, were evident all over the district by 1920.2 What was driving these cultural changes and this engagement with the cash economy? Was it evidence of movement toward European modes of thought? Certainly, the new generation of elders who came into their positions in the early 1920s were much more enthusiastic about mission education than those who had been in power a decade earlier. In 1911, Longden had noted that while young people were “disposed to take advantage” of educational opportunities, “the older men still look with suspicion on educational institutions.” By 1923, however, the Rev. Fuller at Mt. Silinda reported a huge upsurge in appetite for education, noting that, for the first time, “the demand for schools on the part of chiefs and headmen runs ahead of the ability of the mission to open schools and furnish teachers.”3 The coincidence, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, of increasing engagement with the labor market and white education on the one hand and significant cultural innovation on the other, might indicate the success of a colonial hegemonic project. It would appear that Africans, particularly those on mission lands, had absorbed the values of the white settlers and were routinely translating them into local terms, adapting them into their everyday lives. However, the white settlers were themselves divided about how they wanted Africans to behave. Moreover, “values” are hard to define, and similarities in

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behavior were not necessarily driven by similarities in values. As Derek Peterson has suggested for Gikuyu communities in the same period, Africans who appeared to be adopting the outward forms of white society were likely to be ascribing their own meanings to those things.4 Expectations about Africans’ ability to adopt a “civilized” lifestyle and flourish in the new economic environment had initially been low among the white invaders. The 1900s had been characterized by a serious national debate over whether there was any place for Africans in the economy. Imagining the world a century hence, “The Lounger” column in the Rhodesian Advertiser of 1906 had declared that “sooner or later provision will have to be made for a Zoological Garden in which to exhibit the few then-remaining specimens of Kafirs which will be extant.”6 However, while this “humorist” speculated about the year 2006, the port of Lourenco Marques only a few hundred miles to the east was developing a vibrant café society in which Portuguese Africans could make important contributions to discussions on political theory and colonial policy.7 Nonetheless, this was not the future envisaged or desired by white settlers further inland. Aspirations in the white communities of Southern Rhodesia about African economic life pulled in three conflicting directions during the late 1910s and early 1920s. None of these directions was toward increased literacy: “Of all the qualifications of which an employer has need in the natives he employs, reading and writing are the last.”8 Most whites felt threatened by African claims on white-collar jobs, and even the missionaries were uneasy about the thought of Africans with graduate qualifications. However, white communities were at odds about what key aspects of their culture they expected Africans to adopt. Not only were there longstanding disagreements within the white communities about which particular aspects of African life needed to disappear if there was to be “progress,” but there was also a growing anxiety during the late 1910s and early 1920s about what sort of “progress” was healthy and what was corrupting when Africans were “driven by circumstances and environment into the net of a materialistic modernism.”10 The white farmers in Melsetter district wanted very large quantities of unskilled, cheap labor. They were still struggling to make a good living from the land and could not compete with the mines over wage levels. There were no significant markets for crops or market garden produce within reach, so the white farmers depended on selling livestock for a steady income. Other whites, most notably E. D. Alvord, who joined Mt. Silinda mission in 1920, wanted to see Africans expand their agricultural output and market their surplus, to support a growing consumerism. This put them in direct competition with the white farmers for the limited local markets.11 Meanwhile, the demand for higher paid skilled labor was growing apace, as the economy expanded and differentiated. For an employer contributing to the 1927 issue of the Native Affairs Department Annual (NADA), “It seems … obvious that, for many years to come, the road to prosperity for natives must be through their wage-earning capacity.”12 Practical education in the use of machinery, carpentry, cabinetmaking, bricklaying, masonry, and brick and tile making or, for girls, in

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sewing, dressmaking, and housekeeping was offered by Mt. Silinda alongside agricultural training.13 Such skills put wages up to a level at which the local farmers could not compete and also took attention away from the agricultural transformations that Alvord was trying to introduce. However, whether the whites were demanding an unskilled, a skilled, or an agricultural future for Africans, all agreed that they needed to acquire certain aspects of the European outlook on the world if they were to succeed economically. Fitness for employment and prosperity was not simply a matter of having the right technical abilities. There was also a strong sense among the whites that Africans needed to adopt other traits: European manners, language, imperial measures, and business practices. These requirements were frequently subsumed under the label “civilization,” although, during the course of the 1920s, the terms “development” and “modernization” came to serve the same purpose. These were not just modes of behavior: they were linked to a way of thinking and perceiving the world. White commentators presented them as the outward manifestations of moral uprightness, the ability to use abstract reason and scientific method, and a work ethic that equated hard work with religious superiority. Material changes in economic life had strong normative values associated with them by the whites. How successful were they at translating these associations in terms that made sense in the African communities? The association between Christian morality and forms of economic behavior was remarkably strong in the minds of white commentators. We might expect this from the missionaries: their superintendent of education commented in 1922 that “one always has to fight to make sure his work is not only a civilising force but also a spiritualizing one.”14 But it was not only the missions who made this connection. It was found throughout the white communities. The native commissioner (NC) described nonpayment of tax as an “evil,” while a white employer asserted that one of the most important things it was necessary for an African to understand was “the sanctity of a contract.”15 It seems this employer did not only want Africans to abide by European civil law; he wanted the law to be understood as a moral duty, underpinned by religious obligation. This packaging together of material culture, economic development, moral codes, and religious beliefs was a significant element in the white hegemonic project. In seeking evidence for whether key concepts from white culture were translated into and absorbed by African communities during this period, we need to look not only at changes in lifestyle but also at attitudes toward contracts and measurements and consider how these might have been associated with normative or religious values. “Civilization,” for many white settlers, was a system of uniformity, regularity, and measurement. We have already seen, in Chapter 6, how abstract thought and scientific method were associated with “truth” and thereby with Christianity, in distinction from African “superstition.” But the normative aspects of regulation and measurement extended beyond religious matters into economics and business. In 1915, the missionaries were perturbed that “some of our Christian natives think they

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have gone far enough on the scale of civilization and intelligence to believe that they can run a store.”16 The missionaries’ concerns were expressed in moral terms. On the one hand, the Africans were criticized for avarice, for thinking that the “glamor for money is all that is necessary” to run a store when a mathematical and business training was also required. On the other hand, they were accused of potential dishonesty, not because of their avarice but because they had not yet gone “far enough on the scale of civilization.” Concerned also by nonpayment of medical fees, Dr. Thompson mused that “few of them have … attained a sufficiently ready use of arithmetic to know what honesty means.” This emphasis on abstract measurement as the foundation of honesty in business was repeated by Thompson in 1919 when he described the work of a missionary: “As he tries to preach honesty, he finds that they need to know what a just measure and an equal value mean. He must surely teach a little Arithmetic.”17 Honesty, in other words, despite being a Christian value that the missionary needed to preach, was a product not of morality but of mathematics. Africans were also keen on business ethics and ready to take a case to court if they felt cheated. However, the normative value placed on mathematics did not translate fluently into African communities. Cross-continental trade with the Portuguese or complicated bridewealth payments had been effectively negotiated for centuries, despite the lack of the missionaries’ system of mathematics to illustrate “what honesty means.” As we saw in Chapter 5, the context in which payments were negotiated and settled was more important than the numerical values. Longden’s insistence on “four head of cattle or twenty pounds” was neither fair nor meaningful in the shifting web of relationships defined by a bridewealth agreement. The whites’ focus on exact quantity and number, as a mark of fairness in business, was a product of monetization and the standardizing of weights. It was less appropriate to situations in which exchange was based on noncommensurate items, some of which were likely to reproduce (such as goats), whereas others (such as hoes) were not. Even cash exchanges did not need to be measured exactly. As many of the civil cases before the NC in the 1910s demonstrated, a man who lent money for another man’s tax payment normally expected the full amount to be returned—but not if some other service (including a marriage alliance) was provided in lieu of the cash. The mathematical equivalence was less significant than the patronage and obligations that had been established. In arguments about justice, Africans appeared to place more emphasis not on the measurement but on its moral economy. This difference in attitudes toward contracts was interpreted by at least one NC as evidence of a naive inability to understand legal systems or verbal agreements. A piece in NADA in 1924 represented an African informant as an innocent abroad, a figure of fun to the white reader as he constantly found himself in trouble and, indeed, in prison. One anecdote was about the difficulties in negotiating contracts with white employers, who took agreements to be precise and nonnegotiable: When I first received an isitupa I went to work for a white man. After I had been with him for some time the other natives said I should apply for an increase of pay. I explained that I was quite satisfied with things and did not want to leave.

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“That,” said the senior boy, “need not prevent you from applying. If he refuses, give notice, and if that does not have the desired effect, you simply go on as before.” I applied, was refused, and so gave notice. My employer did not act as I had been led to anticipate; he became very angry, … and during the next month he gave me a particularly bad time, so bad a time that I was glad to go at the end of the month!18

The anecdote ended with the informant musing that “I do not understand white men.” However, the story’s role in NADA was not to sympathize but rather to highlight the absurdities of African modes of thought. Whites clearly liked to present themselves as having a better understanding of business practices than Africans, who expected contracts to be open for renegotiation. With the increased monetization of the economy, Africans were, of course, more likely to use numerical values in negotiating exchange contracts. Ethics in such business dealings were not dependent on appropriate schooling: where specific quantities had been agreed, Africans were clearly able to use mathematics to determine what was honest. Their problem was not arithmetic but exploitation. Despite being well trained in mathematics, the white farmers were regularly dishonest about payments and exchanges of goods with Africans. Such sharp practices were not necessarily punished by the state. As far back as 1903, W. N. Odendaal was accused of reneging on paying the full price agreed for sale of some cattle. His response was to get two of his friends to hold the complainant while Odendaal beat him, to the point where Odendaal and his friends were prosecuted for assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm. At their trials, a stream of witnesses confirmed that the assault had taken place; but the fact that the African had had the temerity to complain at being cheated was deemed adequate provocation, and the white men were acquitted.19 Even Mt. Silinda displayed fairly shoddy treatment of its Zulu staff when negotiating and honoring their contracts. When finally forced to recognize reasonable furlough allowances and pensions for the Zulu staff, the Americans consoled themselves with the thought that they could soon phase out Zulu missionaries entirely and replace them with Ndau employees.20 The use of moral terminology to condemn late payment of tax or renegotiation of a contract, then, did not find a ready translation. African experiences of contracts with whites were not always characterized by “sanctity.” The connection between mathematics, honesty, and contractual obligations was preached but not practiced. As we saw in Chapter 1, the great Bible translator Eugene Nida has argued that there is no need to go outside a culture to find adequate translations. The belief that Africans could not be “honest” without being schooled in arithmetic was, of course, not because the idea of business ethics was meaningless within African culture. The attempts to persuade Africans to equate “honesty” and mathematics was not about translating—that is, finding equivalences—but about introducing new ways of defining morality based on measurement and legalism. With the changing economy, the insistence on precise contractual agreements, numerically defined, made sense both to Africans and to whites. However, the idea

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that “honesty,” as a concept, had necessarily to include these elements does not seem to have taken deep root in African communities. The desire to renegotiate agreements when there were changes in the personal relationships on which the contracts were based seems to have persisted throughout the 1920s. Agricultural production was another area where Africans were expected to adopt European values alongside their adoption of material innovation. The idea that physical labor, especially agricultural labor, was morally uplifting as a good in itself was well established in European modes of thought. The Dutch farmers were deeply committed to the idea of farming as a moral good. Officials of the Native Affairs Department (NAD) were inclined to agree. In 1919, the newly arrived NC, F. G. Elliott, who had previously worked in Natal and in Matabeleland, was annoyed that local Africans did not seem to follow the example set by white farmers and attempt to generate an agricultural surplus. His annoyance was not simply that African producers were not growing for the market, although this was part of his complaint. More important for Elliott, this lack of surplus grain arose because Africans did not seem to be working hard enough: “They do not appear to wish to derive revenue through the medium of the ‘sweat of the brow.’ ”21 At Mt. Silinda, especially following the appointment of E. D. Alvord in 1920, the link between increased agricultural output and moral improvement was made even more overtly. The mission had initially had only a limited interest in agriculture.22 Agriculture did not involve straight lines and was not seen as an effective means of evangelism in the way that industrial work was seen. However, in 1910, Rev. Dysart was appointed as ordained evangelist for Chikore. As well as graduating from Oberlin Theological Seminary, Dysart was also a graduate of the Agricultural Department of the University of Illinois.23 By the late 1910s, agricultural innovation was becoming more important to the mission than either literacy or industrial training. A series of devastating famines, along with acutely rising prices for commodity goods, particularly imported goods from Germany, had put pressure on grain supplies, and inspired both Africans and missionaries to think more about agricultural innovation.24 As we saw in Chapter 6, the missionaries’ faith that modern technology (founded on “science”) posed a challenge to heathenism (founded on “superstition”) was not sustainable. Machines could be operated and joints welded, regardless of the spiritual beliefs of the welder. Agriculture, however, was different: agriculture was linked to fertility and spirits in a way that machines were not. With Alvord’s appointment, the introduction of plows became a major evangelical project. Plowing was seen as a means of introducing straight lines, both mental and physical, and of banishing “superstitious” notions about land and spirits. In Peterson’s Kenyan case study, translations of the Bible by junior men served to provide scriptural authority for their challenges to senior men, to support their cash orientation against the livestock orientation of their elders, and to establish them as natural leaders in new times.25 In Melsetter district, however, the mission’s aggressive use of scripture to promote plow-based farming left little room for such appropriations. The use of the plow, the development of a new consumerism, and the belief in Christianity were all inextricably entwined in Alvord’s unpublished autobiography

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“The Gospel of the Plow.” Alvord argued that agricultural innovation was actually a precondition for effective conversion. This thesis was based on the sound observation that African farming was closely linked with beliefs about fertility, ancestors, and spirits: No matter how well they may learn in Mission Stations to read the Bible, sing and pray, they cannot remain Christians if they return to an agricultural life which is filled with the degrading influences of lust and witch-craft, superstition and ignorance, and all the unspeakable customs and taboos of heathenism and spirit worship.26

He therefore reasoned that only by changing the ways in which Africans farmed was it possible to bring about a commensurate change in their spiritual beliefs. Moreover, argued Alvord, plow-based prosperity would also assist the acquisition of more and better possessions, which would make the old lifestyle seem even more inappropriate and unattractive: “The African will have a better chance of the after life in the Kingdom if he is taught by the Gospel of the Plow how to live a better life here on earth…. They cannot go forward while shackled down by poverty.” The adoption of plows was therefore assumed to entail new modes of thought as well as greater productivity. Alvord’s ideas resonated with a new initiate from the government, which, in the same year that Alvord arrived at Mt. Silinda, had established the Department for Native Development (DND).27 The new department had an overtly hegemonic agenda. It was intended to train and employ African men “to be the agents for bringing about improvement in every occupation of the native in his home life.” The program specifically targeted younger men. Their task was “to penetrate kraal life and to bring about a better state of home conditions.”28 The DND’s program was partly intended to inculcate new gender norms, to persuade more men to take an interest in agricultural innovation not only to develop the rural economy but also so that they could take up skilled work on farms. The program also encompassed new ideas about meritocracy and technocratic authority.29 However, it seems that most of the men involved in the early DND agricultural initiatives had little interest in being part of a hegemonic project—they just wanted a training that would help them to get better wages. This dismayed H. S. Keigwin, the first director of the DND, who commented that “their aspiration to better themselves is perfectly legitimate, and no one will deny them every reasonable opportunity to progress. But … we must arouse in some of them a sense of mission to their fellows.”30 It seems, then, that it was possible for men to live at the heart of the white hegemonic project and still not acknowledge the key concepts underlying it. Alvord’s vision of Christianized plow-based rural entrepreneurs fell on stony ground in the Chimanimani mountains. By comparison with other districts in Southern Rhodesia, the pace of agricultural change in Melsetter district was very slow. The long-established migrant labor patterns had been a successful strategy

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and provided a rite of passage into adult masculinity for young men. There were no African-owned plows before 1917 and only one wagon. However, this situation changed during World War I. A series of droughts, followed by price inflation linked to the war, meant that there was 30 percent inflation by 1916 and grain scarcity. Grain could be purchased, but prices were high, and cash was needed for increasingly expensive consumer goods, as people had become accustomed to buying household items such as blankets, hoes, and pots rather than making them themselves. New strategies were clearly required. In 1918, the number of African plows rose sharply, to 13, with another four being acquired in 1920. Nonetheless, this was still way behind other districts: even the urbanized, cattle-oriented district of Gwelo had 250 plows in use that year.31 This might suggest a deep-seated conservatism in the district. However, the relatively slow rate of agricultural change contrasted noticeably with the extraordinarily rapid rate at which women took up paid labor. In 1917, the CNC’s report noted that, “in the Melsetter district only do an appreciable number of native girls enter domestic service.” By 1922, the NC’s annual report observed that most white farmsteads employed African women as domestic servants. No other district saw comparable levels of female domestic employment or anything close to them. Moreover, the choice of migrancy over agriculture was clearly flexible and pragmatic: in 1913, following the trauma of extensive and deadly drought the previous year, the numbers of migrant laborers dropped significantly, apparently because people wanted to stay at home and build up food reserves with their families rather than go to labor centers.32 This suggests that it was not conservatism but the relative success of waged labor strategies that discouraged the emergence of a peasant economy in the district. For African Christian men living on the mission, particularly the Zulu workers, cattle holdings seem to have been more important than crops. These salary earners sought wealth and status through developing their herds, not through the adoption of plow-based farming. As during Ngungunyana’s time, cattle holdings in the district were comparatively low, “the [local] native not being a lover of cattle.”33 The combination of East Coast Fever restrictions on cattle movement and the high cost of compulsory dipping fees meant that for most cultivators there were few incentives to build large herds or to develop stock through cross-breeding with European bulls. Even during the war, with rising prices, the construction of a canning factory, and the development of a significant export market to the Allied forces, there was no movement toward developing large beef herds.34 By contrast, however, a group of literate men based around Mt. Silinda mission were busy developing herds through purchase or by acting as cattle keepers for others. Some of those involved were even prepared to risk prosecution for importing cattle without all the permits and paperwork in place, for which the penalties were harsh: high fines and imprisonment.35 There is, however, nothing to suggest that these herds were intended to provide draught cattle. There were many reasons why a Christianized plow-owning class was unlikely to flourish in Melsetter district. The terrain was steep and varied in the mountains and arid in the lowlands. Much of the best farming land had been seized by the whites,

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who did not welcome competition for already very limited markets. The costs of getting a plow into the district, along poor-quality transport links, were prohibitive: the first plow in the district was acquired by a syndicate. In 1920, when four plows were bought, one farmer walked 170 miles to Umtali and back with four helpers to reduce the transport costs of buying his plow. Even once the plows were acquired, there was a lack of draught oxen to pull them, particularly with East Coast Fever restrictions on cattle movements. And, in any case, apart from local demand when there were grain shortages or high prices, there was no accessible market for the produce. A more effective response to the problems of drought and grain shortages was the development of winter irrigation, and the cultivation of new crops, notably winter wheat. There was also increasing cultivation of market vegetables and fruit—crops initially introduced by white farmers—that could be sold to whites in the town.36 The spread of material innovations such as square houses and new crops cannot, therefore, be attributed to the adoption of “the Gospel of the Plow,” with its concomitant values of Christianity, consumerism, and male farming. The introduction of 17 ploughs into a district with a population estimated at 28,500 suggests a tiny group of wealthy households able to diversify their economic activities.37 Insofar as a peasant economy was developing, it was based not on men with plows but on small-scale market gardening, supplemented by wage incomes. This used predominantly female labor, although it seems likely that male household heads controlled the disposal of the crops. The missionaries were not entirely without influence. Fuller claimed that there was a growing demand for individual tenure, but this appears to have involved mostly the Zulu staff at the mission. They had been allocated Emerald Farm when the mission had been first established; in 1919, the farm was reallocated under individual tenure plots to children of six of the original “Zulu helpers.”38 There are also indications that, toward the end of the 1920s, women’s role in agricultural production may have been transformed in some households in response to mission influence. This would be in keeping with changing gender roles beginning to emerge across the territory, but these households do not seem typical.39 One plow-owner’s wife commented in 1929 that “my husband always tells me [about business. He] was educated at [Mutambara] Mission as a Christian. Christian natives do not follow the native’s custom but tell their wives everything.”40 Even more radically, in a case heard in the criminal court in 1926 involving neighbors fighting over destructive wandering cattle, the official record states that the wife referred to “my cattle” who strayed and “our crops,” stating that “we owed him compensation.” Her husband, meanwhile, referred to “the grain hut, which is the joint property of my wife and myself,” and also referred to “our” cattle (which his wife had called “my” cattle). The pronouns may represent poor translation but seem rather to be evidence of a married couple who regarded their agricultural work as an independent and shared business in which the crops were jointly owned but responsibility for cattle was separately allocated.41 However, most men, even Christian converts, continued to build up households through polygyny rather than developing peasant households based on a married couple. The missionaries were puzzled by this, pondering why the wives tolerated

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it and why their model converts suddenly insisted on inheriting widows. It is clear that the evangelists had expected to encounter these practices in the 1890s but also expected to have overcome them by the 1920s. The first cases of a church member acquiring a second—illegal—wife, following a Christian marriage, were in 1919, but the problem festered throughout the 1920s.42 Mtisu, “one of the Charter members of our … Church and long in mission employ … as a teacher-evangelist,” inherited his brother’s widow as a wife in 1928, while Franz, who had taught at the mission’s Beacon Hill school, after “denying for a long period … that he had any thought of taking another wife, finally came and declared his intention to do so.”43 Carol Summers notes that new patterns of “exemplary” marriage had begun to emerge among converts by the 1930s, but even then, Frank Hlabati Dzukuso, one of the mission’s few ordained Africans, was forced out of the church in 1937, having taken a second wife.44 It seems, then, that the slow introduction of plows and the development of market gardening during the 1910s and 1920s were not widely accompanied by the adoption of new ways of thinking about gender or land tenure. Nor did they have much impact on the spiritual aspects of agriculture. As with mechanics and carpentry, it turned out that Africans could adopt agricultural innovations without abandoning their spiritual beliefs. Alvord’s faith that scientific explanations for increased yields would result in the rejection of local beliefs about spirits was misplaced. His DND associate, Guy Taylor, noted that “the native does nothing (except ‘rain-making,’ ‘mixing ant-bear claws with his seed,’ etc) which cannot be explained scientifically.”45 Precisely because the ant-bear claws and the science were mutually independent, there was no need for African farmers to abandon the former when adopting the latter. Science and the spirits occupied different explanatory systems that did not impede each other. The exiled charismatic claimant to the Musikavanhu chiefship was reinstalled in 1923, and the rainmaking powers of the Musikavanhu chiefs continue to be revered in Chimanimani district to this day. So changes in economic conditions had influenced African perceptions of the world, but they did not, in themselves, require the adoption of white values. Africans could embrace new technologies, new crops, and new standards of measurement but still maintain their own ideas about contracts, fair exchange, and fertility. However, the 1910s and 1920s were not only a time of economic development. They were also years in which Africans and whites regularly came into contact with each other. Moreover, it was a period in which school education became a routine part of African life. Mission teaching reflected values imported from Europe and the United States. Routine contact required Africans to engage with and respond to those values. Carol Summers has argued that white settlers of the 1920s expected African education to “shape a specific and subordinate role for Africans” but that African responses to education meant that this did not always work out in practice.46 So it is worth looking at the curriculum at Mt. Silinda mission to consider whether it worked, in effect, as an ideological state apparatus, to produce compliant workers. The government required that two hours each day be devoted to industrial work.

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Consequently, a large part of the curriculum at both Mt. Silinda and Chikore schools involved practical lessons, with a big emphasis on industrial and agricultural work.47 Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 6, these practical lessons were linked to an education in rationalism, based on science, mechanics, and hygiene. It is clear that this education did equip many local people for an effective life as skilled waged workers. However, it does not seem that Africans absorbed a sense of subordinate destiny from this education. In 1928, Thompson reported how pleased he was that “four pupils, two boys and two girls, from the School, came to question me regarding the process of becoming a civilized doctor.”48 Whether this was instead of rather than in addition to a respect for African medicine is difficult to tell. It seems clear, however, that the missionaries’ goals and those of the local settlers were not the same. Certainly the mission was deemed by sections of Melsetter’s white community to have failed them by not producing the right sort of Africans. The education of skilled workers actually made it very much harder for the farmers to find unskilled labor.49 Moreover, there seems to have been active disagreement between the mission and some of the whites about the values and behaviors that they wanted Africans to adopt. One area of contention was “manners.” “Manners” was a complex package. On a simple level, it was to do with hygiene. Defecating in “unauthorized places” was clearly unsavory, and young Africans caught behaving in town as they would in the bundo were criminally prosecuted.50 But “manners” was much more than hygiene. It was also a marker of status and appropriate behavior. “Manners” defined the correct modes of behavior and interaction between people, depending on their relative status toward each other. In African communities, these protocols were strictly defined by kin and lineage, producing, in the words of Robin Horton, “a social calculus … unique in its exactness, neatness and fineness of discrimination.”51 By the early 1920s, local systems of “manners” were under strain. Senior men found that young men no longer respected them in the old ways. As we saw in Chapter 2, during the time of Ngungunyana, membership in military regiments had been an important marker of masculinity and authority. By 1922, this was under challenge, although the old ways were still defended. Testimony in one court case recounted, The [accused] then addressed Hlabiso & asked him to what troop in Ngorima’s old regiment he belonged. I … remarked that it was not a question he should put to an old and dignified man like Hlabiso. It was my place [as a much older man] to stop accd putting questions like that to my Headman, & accd is only a young man. I then advised accd that he had better go away as I thought the beer was beginning to get the better of him…. It is not etiquette for a younger native to ask an older one to what troop he belonged.52

Young men seem to have been pushing the boundaries regarding appropriate “manners” toward elders. Other examples include a young man who provoked a

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violent reaction by presuming to criticize an older man’s management of his family affairs—“According to our custom an old man like my father would naturally resent any interference on the part of a boy … in a matter concerning the finding of a wife for his son”—and arguments about the etiquette of younger men deferring to older men in the passing of beer at beer parties.53 However, these issues of protocol were not the issues that whites meant when they observed that Africans needed to observe “manners” if they were to succeed economically. As established etiquette came under strain, there was an opportunity to impose new systems of “manners.” The idea that invaders imposed their own protocols was not new: the Gaza occupation had also expected the local people to abide by Gaza “manners” and been ruthless in punishing those who failed.54 The interesting question is how far Africans had absorbed the European system of “manners” into their lives after over a generation of white occupation. At a crude level, “manners” for white settlers meant “deferring to whites.” This was heavily policed by the white communities and so can hardly count as a hegemonic principle. In the 1903 case in which a man was beaten for wanting the full, agreed price for his cattle, the issue of whether he had been respectful was deemed material by the acting magistrate and contributed to the “not guilty” verdict.55 Such attitudes were also found within the NAD. In 1919, the NC Gutu was astonished to encounter an African who, after helping his car out of mud, had the temerity to ask for a lift, even though he “must have known that I was … able to speak to him in his own language.” For this effrontery, without even the excuse of linguistic confusion to mitigate it, the NC “gave him a piece of my mind, as well as a little run in front of my car.”56 Rather than seeing a successful hegemonic movement toward “manners” with the spread of African education, local white settlers saw the opposite. Indeed, they expressed greater anxieties about Africans who had contact with whites than about those who did not. In his capacity as NC in 1912, Longden reported that “contact with whites does not improve their manners … the semi-civilized native will always be less amenable to discipline and more difficult to manage than the raw native.” Longden specifically blamed the missions and added that “it would, I think, have a good effect if the many schools and missions could be induced to include in their curriculum a short time spent on instructing natives in good manners.”57 Mt. Silinda mission, however, believed that it did indeed teach “manners.” This was largely a gendered curriculum, linked to hygiene, but also to sexual morality, food etiquette, and housework. Focusing on domestic behavior, including the wearing of appropriate clothing, the mission’s work was designed to inculcate new gender norms. The missionaries clearly felt that African domestic life was unhygienic and immoral. Expressing the urgent need for a boarding mistress at Chikore school, Miss Gilson reported to the mission’s headquarters in Boston that “Mrs. King now has ten girls sleeping on her kitchen floor, and please remember that they are native girls.”58 She also begged for a man to act as principal over the 50-odd boys at the Mt Silinda school because “they greatly need aid in the cultivation of civilized habits which [they] … cannot have until there is a gentleman

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whose chief work is [their] … care.” In particular, she worried about “the weakness of their moral nature.”59 Girls were educated in laundry, spinning and weaving, housework, needlework and dressmaking, as well as agricultural work and literacy.60 The curriculum clearly indicates an attempt to introduce American ideas of morality and women’s work. So how far did African women absorb these codes of conduct? Miss Clarke, the boarding mistress, noted in 1911 that “the girls … have given much more ready and willing obedience to the rules made for them than was the case when first they came to their present quarters, two years ago.”61 By 1916, the mission was beginning to acknowledge some changes in local women. Dr. Thompson noted that “the term native woman … may need some definition. Its essential meaning does not relate, necessarily, to color or race but rather to that social condition of ignorance and helplessness which is ordinarily indicated by the term native.”62 The mission had always excluded their Zulu staff from the category of “native,” arguing (unsuccessfully) for the men’s exemption from hut tax on the grounds that “they live in civilized dwellings … they live as civilized people, spending [their] salary largely for imported goods thus doing their share in the way of indirect taxation.”63 It seems that by 1916 the missionaries considered that some local women, too, did not occupy that “social condition.” By 1919, it was routine for the female pupils to take short-term domestic jobs during school holidays, and, as noted previously, by 1922 most farms were employing “native girls” as domestics.64 So clearly, after a quarter of a century of schooling, white “manners” and ideas about hygiene had spread among local women. At the same time, increasing numbers of Africans were purchasing Europeanstyle manufactured material goods, including beds, tables, and chairs, and living in square brick houses. However, these were material investments: there does not seem to have been a comparable market for cutlery, which would indicate a significant change in lifestyle. Derek Peterson indicates that Nyeri people in the 1910s ascribed moral values to food and cleanliness using entirely different standards from those that the missionaries were trying to inculcate.65 Tim Burke has shown conclusively that Africans in Southern Rhodesia ascribed their own meanings to soap products in the 1940s.66 So it is difficult to assess what these goods meant to local people. Although there were clearly changes in household conduct, this is not conclusive evidence of an acceptance of European domestic “manners.” Similarly, literacy was not a straightforward conduit for white values. Its hegemonic potential was recognized: the teaching of basic reading and writing skills provided an opportunity to inculcate values. In the early 1910s, literacy was a major part of the Mt. Silinda curriculum, alongside constant worries over poor standards.67 Literacy was taught, too, at the United Methodist mission established on Mutambara’s land to the north in 1904, where children were expected to attend school and where adults also learned to read and write in the vernacular.68 For the missions, of course, the most important value that could be taught was Christianity. Other whites, however, strongly opposed basing literacy lessons on “a Bible story or a nursery fable”; they seemed, rather, an ideal opportunity to teach about “common European standards,” including “working to a straight line or a right angle.”69

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However, as we saw in Chapter 4, students were able to read texts in English without fully understanding their meaning or absorbing their messages. Moreover, missionaries found it difficult to control who was reading or what they read. Young Africans were keen to acquire literacy skills. As with Christian evangelism, many of them learned to read from other Africans, rather than from the missionaries.70 In the early 1910s, having learned to read from their peers, men went to Mt. Silinda mission to buy primers to practice with. These were in siZulu, not English (or chiNdau), but they had a strong Christian message. From the mid-1910s, the siZulu primers were replaced by Readers in chiNdau, costing 3d. each, based on texts devised by the Christian Literature Society in London.71 The spread of literacy might, therefore, be seen as an agent in the spread of Christian values. However, when, in the early 1920s, the NC claimed that there was an entire generation of literate elders, only a minority of these were Christian.72 Literary education was not much valued as an effective hegemonic tool by white society at large. Africans, on the other hand, seemed to find much to value in literacy. As we saw in Chapter 4, it was hard for missionaries—or other whites—to police how Africans read texts. Education could be both an ideological state apparatus and a site of African empowerment. Reading, as Matthew Engelke reminds us, “had given Africans a valuable initiative.”73 They had a strong sense of commitment to and ownership of their literary education. When budget constraints led the mission to decide to close its boarding school at Chikore in 1910, “the boys said that they would rather stay and not receive any pay if their soap and books were supplied to them.”74 In 1922, at a time when the mission was being criticized because the curriculum “follows too closely the course for European children and is not sufficiently adapted to Native Education,” there was a strike at Mt. Silinda school.75 Students wanted to use Longman’s Standard Reader at Standard V, “a book we all coveted for its long words,” rather than another textbook.76 They risked expulsion in this cause, suggesting that they very much wanted both the status that came with the ability to use long words in English and access to the “vast storehouse of knowledge”77 that these words represented. The following year, when Rev. Fuller was reporting that demand for education outpaced the ability of the mission to supply it, a student was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment with hard labor after he had “very cleverly forged the signatures of one of the Missionaries”—indicating once again that Africans could make many uses of literacy, and exploit it as their own.78 So it seems that neither education nor economic changes, in themselves, forced Africans to abandon their established value systems and adopt the “civilized” values of the white settlers and missionaries. Skills, technologies, crops, and protocols could be adopted—and adapted—without being internalized as hegemonic values. Moreover, political ideologies had not been fatally undermined by the reconstruction of political authority during the decades following the departure of Ngungunyana and the arrival of the whites. Despite the fading of regimental membership as a source of status and the spread of new sources of patronage, chiefs still remained powerful. The missionaries had cultivated chiefs as part of efforts to site outstations on their land.

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Mutambara had reluctantly agreed in 1904 to allow a mission station on his land: “he found Mr Wodehouse so importunate that he finally agreed to let him have his Mission, but he stipulated that it was to be on the Umtali side of the Umvumvumvu river.”79 At Mt. Silinda, it was other Africans, not whites, who were sent to do the persuading. Negotiations with Mutema during 1909–1912 were led by the Zulu evangelists Tom Zonzo and Tom Mapanigisana. There was also a request in 1910 to send an evangelist to the people south of Chikore, presumably those who had settled with the Shangaan leader, Garawha, and whose numbers were steadily growing with refugees from Portuguese East Africa (PEA).80 The chiefs around Mt. Silinda, it seems, did not feel threatened by the missionaries but found them useful as providers of education. In 1921, the new NC, E. T. Kenny, observed that “Mutema … is a man of some considerable influence,” and there is ample evidence that chiefs continued to exert extensive judicial authority.81 There is less evidence of masvikiro continuing to wield influence. The start of this decline should probably be traced back to Ngungunyana’s suspicion of the influence of chiNdau spiritual leaders, subsequently reinforced by Meredith’s hostility toward them. With no political role to play, their spiritual authority also declined. However, other forms of spiritual power were openly respected. Diviners were frequently consulted in witchcraft cases, as prosecutions by the state under the Witchcraft Suppression Ordinance attest. The state attacked these practices but could not provide a convincing hegemonic alternative. It had no way of talking about witchcraft that mapped onto local belief systems. In 1923, a village was thrown into turmoil by the visit of a man from across the nearby border with PEA, who claimed (according to the court interpreter’s translation), “I am the big chief who makes the rain,” and who then proceeded to abuse many of the villagers with threats that “I will call down lightning to strike you.”82 Their credulity may have been encouraged by the fact that the charismatic claimant to the Musikavanhu chiefship was still living in PEA and that very year returned to take up the chiefship. But it also seems salient that the crude English translation of their accounts gave these villagers little reason to reappraise their established ideas about witchcraft and spiritual powers. No new ideas from English-speaking cultures were communicated by the translation, which signally failed to capture the complexity of African beliefs. During the 1910s and 1920s, then, there was significant routine contact between Africans and whites. Africans were changing some aspects of their lifestyles to make more use of the skills acquired from the missionaries, especially mechanical skills and literacy. They adopted European systems of measurement. They were using their cash wages to purchase consumer goods adopted from European culture, notably furniture, and to build square brick houses. By 1916, Mt. Silinda mission acknowledged that “native” was a cultural, not a racial, definition, and that some local Africans were no longer included in it. There was a growth in market gardening, based on new crops and winter irrigation, and, after 1918, a limited growth in the use of plows. However, although all of these material and educational changes were influenced by the increasing contact with whites, there is less evidence that Africans

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internalized the values that whites associated with these things. Changes in lifestyle and even in religion were possible alongside the maintenance of older values. The reasons for Africans to adopt these markers of white culture were partly pragmatic—as in the use of new measures—and partly because they benefited from them. However, the relative usefulness to Africans of plows, or furniture, or literacy was not dependent on their accepting the cultural baggage that these things had within white society. They could use them in their own ways and on their own terms. The links that whites made between lifestyles and moral/belief systems were not necessarily made by Africans. Africans, it appeared, could adopt the material culture and lifestyle of the whites, but without absorbing the values that accompanied them. Whites began to speculate about whether Africans really did have different ways of thinking that were not eradicated by the outward adoption of “civilization.”83 NOTES 1. Terence Ranger, Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920–64 (London: James Currey, 1995); David Maxwell, Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People c.1870s–1990s (Edinburgh: International African Library/Edinburgh University Press, 1999); Teresa Barnes, “We Women Worked So Hard”: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Reproduction in Colonial Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930–1956 (Oxford: James Currey, 1999); Michael O. West, The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Carol Summers, Colonial Lessons: Africans’ Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918–1940 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2002). 2. Annual Reports (ARs), NC Melsetter, 1911 and 1920, N9/1/14 and 23. 3. AR, NC Melsetter, 1911, N9/1/14; Rev. C. C. Fuller, “Notes on (a) Education and (b) Land,” Native Affairs Department Annual 1 (1923): 28. 4. Derek R. Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2004). 6. “In the Street,” Rhodesian Advertiser, 25 October 1906. 7. Jeanne Marie Penvenne, “João dos Santos Albasini (1876–1922): The Contradictions of Politics and Identity in Colonial Mozambique,” Journal of African History 37, no. 3 (1996): 419–64. 8. Tudor G. Trevor, “Native Education from an Employer’s Point of View,” Native Affairs Department Annual 5 (1927): 99. 10. Guy A. Taylor, “Introduction,” Native Affairs Department Annual 3 (1925): 4. 11. ARs, NC Melsetter, 1920 and 1921, N9/1/23 and 24. 12. Trevor, “Native Education from an Employer’s Point of View,” 97. 13. AR, NC Melsetter, 1918, N9/1/21. 14. Mather to Edward Irving Everett, 20 March 1922, UN3/2/1/14. 15. AR, NC Melsetter, 1914, N9/1/17; Trevor, “Native Education from an Employer’s Point of View,”99. 16. AR, Mt. Silinda, June 1915, UN 3/20/1/10/1. Although the report does not state this, the store in question may be the one that was opened by Hlatcwayo in 1912. 17. Report of the Medical Dept., Mt. Silinda, May 1915, June 1919, UN 3/20/1/10/7, UN 3/20/1/14/7.

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18. “Mapanabomvu,” “Fragments of a Conversation with Macebo,” Native Affairs Department Annual 2 (1924): 83. 19. R v. W. N. Odendaal, 27 April 1903, PE 19/1903; R v. J.C. Bekker & G. Smuts, 29 June 1903, PE 36/1903, D3/3/2. 20. See, for example, the treatment of the widow Alice Mbesa and her daughter, Wilder to Laurence, 17 January 1910, UN 3/2/1/4; Orner to Bell, 30 July 1919, UN 3/2/1/13; and general unhappiness of Zulu workers during 1919, reflected passim in UN 3/2/1/13. 21. AR, NC Melsetter, 1917, N9/1/20. 22. Fuller, AR Industrial Dept., June 1907, UN 3/20/1/2/8. 23. Bell to Lawrence, 20 December 1909, UN3/2/1/3; Fuller to Mt. Silinda, 15 January 1910; Bell to Lawrence, 20 January 1910, UN3/2/1/4. 24. AR, NC Melsetter, 1916, N9/1/19. 25. Peterson, Creative Writing, 80–85. 26. E. D. Alvord, “The Gospel of the Plow, or a Guided Destiny?, unpublished autobiography of E. D. Alvord, UN3/8/4, 111. 27. Alvord moved from Mt. Silinda to work on this program for the government in 1926. He was initially appointed as agriculturalist for instruction of natives with the Department of Agriculture, which primarily served white farmers; in 1927, he was transferred to the NAD and then joined the DND in 1929. 28. H. S. Keigwin, “Native Development,” Native Affairs Department Annual 1 (1923): 15; AR, Director of Native Development, 1921, 14. 29. This put the DND and its protégés in a difficult relationship with its father department, the NAD, which preferred to work with senior men, whose authority in the communities was linked to established power structures. Summers, Colonial Lessons, 135–36. 30. AR, Director of Native Development, 1921, 14. 31. AR, NC Melsetter, 1910–1920, N9/1/13–23; AR, CNC, 1920. 32. AR, NC Melsetter, 1913, N9/1/16. 33. AR, NC Melsetter, 1921, N9/1/24. 34. AR, NC Melsetter, 1917–1921, N9/1/20–24. 35. See, for example, R v. Nduto, PE 219/1910, 7 October 1910; R v. Jim Magindan, PE 189/1910, 17 September 1910; R v. Mtisu, PE 143/1912, 16 December 1912, D3/3/4. 36. AR, NC Melsetter, 1910–1920, N9/1/13–23. Todd H. Leedy is carrying out interesting research on the role of the mission in developing irrigation projects in the district. 37. AR, NC Melsetter, 1920, N9/1/23; J. K. Rennie, “Christianity, Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism among the Ndau of Southern Rhodesia 1890–1935” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1973), 527ff. 38. Fuller, “Notes on (a) Education and (b) Land,” 29; Orton to Barton, 19 December 1919, UN 3/2/1/13. 39. Notably study of “righteousness” in Barnes, “We women worked so hard,” see also Summers, Colonial Lessons, and Carol Schmidt, Peasants, Traders and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939 (London: James Currey, 1992). 40. R v. Muchadeni @ Mahlanganipeni @ Charlie Tuso, Manyadza’s testimony, 14 October 1929, S1027. 41. R v. Muchayenda, 14–16 August 1926, PE 61/1929, S1071. See also Report of Chargée, Mt. Silinda station, 1928–1929, UN 3/20/1/24/1, where the mission supported a wife in reclaiming her own cattle, which had been taken by her estranged husband. 42. Orton to Assistant Native Commissioner, Chipinga, 19 December 1919, UN 3/2/1/13.

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43. Report of Chargée, Mt. Silinda station, 1928–1929, UN 3/20/1/24/1. 44. Summers, Colonial Lessons, 182ff. 45. Guy A. Taylor, Review of “Agriculture in East Africa” by H. L. Shantz, Bureau of Plant Industry, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Native Affairs Department Annual XXX (1925): 89. 46. Summers, Colonial Lessons, 4. 47. AR, Mt. Silinda, May 1911, UN 3/20/1/6/1. 48. Medical Report, East Africa Mission, June 1928–September 1928, UN 3/20/1/24/16. This was interestingly distinct from an “uncivilized” doctor, presumably an indigenous healer. 49. By the late 1930s, the state inspectors were also concerned that the mission school was fostering Zionism rather than compliance. Summers, Colonial Lessons, 103–4. 50. See, for example, cases PE 160/1913, 162/1913, 564/1914, 592/1914, 112/1915, and 117/1915, all in D3/3/5. Bundo was the chiNdau word for bhundu or bushveldt as recorded in the 1915 dictionary. 51. Robin Horton, ‘Stateless Societies in the History of West Africa,” in History of West Africa, vol. 2, ed. J. F. Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowder (Harlow: Longman, 1974). Horton was writing about West African societies, but the principle, if not the detail, applies also to southern Africa. 52. R v. Chokufa @ Apureni, PE 116/1922, 22 June 1922, D3/3/6. 53. R v. Karimba, PE 158/1917, 6 September 1917, D3/3/6; R v. Gumesene, PE 64/1925, 3 August 1925, S1071. 54. Elizabeth MacGonagle, “A Mixed Pot: History and Identity in the Ndau Region of Mozambique and Zimbabwe 1500–1900” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2002), 185ff. 55. R v. W. N. Odendaal, 27 April 1903, PE 19/1903; R v. J.C. Bekker & G. Smuts, 29 June 1903, PE 36/1903, D3/3/2. 56. NC Gutu to SN Victoria, 13 December 1919, N3/7/1. 57. NC, Melsetter, AR 1912, N9/1/15. 58. Gilson to Barton, 9 June 1911, UN 3/2/1/5. 59. Gilson to Barton, 19 August 1911, UN 3/2/1/5. 60. Report of Girls’ Boarding Dept., Mt. Silinda, June 1910–May 1911, UN3/20/1/6/3; NC, Melsetter, AR 1918, N9/1/21. 61. Report of Girls’ Boarding Dept., May 1911, UN3/20/1/6/3. 62. “Report of a Conference between Members of the Mission and Members of Government Native Department,” Chipinge, 28 July 1916, 9, UN 3/20/2/8/6. 63. Thompson, Fuller, and King, Mt. Silinda, to Longden, 9 November 1907, DM2/2/2. The question of whether it was manners or race that made one “native” were part of mission struggles with the state in South Africa from the mid-nineteenth century: see Robert Ross, “Missions, Respectability and Civil Rights: The Cape Colony, 1828–1854,” Journal of Southern African Studies 25, no. 3 (1999): 333–47. 64. AR, NC Melsetter, 1919 and 1922, N9/1/22 and 26. 65. Peterson, Creative Writing, 73–80. 66. Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, N.C. Duke University Press, 1996). 67. See, for example, Lawrence to Bell, 2 February 1910, UN 3/2/1/4; Gilson to Barton, 10 March 1911 and 19 August 1911, UN 3/2/1/5; AR, Mt. Silinda School, May 1911, UN 3/20/1/6/2.

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68. R v. Muchadeni @ Mahlanganipeni @ Charlie Tuso, Garumeyi’s testimony, 12 October 1929, S1027. 69. Trevor, “Native Education from an Employer’s Point of View,” 99. 70. Gilson to Bell, 6 January 1911, UN3/2/1/5. 71. Report of the Printing Department, June 1914, UN 3/20/1/9/6. 72. AR, NC Melsetter, 1922, N9/1/25. 73. Matthew Engelke, “Review article. The Book, the Church and the ‘Incomprehensible Paradox’: Christianity in African History,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): 302. 74. Wilder to Lawrence, January 1910, UN 3/2/1/4. It is unclear from the context whether “boys” meant pupils or whether it meant teachers. 75. Mather, Superintendent of Education, Mt. Silinda, to Edward Irving Everett, Congo Mission Schools Survey, 20 March 1922, UN3/2/1/14. 76. Cited in Summers, Colonial Lessons, 106. 77. W. L. Thompson, “A Uniform Phonetic Alphabet for the Native Languages of Rhodesia,” Native Affairs Department Annual 5 (1927): 75. 78. AR, NC Melsetter, 1923, N9/1/26. See also AR, NC Melsetter, 1917, N9/1/21, regarding a native messenger who “tried his calligraphy on the tax registers and was awarded nine months H.L. for his pains.” 79. NC Melsetter to CNC, 5 September 1904, NUE 2/1/4. 80. Report of Chikore Touring, 1909, UN 3/20/1/4/3; Chikore Report, 27 May 1910, UN 3/20/1/5/3; Gilson to Wilder, 4 January 1912, UN3/2/1/6; AR, NC Melsetter, 1911 and 1918, N9/1/14 and 21. 81. AR, NC Melsetter, 1921, N9/1/24. The court records are full of references to cases having been first taken to the chief. 82. R v. Tafurinika @ Chandakasarira, PE 60/23, 3 April 1923, S1071. 83. Debates, Legislative Assembly of Southern Rhodesia, 13 May 1925.

9 “Thinking black”: Text and Translation, 1915–1925

We saw in Chapter 8 that many Africans in Melsetter district adopted elements of European/U.S. material culture during the 1910s and 1920s. However, whites remained unconvinced that Africans had adopted the manners and normative values that they associated with modern technologies, literacy, and standardized contracts. This chapter, by focusing on translation projects, tries to explain why whites found it difficult to tell whether “the relentless advance of civilization” was actually affecting African modes of thought or whether it was “touching them on the surface only, leaving unaltered their racial mentality.”1 The period of initial encounters was followed by a time when whites became confident about using local vernaculars in ways that they had not been used before.2 In particular, the development of textual versions of local languages meant that they could be used to teach literacy.3 At Mt. Silinda, a steady stream of educational and evangelical materials in chiNdau was published between 1915 and 1920 to supplement and replace the materials in siZulu. Clearly this work contributed to the notable extent of literacy in the district in the early 1920s. Wilder’s hymnbook sold 300 copies in its first year of publication, and, with the print run exhausted, Mt. Silinda was not even able to supply Mr. Hatch with the number of copies that he wanted for the Rusitu mission.4 There was also a written catechism, plus translations of the Psalms, the Gospels, Acts, Romans, and Corinthians I and II. In addition to these purely evangelical texts, the missionaries produced educational and literary works that sold rather better than the Bible translations. In 1915, Mt. Silinda published a pamphlet on tuberculosis, translated from a text issued by the South African (Native and Coloured) Health Society, that was to be used as a reader in all the schools. By 1917, the mission had published a First and Second Reader in Chindau, both based on texts devised by the Christian Literature Society in London for use in African schools.5 Meanwhile, Mr. Hatch at Rusitu worked on a chiNdau translation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which was clearly

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published and circulating in the district by the late 1920s, when it was stolen from a mailbag (unlike most of the checks, postal orders, and general mail in the bag) by the acting “post-boy.”6 By 1927, Mt. Silinda’s Language Committee proposed that “the first Sunday in August each year be set aside as a Christian Literature Sunday on which the literature already on hand be shown and the Christians encouraged to do more reading, as a means of growing in their Christian lives.”7 The missionaries’ increased production of chiNdau reading material was linked to their growing use of spoken chiNdau. As Mr. Fuller, who was in charge of the printing department at Mt. Silinda, commented, “It would seem best to do something toward placing more of the Scriptures in the hands of those who do not know Zulu, and it is now sometime [sic] since Zulu was dropped in the schools.”8 Initially, as we saw in Chapter 4, translation at Mt. Silinda had been the particular project of Rev. Wilder, who had worked independently, with his African collaborators, and treated translation as a formal exercise in comparative linguistics. However, the mid-1910s marked the start of a period when the missionaries really tried to learn—and use—the local vernacular. Partly in response to pressures from Boston and partly in response to their sense that Christianity, as they defined it, had not been fully understood by their converts, the missionaries were setting out to begin their exploration of the “native mind.” Local ways of understanding and ordering the world were to be grasped and local vernaculars mastered. Dr. Lawrence and Rev. Orner began learning chiNdau in 1910. Lawrence noted that women, in particular, used chiNdau, and decided, “I have never studied Chindao very much as I have always used the Zulu instead, but now I feel that I ought to know the Chindao also.”9 Boston approved the new initiative, noting, “We are very glad that you are planning to give the new missionaries a period for uninterrupted language study.”10 The arrival of the linguistically gifted Dysarts in 1910 made a significant difference to the mission: “Mr and Mrs Dysart are giving themselves most faithfully to the study of the language and are setting a stiff pace for others to follow.”11 Dysart quickly took over as the chiNdau expert, designing a language study program for the other missionaries, both American and Zulu. By 1919, a quarter century after the founding of the mission, Orner finally shifted to preaching in chiNdau, “the first time in the history of the Mission that the services at Silinda have been regularly conducted in the native language without an interpreter’. ” He concluded that this was responsible for a significant improvement in attitudes within the congregation: “the church seems to me better than it has been for years … the mere fact of having the services in the native language must have a real effect.”12 Nonetheless, there were limits to the missionaries’ engagement with learning chiNdau. They seemed to be teaching themselves and then “practicing” on Africans rather than asking the mother-tongue speakers to be their teachers. Heavy use was made of teaching texts produced by Wilder, Hatch, and Hatch’s Rusitu colleague, Douglas Wood.13 It seems that even when knowledge of the vernacular moved from being a textual exercise to practical exercise, the missionaries still thought of the language primarily in textual terms. Emphasis was placed on

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systematizing the grammar and designing a teaching program. Dr. Thompson, in particular, had an enthusiasm for linguistics and phonetic science and entered into vigorous debate about the merits of various orthographic principles and the appropriate typeface for local languages.14 These tendencies were encouraged by Boston, which required full reports of the teaching syllabus and attainments in language of new recruits.15 Dysart found it difficult to find time to organize a syllabus, lesson plans, and a suitable examiner, so that proficiency could be proven. Despite being surrounded by native chiNdau speakers, he complained that “the greatest difficulty is that there is not proper material for language students.” By “proper material,” he meant written lessons, observing that “much of the material I have to get first hand, as neither Mr Hatch or Mr Wood have it in their [lessons].” By 1912, he had managed to sketch out a possible—highly grammatical—syllabus but noted that he had not had much time because of the pressures of famine relief.16 Dysart’s syllabus involved very little conversation. The course involved two programs of six months’ study, each to be followed by an examination. The first six months included drill in pronunciation and the “ability to converse with people coming to get medicine or to sell grain etc.” The rest of the syllabus, however, involved the memorizing, reading, and translating of biblical texts, plus a hefty dose of grammar, including “the conjugation of a regular verb in the Indicative, Potential, Optative, Subjunctive and Imperative Moods, Active voice, in both affirmative and negative forms and in all tenses.” The second six months again included conversation “such as might be carried on during a journey, a visit to a kraal, about the house, and also the telling of short narratives such as one of the parables,” but otherwise the work was again almost entirely textual/grammatical.17 The mission’s language syllabus and examinations were focused on translating, not on speaking—or even thinking in—chiNdau. In 1919, when Orner finally started to produce all his sermons in the local vernacular, it prompted him to reflect that we think in the manner of the people in whose language we are thinking and English thought is so foreign to Chindau thought that many splendid sermons in English are practically without meaning or value when translated … into Chindau.18

Orner clearly recognized that thinking in the vernacular required a different mode of thought from thinking in English and that the power of vernacular preaching lay precisely in making this step. Nonetheless, there is little evidence that Dysart’s language syllabus encouraged thinking in the vernacular rather than thinking in English and then converting it to the vernacular.19 The first examination in chiNdau was taken in July 1913 by six American and five Zulu missionaries. Only two candidates failed, and these were two of the Zulu workers whose problems were attributed to a lack of knowledge of English. Clearly, then, the examination was not a test of whether they could converse in chiNdau but whether they could translate between chiNdau and English.20 By 1928, the Language

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Committee required regular submission of written work from all new missionaries learning chiNdau (up to “four pages of double spaced material per month”) but no requirements for conversation once the first examination had been passed.21 By 1915, the mission had published its own dictionary, with words compiled by Wilder and Orner and grammatical notes from Dysart, to help new recruits in their language learning.22 They drew particular attention to its uses in learning to translate from English into chiNdau rather than in learning to hear and understand words originally spoken in chiNdau: “The Chindau-English section is followed by an English-Chindau section which should be of great help to new missionaries, civil servants, and other white residents of the country.” This was a book for people who wanted to be understood, not to understand. The editors stated that their primary purpose in compiling such a dictionary was to aid conversion, not conversation: “That this book will justify its publication and be of real service to those who may use it in the evangelization and civilization of the Ndau people is the prayer of those who have laboured together in its preparation.”23 There was no room for conversation with Africans about what key concepts such as “God” or “civilization” might entail in their worldview. As the missionaries became more interested in designing their own language syllabus, their dependence on African advisers began to wane. The teaching materials produced during the late 1910s relied on the advice of Watch Sithole, a local teacher who was also involved in the printing and publishing of the texts.24 But translation was becoming a core activity of the missionaries in which many of them were involved. Each new recruit to the mission was set to work translating biblical, educational, and medical texts as the way of learning the language. The missionaries had come to regard themselves as experts on local culture and language. Their 1917 Second Reader in Chindau, which modified the texts devised by the Christian Literature Society “to make them more intelligible to the Ndau scholars,” included a large number of “Ndau Folk Lore stories,” written by Watch Sithole. Of course, these stories had been originally composed and written in chiNdau and so “did not require any translation work.” Nonetheless, they were “carefully examined by Mr Fuller.” Fuller was clearly deemed to be more expert than Sithole in the correct use of chiNdau.25 Similarly, in 1923, Dysart organized a competition for an essay on “native customs,” with the prize-winning papers to be published “in connection with Mr Dysart’s paper on the same subject.” Dysart’s work, which included an attack on bridewealth and polygyny, was presented as the authoritative account, to which the “papers prepared by the Natives” merely added some local color.26 Across the territory, evangelists and administrators made surprisingly limited use of African informants in their attempts to codify the local vernaculars. As Orner came to recognize, effective communication required the “civilizers” to enter into African modes of thought. Nonetheless, there was a powerful reluctance to grasp this nettle. In 1915, there was a major mission conference to debate appropriate translations for key religious concepts, as existing translations diverged significantly across the territory. Representatives were sent from all the missions,

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including Wilder and Dysart from Mt. Silinda and Hatch from Rusitu. There were also five unnamed “native representatives.” Rather than including these Africans in their deliberations on translation itself, “it was voted that ArchDeacon Etheridge and Rev A. A Louw go aside with the native representatives and find out their opinion as to whether one translation can be made for all Mashonaland.” Having advised that it might be possible, these men’s expertise was then ignored, as the delegates got on with attempting to agree on “a new language composed of the best known words of all the dialects.”27 Of course, the “dialects,” as defined by the missionaries, reflected mission fiefdoms rather than language families.28 They were the product of different missions undertaking independent projects to record the vernaculars in their districts, using different orthographies, and coming up with different ways to translate significant concepts. The “best known words” were simply those that missionaries had chosen to represent their religious views. Lamin Sanneh has argued that in the translation of religious ideas, the vernacular will take precedence over neologisms because there are limits on how far new words can be imbued with meaning.29 Among Southern Rhodesian missions, a variety of indigenous concepts had been drawn on to find a term for “God,” drawn mostly from ideas about ancestral spirits or from the Mwari territorial cult. Given the importance of the concept of “God” to the Christian missionaries, it is no surprise that they spent most of the conference disagreeing about how best to translate it. Their problem was that the indigenous terms, although more effective than neologisms, came with quantities of conceptual baggage attached. So, noted the missionaries, “After a careful examination of the words Mwari and Mudzimu it was admitted that neither word taken as originally used by the natives fully met the needs of the case.” A variety of other terms were considered, before eventually agreeing on “Mwari-Wedenga,” two words that together meant something like “Spirit (linked-to-the-health-of-the-natural-world) of the Sky,” so distinguishing this Being from the better-known (but presumably more terrestrial) Mwari of the shrines. However, the new term was unwieldy, and so, “feeling that the majority of the Delegates present, in their hearts, preferred Mwari … the former vote [was] rescinded,” and the reference to the sky was dropped.30 The report of the meeting gives fulsome thanks to the delegates from the Dutch Reform Church, who had used “Wedenga” as their word for God, for agreeing to this compromise but gives no indication of the views of the African delegates. Effective translation must initially be founded in an understanding of other cultures. However, as the deliberations of the 1915 conference demonstrate, once the missionaries had found serviceable lexical items for their own purposes, they lost interest in indigenous concepts. Alongside the problem of “God,” missionaries had difficulties in finding appropriate terms for “Holy Spirit”—unsurprisingly, given the importance and complexity of concepts of spirits in local society. Many different words and phrases were offered over the years, often trying to put an idea of “sanctity” (presumably not as applied to a contract) together with the term for “ancestral spirit.”31 However, when the Rev. Bertrand Barnes, C.R., issued his

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quasi-official dictionary using the Doke Commission’s orthography in 1932, he noted firmly, “Holy Spirit: this is variously rendered in different missions; should not be rendered by Mudzimu.”32 By this time, there was enough understanding of the specific role of vadzimu as ancestral spirits to recognize that the word could not be applied to the “Holy Spirit” without considerably damage to the concept. Once this understanding had been reached, the issue of what mudzimu really meant faded away; the missionaries did not want to know. The lexicographers were interested in African concepts only insofar as they provided a basis for translating European concepts. Once these translations had been identified, they provided the canon of which words English speakers needed to know and which words should not be used in the context of Holy Scripture. The actual structures of local cosmology were not important in themselves. It is significant that, in conversations among themselves, white missionaries and administrators displayed genuine interest in accurately expressing indigenous beliefs. In the Native Affairs Department Annual (NADA), which was launched by the administration in 1923, we find evidence of white attempts to translate African ideas about gods, fertility, and so forth into English. These contributions were written for the benefit of administrators, not Africans, and were intended to represent but not involve local people. The viewpoint was from the outside: an ethnographic concern rather than theological debate. Africans were not invited to provide their own accounts of their societies and beliefs. They had been excluded from claiming expertise about their own culture—Sithole’s folktales were checked for accuracy, and the essays on “native custom” were mere addenda to Dysart’s definitive accounts. It was clear that very few Africans would read NADA. In this internal conversation, administrators and missionaries recognized that “middlemen” translations, attempting to find simple parallels in English vocabulary, would not successfully convey the meaning of African concepts. One contributor’s difficulties in adequately explaining indigenous religious beliefs was derided by the feisty Jesuit Father Burbridge, who pointed out that the world into which the Rev. Mr. Hugo has ventured is full of new ideas for the European, which for the native are very old and he must not be disturbed if he finds that an attempt to clothe these ideas with European words results in misfits.33

Burbridge himself was proud of his ability to understand and find ways to represent local ideas in English. His landmark essay, “In Spirit-Bound Rhodesia,” was in many ways an exemplary work of translation, seeking careful parallels from classical mythology to expose the subtle differences between various kinds of spirits: To give the name of “ghost” to either ancestral spirits, strictly so called, or to their emanations, known as mashave spirits, is a misnomer…. It would seem … that we must describe these mashave spirits as “divinities.” How describe the midzimu spirits?… What of the classical manes—spirits of the departed? We feel bound to reject its adoption …, since it is never used in the singular, and seems therefore to suggest

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a kind of clan existence shorn of individuality…. In default of a better term, we claim that these midzimu spirits are in the classical sense “gods.”34

Burbridge was aware that his robust engagement with African beliefs might seem to be giving them a little too much credibility and acknowledged, “Some readers may accuse the writer of having succeeded too well in ‘thinking black.’” However, this interest and fluency in African beliefs was justified, claimed Burbridge, because his data, “being objective, belong to Science.”35 It seems, then, that insights into local ethnography were justifiable as a “scientific” study but not as a way of living or a system of belief. It was, therefore, acceptable for Burbridge to put time and effort into taking local beliefs seriously and finding words with which to translate them into English, provided that he confined his musings to the overwhelmingly white readership of NADA. Africans were not granted the same license, nor were they invited to join the conversation. Serious translations of indigenous ideas into English, those that were not looking for Christian parallels but for adequate representations of alien ideas, took place behind the firewall of “science” and were the work of whites, not Africans. While NADA articles often attempted to express indigenous ideas in English, another publication, the Mashonaland Quarterly, frequently attempted to put English ideas into vernaculars. Unlike NADA, it was intended that the Mashonaland Quarterly be read by Africans. It was a didactic publication, not concerned primarily with representing African culture. There is little evidence that the ethnographic insights in NADA (insofar as there were any) were carried over into Mashonaland Quarterly, despite its having many of the same contributors. The Mashonaland Quarterly, later known as the Rhodesian Native Quarterly, was launched in 1926 by the Dutch Reform Mission in Morgenster, near Great Zimbabwe, just under 200 miles to the west of Melsetter. Its purpose was to provide reading material for converts but, more importantly, to help missions move toward a standardization of the vernaculars. This project had not progressed much since the Salisbury conference on biblical translation over a decade earlier. The journal printed articles simultaneously in English and in variants of the local vernaculars. It is, therefore, possible to see exactly how key ideas were translated between English and the vernaculars. There was increasing interest at state level in a unified chiShona vernacular in the late 1920s, alongside a revived interest in translation and in the possibility of nurturing English as a lingua franca for Africans. The settler government, which had come to power in 1923, was concerned primarily not with how language reform could benefit African education but with making things easier for employers and administrators. It welcomed Mashonaland Quarterly as a tool in developing instrumental rather than communicative translation. The Quarterly began to represent an alliance between missionaries and government officials as a means of communicating state policy to literate Africans. Differences in policy intermittently emerged in its pages, but the overall editorial tone was didactic rather than deliberative. By 1928, the publication was funded by the state and had changed its

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name as well as its remit: “In accordance with the wishes of the Government,” the editorial explained, “the languages of the Quarterly will in future be Sindebele, Chizezuru and Chikaranga and also some articles in English.”36 ChiNdau, which had had considerable representation in the paper up to that point, was eliminated, as was ChiManyika. Every “native leader and superintendent” was entitled to a free copy of the Quarterly at government expense.37 A survey of the publication between its launch and the end of the decade reveals an enormous amount about how whites communicated with Africans. Among many interesting characteristics, it is notable how much was not adequately translated. African concepts barely figure. The editorial in the first issue claimed, “We solicit the cooperation of everybody interested,” but the editorial was published only in English and failed to notice that Africans were a potentially interested party.38 The vernacular was used in the Quarterly only for didactic and evangelical purposes. Attempts at understanding African culture and thought were kept safely behind the firewall of scientific ethnography. The voice allowed to African contributors was very limited. There was nothing, for example, from the dynamic and innovative Methodist Thompson Samkange, who during this time was a driving force behind the establishment of the Missionary Conference of Christian Natives—although his mentor, John White, was well represented.39 African contributions were published in untranslated vernaculars or in English that, it was indicated, had been corrected. The first African contribution, in the second issue of the Quarterly, was a short homily on St. Francis in English and chiZezuru; the second, in the following issue, was a short moral tale in English and chiNdau, about a boy who confessed to cutting a tree with his new axe and escaped a beating because his father admired his honesty. Both were by Cyprian Tambo, a chiNdau teacher; attention was drawn to the fact that he was “assisted by Fr. A. S. Cripps, Enkeldoorn.”40 White contributors, of course, were not identified as having been assisted by Africans in writing their pieces—which may account for why the chiManyika that Rev. Bell of Penhalonga managed to produce in the same issue was so very, very basic. The next piece by an African did not appear until the end of 1928. Alvord was the agricultural editor of the Quarterly and made regular contributions in English and chiNdau, providing detailed information about plowing and other farming techniques. He clearly regarded the publication as a useful means of disseminating vernacular teaching materials to support his agricultural demonstration program. The piece published in 1928 was about enhancing soil fertility using European methods of cultivation and was by Mtini Hliziyo, a senior African agricultural demonstrator (Muratidzi Mutema Mukuru wo ku Rima). It provided no insights into African ideas about soil husbandry and was published entirely in Karanga, with no English translation. Clearly the editors decided that no English speaker would be particularly interested in reading this piece, and they were not prepared to invest the necessary resources in getting it translated.41

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Conversely, the fourth and final contribution from an African during that decade was published only in English. It is worth reproducing in full: Hon. Sir, I am very much pleased to write you these few lines. I was sent one of your papers by my friend Rev. J. Tullach. I did not know that there is such a thing like your paper. When I red [sic] these papers I felt very much glad, indeed I understand that the Missinaries [sic] and the Government they wish to make us better people, whereas some of us do not understand. By this letter am thanking you very much I have no more to say at present, because this matter is too big in my mind. Your obedient servant, S. Hlazo.42

It would have been interesting to see this letter translated into one of the approved vernaculars! Of course, however, the effect of publishing the letter was to assert the priority of English as a means of communication. The writer was praised for his efforts, in highly patronizing terms: “We print this letter of appreciation unaltered, except for the punctuation and spelling, and assure the writer that we are grateful for his words of encouragement.” Given the number of errors, the reader is left wondering what punctuation and spelling had been altered and why. Had errors been left in (even added?) to create an “African voice”? The letter also draws attention to the absence of appreciative letters from Africans written in their own languages. A vernacular letter of appreciation had, in fact, been published, alongside its English translation—but it was written by H.M.G. Jackson, the chief native commissioner. One wonders with whom, exactly, he was trying to communicate.43 The letter from the chief native commissioner is unusual in that appears to have been composed in siNdebele and then translated into rather stilted English: “I send you my greetings because your paper is now increasing…. This little word is all I have to say” Most of the contributions, however, indicate that the writers thought in English and then translated the result into vernaculars. Little in the Quarterly engaged with African culture; translations were often barely more than clumsy lexical transfers. This is interesting because it illustrates the concepts underlying the English terms, in particular regarding Africans. The journal is replete with contemporary white ideology about the nature of white culture—and Christianity in particular—and its perceived contrasts with African culture. Burbridge, you may recall, suggested that he had succeeded in “thinking black.” The uses of the term “black” in the Quarterly are very telling.44 Throughout the Quarterly, there are references to local people. In English, the word that was usually written was “Natives.” This term, of course, literally means “indigenous people.” However, when the contributors to the Quarterly translated the English word “native,” they almost invariably used the translation, “Vatema,” which means “Black people.”45 Again, this raises the question, For whom were these translations intended? With whom were the contributors hoping to communicate? Clearly this was a translation designed by and for Europeans, not Africans. Africans did not need the word “Vatema”: there was already a perfectly adequate word in the local

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vernacular to mean “Natives.” This was vanhu, which meant “people” but, more precisely, “people of this place,” that is, “natives.” “Vatema,” by contrast, does not mean “natives” but “Black people,” reflecting a skin color–based categorization of peoples that was not found at all in indigenous modes of thought. Not only was “Vatema” an unnecessary neologism; it was also given additional negative connections. The term nhema, which is the same root as the “-tema” in Vatema, was used by the white writers as a translation for “superstition,” by which they meant the belief systems of local people. For example, Col. J. Carbutt, who was to succeed Jackson as chief native commissioner, declared that the whites had got rid of “superstition, witchcraft and suspicion,” translated as “nema, vuroyri, no ku sa tendana.”46 “Nhema” means “black,” as in color, for example, a black cow: mombe nhema. In chiShona the word also has connotations of “a falsehood,” and this meaning underpinned its use as a translation for “superstition.” Hugo (whom Burbridge had noted struggled to find adequate translations for indigenous concepts) wrote of Africans killing each other from “superstition”—“kutenda ze nema” (literally “faith of lies”)—and then trying to deny their misdeeds with “many lies”: “nema.”47 Again, this was a translation designed to make sense to whites, not Africans. Even if converts had come to reject indigenous beliefs, the original vernaculars clearly did not define local beliefs as falsehoods. This was not a “real” translation that mapped onto something that existed in local culture. The use of the term “superstition” already assumed that there were no valid local beliefs, so no translation word for them was required.48 The beliefs of the “Blacks” were defined by a linked word that meant “falsehood.” Furthermore, this same word, -tema, when put into another noun class, chitema, was used by the missionaries to denote “sin.” In the “Catechism of Health,” the question, “What do you mean by dirt of the spirit?” was answered, “By dirt of the spirit I mean sin,” translated as “chitema.”49 Again, in conventional speech, chitema would simply mean “black,” as in chigaro chitema, a black chair. There was an existing term for wrongdoing, which was linked to concepts of dirt. Unfortunately, this term, too, had been adopted as a label for local people: vaTswina. It is unclear how this word came to be applied to the people and their language, although some traced it to offensive language used by the Nguni about their subject peoples. The Native Affairs Department (NAD) preferred to use the neologism “Shona,” agreeing with Peter Neilsen’s observation that “a backward race is not helped forward by being daily and openly despised in the use of its very name.”50 This did not, however, deter the use of vaTema or chitema. Using the same term for “the people” and for “sin,” a term that already had a link with the idea of falsehoods, created a linguistic link between local people, false beliefs, and wrongdoing. These articles, ostensibly aimed at respectable African converts and teachers, were using language that did not reflect local selfperceptions or vernacular speech at all. Even while praising their achievements, the very language used defined African readers as sinful and untrustworthy. Meanwhile, the language by which Europeans described themselves as a group was also replete with ideology. A common translation was varumbi—as in “the Europeans and the natives”: “Varumbi na Vatema”—or “All those who live in Africa,

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white or black”: “varumbi kana vatema.”51 In these examples, we have both “native” and “black” translated by a term meaning “black” and both “European” and “white” translated by a word that meant neither. The term was of Nguni origin and meant a boss or an overmaster. Other variations were varungu or vazungu, which were also used occasionally, the different versions depending on the dialect. These words appeared as “European” or “white people” in the English translations. The translations were not comparable and described different things. The English words were value free, referring to geography and pigment. The vernacular words, however, had overt connotations of overlordship. It is unlikely that many Africans in the 1920s would themselves have used any of these words to apply to white people. A much more common word was vasinamabvi, “those without knees,” meaning that they were people who couldn’t bend to work on their knees, grinding, digging, and so forth. Alternatively, there was mabvakure, which, being a “ma-” word, denied some humanity to those so named and meant “those who come from somewhere else.” Skin color, again, was irrelevant to this definition. It is interesting that the English speakers rarely described themselves by reference to skin color, despite their universal use of the term “Vatema” to describe Africans. Two exceptions were Alvord and John White, the campaigning missionary from Marandellas (Marondera), both of whom used the term Vachena. This translates literally as “white people” and corresponded directly to their use of the term “whites” in English. Normally, however, the contributors avoided Vachena as a translation. Even so, their self-definition as “whites” had normative connotations when carried over into their versions of the vernaculars. The term “purity” was translated as kuchena, which means “whiteness.” The linking of Africans with sin and Europeans with purity, via use of color-based metaphor, did not reflect indigenous categories. In chiShona, “purity” would be communicated using words to do with “beauty,” not words to do with color. The categories used for translation were clearly informed not by African concepts, but by European preconceptions. The result, as an article in NADA observed in 1925, was “an utter lack of mutual understanding” arising from the fact that “we very readily measure the Bantu by our standards, and eagerly believe that our point of view must evoke a sympathetic response in the other.”52 Even Burbridge, in his contributions to NADA, was not really “thinking black.” His heavy use of classical imagery and lurid fantasies about the power and role of “witchdoctors” drew on what he already knew and then applied it to African cosmology.53 Translation is supposed to involve crossing into another culture. But the Quarterly’s translations worked rather to inscribe difference between whites and Africans. They defined Africans as excluded from modernity. This was not a hegemonic project, inserting new ideas via vernacular language, so much as a reinvention of vernacular language to mean alien things. It is ironic, then, that NADA’s editor recommended the Mashonaland Quarterly to his readers on the grounds that “both missionaries and natives must benefit considerably from an increased knowledge of one another’s language and

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mentality.”54 Despite its rhetoric of education and sharing communication, the Quarterly did not provide Africans with increased access to knowledge of English or of the white mentality. There were few serious attempts to translate important ideas from white culture—or white projects for the territory—into the local vernaculars. Contributors resorted to oversimplification, perhaps on the grounds that Africans could not understand more complex ideas, but more, it seems, because their own use of the vernaculars was fairly crude. “Rudzi,” for example, served variously as a translation for “nation,” “race,” “people,” “tribe,” and “community,” while nyika applied to “land,” “earth,” “the whole world,” “the planet,” “the temporal world,” “the next world,” and, of course, “The Dark Continent” (rendered in one piece as nyika yakasiba: the “dingy land”55). There was heavy reliance on -dzidza (“teaching”), -akanaka (“lovely”), and -tenda (“admit/believe/thank”) to cover most concepts of advancement and civilization and much use of -tema (“black”) and -rima (“dark”) to cover most aspects of African culture. Even allowing for the fact that chiShona develops shades of meaning by building on such root words, the vocabulary was limited. So, for example, Hugo’s term for an “ideal Native community,” surely an important concept in planning native policy, was rudzi rgwa vatema vakanakanaka: crudely, “a very, very nice tribe of blacks.”56 The precise and nuanced meanings that “ideal” and “community” had for Hugo in this context were lost to a basic vocabulary. There were some honorable exceptions to this clunking didacticism and crude translation. Harry Buck’s observation that “the Negroes/WaNegro” in the United States were “making wonderful progress” was translated as wari kusenguka kwazwo, expressing an interesting concept of “progress” not as forward movement but as separating wheat from chaff.57 Alvord, in his detailed technical papers, and John White, in his attempts to explain Native Education Policy and the Land Commission Report, both took their African readership seriously. However, even White tended toward banality in attempting to contextualize the shift in government education policy toward manual training: “The Commission says that the natives … should not only admire the clever things (zwinu zwo uchenjere) done by the white people who live in this country, they must copy them.”58 The significant point about the role of education in defining Africans’ future role in the economy—as manual workers rather than as clerical workers or missionaries/educators—has no reflection here. Instead, there is a crude appeal to the “clever things” that can be copied. Other contributions were adequately translated but, oddly, were clearly not aimed at an African readership. There was a somewhat bizarre situation where the contributors wrote their ideas in English and then translated them into vernaculars, even though their target audience was clearly other whites. A stilted plug for E. W. Smith’s book The Christian Mission in Africa was put in very simple English, concluding, “It would be a very good thing if many black people could read it too.” The use of “could” here seems appropriate: if “black people” needed such simple English to understand the recommendation, they were unlikely to be able to read the book.59 So what was the point of the review, if not to draw the attention of

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white missionaries and administrators to the book—an aim that would have been better served by a more sophisticated use of English? It seems that, increasingly, the significant discussions in the later editions of the Quarterly excluded African readers. Editorials were often not translated. Many ideas were presented in only one language, and, in any case, chiNdau and chiManyika had been excluded as a condition of government funding. We can clearly trace this disengagement from African readers in the discussions about language unification. Both NADA and the Quarterly addressed the issue in the late 1920s. Clearly, the NADA discussion was an internal conversation between whites. However, one would expect to see greater engagement with Africans in the Quarterly. And, indeed, when the topic was first raised in the Quarterly, it was presented in a way that was clearly intended to engage African readers, taking the form of a lively dialogue between two chiKaranga-speaking men. They reached no conclusions but aired many sides of the subject, including the possibility of adopting English as a lingua franca.60 Bertram Barnes, of St. Augustine’s Mission, Penhalonga, was an enthusiast for language unification, and in 1928 he published pieces about it in both NADA and Rhodesian Native Quarterly.61 Unlike the dialogue, Barnes’s piece in the Quarterly does not seem interested in drawing in African readers. He wrote about, not for, African vernacular speakers. His article was translated into chiKaranaga, but only as a limited précis of the English. Significantly, the chiKaranga version omitted his identification of his reader as “one who knows and loves the native people and their languages and their home life in the villages.”62 The piece by Mt. Silinda’s Thompson, responding to Barnes, was published only in English and so did not even an attempt to include Africans in the conversation. However, this may have been because Thompson wrote in chiNdau, a language that had been excluded from the publication. Fuller’s piece on the same subject, similarly aimed at his colleagues, was translated—although not into chiNdau, of course, but into chiKaranga and chiZezuru.63 By this time, the Quarterly’s important founding principle of organizing the layout of the translations using numbered paragraphs on facing pages, to allow direct comparison, had been abandoned. A decreasing number of articles in the Quarterly were directed primarily toward an African readership. Of these, many articles were addressed specifically at teachers. But regardless of the target group, most of the African-facing pieces attempted to encourage an interest and expertise in small-scale farming. Literary education was being downgraded in favor of a Reserves development program. The settler state was moving toward a segregationist policy, while both the NAD and the missionaries tended toward a vision of yeoman farmers (derived largely from utopian bourgeois nostalgias that were rooted in class struggles in Britain and the United States).64 Even the orations and homilies to African teachers— which were largely exhortations to persevere on “the road which goes up to all the good things” despite the unfortunate paucity of their wages65—emphasized the importance of agricultural and manual work.66 The “good things” had to be understood within this segregationist framework. However, only John White attempted to explain the government policy of segregation in meaningful vernacular terms:

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kutsaukanisa, kuparadzanisa: “to branch apart, to scatter about.”67 The rest simply failed to address the vitally important policy shift that underpinned the emphasis on African agriculture. It was not only in the Quarterly that vernacular conversations about matters of policy were notably absent. Translations of key terms such as “civilization” were also missing from the dictionaries, grammars, and language lessons that the various mission stations had produced. The NAD, for example, widely used the 1905 dictionary produced by the Jesuit priest Rev. E. Biehler at Chishawasha. It did not provide a translation for “civilization,” although it did offer “to be civil.” However, the term Biehler chose, “kubvuma” refers more to polite consent in personal interactions than to socioeconomic structures. St Augustine’s mission, in its 1911 dictionary, defined the adjective “civilized” using kudzidziswa, “to be educated,” which begs the question what had been taught since the verb had existed long before the mission schools established their own brand of education. Louw at Morgenster had only the term “to be civil” and followed Biehler. Orner and Dysart, in their 1915 dictionary, did not refer to the concept at all. This is particularly notable, as the word “civilization” was used almost obsessively by missionaries and administrators in their writings addressed to each other, in NADA and elsewhere. It indicates that the “civilizing” project was not something that needed to be explained to or discussed with the African communities. When contributors to the Quarterly used the vernaculars, then, it seems that they rarely did so because they had important ideas about policy that they wanted to discuss with Africans. It was difficult to translate a concept like “civilization” into the vernaculars partly because it lacked meaning even in English. There were tensions between missionaries, “developers” and “native administrators” about practical policy. The word’s most important function was as a marker of difference between whites and Africans in which the meaning shifted with every step that Africans took toward European skills and lifestyles. Meanwhile, the vernaculars were used for preaching, teaching, requiring, and demanding, but not for discussing or debating. Clearly, the period of first encounters had involved a lot of listening and learning by the white administrators and evangelists, as they found out about local beliefs, laws, and languages. However, once that groundwork had been done, and the possibility of meaningful conversation and debate opened up, then that was precisely the moment at which the imperative to communicate—rather than to command—disappeared. The dictionaries and primers that were produced by missions to record and share their knowledge of the vernaculars demonstrate that proficiency in local language was seen as the end of a project, not the beginning of a conversation. As I have argued elsewhere, the dictionaries and grammars were a medium through which established white communities informed newcomers about their society. While ostensibly helping newly arrived whites to talk to Africans, they worked rather as an internal conversation between whites, which prescribed both what it was possible to think and what it was possible to say about Africans and to Africans. They also defined the limits of what could be discussed with Africans. Discussion of “civilization” could take place only in the English language.68

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So, there were key concepts in debates about “civilization” and “advancement” within NAD and mission circles for which no adequate vernacular translations were made. Only those Africans who developed competency in English were able to take part in these conversations. As Mt. Silinda’s doctor, Thompson, observed, “Their language is not the vast storehouse of knowledge that is ours, nor will it be for generations.”69 Similarly, for elements within the NAD, English was necessary “to enable [the native] to seek enlightenment …, or to join in the civilised life going on around him.”70 From a hegemonic perspective, then, the acquisition of English was important precisely because it could open up access to an extensive literature, erase differences in modes of thought, and inculcate “enlightened” Christian values. But what about the Africans whose English enabled them to address these concepts? How far were they encouraged to make use of the “the vast storehouse of knowledge” in order to “join in the civilized life”? Simbini M Nkomo, a “native son” who had had two years of postgraduate training in Chicago, was not exactly greeted with open arms when, in 1919, he offered to work with Mt. Silinda to found another school. The Boston headquarters was, at the time, putting the Mt. Silinda missionaries under pressure to nurture indigenous church leaders: “native leaders will have to take over various portions of the work and carry the responsibility like the missionary.”71 As part of this initiative, Boston sent a letter that bypassed the missionaries, directly addressed to the “proper native leaders of the church” in order to “give honor to the native church and to increase its sense of oneness with the American Congregational Church.”72 However, a “proper native leader” seemed hard to find. On the one hand, men who acquired respect and status through established routes of bridewealth transactions and polygyny were deemed “immoral.” On the other hand, men like Nkomo, who had acquired a high level of education, were regarded as dangerously untrustworthy. Nkomo’s letters show him to be intelligent, articulate, and clear-sighted about the logistics and politics behind his project. He was lobbying Boston for revenue funding for his proposed school, noting that Mt. Silinda could not finance it but could only help to get it established. On the one hand, Nkomo pointed out the benefits that the school would bring: “the Board must be ready to sacrifice if they want to see the natives of Rhodesia Christianized and become respectable citizens of the world.” This notion of “respectable citizens” was fundamentally secular and highly political, demonstrating a ready access to key ideological concepts in the English language. On the other hand, Nkomo argued that the Board should do more to encourage African initiative: “I think you people ought to be able to back up just one native with your money and influence and see what he can do.” Finally, he associated himself clearly with a pan-Africanist development program, signing himself off with, “Yours for the future development of Africa”73 Nkomo’s confident use of English, situating his project financially and strategically, contrasts starkly with a letter from Jonas Hlatcwayo, sent three years later, and similarly requesting help to establish a new mission school. Much of the letter has been washed away by damp, probably brought on by the heavy rains to which it refers. However, some parts, at least, remain legible:

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Sir, my great desire is to get hold of the poor, ignorant Chief Musikavanhu so as to teach him to know Jesus our Lord and His great love. Oh! Mfundisi when I think of that great love in the Son of God, His love to us now I forgetting all [washed away] I want to stretch my [washed away] great help [washed away] all people of my race … the place which Musikabantu [sic] had pointed to Dr Wilder many years ago for school is in Mr Steen’s farm now and we are trying to get the place where he is now.74

The tone is very different from Nkomo’s, indicating that Hlatcwayo had had few opportunities to discuss development policy in either English or chiNdau. Where Nkomo challenged “you people,” Hlatcwayo appeals to “Mfundisi” (teacher/reverend). Where Nkomo envisaged “respectable citizens” and the “future development of Africa,” Hlatcwayo wanted to “help … all the people of my race.” Hlatcwayo was clearly an intelligent man with a good strategic mind and the ability to recognize a market opportunity and exploit it successfully.75 Yet he simply did not have the vocabulary to discuss development policy in English, and the missionaries had neither the vocabulary nor the interest to discuss it in the vernacular. Hlatcwayo’s English vocabulary for abstract thoughts, reflecting the missionaries’ translation projects, left him able to do little more than express piety. Where it was clear that Nkomo had absorbed the ideological as well as the material aspirations of “civilization,” there was simply no equivalent means whereby whites in Southern Rhodesia could tell whether converts such as Hlatcwayo had been “touched on the surface only.” Hlatcwayo did not have words for policies, only for prayers; the conversation could not take place. The period 1915–1925, then, marked a time when whites in the missions and in the administration were no longer discovering local vernaculars but were recording and systematizing them. A flurry of conferences, dictionaries, and other mission publications set in place the foundations on which, over the following decade, the standardized, unified official vernaculars emerged.76 This should, therefore, have been a decade of successful translation and communication in which boundaries were crossed and significant hegemonic inroads could be made into local consciousness. Instead, however, it seems that translation projects served to erect boundaries: linguistic, ethnic, and conceptual. Missionaries standardized the vernaculars and could use them to reflect white ideology, but they could not, it seems, use them to translate their ideology into local terms. The administrators and missionaries had tried to communicate their ideas via the medium of a language that did not easily express or encapsulate those ideas. Even the best linguists struggled with a language that worked with a different syntax and a different way of putting ideas together. However, instead of taking the ethnographic/ cognitive step that Jones argues is essential to translation across alien cultures, there was very little conceptual boundary crossing. Whites succeeded in “thinking black” only if they were away from the African gaze and protected by “science.” Detailed listening and communicating with Africans had once been necessary in order for whites to learn to “think black” and to use the vernaculars “as well as

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the Natives themselves.” However, at the point when whites accumulated enough knowledge to be able to engage in meaningful conversations with Africans, they ceased to do so—precisely because they had acquired that knowledge. Indeed, not only was it no longer necessary for whites to listen to Africans speaking the vernacular: whites also made it necessary for Africans to listen to them speaking it. However, these vernacular translations were not designed to allow communication or discussion of important notions about politics, policy, and society. African notions became “falsehoods”; European notions were reserved for conversations in English. It was difficult to tell whether, in using the same language, the vaTema and the vaRungu were really engaging in the same hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Even though these translation projects failed as a means of conveying key ideas through language, they did, nonetheless, act a means of communicating white ideology. Translation and the making of new concepts are historical phenomena, involving human agency and complex human relationships. To borrow E. P. Thompson’s famous phrase, the “vaTema” and the “vaRungu” did not rise like the sun at their appointed time; they were present at their own making. It was by their interactions that Africans and whites became “vaTema” and “vaRungu.” By accepting these terms, Africans were acknowledging the creation of a new social and political environment in which skin color became a unifying factor and a source of identity. These terms were part of the African vernaculars, but their meanings expressed ideas that came largely from the whites. The “natives” were converted from “vanhu” to “vaTema,” people associated with darkness, sin, and falsehood. Burbridge and his collaborators were not “thinking black” but inventing “black” as a racial category and inscribing it in their own versions of the vernaculars. NOTES 1. Guy A. Taylor, “Introduction,” Native Affairs Department Annual 3 (1925): 4. 2. Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui, The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), 115, point out that “missionary establishments were sometimes involved in preparing African languages for new functions in society in a way that has been virtually unmatched in Africa’s post-colonial experience.” 3. Herbert Chimhundu, “‘Early Missionaries and the Ethnolinguistic Factor during the ‘Invention of Tribalism’ in Zimbabwe,” Journal of African History, 33, no. 1 (1992): 87– 109, provides a good survey of this activity across the territory. 4. Report of the Printing Department, June 1914, UN 3/20/1/9/6. 5. Report of the Translation Committee, June 1914, UN 3/20/1/9/7, July 1915, UN 3/20/1/10/9, June 1917, UN 3/20/1/12/16; Report of the Printing Department, June 1915, UN 3/20/1/10/8; “Rhodesia Branch” Report, unsigned and undated but clearly 1915–1916, UN 3/20/1/11/1. 6. Printing Report, Mt. Silinda, June 1916, UN 3/20/1/11/8; R v. Kasamoya, case 8/1929, 2 March 1929, S1071. See Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), for a fascinating discussion of the dissemination and reception of Bunyan across the African continent. 7. Language Committee Report, June 1927, UN 3/20/1/22/11. 8. Printing Report, Mt. Silinda, June 1916, UN 3/20/1/11/8.

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9. Lawrence to Bell, 2 February 1910, UN 3/2/1/4. 10. Barton to Gilson, 1 December 1911, UN 3/2/1/5. 11. Gilson to Fuller, 4 January 1912, UN 3/2/1/6. 12. Orner to Bell, 4 November 1919, UN 3/2/1/13. 13. Dysart to Gilson, December 1912, UN 3/2/1/6. Douglas Wood, Tshindao Primer (Rusitu: Southern Africa General Mission, 1903). 14. Thompson to King, 26 February 1910, UN 3/2/1/4 and associated correspondence; W. L. Thompson, “A Uniform Phonetic Alphabet for the Native Languages of Rhodesia,” Native Affairs Department Annual 5 (1927): 67–76, and “The Language Question,” Rhodesian Native Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1929): 6. 15. Barton to Gilson, 20 December 1912, UN 3/2/1/6. 16. Dysart to Gilson, December 1912, UN 3/2/1/6. 17. Committee on Examinations in Chindau, Temporary Syllabus for Examinations in Chindau, June 1913, UN 3/20/2/5/5. 18. Orner to Bell, 4 November 1919, UN 3/2/1/13. 19. Compare Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 76, which notes that in the Congo, “concern with spreading the content of the [Christian] message became overshadowed by attention to formal and normative matters such as the exact classification of languages, the standardization of writing, and the teaching of correct grammar.” 20. December 1913, Report of Committee for Examinations in Chindau, UN 3/20/2/5/10. 21. Report of Language Committee, 1928, UN 3/20/1/24/18. 22. “Rhodesia Branch” Report, 1915–1916, UN 3/20/1/11/1. 23. J. P. Dysart and A. J. Orner, Chindau-English and English-Chindau Vocabulary with Grammatical Notes (Binghamton, N.Y.: : Kennedy Morris, 1915), 3–4. 24. Report of Translation Committee, June 1917, UN 3/20/1/12/16. 25. Report of Translation Committee, June 1917, UN 3/20/1/12/16. 26. Report of Language Committee, 1923, UN 3/20/1/18/15. 27. Minutes of Salisbury Conference of Missionary Societies, 25 August 1915, UN 3/13/9/1. 28. Chimhundu, “Early Missionaries.” 29. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989), 171. 30. Minutes of Salisbury Conference of Missionary Societies, 25 August 1915, UN 3/13/9/1. 31. Diana Jeater, “The Way You Tell Them: Language, Ideology and Development in Southern Rhodesia,” African Studies 55, no. 2 (1996): 1–15, has a detailed discussion of the various translations of “Holy Spirit” that were used by missions. 32. Bertram H. Barnes, A Vocabulary of the Dialects of Mashonaland in the New Orthography (London: Sheldon Press, 1932). 33. Rev. H. C. Hugo, DRC, “The Spirit World of the Mashona (Vakaranga),” plus response from Burbridge, Native Affairs Department Annual 3 (1925): 16. 34. Rev. A. Burbridge, “In Spirit-Bound Rhodesia,” Native Affairs Department Annual 2 (1924): 22, 27. 35. Ibid., 29.

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36. Editorial, Rhodesian Native Quarterly 2, no. 2 (December 1928): 1. (English only) 37. Rhodesian Native Quarterly 2, no. 4 (December 1929): 1. 38. Editorial, Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 1 (September 1926): 1. 39. Terence Ranger, Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920–64 (London: James Currey, 1995), 4–5. 40. C. Tambo, “Telling the Truth,” Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 3 (March 1927): 4–7. His mentor was the famed reformer Arthur Shearly Cripps. 41. Mtini Hliziyo, “Kuperergwa ne Simba kwe Minda Yedu,” Mashonaland Quarterly 2, no. 2 (December 1928): 15. 42. Rhodesian Native Quarterly 2, no. 4 (December 1929): 23. 43. H.M.G. Jackson, Chief Native Commissioner, to the Editor of the “Rhodesian Quarterly,” Rhodesian Native Quarterly 2, no. 2 (December 1928): 32. 44. My lexical analysis of racial categories in the Quarterly was greatly assisted by Chenjerai Shire of the Linguistics Department, School of Oriental and African Studies, London. 45. There was no intended link with the Chimanimani paramount chief, Mutema, although his name did have the same meaning, for other reasons. 46. Col Carbutt, “A Word to Teachers,” Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 2 (December 1926): 8, 9 (translations on facing pages). The orthography was slightly different from the conventions used today. 47. Rev. H. C. Hugo, “Uganda,” Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 2 (December 1926): 14, 15. When faced with the challenge of translating “superstitious rite” in the previous issue, Hugo simply left out the phrase in his chiKaranga version: Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 1 (September 1926): 9. 48. “Witchcraft,” of course, already had negative local connotations, and the word “uroyi” or variations thereof was freely used in the Quarterly. 49. Mrs. E. M. Lloyd, “Catechism of Health,” Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 2 (December 1926): 4, 5. The translation was supplied by a convert, Edward Chipunza, but his use of chitema was a neologism, a technical term introduced by the Rusape mission. 50. ANC Shabani to NC Belingwe, 23 May 1923, ED 6/2/1/1, fol. 238. 51. Hugo, “Uganda,” 14, 15; A. A. Louw, “David Livingstone,” Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 3 (March 1927): 6, 7. 52. “Mtwazi,” “The Bandit’s Psychology,” Native Affairs Department Annual 3 (1925): 43. 53. Diana Jeater, “Imagining Africans: Scholarship, Fantasy and Science in Colonial Administration, 1920s Southern Rhodesia,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (2005): 1–26. 54. Editorial Notes, Native Affairs Department Annual 5 (1927): 6. 55. Rev. H. W Murray, “Cape to Cairo,” Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 3 (March 1927): 18, 19. 56. Hugo, “Uganda,” 14, 15 57. Rev. Harry Buck, “The Negroes/WaNegro,” Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 1 (September 1926): 3. 58. Rev. John White, “Three Major Things in Native Education,” Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 1 (September 1926): 7. 59. Editorial/Mashoko o Munyori, Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 4 (June 1927): 4, 5. 60. “Listener,” “John & James Speaking about Languages,” Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 4 (June 1927): 10, 11. This is one of the only occasions where a white person wants to be presented as a “listener” rather than a “speaker” of the vernacular.

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61. Bertram H. Barnes, “A Campaign against Babel: Unification of the Dialects of Mashonaland,” Native Affairs Department Annual 6 (1928): 45–50; Fr. Barnes, “The Mashonaland Dialects,” Rhodesian Native Quarterly 2, no. 2 (December 1928): 11–12 (English), 27–28 (Karanga). The Karanga version is presumably not by Barnes himself, as he spoke chiManyika. 62. It also excluded his consideration that “there are some who have no need nor desire to learn English” and a description of “Kitchen kaffir” as “that dreadful thing.” 63. Dr. Thompson, “The Language Question,” Rhodesian Native Quarterly 2, no. 3 (March 1929): 6; C. C. Fuller, “A Common Language for Mashonaland,” Rhodesian Native Quarterly 2, no. 3 (March 1929): 19 (English), 20 (Karanga), 22 (Zezuru). 64. John L. Comaroff, “Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa,” in Tensions of Empire, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, 163–197 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 65. “zhira i no kwira kumsoro pane zino zose zakanaka”: quotation from Peter Nielsen, “A Word to Teachers,” Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1926): 1; this was contrasted with “the road that goes downward into darkness”: “rima.” Re wages: C. Bullock, “The Lesson of Zimbabwe,” Rhodesian Native Quarterly 2, no. 4 (December 1929): 22. 66. See, for example, an extended piece, with no English version, by H. Jowitt, Head of Native Education, “Zi no Mubato Mukuru pa Zikoro Zedu” (The important work of our schools), Rhodesian Native Quarterly 2, no. 2 (December 1928): 2–5 (Karanga), 5–7 (Ndau), 24–27 (Zezuru). 67. Rev. John White, “The Land Commission Report/Kusuma Kwe Land Commission,” Mashonaland Quarterly 1, no. 3 (1927): 2, 3. 68. Jeater, “The Way You Tell Them.” 69. Thompson, “A Uniform Phonetic Alphabet,” 75. 70. H. A. Cripwell, “SiNtu Sounds and Symbols,” Native Affairs Department Annual 6 (1928): 52. 71. Bell to Orner, 27 August 1919, UN3/2/1/13. 72. William E. Strong to Orner, 12 February 1919, UN3/2/1/13. 73. Simbini M. Nkomo, Chicago, to Bell, Boston, 24 September 1919, UN3/2/1/13. Nkomo’s proposals were rejected by both Boston and Mt. Silinda. 74. J. M. Hlatywayo, Chikore Mission, recipient unclear, 11 April 1921, UN 3/2/1/14. 75. See previous chapters, passim. 76. See Chapter 10.

PART III SEPARATION, 1920s–1930s

By the mid-1920s, Southern Rhodesia was a modern state, with a developing economy and a government controlled by white settlers. The wealth of the state depended on African labor, appropriation of African resources through taxation and land seizure, dogged determination from the white settlers to succeed, and limited investment capital from overseas. However, there were anxieties within the state about the role of Africans within this modernity. These concerns took various forms. On the one hand, there were anxieties, particularly among the settlers, about cultural transformations within the African communities, such as literacy, Christianity, and claims to citizenship.1 By the 1920s, Africans had moved significantly into the semiskilled employment sector and were making inroads into the skilled sector. Their evangelists were establishing independent churches. These transformations threatened the maintenance of markers of difference, on which the systems of appropriation had been justified. If white rule was designed to bring “civilization” and Africans had become “civilized,” then what justification was there for white rule? Moreover, the economy depended on access to land and cheap African labor; the rapid growth of a literate, numerate, and skilled class of articulate Africans threatened the more economically vulnerable sectors of white settler society. Partly in response to these anxieties, the state moved toward a policy of “native development” that set different goals for Africans from those pursued by whites as markers of cultural and economic success. In addition, the autonomy with which Africans engaged with elements of white culture raised anxieties about “standards.” Had Africans adopted the normative values that whites associated with European ways of living? The settlers doubted whether Africans had fully understood the European worldview in adopting its outward forms. The persistence of polygyny and witchcraft beliefs, even among some of the most reliable converts, gave reason for such doubt. Was this truly white “civilization,” or was it only a poor translation?

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On other hand, white administrators had failed to offer legal and employment structures that translated properly in African terms. There were ongoing confusions arising from witchcraft, adultery, and inheritance claims. The white authorities brought their preconceptions, inscribed in their uses of language, into attempts to understand what motivated Africans. This limited their ability to rule effectively or to establish hegemonic influence. Their interpretations of African religion, politics, and society, their “adultery” and their “invented traditions,” appeared to the Africans themselves to be manifestly of European origin. Insofar as the administrators’ interpretations seemed to chime with “tradition,” this was often not because they were gaining hegemonic acceptance but because they were open to other interpretations. Africans could ignore, resist, or reappropriate these attempts to translate their societies into forms that made them more malleable to white rule. The Native Affairs Department (NAD) had begun to feel particularly vulnerable in the face of Africans’ failure to follow the script that the whites had written for them. Meanwhile, the problem of finding adequate interpreters for court cases was exacerbated rather than alleviated as the years passed. As white settlers, particularly the farmers, became wealthier, they developed more mechanisms to establish social distance between themselves and the Africans, whose material culture was increasingly coming to resemble that of the whites. The state moved toward a policy of segregation with the 1930 Land Apportionment and the 1937 Native Law and Courts Act and grew increasingly reluctant to encourage cultural boundary crossing as a means of gaining language expertise. The failure of “translation” projects gradually became clear during the later 1920s and 1930s. “Native experts” moved away from a desire to be able to communicate with Africans toward a desire to codify knowledge. This final part of the narrative traces how the “native experts” retreated from attempts to translate indigenous ideas and chose instead to observe and record them with “scientific” detachment. In this “separation” phase, the NAD re-created images of Africans as inaccessibly “other.” “Separation” was not just about the economic issues of limited access to land and markets; it was also about hiding (from themselves as well as from Africans) the extent of their failure to understand or influence African responses to the changing world order. These final chapters trace the impact of the standardization of language, the practice of the law, and the unfolding of a Southern Rhodesian tradition of ethnography on the creation of a local orthodoxy about the unfathomable nature of the “native mind.” NOTE 1. See, for example, Debates, 27 May 1929, in the discussions on the Land Apportionment Bill.

10 “ChiBaba”: Turning Language into Linguistics

By the early 1920s, the vernacular languages were attracting the attention of central government.1 Poor language abilities in the civil services, combined with a move toward segregationist policies, prompted the state to reconsider whites’ knowledge of the vernaculars. The issue raised important questions about defining the boundary between “natives” and “civilized peoples,” interactions between white and African communities, and the long-term project for the state. Many of the linguists who had been absorbed by the Native Affairs Department (NAD) in its early days were reaching retirement age. Inquiries by the administration during 1923 revealed that few of the young men employed as clerks and assistant native commissioners in NCs’ offices were competent linguists, capable of interpreting in court. New recruits, who were required to have at least South African matriculation, rarely arrived with a good knowledge of the vernacular, having spent their formative years in school rather than mixing with Africans: Under our system of selection of candidates where we gain in a higher standard of education we lose in an imperfect knowledge of Native languages, even where Rhodesian-born candidates are appointed.2

Moreover, unlike their predecessors, clerks and assistant native commissioners were spending less and less time in direct contact with Africans. With the increase in African literacy, much of the face-to-face work was being done by African employees: Natives are being increasingly used for clerical work where the official comes into direct touch with natives. This gives less opportunity for European Clerks to learn native languages.3

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Given this decreasing direct contact with Africans, new recruits were no longer learning “on the job.” This situation inspired a debate about whether a lingua franca should be introduced that could be used by administrators, employers, and Africans. The debate exposed deep disagreements about what would make the most appropriate lingua franca. Both for Africans and for white settlers, the ability to use English provided advantages in dealings with the state. Indeed, white farmers in the 1890s had even been prepared to send their children to study alongside African children at the Mt. Silinda mission so that they could learn to read English.4 Nonetheless, there was debate about whether English was the “ideal” language for communication with Africans. For employers, the most important issue was effective communication of instructions, for health and safety purposes, if for no other. In the 1890s, practical illustration had been favored as a universal language of instruction: “All that the employer qua employer needs is to make the employee understand a few simple orders and questions.”5 This was reinforced by the fact that workers were recruited from across the region and had no shared vernacular. However, by the mid-1920s, it was clear that the orders and questions used in work situations were no longer “simple,” if they ever had been. Africans had moved significantly into the semiskilled employment sector and were making inroads into the skilled sector. Employers needed some guaranteed means of effective communication with their workers: In this Africa of a thousand languages and dialects, it is essential for the success of the natives, as wage earners, that they should have a common language, intelligible to each other and their masters. It does not matter much what the language is, so long as it is adequate for the ordinary purposes of life.6

None of the local vernaculars seemed likely to be useful as a lingua franca, given the geographical range from which labor was drawn. Consequently, there was little interest among employers in acquiring the vernaculars. English and “kitchen Kaffir” were already widely used for verbal contracts by Africans, employers, and traders, even as far north as the Congo, where they were seen as a threat to Belgian hegemony and evidence of creeping British imperialism.7 By the late 1920s, the choice of lingua franca in Southern Rhodesia had come down firmly in favor of English rather than “kitchen Kaffir.” This was not a foregone conclusion. In Melsetter district, there was widespread use of chiLapalapa (“kitchen Kaffir”) rather than English as a means of communicating with Africans. This was particularly true for domestic workers and farmworkers and continued to be the case even into the 1920s. It seems that the white farmers, most of whom were South African Dutch, were not comfortable about speaking in English to employees, who might have a better command of the language than they did themselves.8 Even among Anglophone employers, there was some support for chiLapalapa rather than English as the lingua franca: “it spreads from Durban to the Congo, and in almost every kraal someone can be found to understand

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it.”9 Moreover, as Ali A. Mazrui has argued, in Kenya, with significant numbers of white settlers, there were concerns about Africans becoming fluent in English because this erased one of the important markers of difference between indigenous and white populations.10 We have seen how, in the case of Simbini Nkomo, whites felt threatened by Africans who spoke English with ease. However, English remained as the language of the state and of education. Many employers were comfortable with using English, for, as Bertram Barnes, of St. Augustine’s mission, Penhalonga, pointed out, The small amount of English necessary to serve the employer’s needs is quickly learnt by those who need it, and the employer will always find … that the native boy is very willing to learn it. I cannot imagine that any employer would have any objection to his boys knowing that much of English.11

Mission societies wanting to train Africans as teachers and evangelists had little suitable reading matter in local vernaculars. Their pupils were required to acquire English fairly early in their education so that they could read advanced texts. And, for the state, there was an interest in keeping down costs by minimizing the number of languages to be used for official publications. The use of English as the lingua franca of the state perpetuated the demand for interpreters between English and the vernaculars. This was particularly important in court cases, where witnesses had to be understood and perjury was a criminal offense. As the senior NAD official H.M.G. Jackson pointed out, there was real significance for a law case in confusing “the day before yesterday” and “a day before yesterday” or eliding the categories of “father” and “paternal uncle.”12 By the early 1920s, NCs in rural districts who had additional work as assistant magistrates were pressing for funds to employ interpreters in the courts, leaving the NCs free to concentrate on judging the cases.13 The 1923 survey in response to this proposal exposed the paucity of white linguists in the NAD. The promotion structures of the department did not encourage the development of linguistic skills. Employees in the NAD, from clerks upward, were frequently moved to new postings to gain experience, spread expertise, or simply fill a vacancy. While some NCs were fluent in local languages, others could find themselves in a posting where they had no knowledge of the local language at all. F. G. Elliott was appointed in 1897 to work in siNdebele-speaking districts because of his recognized fluency in Zulu. He became a valued source of intelligence about African politics and was said by the CNC’s secretary to have “a pet ‘Child of the Mlimo’ at his beck and call.”14 Yet within six months of this compliment being paid to him by his bosses, he was posted to Melsetter, where he had no knowledge of the local language and was unable to build up similar useful relationships with the local African authorities.15 Because of the paucity of linguists, there were few white officials available to act as court interpreters. It seemed that most NCs either interpreted for themselves in court or used Africans on their staff to help them. African interpreters were

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especially needed in cases involving “alien natives,” that is, migrant workers whose language the NC did not speak.16 A heavy reliance on Africans in the judicial process was deplored by NCs and the administration alike. The Law Department, in particular, felt that justice was safer if interpreting was “in the hands of Europeans of reliable character,” presumably because Europeans were believed to have a better understanding of the judicial process.17 However, the Treasury would not countenance the use of professional white interpreters in small rural courts18 and, prompted by the administrator,19 even refused an incentive payment to NAD clerks for them to do the job. It was argued that court work should be part of the clerks’ normal duties and might help them to acquire the language and legal skills they so badly seemed to lack.20 Good translation, of course, was not just about being able to speak two languages. It required an ability to reformulate and transfer ideas from one culture to another. As the attorney general put it, “An interpreter is not necessarily one who can talk the native language; he has got to be able to interpret.”21 An effective interpreter would straddle African and white communities, having insight into both, with the vocabulary to explain shades of meaning. Few white people fulfilled this requirement. In 1926, the senior NAD official, H.M.G. Jackson, pointed out that [A European] fails quite commonly to convey to the witness the full purport of the question, and to the Court the full purport of the reply. A native interpreter, on the other hand, fails quite commonly and quite obviously in his knowledge of English.22

In an attempt to improve the quality of interpreters, a two-tier salary scale was introduced in 1922. Junior interpreters could “talk the native language” but did not have the verbal skills and cultural insight to be able to interpret regularly in the larger and busier courts. To become senior interpreters, they had to pass the Native Language Examination. In addition, they were required to pass another examination, also developed in 1922. This was the Native Customs examination.23 As we saw in Chapter 7, the “native customs” that were the subject of this examination reflected the state’s attempts to codify African social and legal practices. Nonetheless, this engagement with “native law and custom” was the closest that the state came to representing an African perception of the world. The senior interpreters had to demonstrate not only that they understood words but also that they had some understanding of the contexts in which they might be used. The inclusion of the Native Customs examination in the requirements for a senior interpreter demonstrates the importance of worldview, as well as words, in the process of translation. This was well recognized by the white settlers, who relied on the NAD to understand Africans for them. In 1923, as part of her case for “responsible government,” Ethel Tawse Jollie, the Melsetter representative in the Legislative Council, argued that the police and NCs should pay greater attention to the vernaculars because it enabled them to “get inside the minds of the people,”24 Similar points were raised in a Legislative Assembly debate in 1925, addressing the injustices caused by poor interpretation. L. K. Robinson, the junior member of the

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Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Victoria, worrying about a case that he felt had resulted in wrongful execution, asked, Had the judge in this case been assisted by experienced assessors, well versed in the mysteries of native evidence, is it too much to assume that they might have probed the matter to the bottom and discovered what was in the mind of the native?25

Similarly, J. P. Richardson, who had claimed that cases of injustice “always come back to the interpreter,” provided an anecdote about a man admitting in court that he had taken a white man’s plowshare: His answer was taken to be an equivalent of pleading guilty. Had that question been put by a man who understood the natives the effect of the answer would have been different. He would have understood that that the native’s master owed the man money and that the native did not look upon the taking of the plough-share as theft.26

Another Assembly member, Major Boggie, also felt that language competence had some link with cultural understanding and added, “It is only through long experience of the native that you are able to grasp what he is really thinking of.”27 Language competence and ethnological insight were seen as a single package of esoteric skills, which the NAD was rather good at, but with which ordinary chaps need not bother themselves too much.28 The MLAs saw this perceived “otherness” of African modes of thought as a linguistic problem, posing specific challenges to interpreters. Even as they debated, however, African “otherness” was shifting from being a difficulty (to be overcome) to being a policy (to be upheld). The more that Africans challenged white domination of the labor and production markets, the more it was insisted that African and white societies were different and should be kept separate. In the face of autonomous and effective advancement by Africans, the NAD had entered a period of uncertainty and instability. In the resonant words of H.M.G. Jackson, writing in 1925, “We have lost our sureness of touch—a sequela of loss of conviction. The half-gods are going before the gods arrive.”29 He feared that the firm hand of NAD tutelage—the “half-gods”—would be lifted from Africans before they were fully ready to control themselves or join the civil society of whites. In particular, he feared that the indirect rule policies that were currently sweeping through the rest of British Africa, under the direction of the Colonial Office, would also be introduced in Southern Rhodesia. These concerns were discussed as a crisis for Africans, presenting them with challenges that were too great for them. In reality, however, this was the internal crisis of an administration that no longer knew what its future held. Consequently, the NAD was keen to support a policy that kept Africans under their tutelage. The new thrust of “native policy” was to govern Africans within their existing institutions rather than guiding their social systems toward local autonomy or industrial proletarianization. As the contributions to the Mashonaland Quarterly

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demonstrated, the idea was to develop African communities on the limited Reserved land while opening up the rest of the land to white farming. They were to continue their lives as agriculturalists, speaking their own languages but adopting farming methods that better suited the economic and land policies of the government. The first of Alvord’s Native Agricultural Demonstrators started work in July 1927. So instead of being “civilized,” Africans were to be “developed.” “Civilization,” it was argued, was not appropriate for Africans and should not be forced on them: It has taken many centuries for the white races of today to arrive at their present state of civilisation, and we cannot expect to bring the native to the same standard in a generation or two … there is danger in a too rapid transition from a state of barbarism to one of civilisation.30

The converse of this was that African culture was not appropriate for whites. Not only African society but also white society had to be molded to suit the state’s project. Many NCs disagreed with this analysis, but government policies created an atmosphere in which it became the orthodoxy.31 The laissez-faire attitude toward language acquisition that had characterized the early years of white occupation was now in crisis. If there was a need for more white translators and if translation required a deep understanding of African culture, then the state needed to allow whites and Africans to mix together and share cultural experiences. But this was precisely what its new “native policy” was designed to prevent. The readiness with which the administration had once recruited anyone who had a reasonable grasp of local languages was now overshadowed by a suspicion about how they had acquired the skill and questions about whether they had become too close to “the natives.” The flurry of activity around vernacular languages that characterizes the period from 1925 to 1935 reveals deep concerns about white relationships with Africans, as the state tried to reconcile its conflicting needs. Traditionally, the administration had depended on orally acquired language expertise. Employees in NCs’ offices were expected to learn on the job; others presented themselves as already fluent. There was growing unease with this method of recruiting interpreters. The “already fluent” were predominantly Afrikaans speaking, like the trekker families of Melsetter.32 They came from a farming tradition in which children routinely spent large amounts of time with Africans, thereby acquiring fluency in the vernacular but not South African matriculation. This fast-growing section of the community had long been regarded as suspect by the administration, especially during the 1914–1918 war,33 and in the run-up to Responsible Government in 1923, when it was feared that they would prefer union with South Africa: According to Mrs. Boddington, an advocate of responsible government speaking in 1922, poor whites were “neither black nor white” but “mentally deficient” and “really worse than animals,”34

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Officials began to disparage the poor whites who made up the majority of the “already-fluent” speakers: A youth who is able, when he begins life, to speak Dutch and a native language may, possibly, not be otherwise mentally well equipped.35

These “mentally deficient” speakers were not experts in linguistics or interpretation. They had not thought about the boundaries between Dutch, English, and vernaculars, and they peppered their speech with elements of all of them. They did not seem to reflect the administration’s belief in a yawning gap between African and white mentalities (which, presumably, was Mrs. Boddington’s point). As we saw in Chapter 7, their interpretation work sometimes reflected—rather than translated—African ideas about supernatural powers. They possibly understood Africans a little too well. Moreover, like the Boer-dominated Apostolic Faith Mission, which also came in for state attack at this time, the self/African-taught speakers had no direct stake in the administration’s project for the territory.36 There was no utility in these whites’ language acquisition. They had not learned vernaculars in order to further state policy or to educate the “natives.” They had not even learned them in order to be able to translate them into another language. (Indeed, as we have seen, they were not very good at this.) They had learned them simply to converse with the Africans around them.37 Given the growing membership of autonomous “native political organizations,”38 free conversation between Africans and whites of suspect loyalty was not what the state needed. Moreover, these “already-fluent” whites had acquired their language skills in mutual interaction with African speakers, acting both as teachers of Afrikaans and as students of the local languages and treating their teachers/pupils as individuals with whom they had personal relationships. This disquietingly inverted the view of Africans as in tutelage—and en masse—which underpinned official thinking.39 By 1925, the uncontrolled, unsanctioned, and unstructured acquisition of vernacular languages no longer seemed appropriate to the administration’s “development” project for the territory. More systematic control over language learning was required. The state wanted to move away from ad hoc use of Africans as language teachers and poor whites as interpreters. The question arose as to whether the vernaculars should be taught in the white schools. To those who favored the idea of putting vernacular languages on the school curriculum, the advantages seemed obvious. It could greatly enhance the potential pool of NAD employees. When, in 1926, the headmaster of Plumtree School in Matabeleland asked whether his pupils might sit the Civil Service Native Languages Examination, the local NC agreed that every encouragement should be given to Rhodesian scholars, the majority of whom are Rhodesian born, to thus fit themselves for an opening in the Civil Service of Rhodesia.40

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The principle of schoolboys learning the vernacular was endorsed by both the NAD and the director of education, although the latter’s enthusiasm waned over subsequent years in the face of logistical difficulties and amounted to the comment that “it won’t lead to any broken heads (or hearts, anyhow).”41 Apart from the potential recruitment benefits to the NAD, teaching vernaculars in the schools was thought likely to improve labor relations. Taylor’s successor, H.M.G. Jackson, declared in 1928, “In my opinion the idea is excellent. If a practical and practicable method of teaching our Native languages could be evolved the benefit to ‘young Rhodesia’ would be undoubted, if only through eliminating misunderstandings which commonly attend intercourse with Natives.”42 However, the Civil Services exam, with its important oral component, was thought inappropriate for schoolboys. The CNC, Herbert Taylor, wary of the “already fluent,” emphasized that tests should be open only to those who had actually been taught the subject in school, as otherwise it would simply mean that lads who had acquired a knowledge of the languages in their homes, from tenants, from servants and so forth would use the Government examination as a vehicle to obtain a certificate43

Moreover, he suspected that the exam, although not beyond a schoolboy’s scope in depth of language knowledge, might be too broad in “range,” Presumably, he meant by this that it might require a detailed knowledge of African society, which was precisely what teaching in schools was expected to prevent. By 1930, Jackson was setting a Junior Certificate Exam for Plumtree School. It was to have no oral component and to follow the heavily grammatical pattern set by South Africa’s school exams in Xhosa, Zulu, SeSotho, and SeTswana.44 Despite the NAD’s enthusiasm, the proposal that schools should teach the vernacular was far from universally accepted. There were simple logistical difficulties, including the basic question of which languages should be taught. Moreover, the putative benefits to labor relations were dismissed on the one hand because employees were likely to be migrant workers speaking a “non-Rhodesian” vernacular45 and on the other because employers were likely to be new settlers, coming “from outside the borders of this Colony.”46 However, the largest practical difficulty was the lack of acceptable teachers or teacher trainers. At Plumtree, a local missionary taught the boys SiNdebele, but traditionally it had been Africans who taught whites to speak the vernaculars. In 1928, T. G. Standing, of the Rhodesian Teachers Association, canvased the NAD about whether any of its officials might be prepared to teach in the high schools.47 L. M. Foggin, the director of education, was dismissive of this idea,48 and even CNC Jackson, though keen on the principle, pointed out that NAD officials were frequently reposted and that there would be no guarantee of continuity of tuition. He suggested that Standing should try to find someone within the Rhodesian Teachers Association, with the NAD taking on a kind of consultative role.49 However, beyond the Plumtree experiment, nothing came of the proposal. Nowhere

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offered suitable linguistic training to white teachers. The nearest universities were in the Union of South Africa, and they had their own vernaculars to study. These logistical difficulties were closely related to the political problems that had given rise to the issue in the first place. They went to the heart of the question of what kind of interactions there should be between whites and Africans. In 1933, the Legislative Assembly member L. Cripps praised a book for its “understanding of the native mind, of which there is not too much known by the public at large.”50 If the entire white population were to be taught vernacular languages, then the boundary between “native experts” and the “public at large” would become blurred, as would the boundary between Africans and whites. The NAD’s claim to authority derived largely from its monopoly on insight into the “native mind,” acquired on the job. As we will see in Chapter 12, this authority was already under pressure from the South, where ethnographers and social scientists were being given a growing role in formulating “native policy.”51 Missionaries, too, were flaunting their expertise in the pages of the Native Affairs Department Annual while themselves struggling to contain the African teachers and evangelists whom they had nurtured, such as Simbini Nkomo or Thompson Samkange, who displayed both textual and oral language abilities. The NAD needed to protect its monopoly, from foreign academics and local missionaries as well as from poor whites and mission-educated Africans. Boundaries of containment were crumbling all around it. Jackson’s successor, C. L. Carbutt, would have no truck with the idea of high school teaching. He set out his reasons in a letter to the director of education in 1933.52 While he conceded that early tuition might be advantageous for NAD recruitment purposes, he did not see that this justified the appointment of an entire staff of teachers. His recruits, he insisted, “are generally men of superior education with a special bent for Native work” or, alternatively, had a special gift for languages, which work in the NAD seemed ready to utilize. In either event, no case could be made for school tuition. However, the crux of the CNC’s argument comes at the end of his letter. He observed at the outset that learning a foreign language “opens the door to the culture of another Nation.” It was this that had made such study valuable to his department. However, it was also precisely why it should not be taught irresponsibly to all and sundry: “a knowledge of Native culture has a sociological value to those concerned with Native policy etc. It is not otherwise edifying.” The very act of learning an African vernacular was thus presented as a potentially polluting experience: “I deprecate the introduction of any innovation which may tend towards increasing association between the Natives in their present state and our young children.” Moreover, the additional threat of introducing such study as a school subject was that it would encourage young people to take undesirable steps to improve their school performance: “A boy (or girl) studying to pass an examination in a Native language would, I think be tempted to perfect his knowledge by association with Natives.” This, in a nutshell, was the entire problem with language acquisition. It was best learned from Africans, which reversed the acceptable power relationship between

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tutor and taught and, in the process, exposed white children to the African worldview. To deny that this was a threat was to undermine the principle of vernacular education for Africans “in an atmosphere of English,”53 which was supposed to transform the whole African into a person ready to join white society.54 What could work one way might, logically, work the other way, too. If vernaculars were taught in Southern Rhodesian schools, the problems of the “already fluent” might not be circumvented but exacerbated. The boundaries of “difference” might become blurred. Too many whites would gain insights into African society, to the detriment of the NAD and to the detriment of “civilization.” The CNC’s fears betray the insecurity that had developed in his department over the preceding decade. The principle of high school teaching was abandoned, and no further attempts were made to teach white settlers local vernaculars. Although vernacular primers and grammatical exercises were produced for new settlers, they were not designed to encourage conversation with local people. An exercise in translating the phrase “It is difficult to get a really good kitchen boy. If you get such a one pay him good wages” was clearly designed to give advice to newcomers about how to behave, not a phrase that would be useful in everyday interactions with native speakers of the language.55 Instead, steps were being taken to gain control over the vernaculars and to contain them as the exclusive possession of those for whom the knowledge would be “edifying.” There was a kind of laager mentality within the NAD, which addressed its insecurity by trying to erect boundaries around “native culture” and impose its own systems of order on what it corralled. A first step in this process was linguistic standardization. This involved an imposition of spatial order: the mapping of languages into definable places and onto defined people. There was a symbolic link, from a white viewpoint, between disorderly peoples, ethnographically defined, and the language that mapped onto the ethnographic group. For example, “The Shona,” as an ill-defined people, mapped onto “chiShona,” a language of many variations, and both mapped onto a set of social systems that were changing even as the Native Affairs Department Annual (NADA), Charles Bullock, and F.W.T. Posselt tried to describe them.56 Tidying up the language was a means of homogenizing the people, placing symbolic boundaries on them and their behavior, and signaling the limits of order. Whereas the “already fluent,” whether white or African, acquired language in a disorderly and unbounded way, slipping between tongues, the classification of these languages represented symbolic and contained order. Real life may have been messy, but it was possible to open Posselt’s 1927 Survey of the Native Tribes of Southern Rhodesia and find a nice, neat map, with clear boundary lines, setting out the “approximate distribution of tribes and languages in Southern Rhodesia.” The map gained canonical status and was distributed in NADA and to all NCs. Standardizing the languages was a ruthless procedure. It was designed to exclude as much as to include. It set boundaries to knowledge by limiting what were accepted into the fold as “true” versions of the vernacular. For example, in 1934, a white clerk at the NC’s office in Chipinga, near Mt. Silinda, pointed out that “after a careful study of the Native Language papers sent to me … I find that there

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are many material differences between the language known as Chishona and the language, Chindau, in which I wish to be examined.”57 By that time, Peter Nielsen had taken over as NC Melsetter. He supported his clerk’s case that chiNdau was in many respects “entirely different” from the language defined as chiShona.58 This evidence from those who actually spoke the language was dismissed by the director of education, who replied crisply that “examinations are held in the Sindebele and Chishona languages only.”59 If the local Africans spoke something that was not covered in the exam, then that was their problem, not the administration’s. The state was concerned only that its NCs should have proficiency in the “approved” vernaculars. Linguistic standardization also required language rules: a “correct” grammar and orthography. The NAD lacked the necessary textual and grammatical expertise for this, and had to turn to the missions and the academics to supply it. A request was made in 1928 to C. M. Doke, erstwhile missionary and professor of phonetics and philology at Witwatersrand University, to unify the “Shona dialects.” Professor Doke’s work, which over the next four years addressed both orthography and language examinations, concentrated on the standardization of the written symbols to represent regional phonetic variations. His project was a textual rather than an oral exercise, and concerned with form and pronunciation rather than with meaning and culture. Members of the committee advising Doke squabbled about phonetics, orthography, and the grammatical principles underlying word division, but they paid surprisingly little attention to whether the language they were producing would actually be usable on a day-to-day basis.60 The final decisions about how the sounds of the language should be written were put in the hands of the linguists at the International Institute of African Languages and Culture in London: people who had never heard the language spoken by an African or had to issue a pass certificate with an African name written on it.61 The new orthography was never widely adopted, as it was expensive to convert typewriters and complicated to teach.62 Nonetheless, Doke’s involvement in standardizing a written version of chiShona was symptomatic of a shift in linguistic influence between the orally based NAD and the text-based missions. As “Wiri” Edwards, the long-standing NC of Mrewa district, wrote, rather huffily, in 1925, responding to criticism of a translation he had provided for the agricultural training school in Domboshawa, “The translation is quite clear to the natives here, I have given it to several to translate … I see no reason why the Principal should not make his own translation…. He may put it in the schoolmasters way, I have put it in the native.”63 Written versions followed different rules from those of everyday speech; they belonged to the white teachers rather than the African speakers. The view that language expertise was good if it aided effective communication with Africans was beginning to give way to the idea that language expertise was good if it was grammatically and orthographically correct. Mission texts and academic learning set the standards. At Mt. Silinda, the missionaries became less and less willing to ask Africans for help in language learning. Increasingly, they practiced conversation with each other: “Mr Kincheloe has passed the first

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examination, having done very well in the written part … we request Mr and Mrs Marsh to give him one hour three times per week to assist him in the study of Grammar and in conversation.”64 Bertram Barnes, too, downgraded interaction with Africans as a means of learning how to speak correctly. He did recommend that a learner of the vernacular “make the natives with whom he is in contact his instructors,” but this was only “in producing the sounds.” Moreover, for “scientific” knowledge of the sounds of the language, a course in phonetics was recommended.65 Both Africans and the remaining members of the old guard of NCs were squeezed out of the inner circle of “language experts” by this process. Africans were no longer the authorities on their own languages. Derek Peterson has shown that similar attempts by missionaries in Kenya to shore up a “standard” version of Gikuyu during the same period had only limited success. As Peterson puts it, “Grammar, orthodoxy, and syntax were never fixed in central Kenya, because everyone reworked vernacular language for different ends.”66 In Southern Rhodesia, too, the vernaculars were transforming at a rapid rate, as language enabled people to react to and establish interests in, changing circumstances. Chenjerai Shire has illustrated in detail how language could be used within African communities to define or exclude new urban and gender identities: how, for example, women who chose to live in town lost their social identity and acquired the objectifying prefix “ma-” and how people born in towns came to be known as mabhonirokisheni (“born in locations”).67 However, the state was not interested in African agency. Its language policies enforced an alliance between missions and administrators (represented by the Doke Commission and the Mashonaland Quarterly) to create the illusion of control over African “development.” The “expert” linguists simply refused to recognize the vibrant and fluid transformations of the spoken vernaculars. Those who were reworking the vernaculars outside the official framework were not recognized or were actively derided as “unscientific.” To police this, the system whereby whites gained access to these “approved” versions of the vernaculars had to be tightened up. The reliance on the “already fluent” and on-the-job learning had allowed too many “unapproved” versions of the vernaculars to flourish. Moreover, there was no means of ensuring that NAD employees were proficient in the “approved” vernaculars. The Civil Services Native Languages Examination, while it enhanced promotion prospects, had not been compulsory.68 So, from 1926, pay and promotion became dependent on having passed the Languages Exam as well as the Native Customs and Administration Exam and the Civil Service Law Examination. The standardization of language was part of generalized move toward a more rule-bound NAD, relying less and less on the initiative of its officers and more on its strict definitions of “development” policy and “native law and custom.”69 With a new generation of NCs, overwhelmed by paperwork and frequently reposted to new districts, came the pressure for standardization in all fields—judicial, administrative, and linguistic.70 After 1926, there was an initial probationary period of two years, which can be extended to five years, during which an officer is compelled to qualify for appointment to the Fixed

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Establishment by passing the necessary examinations; if he fails to qualify he has to leave the Service. Moreover, after his first two years of probationary period he receives no increments of salary.71

The language exams were to be only in chiShona and siNdebele, as defined by the examiners. As one MLA commented, If you are appointed to a certain district and study the language of that district and become proficient, then you may be disqualified because you are examined in a language of some other district, and cannot become a Native Commissioner.72

We can see why the Chipinga clerk was dismayed that he was not to be examined in chiNdau. It quickly became clear that, with careers dependant on success in the exams, there was a need for a clear syllabus and a system of training. Although certain dictionaries and grammars were recommended, there was no actual syllabus or course of study for the Native Languages Exam until 1934.73 In that year, the written part of the examination was handed over the University of South Africa (Unisa), which conducted correspondence courses.74 The written exam was no longer a Southern Rhodesian Civil Service Exam, but a public exam of Unisa, for the Lower Diploma in Bantu Studies, Course I, and was recognized by the government of Southern Rhodesia as one of the qualifying exams for the Civil Service. The syllabus was set by the university, and half the paper dealt with grammatical-phonological issues. Candidates had to achieve a minimum of 40 percent in this half of the paper. The rest of the exam involved free translation and composition, based on set texts decided on by the university. The set texts were all mission texts, including, for the first chiShona exams, translations of the New Testament. “Wiri” Edwards, who had been approved as an examiner for the university, resigned in disgust when he saw the reading list, stating, “I do not feel that papers set on any of these books would be a fair test for candidates in Chishona.”75 He was replaced by a missionary, Bertram Barnes. Proficiency in this written exam could be earned without any direct contact with Africans and with no need to engage with African modes of thought. In later years, this Christianized, text-based vernacular, which developed apart from the spoken language, came to be known as “ChiBaba,” or “Shona spoken by missionaries,” and could “be discounted by native Shona speakers.”76 While the written exam passed into the hands of the missionaries and academics, the oral exam remained as a Civil Service exam in the hands of the NAD. Unlike the written test, the oral test had nothing to do with Christianity but continued to reflect the legal and administrative issues that mattered to the NAD.77 However, these, too, were undergoing a process of standardization and homogenization, which reinforced the “rule-bound” nature of test. The combined effect of the homogenizing of the languages, the development of a standardized grammar and orthography, the requirement of a language qualification, and the introduction of

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a set syllabus for the written language tests, was to turn official language expertise into a rule-bound, book-learned skill. The days of the enterprising trader or farmer’s son who made a career for himself on the basis of his language skills and his ease in African society had been eradicated. Africans had been entirely excluded from the process of creating an “approved” vernacular. Systems had been put in place to stop those with “unsanctioned” knowledge from being able to make use of it. The NAD had created a firewall between itself and the fluid, chaotic, unbounded world of real language use, over which it had no control. During a difficult period for the NAD between 1925 and 1935, language provided a metaphor to express a range of insecurities about African autonomy and white dependency on Africans. It came to stand for the entire “unedifying” culture of African society, from which whites should be kept apart. This, in turn, was an inversion of a deeper insecurity, which was that Africans were too easily absorbing and appropriating elements of white culture—labor skills, Christianity, literacy, and language—and using them in autonomous, unsanctioned ways. Language also provided a focus for action. It was possible to create the illusion of control and containment of African culture by rationalizing and categorizing the languages, turning them into Christian text, and fencing them in with examinations. The NAD decided that white citizens should not be taught to converse with Africans. Instead, it created languages that were for talking at Africans, not with them.78 This was language for organizational, not inspirational, purposes; it was language to control people rather than language in which they could express their wisdom and their fears.79 In the mouths of living speakers, however, language is not bounded. By trying to claim the local vernaculars as government property, the administration simply cut itself off from the people it would rule. As events over the next 30 years would demonstrate, it had made itself even more vulnerable than before. NOTES 1. This chapter draws heavily on material published in Diana Jeater, “Speaking Like a Native: Vernacular Languages and the State in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1935,” Journal of African History 42, no. 3 (2001): 449–68. 2. SN Bulawayo to CNC, 5 March 1923, N3/28/7. 3. Marginal note for the Premier (also Min. of Native Affairs) by his Secretary, written on a letter from CNC to Sec. to Minister of Native Affairs, 4 October 1923, N3/28/7. 4. See, for example, Bates to Smith, 23 March 1899 and 23 September 1901, UN3/2/1/2 and 3. 5. Bertram H. Barnes, “A Campaign against Babel: Unification of the Dialects of Mashonaland,” Native Affairs Department Annual 6 (1928), 45–46; William Grant, Native Labour Commissioner, Chamber of Mines, Johannesburg, to Frank Rhodes, Acting Administrator, Southern Rhodesia, “Suggestions for Mine Managers on the Treatment of Natives,” 18 September 1894, A15/1/1. 6. Tudor G. Trevor, “Native Education from an Employer’s Point of View,” Native Affairs Department Annual 5 (1927): 99.

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7. Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 63. 8. Interview with Mr. John Bill, April 2002; see also R v. Ernst Theodor Ferdinand Julius Angelbeck, 16 November 1911, S279, in which the accused stated, “I speak only kitchen kaffir and could not give the equivalent of that phrase in kaffir.” The magistrate who heard this case, incidentally, was Mr. John Bill’s father, David. 9. Trevor, “Native Education,” 98. 10. Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui, The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), 141. 11. Barnes, “A Campaign against Babel,” 45. 12. H.M.G.J. (sic), “On Interpretation and Mendacity,: Native Affairs Department Annual 4 (1926): 121. 13. Secretary, Dept. of Administrator [SDA] to His Honour the Administrator [HH], 5 January 1923, N3/2/7. 14. Sec. to CNC (H. J. Nanson) to CNC (Taylor), 31 March 1915. N3/14/5. 15. Interview with Mrs. Lillias Dorothy Madeline (“Madge”) Condy, February 1969, ORAL/CO1. 16. Responses to CNC’s circular to all Superintendents of Natives [SNs], 28 February 1923, N3/28/7. 17. SDA to HH, 5 January 1923; CNC to SDA, 16 January 1923; Resolution of the SNs’ Conference, copied by CNC to HH the Acting Administrator, 10 September 1923, N3/28/7. See also Diana Jeater, “‘Their Idea of Justice Is So Peculiar’: Southern Rhodesia 1890–1910,” in The Moral World of Law, ed. Peter Coss, 178–95. Past and Present Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178–95. 18. Treasurer to HH, 10 January 1923, N3/28/7. 19. SDA to CNC, 27 September 1923, N3/28/7. 20. Acting Secretary to the Treasury to CNC, 17 October 1923, N3/28/7. 21. Debates of the Legislative Assembly of Southern Rhodesia, 13 June 1927, col. 1361. 22. H.M.G.J., “On Interpretation and Mendacity,” 121. 23. SDA to HH, 5 January 1923, N3/28/7. 24. Ethel Tawse Jollie, The Real Rhodesia (London: Hutchinson, 1924), 262. 25. Debates, 13 May 1925, col. 418 (emphasis added). 26. Debates, 13 May 1925, col. 422 (emphasis added). 27. Debates, 13 May 1925, col. 419. 28. See, for example, Debates, 13 May 1925, Mr. Gilfillan, col. 419; Charles Eickhoff, cols. 420, 423. 29. H.M.G. Jackson, “Indirect Rule in Southern Rhodesia,” Native Affairs Department Annual 3 (1925): 57. 30. NC Hartley to CNC, 28 February 1924, S138.150. 31. Murray Cairns Steele, “The Foundations of a ‘Native’ Policy: Southern Rhodesia, 1923–1933” (Ph.D. diss., Simon Fraser University, 1972). 32. By this time, South African Dutch had emerged clearly as a language in its own right, Afrikaans. 33. F. G. Elliott was transferred to be NC, Melsetter District, in 1915 to keep an eye on the large “Dutch” community there. Interview with Mrs. Madge Condy, conducted by D. Hartridge, February 1969, Oral/CO1. 34. Donal Lowry, “‘White Woman’s Country’: Ethel Tawse Jollie and the Making of White Rhodesia,” Journal of Southern African Studies 23, no. 2 (1997): 269.

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35. SDA to HH, 5 January 1923, N3/28/7. I think we may safely assume that “life” here is intended to imply “working life.” 36. David Maxwell, “Historicizing Christian Independency: The Southern African Pentecostal Movement, c.1908–60,” Journal of African History 40, no. 2 (1999): 255. 37. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 399, notes how translation entails expropriation and a desire to possess another’s language in a way that simply understanding it does not. 38. CNC’s Annual Report, 1923. 39. Compare Paul S. Landau, “Explaining Surgical Evangelism,” “Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith,” Journal of African History 37, no. 2 (1996): 279. 40. NC Plumtree to SN Bulawayo, 3 February 1926, S138/26. 41. L. M. Foggin, Director of Education, to CNC Jackson, 1 March 1928, S138/26. 42. CNC to T. G. Standing, Rhodesian Teachers Association, 9 March 1928. Taylor had expressed a similar hope in 1926: CNC to Secretary, Dept. of Colonial Secretary, 9 February 1926, S138/26. 43. CNC to Sec., Dept. of Colonial Secretary, 9 February 1926, S138/26. 44. Director of Education [L. M. Foggin] to H.M.G. Jackson, 1 April 1930; Jackson to Foggin, 4 April 1930, S138/26. (I do not have any evidence that the required script was ever actually delivered by Jackson.) 45. Barnes, “A Campaign against Babel,” 46; CNC to Director of Education, 30 May 1933, S138/26. 46. CNC to Director of Education, 30 May 1933, S138/26. 47. T. G. Standing, Acting General Secretary, Rhodesian Teachers Association, to CNC, 27 February 1928, S138/26. 48. Director of Education to CNC, 1 March 1928. Foggin had also pointed out to Standing that “proficiency in Native languages does not necessarily connote a taste for teaching them.” Standing to CNC, 27 February 1928, S138/26. 49. CNC to T. G. Standing, Esq., 9 March 1928, S138/26. 50. L. Cripps to CNC Library, 24 April 1933, S138/26. 51. Charles T. Loram, “The Claim of the Native Question upon Scientists,” South African Journal of Science 18 (1921–1922): 99–109; Brahm David Fleisch, “Social Scientists as Policy Makers: E. G. Malherbe and the National Bureau for Educational and Social Research, 1929–1943,” Journal of Southern African Studies 21, no. 3 (1995): 349–72; Sue Krige, “Segregation, Science and Commissions of Enquiry: The Contestation over Native Education Policy in South Africa, 1930–36,” Journal of Southern African Studies 23, no. 3 (1997): 491–506. 52. CNC to Director of Education, 30 May 1933, S138/26. 53. H. A. Cripwell, assistant NC, “SiNtu Sounds and Symbols,” Native Affairs Department Annual 6 (1928): 52. 54. Compare Fabian, Language and Colonial Power, 80. 55. J. A. O’Neil, S.J., A Shona Grammar: Zezuru Dialect (Cape Town: Longmans, Green, 1935), 183. See also Diana Jeater, “The Way You Tell Them: Language, Ideology and Development in Southern Rhodesia,” African Studies 55, no. 2 (1996): 1–15. 56. Compare Fabian, Language and Colonial Power, 79: languages were approached by missionaries in the Congo as “the possessions of territorially defined groups (so that linguistic, ethnic and geographic labels could become interchangeable).” 57. Clerk to NC, Chipinga to CNC, 29 March 1934, S1542/E8. The NC’s office was located at Chipinga from the 1910s.

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58. NC, Chipinga to CNC, 29 March 1934, S1542/E8. Nielsen, you may recall, had cited his knowledge of the vernacular as his credentials for publicly intervening in the debate about policy toward Africans. 59. Director of Education to J. R. Duncan, Esq., Nat. Dept., Chipinga, 11 April 1934, S1542/E8. 60. See correspondence about these matters in the collection of Doke’s papers in the University of Zimbabwe Library, Harare, plus letters from Thompson at Mt. Silinda, Barnes at Penhalonga, Louw at Morgenster, and Charles Bullock and W. E. Edwards of the NAD, in various files in NAZ. 61. Doke to Charles Bullock, 8 August 1929, BU 1/1/1. 62. However, the government did invest in a publishing a new dictionary that was issued to NCs: Bertram H. Barnes, A Vocabulary of the Dialects of Mashonaland in the New Orthography (London: Sheldon Press, 1932). 63. NC Mrewa to CNC, 2 March 1925; Private Correspondence, W. Edwards, ED6/2/1/1, fol. 260 (emphasis added; missing apostrophe in the original). 64. Report of Language Committee, 1928, UN 3/20/1/24/18. 65. Betram Barnes, notes on orthography and pronunciation, in Neil, A Shona Grammar. 66. Derek R. Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2004), 8. 67. Chenjerai Shire, “‘Men Don’t Go to the Moon’: Language, Space and Masculinities,” in Dislocating Masculinities: Comparative Ethnographies, ed. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, 147–58 (London: Routledge, 1993). 68. Failure to pass the examination had no effect on an employee until their salary reached £400 pa, after which the only effect was reduced increments. 69. NC, Goromonzi (E. G. Howman) to CNC, 8 March 1928, S138/26. 70. Steele, “The Foundations of a ‘Native’ Policy,” 53–65. 71. Secretary to Treasury, to Secretary Department of Internal Affairs, 22 December 1934, S1542/E8/1. 72. Mr. Robinson, Debates, 29 June, 1927, col. 2160. 73. CNC to E. C. Gutridge, BSA Police, Salisbury, 22 July 1930, S138/26. 74. Extensive correspondence on this new arrangement is in files S1542/E8/1 and S1542/E8/2. 75. Acting Registrar, UniSA, to Director of Education, Exams Branch, Salisbury, 3 August 1934, S1542/E8/1. 76. J. C. Kumbirai, “Shona Bible Translation: The Work of the Revd. Michael Hannan, S.J.,” Zambezia 7, no. 1 (1979): 61. 77. CNC to W. Edwards Esq., 16 November 1934; CNC to W. Edwards Esq., 26 November 1934, S1542/E8/1. 78. As late as 1979, Fortune could note that the standard Shona dictionary had not been produced from “within the Shona world view.” G. Fortune, “Shona Lexicography,” Zambezia 7, no. 1 (1979): 41. 79. Compare Ali A. Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 128–46.

11 “I do not want the opinion of a native”: Native Law and Custom, 1920s

The retreat from translation, in favor of codification of an “expert” understanding, also began to affect the practice of law. The Native Affairs Department’s (NAD’s) legal powers were under a two-pronged attack. On the one hand, the Law Department wanted to wrest those powers out of NAD hands. The Law Department had once believed that “native law and custom” would atrophy in the face of a superior legal system. By the mid-1910s, it was clear that African systems of administering justice, based on compensation and local definitions of due process, remained robust. The Law Department had begun to put pressure on the NAD to follow through its long-standing hegemonic project and to insist on approved procedures in its hearings: “We cannot go back to Native methods but must attempt to educate them up to ours.”1 Hard-earned knowledge about African laws and legal processes was therefore losing its currency within the state. Meanwhile, on the other hand, African actions were rendering that hard-earned knowledge obsolete. With changing social circumstances, African interpretations of their laws, about inheritance and bridewealth in particular, had begun to change. Their interest in using white arbiters to settle those matters had also begun to wane. Consequently, by the 1920s, the NAD was no longer interested in learning about African legal practices or in applying them in translated forms. It was interested in validating its existing expertise. As well as continuing to use their own languages, Africans had also continued to use their own systems of justice. In 1925, H.M.G. Jackson observed that “the natives in their reserves regulate their lives and compose their disagreements largely as they did before our intrusion. Immeasurably the larger number of their disputes are settled by meetings of the vakuru as heretofore.”2 Officials of an earlier era had hoped that the experience of having their cases heard by white officials would encourage Africans to adopt “habits of obedience to the Law” and that this would be the first step towards the “advances of civilization.”3 By the 1920s, however, it was

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clear that, where possible, Africans continued to operate the law according to local principles and practices that were not approved by the Law Department. To white adjudicators, African concepts of law seemed as robust—and as alien—in the 1920s as they had seemed in the 1890s. The law cases that were legitimately heard by local adjudicators, whether African authorities or NAD officials, generally concerned disputes over compensation, bridewealth, and inheritance. They were not, in other words, cases arising out of market transactions. They represented disputes about relationships between people rather than disputes about property. The goods under dispute were widely scattered between people involved in a network of relationships that these goods themselves helped to define. The question of “ownership” was not what was being contested as much as the rights to make claims on property. Consequently, as we saw in Chapter 5, the issues that were relevant to the case were often complex and not confined to the transactions between the parties in dispute. Native commissioners (NCs) could find themselves at a loss to understand, and relied instead on local advice: ‘Their decisions often seemed most unreasonable from a European point of view, and yet it must be admitted that they generally seemed to give entire satisfaction to the litigants’.4 An article in the Native Affairs Department Annual (NADA) in 1925 recounted the story of three prisoners awaiting trial and their explanations of why they had not tried to escape from custody when given the opportunity. This was offered as evidence of their oddness and of the difference between their ideas and white concepts of law.5 It seems that, after three decades of routine court hearings, some whites in the region were beginning to question whether they had understood anything at all. Two officials in Northern Rhodesia presented their thoughts on “Native Customary Law” to a missionary conference in 1925; their paper was subsequently published in South Africa and noted by NAD officials in Southern Rhodesia.6 A legal challenge to land reservation in Southern Rhodesia had revolved around the “native conception of land tenure” and a denial that “such a thing existed; yet,” argued the paper, “it does, and awaits study.” The fact that there was no easy way to translate this concept into English and that no English word could be found to encapsulate it did not mean it did not exist. The authors, it seems, were proposing that the African worldview had yet to be investigated: after 35 years of white occupation, routine translation, and continuous court hearings by NCs, something as fundamental as land tenure was still “awaiting study.” Indeed, they indicated, all the categories of translation that had been used to hear such cases were inadequate: Are we in a position to say of so seemingly simple a thing as the ownership of an ox, that we know exactly what that ownership means, that we understand its implications and consequences, that we could give a clear judicial explanation of what the Native mind means by that phrase?

The routine translation of such words was being challenged by the argument that Africans had a fundamentally different way of thinking—the “native mind”—

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which had yet to be investigated and which imbued all their transactions in the courts. As well as maintaining their own systems of jurisprudence, Africans across the territory also maintained their own judicial procedures, which remained remarkably resilient against attempts to displace them. In particular, plaintiffs continued to choose their own arbiters. Such arrangements had no legal standing from the state’s perspective, although some were tolerated more than others. African teachers and evangelists, who had significant standing in their local communities, were strictly forbidden to hear cases. In 1913, the Acting NC Goromonzi had complained bitterly about a local evangelist who had sent a man and his wife to the NC’s office, with a covering letter of introduction and his views on their case: As a matter of principle, I object most strongly being called upon to settle any case in which Missionaries, especially native, have attempted and failed … I do not want the opinion of a native in the matter.7

The CNC took his concerns directly to the Bishop of Mashonaland, asking him “to instruct your missionaries, both European and Native, to desist from settling any native disputes, as this is purely the work of a Native Commissioner or Magistrate appointed by law.” The bishop sent a groveling apology.8 Chiefs, however, continued to be tolerated as arbiters, not least because it was impossible to stop them. However, there were efforts to make it plain that the NC also had authority to hear the cases, and that the chiefs’ rulings had no legal standing: “Chiefs do settle disputes by arbitration [i.e., not by law], and undoubtedly will continue to do so, whether we recognise it or ignore it. Such settlements are only arbitrations by the consent of both parties, and this must be made clear.”9 Legal civil jurisdiction was not formally granted to chiefs until 1937 in a move that was as much about removing such powers from NAD officers as it was about granting them to Africans.10 The choice of whether to use a white court was influenced by local circumstances. In Melsetter district, it is remarkable how rarely the local Africans used the textbased legal systems of the white courts in their struggles with each other. This is not because members of the urban middle classes were unwilling or unable to make use of such systems: the “head servant” of the vet, Mr. Ferguson, had employed Daniel Macnee Stanley, a local attorney, to defend him on an assault charge in 1917. However, the defendant stated, “I am a stranger in this district.”11 As we saw in Chapter 5, there was no ready embrace of these modes of argument among the local educated, political classes. Derek Peterson has persuasively argued that “texts helped to create realities in the real world of African political life.”12 Yet in Melsetter district, it seems that the influence of the mission on both young and old, combined with the prevalence of waged labor, meant that there was little relative rhetorical advantage to be gained from drawing on texts or from claims to modernity.13 Moreover, when local people did take cases to the police or the NC, this was not necessarily an indication that they acknowledged or preferred the logic of white

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adjudicators. As we saw in Chapter 5, what Africans in the 1900s understood white courts to be about and what the NC understood did not necessarily match up. This trend had continued through the 1910s. It was evident that local people were not comfortable with the legal procedures found in the magistrate’s court. The NC, Melsetter, noted in 1914 that they “are often bewildered at the formalities of a Court.”14 However, it seems that Africans were not so much “bewildered” by the white courts as working with a different concept of how to behave and assess evidence in a court. As those courts failed to recognize their priorities, they ceased to embrace them. The numbers taking cases to the NC dried down to a trickle in the 1920s. Nonetheless, for African plaintiffs, the NCs’ courts could sometimes be a useful weapon in their arsenal. The meaning of the event was less important than its effective outcome. The number of cases heard in Melsetter district declined steeply in the 1920s, but NCs elsewhere still heard plenty of cases. This was especially common at times when economic pressures led people to pull in outstanding compensation, bridewealth, or inheritance debts. So, for example, in 1922, a year of famine, economic slump, and sharply falling wages, CNC Herbert Taylor noted in his annual report that “the NC, Charter, reports that many decisions by chiefs and headmen are appealed against.”15 Clearly, people were continuing to fight cases even after they had been given rulings in an attempt to find an arbiter who would support their claim. Taylor emphasized that “the demand of the native for law and equity should not be looked upon as a trivial and negligible thing, and the study of native law and customs is as important for officials as ever.” However, the more that NCs attempted to engage with “native law and customs,” the more they found themselves in conflict with the Law Department. The early 1920s saw relationships between the NAD and the Law Department begin to fester. Locally acquired knowledge was mistrusted by the Law Department, which wanted to see clear legal principles and procedures being applied in all court hearings. Attempts to use African definitions of correct legal procedure, even in civil cases, met with exasperation from Law Department. Back in 1914, the attorney general had complained that Africans did not abide strictly by the rules of evidence, but proffered opinions, hearsay, and the “surrounding gossip” of a case. African ideas of due process and appropriate testimony were seen as a mixture of mendacity and naivety by the Law Department, which could not take them seriously without calling into question the fundamental principles underpinning its own practice of law. There were squabbles throughout the 1920s between the departments, because NCs tended to accept African methods when hearing African cases. The NCs were criticized for their attitudes toward procedure and for their extensive claims to jurisdiction. The head of government, Robert Moffat, echoed the earlier comments of the attorney general when in December 1919 he expressed himself unhappy about NAD court procedures, accusing them of a “want of care” and a readiness to admit hearsay evidence and evidence that was “clearly inadmissable under certain well-defined principles of law.” He also expressed concern that adequate written records were not being kept.16

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Soon after this, there was an extended—and frequently ill-tempered—disagreement between the attorney general and the NAD over appropriate courts for civil cases between Africans (“kraal cases”) in urban areas, where both magistrates and superintendents of natives (SNs) claimed jurisdiction. The SNs argued that their right to hear these cases bestowed authority on them in African eyes, that it was cheaper for the state, and, perhaps most important, that the procedures were easier for Africans to understand.17 As we have seen, these procedural similarities between the SNs’ courts and chiefly courts did not indicate a real engagement with African systems of justice; nor were they meant to. The magistrate’s courts, however, had almost no procedural similarities at all. Cases were focused on specific litigants rather than the wider network of relationships in which the cases made sense. While insisting on forensic proof and limiting evidence to independent eyewitnesses, the whites meantime ignored African evidence of acceptable proof—payment of compensation, the presenting of a token, or the testimony of a diviner during a properly conducted ritual. Africans had little regard for white judicial systems that allowed so many miscarriages of justice, and white magistrates felt much the same about what they called “native law and custom.” As attitudes hardened, there were few incentives for NCs to attempt to bridge the divide. Perceived injustices were not only procedural. As we saw in Chapter 10, white courts could be ambiguous in their use of language. By the 1920s, this was attracting the concern of missionaries. An article in NADA by “A.B.” (presumably Alfred Burbridge) argued that ignorance of the fact that African speakers “use the verb ‘to be’ with the meaning ‘to participate of ’” had led to “violation of justice by the superior race.”18 Two years later, Bertram Barnes, another missionary with a deep interest in linguistics, noted in NADA that language skills were important for NCs not only in applying justice but also in explaining it: “Sound and deep knowledge of native dialects in their variety is required for the important work of … making the native see the justice of the system under which he is governed.”19 However, this injunction came at precisely a time when the NAD was retreating from attempts to explain and translate their fundamental notions to Africans in the vernaculars. While NCs retreated from trying to explain their own notions of law, they also retreated from attempting to understand African notions. The study of “native law and custom” continued, but it was increasingly regarded as a fixed and archaic system rather than as a living and developing practice. Writing in NADA in 1924, Guy Taylor argued that “native law and native custom, gradually evolved during the course of centuries, are exactly suited to the requirements of the native in his natural environment.”20 The same year, “Wiri” Edwards similarly argued that bridewealth payments were “a custom from the beginning of time” and that nothing, most especially not legislation, would do much to change it.21 Although Taylor and Edwards were aware that important forms of contract, such as bridewealth, were undergoing transformation, they interpreted this as the corruption of a natural state rather than the rational response of contracting parties to changing situations. Tagart and Macdonnell similarly interpreted changes as the consequence of white intervention from above—“Native customs adopted and acted

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upon by our courts insensibly receive modification in the process”—rather than the product of African agency. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, transformations in bridewealth practices between 1914 and 1926 were far more affected by struggles of rural patriarchs to protect their position than they were by the 1917 Natives Marriages Ordinance (NMO).22 Yet despite his own evidence (regarding fathers’ rights to children) that Africans were changing their practices to meet changing situations, Edwards still believed that the customs were an ancient and endangered artifact.23 By the 1920s, then, the state had abandoned its hopes that “native law and custom” would atrophy in the face of a superior legal system. Instead of hoping to prevail over African legal systems, elements within the state were becoming alarmed that, in urban areas and on mission stations, these old systems of social control would disappear, with nothing to take their place.24 People whose interests in the past had seemed quaint and possibly not in the best interests of Africans—“Dear Edwards, Why not let the native Customs die a decent death instead of trying to perpetuate them”25—now appeared as valuable founts of knowledge. As we saw in Chapter 7, the regular suggestion that the laws should be written down and codified became a matter of more urgent concern by 1920, as the old guard retired. The difficulty with codification was the diversity of practices that constituted “native law and custom” within the territory. Responding to queries from the administrator’s office about codification, Herbert Taylor observed that the project had always been postponed, “in the hope that in the course of time a certain uniformity would become evident in the many divergent laws and customs which obtain amongst the natives in different parts of the Territory.”26 By the 1920s, the NAD was losing the belief that such universal principles might emerge—but some members were wondering whether legislation might impose them. Edwards felt not; regarding bridewealth, he felt that this was a matter that most Native Commissioners have at one time or another given serious thought to, but the difficulties have appeared to be so unsurmountable [sic], that most have given up trying to find a solution, and have left it to time and the advance of civilisation to bring the change.27

The NC Gwanda, by contrast, could say about the terms of the 1917 NMO that “with enlightenment and economic growth they will gradually become more or less consolidated into universal customs for the whole race.”28 The universal observance of a single “native law” was not the sort of “enlightenment” or “transition” that the resident commissioner had had in mind in 1904 when he advised against the “stereotyping a state of law and custom which is naturally in a state of transition,”– but it was preferable to the collapse of social order that others feared.29 As we saw in Chapter 7, the codification project was abandoned. However, 1922 saw the launch of the Native Customs Examination, followed the next year by the launch of NADA. Between them, they indicated that Africans were no longer to be regarded as the approved source of information on “native law and custom.”

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(This was despite the fact that some NCs were still trying to gather data from them, even in Melsetter district. Meredith’s sterling efforts of the 1890s seemed to go unnoticed by his 1921 successor, E. C. Kenny, who sent Edwards information about inheritance laws only “in so far as I can gather in these parts.”30) Unlike the language exams, the Native Law and Custom Exam did, at least initially, require some interactions with Africans for the candidate to succeed. There was no textbook for candidates interested in Ndebele society, and before 1927 there was only Bullock’s 1912 publication The Mashona, about which E. G. Howman had been “very scathing that Bullock should have written it so early when so little was known.”31 Bullock published a more anthropological study in 1927, but apart from this text and NADA, there were no written sources.32 The rubric advised that candidates “will be given the opportunity of showing knowledge of a local nature.” Nonetheless, a body of textual material quickly built up in NADA over the next few years. The first issue explained that it had been founded to meet demands for “knowledge on which to base the study of natives and native administration, and to lead to a more general appreciation of the problems which confront the country.”33 It also included model answers by Howman to the Native Customs Exam. NADA, of course, itself consisted largely of collections of “knowledge of a local nature,” most of it acquired some decades earlier. A copy of the syllabus for the Native Customs Exam from 1933 illustrates how, even in the mid-1930s, the examination showed no interest in cultures in transition.34 The second paper on the syllabus tested knowledge of “Legislation Affecting Natives.” The first paper tested “Native Laws, Customs and Superstitions.” Its topics covered much the same ground as had dominated the early investigations directed by Frank Rhodes back in the 1890s. “Superstitions” covered “Witchcraft” but no other beliefs. The candidates were advised that they “may be required to answer questions on the effect of legislative enactments on these laws, customs and superstitions.” However, they were not required to show how the profound social, political, and economic upheavals of the past decades might have had an impact. The “native experts” were no longer translating dynamic and ongoing African cultures into English words; they were studying “native mind.” This, they were sure, was not a topic on which Africans themselves were the experts.35 However, there was growing disagreement about who the real experts might be. Bullock, like Tagart and Macdonnell, was coming increasingly to feel that basic legal concepts needed revisiting and that, to do this, a knowledge of anthropology was required. Specifically, he argued that the administration of law by whites had overlooked the restitution aspects of African law, including spiritual reconciliation. Consequently, he urged the “application of principles based on scientific study of our primitive races, in regard … to their own conceptions of Native law.”36 The majority of NCs, on the other hand, felt that their hard-won knowledge was adequate in itself to provide an insight into the “native mind.” As the next chapter will demonstrate, during the 1920s, claims to expertise about the “native mind” became a battleground between administrators and academics, in a war where African lives were the weapons of choice.

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NOTES 1. Statement by the Attorney General on Rex v. Mjera @ Mganda, 17 March 1914, N3/15/6. 2. H.M.G. Jackson, “Indirect Rule in Southern Rhodesia,” Native Affairs Department Journal 3 (1925): 58. 3. CNC, Matabeleland, to NC, Sebungwe, 20 June 1906, N3/23/3. Compare V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (London: James Currey, 1988), 52. 4. Guy A. Taylor, “The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Enquiry,” Native Affairs Department Journal 2 (1924): 34. 5. “Mtwazi,” “The Bandit’s Psychology,” Native Affairs Department Journal 3 (1925): 43. 6. ESB Tagart and Sir Philip Macdonnell, “Native Customary Law in Northern Rhodesia—III,” The South African Outlook 55, no. 651 (August 1925): 188ff, S138/26. 7. Acting NC Goromonzi to CNC, 7 October 1913, N3/15/5. 8. CNC to Right Rev. F. H. Beaven, Bishop of Mashonaland, 23 October 1913; Bishop of Mashonaland to Mr. Taberer [CNC], 23 October 1913, N3/15/5. 9. CNC to SN, Sby, “Chiefs Hearing Civil Cases,” 18 September 1922, N3/15/1. 10. Jocelyn Alexander, personal communication, interprets the late 1930s as a period when the Law Department defined itself as “expert” on Africans and the law, in direct challenge to the NAD. 11. R v. Mahori, PE 159/1917, 10 September 1917, D3/3/6. Stanley, who was the town’s sanitary inspector as well as a lawyer, also appeared on behalf of African defendants in 1928 (bestiality) and 1930 (indecent assault). In the bestiality case, the defendant was employed by the magistrate, W. A. Brooks, who probably secured Stanley’s services on behalf of his employee: R v. Simaiju, OJ 56/1928, 6 November 1928, S1071. In the indecent assault case, the defendant was a “general servant,” and it is unclear who paid: R v. Penayi @ Rice, PE 17/1930, 20 May 1930, S1071. 12. Derek R. Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2004), 244. 13. The relative advantage of such rhetoric grew over time, as the “modernizing” state invested more in development projects. Jocelyn Alexander, for example, in her unpublished 1992 paper “Tradition, Modernization and Control: Local and National Disputes over Authority and Agrarian Policy in Zimbabwe,” demonstrates how, in the 1980s, claims by Chief Mutambara to farmland adjacent to Guhune communal area land were presented as part of the state’s land redistribution scheme, rather than as a claim about return to ancestral landholdings. The appeal to modernization tells us little about the content of the project, only that Mutambara was seeking the support of the state in pushing his claims. 14. NC, Melsetter, Annual Report (AR), 1914, N9/1/17. 15. AR, CNC, 1922. 16. CNC circular, based on circular from HH the Administrator, 2 January 1920, N3/23/1. 17. All the correspondence is in file N3/28/11. This last point was set out in CNC to Sec., Min. Native Affairs, 13 October 1923. Eventually it was ruled that while the SN had the right to try such cases, it was undesirable. He could, however, be appointed to the additional post of assistant magistrate to hear these cases in the magistrate’s court. 18. “A. B.,” Review of “How Natives Think” by Professor Lucien Levy-Bruhl and translated by Lilian A. Clare, Native Affairs Department Journal 4 (1926): 126.

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19. Bertram H. Barnes, “A Campaign against Babel: Unification of the Dialects of Mashonaland,” Native Affairs Department Annual 6 (1928): 46. 20. Guy A. Taylor, “The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Enquiry,” Native Affairs Department Annual 2 (1924): 34. 21. NC Edwards, Mrewa, to SN, Salisbury, 10 March 1924, ED6/2/1/1. 22. See Diana Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 197–226. 23. Replies to University of Cape Town questionnaire about Native Marriage Customs, 1 June 1926, ED 6/5/1. 24. AR, CNC, 1929. 25. Letter to Edwards, no date, but clearly early 1900s, ED 6/5/1/2 (question mark missing in the original). 26. CNC to SDA, 3 January 1920, N3/23/1. 27. NC Edwards, Mrewa, to SN, Salisbury, 10 March 1924, ED6/2/1/1. 28. NC, Gwanda to SN, Bulawayo, 28 July 1923, S138.47. 29. Southern African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC), 31 August 1904, §34,980. 30. Kenny to Edwards, 25 June 1923, ED 6/2/1/1, 2a, f237. 31. Charles Bullock, Mashona Laws and Customs (Cape Town: Juta Press, 1912); Interview with Roger Howman, Oral/HO3, 5. 32. As the CNC’s office had to keep pointing out, in response to inquiries, for example, CNC to J.S.W. Swiney Esq., 17 January 1927, S138/26; to E. C. Gutridge, 22 July 1930, S138/26; and to T. J. Trevor, 1 August 1934, S1542/E8/1. 33. N. H. Wilson, “Introduction,” Native Affairs Department Journal 1 (1925): 3. 34. Syllabus for Rhodesian Civil Service Customs and Administration Examination, 1933, S1542/E8/2. 35. In 1927, Mt. Silinda ceased to publish the English translation of its booklet on native customs, keeping the chiNdau version for teaching purposes. But why did Africans need a booklet explaining their own customs when the whites did not need it? Who was teaching what, to whom? Language Committee Report, Mt. Silinda, June 1927, UN3/20/1/22/11. 36. NC, Sinoia, to CNC, 16 February 1928, S138/26.

12 “The meddlesomeness of professors”: Theories of the “Native Mind,” 1923–1935

Anthropology was blossoming as a university discipline in both Britain and France in the period following the 1914–1918 war. In Britain, the anthropologists centered on the London School of Economics (LSE), and the International Institute of African Languages and Culture (IIAL&C) needed a good relationship with colonial government if they were to be allowed to develop their fieldwork. They promised, therefore, to make themselves useful. They defined anthropology as a science, thereby validating their claims to have a role in influencing British colonial policy: “the group of sciences classed under the general heading of anthropology can point the way to the better government of the indigenous peoples.”1 However, out at the periphery, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, the newly appointed professor to the newly created chair of social anthropology at the University of Cape Town (UCT), did not use the position to develop a policy advice unit. He knew that the discipline had to prove its worth as an applied science, but he was wary of intervening directly in “native policy” politics. Instead, he offered training in general anthropological principles to missionaries and officials. Radcliffe-Brown’s new discipline of “social anthropology,” which analyzed African societies in terms of contemporary interrelationships rather than speculating about their past configurations, was predicated on the assumption that “natives” represented a “problem.”2 Having developed a two-year B.A. in social anthropology, Radcliffe-Brown set out publicizing it in the region to the various missions and departments with responsibility for administration of Africans. In response to queries from Herbert Taylor, the Southern Rhodesian chief native commissioner (CNC), he emphasized that “the aim throughout is to treat the subject in such a way as will make it of most practical value to missionaries, civil servants, and others who have to deal with practical problems relating to the natives.”3 Meanwhile, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg launched vacation courses in “African Native Studies.” The publicity for the first such course in 1924 offered

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three topics of study: anthropology, philology, and “modern problems.” The last category promised to cover “Native Law and Administration; Education; Missionary; Social and Economic; Medical.”4 The exact nature of the “problems” that each of these topics was thought to represent was unclear. However, a clerk at the office of the NC, Belingwe, who a decade later attended a four-month course at UCT, was able to report that “it helps to make the young officer take an earlier and more serious interest in the Native and view him in the light of a growing problem rather than as a tax-paying unit.”5 What was the nature of this “problem”? Africans, like their white contemporaries, were engaging with modernity in many ways in this period. It was their proximity to (rather than their distance from) white culture that was causing unease. In South Africa, the anthropologists and social scientists wrestled with the question of whether African and white societies were part of a single culture and how to analyze the interactions between them: “It is from the Native in contact with the European that the Native problem arises, and there is a great dearth of studies of the Native in this relationship.”6 The NAD in Southern Rhodesia was dealing with similar challenges. In 1919, CNC Taylor noted that “signs are apparent that some of them have begun to realise that they constitute a considerable political, social and economic factor in the development of the country.” Taylor did not at first feel threatened by this. Rather, he considered that “occasional agitation is evidence of progress and enlightenment.”7 Two years later, however, he felt “compelled to admit” that “once the native becomes an active competitor he will be viewed with irritation and possibly with a good deal of hostility by certain classes of the European community.”8 By the end of the decade, his successor as CNC, H.M.G. Jackson, complained that “the problems of the Union of South Africa, especially those of the industrial sort, have their repercussions in this Colony, mainly in the formation of societies and associations and in (mostly) abortive attempts at religious separatism.”9 Taylor’s willingness to welcome signs of autonomous organization at the start of the 1920s had, within a decade, turned to alarm within the NAD. The NAD’s anxieties about how swiftly local Africans were passing the “milestones on the tedious journey from barbarism to civilisation” had many causes.10 The NAD was partly concerned at how successful Africans had become at organizing away from and in opposition to the white supervising gaze. The decade saw the flourishing of Zionist churches, which incorporated Christianity into indigenous faith systems, and Ethiopianist churches, which broke away from the missions as independent Christian faiths. From 1927 on, the South African Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union began recruiting effectively among migrant industrial workers in Harare and Bulawayo. By 1930, a vernacular press was beginning to emerge that, even under government license and supervision, represented African viewpoints far more effectively than the Mashonaland Quarterly had ever done.11 There was a sense within the NAD that direct rule systems based on the political realities of 40 years ago had lost their relevance for “detribalized natives.”12

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Meanwhile, the NAD was also struggling with the fact that it was changing its “native policy.” During the early 1920s, as we have seen, the government pushed the NAD toward a policy of “industrial” (i.e., manual) education, segregation, and Reserve development, and away from encouraging literary education and industrial waged work for Africans. The Department for Native Development was established, emphasizing small-scale agricultural production as the appropriate economic activity for Africans. This policy better suited the new settler government, which supported commercial farming interests above those of the industrial and mining sectors and wanted to limit the land used for African cultivation. So, Jackson observed, “One of the main aims of the Agriculturalist [Alvord] is to substitute intensive cultivation of a smaller area in place of the extensive … cultivation of a wide area.”13 Moreover, even the industrial and mining sectors did not welcome trades union organization or competition for skilled labor positions. So all significant sectors of white society were beginning to regard African “advancement” as a problem. It was against this background that the NAD began to show an interest in what the new discipline of social anthropology might have to offer. As we saw in Chapter 10, the retirement of the first generation of NCs meant that attention turned to the qualifications required of a native commissioner. In the founding issue of the Native Affairs Department Annual (NADA), the editor, N. H. Wilson, noted the need for “a broader knowledge on which to base the study of natives and native administration.”14 Radcliffe-Brown himself had noted that “the Colony of Southern Rhodesia was practically an unworked field.”15 The NAD therefore began regularly to send people to short courses at UCT and Witwatersrand; it also supported NC Charles Bullock’s role as corresponding member of the IIAL&C and his membership of the UCT-based Advisory Committee on Bantu Studies and Research. The NAD’s interest assumed that there was value in the “scientific” approach of the social anthropologists. In practical policymaking, for example, some administrators felt that more research might lead to more effective systems of control. African women, for example, were becoming defined as a “problem” throughout the region, as administrators struggled to find effective means to control their movements and economic activities.16 In Northern Rhodesia, Tagart and Macdonnell observed that “there are few branches of Native Law in which the counsel of those who know is more badly needed at the present day.”17 Clearly “those who knew” about “Native law” were no longer deemed to be Africans but “experts” whose insights could assist in the formulation of policy. Burbridge, the Jesuit missionary, thought it self-evident that “ethnological science” was a prerequisite for “just and beneficent rule.”18 For most of the NCs who took part in the Vacation courses, however, the value of social anthropology was not in proposing any specific policies but in providing a way of thinking systematically about African culture. Roger Howman recalled that F.W.T. Posselt, Charles Bullock, and his own father, E. G. Howman, all appreciated the courses because

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they all got a better knowledge of the kinship system, which is the most dreadful thing to have to try to sort out even if you were an expert linguist and knew exactly what to call that old women or that youngster there in terms of kinship. Nobody in their right minds would normally settle down like an academic and evolve a pattern. It wasn’t until they had met people like [Isaac] Schapera …at Cape Town, that the full significance of what this kinship system as an institution meant—it must have had a change in their ideas.19

The anthropological training was valued, then, because it enabled administrators to ask questions about underlying social principles. In asking these questions, the balance of epistemological power shifted; anthropological science claimed knowledge of things in African culture that Africans did not know themselves. Having attended a lecture by Winifred Hoernlé, the first head of the anthropology department at Witwatersrand, Guy Taylor, the editor of NADA, enthused that techniques from anthropology enabled researchers “to formulate laws regulating the lives of people which they have probably never formulated for themselves.”20 The “science” of anthropology was predicated on the assumption that Africans could not systematize for themselves. If they could, then the anthropologist would be redundant: the “native informant” would be able to communicate all that it was necessary or possible to know. However, by “formulating laws,” anthropology could be presented as a “science,” giving powers to predict and manage its subject. The introduction of “science” to native administration, in the form of social anthropology, provided a way to step outside the whole project of mutual understanding and engagement with another’s worldview. It offered bemused whites a tool to cut through some of the dilemmas that more humanistic, interactive methods of translation and understanding failed to resolve. It was no longer necessary to understand what Africans meant by their concepts, merely to understand what function these beliefs played in their societies. Charles Bullock was the official within the Southern Rhodesian NAD who came closest to thinking like a real anthropologist during this period. Significantly, Bullock was not good at talking to Africans. According to Roger Howman, “There was a peculiar ability amongst some of those early NCs of being able to talk to Africans … and Bullock was a little bit of a pompous type, you know. He never had that ability to get down and sit around a fire and dig things up.”21 Bullock’s skill lay in systematizing. Others, such as Edwards or Howman, knew more but didn’t publish. Bullock was keen to see more investigation of the systems underlying local culture, pointing to “The feasibility, & even the urgency, of applying anthropological science to Native policy.” For him, anthropology was intellectually stimulating, but its value lay in its use for practical administration and what it might contribute to “a full comprehension of all the factors in the Native problem before us; and also, as to whether our methods are those best calculated to lead to the true solution.”22 However, like all his colleagues, he insisted on the importance of local knowledge; he remained skeptical about the value of lectures on

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Melanesian culture and guarded against generalizations that had not been proved to include local peculiarities. Partly because of this insistence on local application, Southern Rhodesia remained an anthropological desert for ethnographers such as Bullock. Native commissioners did not get much respect from the academic professionals in the discipline. Bullock had few publication opportunities outside NADA, despite his involvement in the IIAL&C and his eagerness to contribute papers to academic conferences. His 1927 book The Mashona attempted to do much more than describe; he wanted it to have academic respectability. However, Winifred Hoernlé made short shrift of his attempts to explain totem names: “That was alright for Durkheim, [but] the theory has been absolutely discredited long ago.”23 For Hoernlé, Bullock was little more than a native informant himself: “Your theory of Totemism I don’t believe at all, but I do find your facts most interesting.”24 In Southern Rhodesia, the study of African cultures remained the preserve of administrators and missionaries and was more ethnography than anthropology. Social anthropology set out to explain observable institutions within African societies in terms of their existing functions within the network of social relationships. Ethnography, on the other hand, set out to record—and indeed to speculate on—the historical formations of those institutions. In Southern Rhodesia, accounts of African belief systems tended to exoticize rather than analyze. Burbridge’s famous analysis of “How to Become a Witch Doctor,” which appeared in the first issue of NADA and was republished several times thereafter, seemed torn between a desire to immerse the reader entirely into the African belief system and a desire to pull back from it and debase it.25 Burbridge was aware that a technical training in Western medicine was not incompatible with “a spirit-midden mind” and that African patients expected of their doctors “not … the mere possession of a skill, but of spiritual sanction.” So his essay gave two very vivid case studies of the ways in which spiritual authority could be acquired by healers. The first, in which a son could inherit his father’s healing spirit, revealed through possession of that spirit, was described in precise anthropological detail, replete with indigenous terms. However, rather than going on to analyze the structures and functions underlying this system, the essay’s commentary then tried to demonstrate the falsity of the belief, retreating from its carefully nuanced use of local terms and instead describing midzimu and mashave somewhat mockingly as “ghosts and familiars.” The second case study, in which healing powers could be acquired from water spirits named njuzu, was little more than a piece of wonderfully vivid storytelling, steeped in classical references, where the spirit medium Chiremba’s sojourn with the njuzu was presented in terms reminiscent of Odysseus’s visit to Tiresias.26 Burbridge wanted to make sense of local beliefs, but he was then disturbed by the conclusion that they did, therefore, make sense. Instead, he resorted to exoticism, defining the beliefs as false in terms that made sense to him and campaigning against the healing contexts in which they derived meanings for local practitioners. As Paul Landau has commented, “the notion that precolonial Africans ‘believed’ unlikely things derived from situations where settlers articulated the subjectivities of Africans’ logic, converting praxis into proposition.”27

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Moreover, “native experts” in Southern Rhodesia valued local anecdote over general systems. When it started, NADA was proclaimed to be about applied theories of administration; in practice, it consisted largely of anecdotal information. Indeed, the introduction to the second issue pointed out that its “main object” was “to record evidence” rather than to draw conclusions.28 By the fourth issue, despite his admiration for Mrs. Hoernlé, Guy Taylor argued that the point of NADA was to provide ethnographic data because social anthropology was not specific enough for practical purposes: “The lore of each race and tribe incorporates its own particular circumstances and ideals, and a people cannot be properly understood until a minute knowledge of its history and mentality is obtained.”29 This was not at all the opinion of the social anthropologists; Hoernlé argued in 1933 that “the functioning of a culture can be understood and must be studied without bringing in its history.”30 Indeed, it was precisely this refusal to become interested in culture as an accretion of the past that had defined social anthropology as a discipline distinct from ethnology. Rather than seeking to contribute to an overarching analytical system, the details about African societies that were published in Southern Rhodesia in the 1920s focused on distinct individual experiences. The old guard of missionaries and NCs all had their individual fiefdoms to protect and insisted on the specificity of their data. As “Wiri” Edwards once asserted, “Well, even if it isn’t the custom, it’s my custom.”31 A wealth of ethnographic detail could be derived from the factfinding surveys of the early days of the NAD.32 The data about chiefships that had been gathered during the period of initial encounters in the late 1890s and early 1900s, for the purposes of rationalizing bureaucratic administration, found their way into NADA as ethnographic curiosities. These were not new topics “awaiting study” but old information about the past awaiting publication. It was precisely because this data described the past that there was a perceived urgency about recording it. Having a vision of African societies as ancient and unchanging prior to white intervention, the ethnologists interpreted evidence that modernity was creating changes in those societies as indication of their imminent demise. A long article by Rev. Robert H. Baker urging more anthropological research in Southern Rhodesia suggested no real use for this knowledge other than to record it quickly before it vanished.33 Edwards gloomily commented that “we are dealing with a primitive people whose morals were kept within reasonable bounds by their own laws, customs and superstitions, [but] contact with our civilization has broken down many of the old restrictions.”34 Guy Taylor, who, as we saw in the last chapter, believed that local legal systems had evolved over centuries to suit “the native in his natural environment,” expressed concern that “the advent of civilization lends complication.”35 Discounting the threat that local culture would be “extinguished and overwhelmed, beneath the obliterating flood of modern ‘progress,’” he nonetheless urged NADA’s readers to consider ways to protect African society from the impact of the changes that were taking place “while there is yet time.”36 The NAD moved steadily toward a “gamekeeper” approach toward African culture, trying to preserve archaic systems of direct rule in the Reserves.

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The ethnographic information that was published in NADA came from the NCs and missionaries; it was rarely from African informants or white settlers. The study of African societies sanctioned access to the “exotic” for white officials, whereas autodidacts with knowledge derived from everyday interactions were regarded with suspicion by the administration. Cracking the code of African societies was the preserve of “experts”; otherwise, it was transgressive knowledge. The content of what was known—and even the means of learning it—might have been identical, but the authority to acquire it conferred legitimacy to one and mistrust to the other. As we saw in Chapter 9, Burbridge even cast doubts on the authority of Rev. Hugo, in Chibi, to provide data on spirit beliefs.37 Africans were even more mistrusted as sources than white settlers. By 1920, C. Kamba Simango, an Ndau man in Portuguese East Africa (PEA), was working at the coast with the celebrated U.S. anthropologist, Franz Boas, as a valued and insightful anthropological informant. However, in Southern Rhodesia, both Baker (NADA 1) and Burbridge (NADA 2) commented on the problems of getting data out of Africans. Burbridge argued that “the tribal lie is their only weapon” against state assaults on their religious and political institutions: “the reticence of the natives, rooted in political fear rather than in religious reverence, may be expected to be a stumbling block to ethnological science for many years to come.”38 Elaine M. Lloyd (she of the Mashonaland Quarterly Catechism of Health) observed that “a great deal of the anthropological and general information garnered by many painstaking white folk is entirely unreliable.” Consequently—and unusually—she handed over the task of recording testimony to Rev. Samuel Muhlanga instead.39 However, Mrs. Lloyd, too, felt that the relevant data was about the past, not the present: “The younger generation, who know us well, will tell us what they know, but very often they do not themselves know much about what we are asking; the older ones will not tell us anything.” Information about the past was the only information that the ethnologists acknowledged as “authentic.” Unconvinced by communication with elders, they moved increasingly toward talking to each other as a means of garnering data. Africans became the topic, not the participants, in conversation. The people who had spoken with chiefs and spiritual leaders in the 1890s, attempting to translate what they had learned into principles of administration, were no longer engaged in translating; they were merely recording their dated knowledge. Inspired by thinking about underlying structures, some NCs began to see their role as guiding Africans to rationalize rather than to abandon their “traditions.” This interest in systematizing indigenous culture was encouraged, not in order to accelerate the pace of change, but to curb it. Accounts in NADA were designed to preserve a knowledge of “native law and custom,” to save Africans from the terrible disintegration of their culture. Ironically, during the years that the data had first been collected, this disintegration had been the goal that the NAD was aiming for. The interest in preservation was very different from the interests of the functionalist anthropologists such as Radcliffe-Brown and Winifred Hoernlé.

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However, the ethnographers shared with the social anthropologists a belief that African thought could be an object of science, a discrete entity to be analyzed. Academics, administrators, and missionaries debated whether the mental processes of Africans were, in fact, fundamentally different from those of Europeans. Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s recently published arguments about a “primitive mentality” that underpinned How Natives Think had proposed that African thought was determined by a mystical outlook that overrode any objections founded on rational contradictions.40 Anthropologists such as J. D. Rheinallt Jones, who founded the journal Bantu Studies in 1921 and worked with Clement Doke at the University of the Witwatersrand, felt that this proposition had yet to be proved and cautiously called for further research into mental difference.41 Burbridge, on the other hand, rode robustly to the attack, insisting that Africans reasoned in the same way as Europeans—but only some of the time, and only when they were making things in the approved “traditional” manner: The weakness of [How Natives Think] lies in its exclusion of the very facts which show the native mind freely applying the principles of normal causality, and subjecting itself to logical methods, much in the same way as any European might do in like circumstances. Such facts are native arts, crafts and industries.42

Burbridge, then, did not look for evidence of African rationalism in modern contexts but instead referred back to the past, where rationalism could safely be combined with what he agreed was “evidence … of primitive mental activity—the ‘mystic’ side.” He had nothing to say about the rationalism of modern industrial workers, and clearly agreed that there was a thing called “the native mind.” Other commentators, however, insisted very forcefully that Africans thought and behaved in ways that closely mirrored those of their European counterparts. Peter Nielsen, for example, in his 1922 book The Black Man’s Place in South Africa, carefully argued that there were no fundamental differences between the races based on biology, evolution, brain capacity, or the concepts that could be communicated in their languages. He then went on to demonstrate that Africans could “show a capacity for mental analysis and clear ratiocination equal to that of the educated European.”43 For example, he cited an aged hunter, applying the scientific reasoning underlying cladistics, that is, that members of a group share a common evolutionary history, based on evidence of key shared characteristics: “Look at the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and the wild pig,” he said, “they must at one time have been one kind; their teeth are alike, and none of them chew the cud. I think they must be cousins to one another, and, one time, perhaps, they were brothers.”44

Nielsen piled example on example, each designed to demonstrate the parallels between logical arguments produced by Africans in discussions of science, law, religion, and morality and similar arguments produced by Europeans. He concluded,

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Now I do not say that these instances show any remarkable intelligence or power of thinking, but I do say that they show sound level-headed reasoning just like the common sense reasoning from cause and effect which we find in the average European.45

For Nielsen, if Africans did not have a “primitive mentality,” then it followed that they were equivalent to modern Europeans. There was no room in his argument for dialogia for Africans to define themselves and their modes of reasoning. Others, following Nielsen, similarly tried to shoehorn all local systems of thought into a European epistemology. As with Livingstone’s conversation with the rainmaker, or Guy Taylor’s comments on ant-bear claws in African agriculture, local beliefs were validated only insofar as they overlapped with European assumptions about truth, fact, and science. So, for example, Denys Shropshire, in notable contrast to Burbridge, discussed the initiation of an indigenous healer solely in terms of outward ritual, referring him to as a doctor with a medical practice, and so marginalizing the fundamentally spiritual aspects of healing that Burbridge had correctly foregrounded, if only to attack.46 Similarly, Hugh Tracey, in a very informative and detailed account of the wooden hakata divining “dice” (which we saw luridly translated as “bones” in Chapter 7), suggested that the purpose of throwing them was to set in motion a psychological experiment. The questioner’s reactions to the fall of the dice were what was important and the throwing no more than a device to stimulate these reactions. Such rationalizations appealed to those who wanted to argue that there was no difference between local and European epistemology.47 These, however, were minority voices, based on the “middleman” form of translation, which ascribed Africans as “really” European in order to make sense of them. More common was the insistence on a mentality gap that defined the “native mind.” At Morgenster, for example, the younger Rev. Louw, intrigued by a study of animism in Nigeria, declared himself ready to accept that there might be an underlying “science” to the idea of natural energy that motivated African animism: “is not science in our day beginning to speak in the same terms … about atoms and molecules.” But he was not claiming that reason had brought Africans to this convergence with nuclear physics: “science” was “in our day,” whereas Africans belonged to the past: “So the master-mind of civilised man and the primitive mind of the Bantu meet again on common ground.”48 This belief in a “mentality gap” was widespread and unreflective. So, for example, Rev. Neville Jones commented with reference to SiNdebele proverbs that it was “difficult to arrive at an adequate comprehension … but this is hardly surprising in view of the great difference in mentality existing between the white and black races,” yet then went on to explain each of them lucidly and effectively.49 The axiom that Africans had a separate mentality from Europeans had evident appeal to NAD officials. It helped to explain NCs’ difficulties in understanding African legal decisions. Clearly, the problem was not poor translation or their inability to understand complex principles; the problem was just that Africans thought

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differently. Nothing could be done to change this: “It is as fast in their minds, through countless generations, as is our belief in heaven.”50 Consequently, it was a problem that the NC could not be expected to solve. Like African men’s “laziness” or African women’s “immorality,” references to difference in mentality provided an excuse for administrative failure, ascribing it to inherent characteristics over which the administration had no control. Another important function of the belief in the “mentality gap” for the Southern Rhodesian NAD was as a justification for direct rule. With the establishment of settler government in 1923, the Southern Rhodesian state became committed to segregation and “development,” that is, removing Africans from high-wage sectors of the economy and keeping them involved in agricultural work on low-productivity land as peasant producers. NADA’s editorials consistently described changes in African society as a necessary evil, insisting that Africans were fundamentally different from whites and had little chance of flourishing in a white-dominated culture. So, in his preface to the first edition of NADA, CNC Taylor observed that “I do not think [the native] ever will be as productive as the white man … we should create a policy of deliberate development.”51 The Reserves policy posited Africans as irredeemably other, best left to administer themselves under NAD supervision and tolerated only as migrants into the white world. Moreover, the axiom of a “mentality gap” allowed the NAD to argue that it had a moral responsibility to protect Africans from their own backwardness as well as from the corruptions of modernity. As H.M.G. Jackson sardonically observed in 1929, “Those who deplore what has been called the westernisation of our natives may derive some consolation from the fact that in Melsetter district … natives are still primitive enough to pursue and kill baboons with bows and arrows.”52 Burbridge and Jackson both hinted at the floodgates that would open if direct rule were lifted, with Burbridge indulging in particularly vivid fantasies: Again would parents make bonfires of their children to condense the clouds. Again the rain-prophet would fashion his drum-heads from the skins of human victims. The time-honoured tragedies of the Sinoia caves would be re-enacted, and jet-black maidens once more be flung into the pool of Chirorodziva as a sacrifice to induce the sky-gods (vokudenga) to break the drought…. This would they have to-morrow were their sighs not stifled by the righteous restraints imposed by civilised law.53

Jackson argued passionately that, in view of the backwardness of African peoples, there should be no policy of indirect rule and no decision to “leave the natives to develop on their own lines.”54 Nielsen, by contrast, favored indirect rule and some years later made an approach to Lord Lugard, the architect of the indirect rule policy, to request assistance in the publication of his new book The Colour Bar.55 So claims about scientific reasoning or a primitive mentality were not primarily about African modes of thought and consciousness but about systems of government. The claims about a putative “mentality gap” had credence in the 1920s because, as we have seen, attempts to explain and understand African culture over

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the preceding decades had foundered when whites became anxious about developing too close a proximity to African ways of thinking. White translators had failed to harness the vernaculars to gain mastery over African modes of thought, and so had reinvented the vernaculars and retreated toward internal conversations. However, the claims of the 1920s about a “mentality gap” were political, not “scientific.” This, as we shall see, explained why there was not so great a welcome within the Southern Rhodesian state for anthropology, the “science” of African societies, as there had been for linguistics, the science of African languages. Despite their focus on general principles rather than policy specifics, the social anthropologists became closely associated with indirect rule policies. British anthropology had been steadily growing in influence in the “native policy” of the British Empire, particularly during and after the 1914–1918 war. Influential thinkers in government circles argued that colonial administrations, with their locally trained officials, were perpetuating misperceptions and errors about local people across generations, to the detriment of both the local people and the empire. Expert outsiders, with a broad range of comparative knowledge to draw on, were needed to remedy this problem.56 The British school of anthropology, with its functionalist approach to understanding other cultures, transformed “native policy” within the empire. It posed a direct challenge both to the “on-the-job” expertise of local administrators and to their ideas about evolutionary hierarchies, in which the job of the NC was to nudge peoples at an “earlier” stage of civilization into a “higher” evolutionary stage.57 By the 1920s, with the spread of indirect rule systems, the colonial officials of the British Empire were required to engage with functionalist ideas. At the least, they had to reassess the effectiveness of perceiving African cultures in evolutionary terms, as analogous to peoples of the past. In Southern Rhodesia, however, the NAD was answerable only to the British South Africa Company and, after 1923, to the white settlers. It was not part of the British colonial administration, and it did not use indirect rule methods. In defending their direct rule policies, the higher echelons of the NAD gave short shrift to the functionalist interpretation of African societies. Jackson, with heavy sarcasm, suggested that the limitations placed on “native law and custom” by his staff should perhaps be challenged, because “it cannot be positively and scientifically asserted that there is an underlying truth supporting the dogma of twin-destruction of which we are unaware.”58 The members of the NAD who attended the vacation courses expressed appreciation for some of the comparative insights but, perhaps unsurprisingly, were not impressed by C. T. Loram’s lectures investigating the relative merits of different forms of administration: “I see no good reason, either from the European viewpoint, or that of the Native, for wishing that the Southern Rhodesian Natives were otherwise controlled.”59 Simply by opening up the possibility that the founding assumptions of the NAD could be the object of critical reappraisal, the social anthropologists made themselves unpopular in Southern Rhodesia. Social anthropology was also associated with the argument for a common human psychology. As Saul Dubow has observed, this was one of its significant contributions to policy debates in South Africa in the 1930s: “it was the pluralism

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and relativism characteristic of anthropological thought which offered a way out of the evolutionist constraints of biological determinism.”60 This characteristic was deemed novel enough by NAD students to be worthy of particular comment in their reports. So the CNC learned that, in the UCT lectures attended by officials from Southern Rhodesia in 1930, W. G. Bennie, who had been chief inspector of native education in the Cape, argued that “the spirit domination experienced by the native is very much against scientific training and that the backwardness of the child is due to its environment and upbringing and not to its mentality.”61 His colleague, Professor J. S. Marais, who lectured on history in 1935, “was, as were the other lecturers, convinced of the ability of the native to rise within a very short space of time to the level of western cultures, and the subsequent equality of black and white in Africa.”62 Social anthropology analyzed African societies as contemporary and internally rational, providing the framework for policies that could, at best, integrate European and African culture into a common modernity and, at the least, ensure the successful operation of indirect rule. Despite these fundamental differences in perspective about “native policy,” the NAD continued to send its members down to South Africa for the vacation and diploma courses. It was driven by its own internal logic, the same logic that led in the early 1930s to the invitation to Professor Doke to standardize the language and to UniSA to take over administration of the language exams and the Native Laws, Customs, and Administration Exam.63 The NAD was increasingly anxious to police the boundaries between sanctioned and unsanctioned knowledge of Africans. Any relationship that placed Africans in the role of experts and tutors was unsettling. The moves to professionalize the service reflected the increasing faith in “science” as a marker of authentic and approved knowledge about Africans and their culture. Where once the whites had depended on Africans to supply them with information, they now depended on “experts” to decide whether that knowledge was correct. This knowledge was fixed, certain, and written down. It revealed systematic underlying principles that were not open to renegotiation. In seeking the authority of the universities, the NAD indicated that it had long ceased to accept Africans’ own knowledge of themselves as legitimate. And yet, having rejected Africans’ own knowledge of themselves as a source of authority, the NAD then found itself threatened by the applied anthropologists, who offered a rival source of authority. “Social science” solutions to “native problem” involved a shift in the nature of effective knowledge. Research to inform Southern Rhodesian policy matters had relied on the anecdotal “commissions-and-informants” model of data gathering; this model gave particular authority to the missionaries and NCs who had day-to-day dealings with Africans. The method was directly challenged by the social science research model in South Africa. During the 1930s, the authority of NCs and missionaries seemed threatened by the outside consultants with anthropological training, who were beginning to formulate responses to industrialization north of the Zambezi as well as south of the Limpopo.64 The NAD continued to insist on the value of its locally acquired knowledge and its mission to “bring the native up to our standard.” Bullock’s recommendation that

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the administration should reconsider its attitude toward indigenous legal systems in the light of anthropological research was not well received. The CNC firmly asserted that “it may be doubted whether the discoveries of modern anthropological science will for a very long time prove a better illuminant for our path than a combination of ‘horse-sense,’ justice and sympathy, added to a first-hand knowledge of Native needs.”65 H. U. Moffat, the premier, agreed, expressing surprise that Bullock had “rather indicated that before we take steps to deal with and to improve our ‘form of Native Government,’ the whole question of anthropology should first be gone into by scientific experts.” Like Jackson, Moffat rejected Bullock’s argument in favor of “the knowledge acquired by our Native Department of the Native, his customs, superstitions and social laws [combined] with the exercise of common sense.”66 “Common sense” or “horse sense” was positioned in direct rivalry to “science.” A significant number of NCs and missionaries continued to romanticize African societies and to put a premium on knowledge of classical societies rather than of Pacific Islanders, as an essential preparation for native administration. So, for example, the fact that “cattle were considered of great importance … in Biblical days” was presented as self-evidently relevant to a discussion about reducing the numbers of African-owned cattle in 1920s Southern Rhodesia.67 Representations of the African voice in NADA during that decade reflected genres familiar to the writers from their schooldays: the Christian Bible, the Greek and Roman classics, and popular literature. However, this had the effect, not of making Africans seem more familiar, but of distancing them, at a time when they seemed to be getting too close. The consequence of this habit of thought was to place Africans not in the present but in “ancient times” and to inscribe them as “ancient peoples,” not yet caught up with the modern world. These “literary” representations of African speech were used alongside a competitive flaunting of vernacular lexicography. They cast Africans not just as Other but as ancient and mythological, the holders of esoteric secrets that only linguists could unlock. The narrative genre reinforced the anecdotal “commissions-and-informants” model of data gathering, which privileged local expertise over that of the “scientists.”68 However, the “native experts” of Southern Rhodesia were divided over the role of “science” in formulating policy. Romanticized ways of perceiving Africans were rejected by some within the state, including Nielsen and Alvord, who saw Africans as contemporaries in a process of change. They wanted Africans to join in the modernizing project, even while they were casting them as in urgent need of practical education.69 On the other hand, many missionaries and NCs did not wish to confront the suggestion that their hard-won secrets were of no lasting use to the state. Their concerns were linked to resentment, particularly within the missions, that social survey methods had the effect of excluding ethical/moral interests, in favor simply of what worked. Similar tensions were coming to the fore in South Africa at the end of the 1920s, where the state began to pilot social science surveys as a means of developing educational policy for Africans.70 Sue Krige has argued that in 1933, the social survey researchers Rheinallt Jones and E. G. Malherbe brought in Bronislaw Malinowski from London precisely in order to reduce the influence of missionaries.71

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There was resentment within Southern Rhodesia that the claims of theoreticians might be privileged above the claims of practitioners. In a letter to Bullock in 1929, Burbridge declared that “what authority Anthropology has as a pure science is out of place where practical questions arise.” Burbridge mistrusted any claims from anthropologists that stepped outside theoretical models and structural analysis. “We shall have to watch closely this meddlesomeness of Professors,” he warned Bullock, “which has come out into the open in Malinowski’s article under the specious name of ‘applied anthropology.’”72 Bullock himself, of course, had found his theoretical work rejected by Hoernlé and his championing of anthropology in native administration rejected by the Premier. Resentment toward the academics within the NAD grew during the 1930s. Reporting on a four-month diploma course at UCT in 1935, a clerk from the NC’s office in Chipinga complained, Unfortunately they have not the slightest idea of the duties of an official at the present day. All had very definite opinions on native policy and were inclined to be sarcastic at the expense of administrations and officials…. There was an inclination to speak of those officials who have written on the native, as “amateur anthropologists” and ridicule their works.73

His colleagues on the course agreed: “I feel it would be presumptious [sic] to think that a 4 months Course by non-administrators could very materially help administrators in their everyday problems”; “The school of practical experience is still a better one than the enormous output of publications of the anthropologists.”74 By the mid-1930s, the NAD in Southern Rhodesia had firmly decided to reject the scientific authority of anthropology in favor of the scientific authority of ethnography, rooted in practical administrative experience. However, its members had decreasing experience of “traditional” Africans and, with a few exceptions such as Nielsen, resisted the prospect of learning from “modern” Africans. So, in the pages of NADA, which was the closest that Southern Rhodesia came to having an anthropological journal, they largely just read each other’s memoirs. African culture was no longer to be translated or analyzed as a contemporary and changing phenomenon; it was to be remembered and recorded. The “native mind,” then, was never closely defined or analyzed by the “native experts” of Southern Rhodesia. Its point, as a concept, was to be discursive and normative, not descriptive or explanatory. Social scientists to the south engaged seriously with research programs to assess whether there were differences in mentality between whites and Africans; Peter Nielsen argued carefully that the “native mind” was no different from the European one. But the official line in Southern Rhodesia was that “common sense” should decide. “Common sense” decreed that the “native mind” was an esoteric thing into which only NCs and a few missionaries (but not academic theoreticians) had any insight. White administrators and missionaries had found that they could not make sense of African consciousness in European terms without shaking some of their

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own fundamental beliefs. However, they could at least define it as an object of study in which qualifications could be gained. Claims about the “native mind” substituted for attempts to translate and interact with African ways of ordering knowledge and imposed order on a messy reality. It cordoned off the things that could not be controlled, such as thought, speech, and human relationships, under the umbrella of the “native mind,” and replaced them with standardized rules, such as grammar, legal procedures, and kinship structures. Africans were appreciated best not when they reflected white modes of thought but when they behaved like the Africans defined in the Native Law, Customs, and Administration Exam. And so translation projects could be abandoned in favor of linguistics; the impact of modernity could be ignored; African expertise in their own languages and culture could be discounted; and failures to control the political and economic choices of Africans could be explained by Africans’ very inexplicability. NOTES 1. W.H.R. Rivers, “The Government of Subject Peoples,” in Science and the Nation, ed. A. C. Seward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), 303. 2. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, “The Methods of Ethnology and Social Anthropology,” South African Journal of Science 20 (1923): 124–27. 3. Radcliffe-Brown to CNC, 18 April 1923, S138/26. 4. Preliminary Notice of a Vacation Course in African Native Studies, February 1924, S138/26. 5. E.C.W. Trollop, 20 August 1935, S1542/E8/2. 6. C. T. Loram, “The Claims of the Native Question upon Scientists,” South African Journal of Science 18 (1921): 100. 7. Annual Report (AR), CNC, 1919. 8. AR, CNC, 1923. 9. AR, CNC, 1929. 10. Phrase from C. L. Carbutt, AR, CNC, 1930. 11. See government correspondence with and about the “Native Mirror” in S1542/ L11. 12. AR, CNC, 1930. 13. AR, CNC, 1928. 14. N. H. Wilson, “Introduction,” Native Affairs Department Annual 1 (1923): 3. 15. Quoted in Rev. Robert H. Baker, C.R., “Suggestions for Anthropological Investigations among the Makaranga,” Native Affairs Department Annual 1 (1923): 55. 16. Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasants, Traders and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939 (London: James Currey, 1992); Diana Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 17. E.S.B. Tagart and Sir Philip Macdonnell, “Native Customary Law in Northern Rhodesia—III,” The South African Outlook 55, no. 651 (1925): 188. 18. A. Burbridge, “In Spirit-Bound Rhodesia,” Native Affairs Department Annual 2 (1924): 17. 19. Steele, interview with Howman, Oral/HO3, 52.

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20. Guy A. Taylor, “The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Enquiry,” Native Affairs Department Annual 2 (1924): 34. 21. Steele, interview with Howman, Oral/HO3, 53. 22. NC, Sinoia, to CNC, 16 February 1928, S138/26. 23. A. W. Hoernlé to Bullock, 4 June 1929, BU 1/1/1. 24. A. W. Hoernlé to Bullock, 18 May 1929, BU 1/1/1. 25. Rev. Father A Burbridge, S.J., “How to Become a Witch Doctor,” Native Affairs Department Annual 1 (1923): 94–100. 26. However, Burbridge was at pains to point out that these departed spirits were in an Elysium, not a Hades, despite similarities with accounts of Persephone’s visit to his realm, 99. 27. Paul S. Landau, “Transformations in Consciousness,” in Cambridge History of South Africa, ed. S. Marks and B. Nasson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press). 28. Guy A. Taylor, “Introduction,” Native Affairs Department Annual 2 (1924): 4 (emphasis in the original). 29. Guy A. Taylor, “Introduction,” Native Affairs Department Annual 4 (1926): 4. 30. A. W. Hoernlé, “New Aims and Methods in Social Anthropology,” South African Journal of Science 30 (1933): 82, cited in Hugh Macmillan, “‘Paralyzed Conservatives’: W. M. Macmillan, the Social Scientists, and ‘the Common Society,’ 1923–48,” in Africa and Empire: W. M. Macmillan, Historian and Social Critic, ed. Hugh Macmillan and Shula Marks (Aldershot: Temple Smith, 1989), 78. 31. Steele, interview with Howman, Oral/HO3, 4. 32. See Chapter 5. 33. Robert H. Baker, “Suggestions for Anthropological Investigations among the Makaranga,” Native Affairs Department Annual 1 (1923): 55–60. 34. NC Mrewa (Edwards) to SN Sby, 7 July 1923, ED 6/2/1, f243. 35. Taylor, “Genealogical Method,” 34. 36. Guy A. Taylor, “Introduction,” Native Affairs Department Annual 3 (1925): 4. 37. H. C. Hugo, “The Spirit World of the Mashona (Vakaranga),” Native Affairs Department Annual 3 (1925): 13–16, plus response from Burbridge, 16. 38. Burbridge, “In Spirit-Bound Rhodesia,” 17. 39. Samuel Muhlanga, “Mbava and Others,” with an editorial introduction by Elaine M. Lloyd, Native Affairs Department Annual 4 (1926): 91. 40. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions Mentale dans les sociétés inférieures, 1910, published as How Natives Think (London: Allen & Unwin, 1926); La Mentalité Primitive, 1923, published as Primitive Mentality (London: Macmillan, 1923). 41. J. D. Rheinallt Jones, “The Need for a Scientific Basis for South African Native Policy, South African Journal of Science 23 (1926): 80, cited in Macmillan, “‘Paralyzed Conservatives,’” 79. 42. “A. B.,” “Review of ‘How Natives Think,’” 127. 43. Nielsen, Black Man’s Place, 59. 44. Ibid., 64. Nielsen did not call this “cladistics”, because the discipline had not then been specified as a distinct branch of evolutionary thought; and I suspect that, to a real cladist, the relationships cited here would not count as significant shared derived characteristics. 45. Ibid., 74. 46. Rev. Denys Shropshire, CR, “The Initiation of a Doctor of the WaBarwe Tribe,” Native Affairs Department Annual 8 (1930): 8–10.

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47. Hugh Tracey, “‘The Bones,’” Native Affairs Department Annual 12 (1934): 26. 48. Rev. A. A. Louw Jr., “The Animism of the Bantu,” Native Affairs Department Annual 4 (1926): 59. 49. Rev. Neville Jones, LMS, on “Sindebele Proverbs,” Native Affairs Department Annual 3 (1925): 65. 50. NC Marandellas to CNC, 8 January 1921, N3/23/1. 51. Herbert J. Taylor, “Preface,” Native Affairs Department Annual 1 (1923): XXX– XXX. 52. AR, CNC, 1929. 53. Rev. A. Burbridge, “The Witch Doctor’s Power: A Study of Its Source and Scope,” Native Affairs Department Annual 3 (1925): 22 (punctuation in the original). See also H.M.G. Jackson, “Indirect Rule in Southern Rhodesia,” Native Affairs Department Annual 3 (1925): 57, for similar though rather less excited claims. 54. Jackson, “Indirect Rule,” 58. 55. Peter Nielsen, Chipinga, Southern Rhodesia, to Lord Lugard, 9 May 1938, Royal Commonwealth Society Collection, Cambridge, RCMS 113/3. 56. Rivers, “The Government of Subject Peoples.” 57. Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 254ff. 58. Jackson, “Indirect Rule,” 58. 59. W. T. Stead to CNC, Report on Vacation Course, 4 March 1928, S138/26. 60. Saul Dubow, “Race, Civilisation, and Culture: The Elaboration of Segregationist Discourse in the Inter-War Years,” in The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa, ed. Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (London: Longman, 1987), 82. 61. J. V. Kerr to CNC, Report on Vacation Course in Bantu Studies, 29 March 1930, S138/26. 62. E. F. Dawson, clerk to NC, Chipinga, Report on four-month Diploma Course at UCT, 20 July 1935, S1542/E8/2. 63. See correspondence, March–August 1933 between Bullock, Lestrade, and the Secretary, Dept. of Internal Affairs, regarding UniSA’s role in the Native Law, Customs, and Administration Exam, S1542/E8/2. 64. Brahm David Fleisch, “Social Scientists as Policy Makers: E. G. Malherbe and the National Bureau for Educational and Social Research, 1929–1943,” Journal of Southern African Studies 21, no. 3 (1995): 352; see also Sue Krige, “Segregation, Science and Commissions of Enquiry: The contestation over Native Education Policy in South Africa, 1930–36,” Journal of Southern African Studies 23, no. 3 (1997): 491–506. For an exemplary account of how the anthropologists’ social survey work in Northern Rhodesia appeared to the Africans employed by them, see Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 65. CNC to Sec. to the Premier (Native Affairs), 22 February 1928, S138/26. 66. Minister of Native Affairs to CNC, 1 March 1928, S138/26. 67. “Cattle and Their Relation to the Human Race,” Rhodesian Native Quarterly 2, no. 4 (October–December 1929): 13. 68. Diana Jeater, “Imagining Africans: Scholarship, Fantasy and Science in Colonial Administration, 1920s Southern Rhodesia,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (2005): 1–26.

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69. Michael Drinkwater, The State and Agrarian Change in Zimbabwe’s Communal Areas (London: Macmillan, 1991), 45–49. 70. Krige, “Segregation, Science and Commissions of Enquiry”; Fleisch, “Social Scientists as Policy Makers.” 71. Krige, “Segregation, Science and Commissions of Enquiry,” 496. 72. Burbridge to Bullock, 24 March 1929, BU1/1/1. 73. E. F. Dawson, clerk to NC, Chipinga, Report on four-month Diploma Course at UCT, 20 July 1935, S1542/E8/2. 74. Noel Robertson, Clerk to ANC, Gwaai Reserve, 29 July 1935; F. W. McCauley, ANC Shamva, 26 July 1935.

Conclusion

I started this book as an attempt to make sense of my own claims to be an “expert” on Zimbabwean history. I wanted to trace the history of my discipline back to its foundations to see how and why the archival material that I used was generated. I wanted to examine whether the assertions about African culture from people outside those cultures could be based on valid claims to know. And I wanted some means of judging whether Robert Mugabe’s claims that whites had never truly understood or been a part of Zimbabwe were more than simply polemical. I ended up by writing a story about people who lived in the Chimanimani district of Zimbabwe between 1890 and 1935. In it, I proposed a story of encounter, translation, and separation. Initial attempts to listen to Africans and learn from them were followed by a period of mutual miscommunication where it was assumed that translation was taking place during interactions but where, very often, the same terms were being used to mean different things. Finally, there was a process of separation where the state abandoned attempts to communicate with Africans through effective translation and instead, like Humpty Dumpty, simply deemed that things would mean what the state said they meant. Vernacular languages were standardized, and legal practices were unofficially codified through the institution of the Native Customs Examination. Of course, like all historical narratives, this account appears suspiciously neat and tidy. Real life—and real history—is of course rather messier. This story of encounter, translation, and separation, has other stories within it and other actors. Moreover, tensions pull the historical actors in conflicting directions. There is, for example, an irony to be explored in the fact that the most text-oriented group within the story, the missionaries at Mt. Selinda, were also in some ways the most “superstitious” in their faith in the power of their God. For one native commissioner, “science” provided a defense against the real threat posed by Africans’ supernatural powers; for another, it was useful to claim magical powers for himself.

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Contemporary historians tend to write about Africans as if they were simply rational decision makers. The white archival record almost invariably presents Africans as superstitious and irrational. In picking a way through this material, I have tried to show that Africans in the early twentieth century were both “rational” and “superstitious,” but so, too, were the whites. There is also a tendency to read the archives as an account of state projects to effect change and to interpret changes that actually took place as the outcome of these state interventions. I have tried to suggest that often whites didn’t change what they thought they’d changed and that changes that they thought they’d made weren’t primarily the product of their interventions. Moreover, regardless of either of these two propositions, whites were not accurately perceiving the processes of change at all. Even more tentatively, I want to suggest that Africans’ perceptions of themselves changed, but not necessarily in ways clearly perceived by the whites. The white state was poorly resourced and understaffed. It seems to me that, both because it was understaffed and because it used discourses that distorted its perception, the state remained largely unaware of the extent of its failures to produce the results it intended. Consequently, the archival record paints a misleading picture. Overall, my interpretation focuses on the limits and ineffectiveness of white rule rather than its injustice. Tensions arise in the work from recognizing the oppression and economic hardship felt by Africans while not allowing white policymakers to seem more powerful than they really were. Clearly, then, this work does not follow the same trajectory as the standard histories of Zimbabwe. Issues of exploitation and land seizure and the development of a peasant agriculture and a nationalist consciousness occur only at the margins of this work. Instead of focusing on moments of conflict and resistance, this account emphasizes how Africans were flexible in their responses to white interventions and suggests that this flexibility was deeply rooted in local epistemology. Local languages were founded on metaphorical and idiomatic modes of thought; local jurisprudence assumed a provisional reality, open to renegotiation. Instead of resistance, hegemony, or hybridity, Julie Livingston (personal communication) has suggested that this account reveals “an emergent, if at times troubled, African agility.” This was reflected in the playfulness of African uses of language, in English as well as the vernaculars—a playfulness that European linguists enjoyed and patronized but did not realize reflected a more metaphorical epistemology than they could encompass. The “invention of tradition”1 created solid blocks of “knowledge” against which African interpretations collided, flowed around, and, I suggest, diverted off down different channels entirely, unperceived by the “experts” standing guard over the blocks. In dealing so heavily with perception, I have had some real problems (which cannot be fudged) with the archival record. There is an uncomfortable paradox about using contemporary white sources for ethnographic data while at the same time arguing that that the sources themselves were based on misunderstandings and distorted perceptions. We have to accept that there are things that are seen but misunderstood and things that are hidden yet perhaps still perceived. And there is

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much that is simply hidden. Some of what is hidden from the archive reflects the failures of white commentators to understand. However, some of it was no doubt deliberately hidden. The provisional and negotiable status of the knowledge produced by this text is also part of its subject. I remain, therefore, ambivalent about my own claims to expertise. So I did not solve my concerns about the status of the “expert.” However, I have perhaps raised some questions that matter. One part of this narrative is particularly striking and became more evident to me in the course of writing. The African voice becomes fainter throughout the book. In the final part, it makes almost no appearance at all. I hope it is clear from the story I tell here that this is not because the African voice disappeared but because the white “experts” stopped listening to it. This was not a case of epistemic violence or even the hegemonic influence of white administrators over their charges. This was, I think, simply an echo chamber, where white administrators called out to themselves and heard their own voices back. This closing down of genuine communication was necessary in order to continue with the direct rule systems to which the state was wedded. It coincided with missionary networks taking over textual versions of chiShona and codification of language. The incentives to learn—rather than to control—were written out of policymaking. The voice of the subaltern had not been silenced; it was just no longer listened to. The administrators had, metaphorically, stuck their fingers in their ears and sung loudly to their own tunes instead. These tunes were ones that they had learned from Africans originally but never really understood and had preferred to rewrite with their own words. This left Africans free to write new songs, the chimurenga songs, which they did not bother to teach to the whites. In the words of Thompson Sankange in the early 1930s, “it is amazing how little the white man really knows of the stirring of new life in native peoples living in his midst.”2 In this sense, perhaps, Mugabe was right. But what he overlooks is that, in averting its gaze from real Africans to focus on its invention, the “native mind,” the white state allowed these other histories and hidden vernaculars to flourish. Moreover, there were still some people who were not African, yet who were prepared to listen to and to learn from Africans. Not all were sympathetic to African nationalism. I found that “Rhodies”—indigenous whites, often from farming backgrounds, whose forefathers’ knowledge of African life had been denied formal recognition—were hostile to “native experts” (they repeatedly challenged me about whether my vernacular linguistic skills could match theirs), yet they had no sympathy for the nationalist cause. There were other whites, however, who risked their lives to build the new Zimbabwe. Their example, of course, was what inspired me. I arrived in Zimbabwe determined to learn about African society and assist in the new state’s development. I came armed with information—expert knowledge—from London, yet I was ready to listen. Indeed, speaking to development workers in Harare in the mid-1980s, I was repeatedly told of the importance of listening to rural women. It appeared that some kind of dialogue was being proposed. Scratching below the surface, however,

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I found that “listening” was emphasized primarily because aid workers believed that understanding how rural women thought provided the best way of communicating to them a strategy that had already been formulated elsewhere. They wanted not to converse but to implement policy. Moreover, even today, young Zimbabwean academics find that their education has not equipped them with the words they need to express dissatisfaction with their experiences.3 We are told that there is no political will on the part of Western governments to engage with the rural poor. But it seems that absence of political will is not the only issue. There is also the question of whether there is a shared vocabulary and worldview that would allow this to happen. The echo chamber has not gone away. NOTES 1. Not in Ranger’s original sense of European traditions imported into Africa but in the now-established sense of African traditions codified by Europeans, as discussed in Thomas Spear, “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa,” Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (2003): 3–28. 2. Terence Ranger, Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920–64 (London: James Currey, 1995), 15. 3. Jimmy Dube, personal communication, describing his attempts as a student to challenge autocratic decisions.

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Index

Abduction, 86, 94, 137, 143 n.60 Adam, naming activities of, 140 n.21 Administration, 46; attempted codification, xiv; orderly, 36; political, 84; principles of, xv, 221 Administrators, xv, 6, 35, 94, 113, 114, 121, 168, 178, 186, 188, 222, 235 Adult education, 56 Adultery, 186; legal definition, 128–29; terminology, 125, 130, 138, 139 Adults, 64, 158 Africa, xvii, 4, 22, 181 n.2, 191 African culture, xv-xvi; attempt to embed colonial values in, 9–10; values from white culture (degree of inculcation), 145; words adopted by white farming communities, xiv, 129, 137, 145 African helpers/informants, 3, 4, 11, 12, 17, 50, 59, 61, 68, 72, 75 n.54, 218; preaching, 64; rarely even named, 62; relationships with missionaries, 62–63; working on chiNdau texts, 62, 74 n.42 Africans, 4, 35, 104, 111, 135, 208, 213 n.35, 229, 231 n.64; arcane knowledge, 46; authentic and approved knowledge about, 226; became the topic, not the participants, xv, 221; different ways of thinking, 81, 161, 223–24; different ways of understanding the law, 87;

expected contracts to be open for renegotiation, 150, 151; inexplicability/ unknowableness, 47, 229; irredeemably other, 224; literacy, 158–59; no longer the authorities on their own languages; own knowledge of themselves ceased to be accepted as legitimate, 198, 221, 226; perceived as irrational/superstitious, xii, 16, 234; recognized as experts, xiv, 48; settlers, 22; spiritual beliefs linked to farming methods, 152; reticence to talk about God, 20 n.26; romanticized and fictionalized, 47; supernatural powers, 113; systematic distancing from whites, xv, 215–32; taught whites vernacular languages, 194; too easily appropriating white culture, 200; use of European languages for their own ends, 19 n.11; written out of their own history, 14 African society, 15; concepts underpinning, 13, 116; ease (white) in, eradicated, 200 African voice, 172–73, 235 Afrikaans, 49, 192, 193; Dutch language, 2, 11, 48–50, 104, 121; emerges as language in its own right, 201 n.33; South African Dutch language, 188, 193, 201 n.33

246

INDEX

Agricultural innovation, 151–52, 155 Agricultural produce, limited market, 38, 41, 147, 154 Agricultural work: curriculum subject, 156, 158; jointly-owned (husbandwife), 154 Agriculture/farming, 40, 56, 57, 146, 151, 162 n.27, 223; African, 178; Africans in direct competition with white farmers for limited local market, 147, 154; commercial, 217; less attracting that migrating for work, 153; male, 154; moral good, 151; slow rate of change, 153; small-scale, 177; spiritual aspects, 155. See also Farmers Alexander, Jocelyn, 212 nn.10, 13 Alvord, E. D.: agricultural editor, Mashonaland Quarterly, 172; agricultural innovation, 147–48, 151–52, 155, 192, 217; career moves, 162 n.27; joined Mt. Silinda Mission (1920), 147; saw Africans as contemporaries in process of change, 227; technical papers, 176; unpublished autobiography, 151–52, 162 n.26; use of term Vachena, 175 Ambiguity, 125–43 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM, Boston), 31, 34 n.46, 62, 179; establish of Methodist mission in Natal (1835), 23–24; mission stations and outstations, 55 American Mission (Chikore), 51 n.16 Americans, 72 Ammunition, 29, 46 Ancestors, 51 n.11, 135, 152 Ancestral cults, 21 Anderson, Benedict, xvi Anecdotal opinion/inquiry, 96 Anglicans, 48, 132 Animism, 223 Ant-bear claws, 155, 223 Anthropologists, 8, 221, 231 n.64 Anthropology, xvi, 35–36, 211, 215–16, 219, 227; applied, 215, 218, 228; British school, 225; fieldwork, 215; functionalist, 21, 126, 221, 225; pluralism and relativism, 225–26; scientific authority rejected, 228;

Southern Rhodesia desert for ethnographers, 219. See also Ethnography Apostolic Faith Mission, 193 Arabs, 21 Arbiters, 78–79, 82, 91, 95, 121, 207; African, 88; experts on local law, 81, 97 n.20; white, 87, 94, 205 Arbitration, 90, 100 n.81 Archives, 10, 53 n.53, 233, 234 Aristocrats, 23 Arithmetic/mathematics, 149, 150 Arts and crafts, 222 Assault, 150, 207, 212 n.11 Assistant magistrates, 189, 212 n.17 Assistant native commissioners, 187 Attorney-general, 190, 208–9 Authority, 115, 156; chiefly, 107, 117 n.22; claims to, 108; ideologies of, 40; legitimacy (local ideas), 57; legitimate, 108; of paramount chiefs, 87; political, 40, 86, 159; pre-colonial, 114; ritual, 22, 23; sources of, 82; spiritual, 22, 40, 160, 219; symbolic, 22; white (threats to), 109 Autodidacts, 221 Baker, Rev. Robert H., 220, 221 Bananas, 26, 106 Bantu people, 175, 223 Barberton, 27 Barlow, 14 Barnes, Rev. Bertram H., 199, 200 n.6, 209; downgraded interaction with Africans (as means of learning how to speak correctly), 198; quasi-official dictionary (1932), 134, 169–70, 203 n.63; spoke chiManyika, 184 n.61; of St. Augustine’s Mission, Penhalonga, 177, 189, 203 n.61 Basket ordeal, 135 Basket work, 105 Bates, Rev. F. W., 68, 75 n.73 Beach, D. N., 53 n.56 Beacon Hill school, 155 Beans, 51 n.16, 52 n.17 Beer, 61, 63, 68, 105, 157 Beira, 21, 62 Belgian Congo, 19 n.25

INDEX Beliefs/belief systems, 121, 160, 174, 219; African, 96, 121, 122, 216, 223; African (Burbridge’s engagement with), 170–71; attempts at translation, xiii; process of translation (Jones), 7; social function, 17 Belingwe, 127, 216 Bell, Rev., 172 Bennie, W. G., 226 Berry, Sara, 117 n.25 Bhabha, Homi, 20 n.35 Bhebe, Ngwabi N., xvi Bible, 58, 73 n.19, 150, 152, 158, 165, 168, 171, 227. See also Scriptures Bible-as-object, 67, 75 n.70 Bible study, 67, 68, 70 Bible translation, 8, 11, 12, 60, 151 Biehler, Rev. E. A., 132, 133, 136, 141 n.35; Jesuit priest at Chishawasha, 178 Big men, 26 Bilene, 27 Bileni, 27–31, 49, 70 Bill, David, 201 n.9 Bill, John, 52 n.21, 54 n.72, 201 n.9 Biological determinism, 226 Biology, 106 Bishop of Mashonaland (Right Rev. F. H Beaven), 207, 212 n.8 Black Man’s Place in South Africa (Nielsen, 1922), 222 Black people, terminology, 173 Blankets, 95, 153 Blinding, 25 Boarders (at school), 56, 63 Boas, Franz, 221 Boddington, Mrs., 192–93 Boggie, Major, 191 Bonded labour, 42, 43 Bone-throwers, 109; possible origins of term, 142 n.51; term replete with ideology, 135–36; wildly inaccurate use of word, 137 Books, 159 Borrowing, 44, 53 n.45 Boston: headquarters of Mt. Silinda mission, 2, 71, 72, 157, 166, 167, 179, 184 n.73; nurturing of indigenous church leaders, 179

247

Botswana, 136 Boundaries, xv, 196; need to maintain, 49; policing, xv Boundary blurring, 195 Boundary crossing, 15, 17, 50, 72, 78, 116, 121, 175, 180, 186; cultural, 71; project of translation, 13 Boys, 56, 157–58; ambiguity of meaning, 164 n.74 Bradford, Helen, 52 n.19 Bribery, 81 Brick housing, 3, 55, 68, 104, 105, 121, 158, 160; durable housing, 76 n.76 Bricklaying, 39, 43 Bridewealth, xv, 2, 27, 33 n.37, 40, 41, 44–48, 51, 53 n.41, 53 n.53, 69–70, 81–84, 87–89, 92–93, 108, 111, 126, 127, 168, 205, 206, 208; lobola, 88, 94–95, 100 n.76, 130; lobolla, 26, 45; lobolo, 47, 86; roora, 45, 69, 129 Bridewealth contract, 101 n.88 Bridewealth payments, 129, 149, 209 Bridewealth practices, 210, 213 n.22 Bridewealth transactions, 179 British Crown, 4, 78 British Empire, 225 British and Foreign Bible Society, 5, 60 British imperialism (Mugabe), 18 British South Africa Company (BSACo), 1, 5, 29, 31, 34 n.46, 41, 78, 82, 84, 86, 87, 96, 131, 225; courts, 79; instructions to native commissioners, 39; legal officials, 81 British South Africa Native Police, 45, 79 Brooks, W. A., 212 n.11 Brutality, 48, 52 n.26 Buck, H. R., 132, 136, 141 n.35, 176 Bulawayo, 27, 216 Bullock, Charles, xi, 34 n.39, 139 nn.6–7, 196, 203 n.61, 211, 217, 226–27, 231 n.63; little more than a native informant himself, 219; pursuit of academic respectability (rejected), 219, 228; skill lay in systematizing, 218 Bundo/bhundu, 156, 163 n.50 Bunker, Rev., 62 Bunyan, J., 75 n.67, 165–66, 181 n.6

248

INDEX

Burbridge, Rev. Fr. A., SJ, 209, 217, 221, 222; “How to Become a Witch Doctor,” 219; landmark essay “In Spirit-Bound Rhodesia,” 170–71; meddlesomeness of professors, 228; thinking black, 171, 173, 175, 181; translations of indigenous ideas into English, 171, 174; vivid fantasies, 224, 231 n.53 Bureaucratic systems, 78 Burke, Timothy, 158, 163 n.66 Bushveldt, 163 n.50 Business ethics/practices, 148, 149, 150 Buzi River, 22, 62; headlands/headwaters, 24, 28; lowlands, 24 Cape Colony, 79, 80–81, 101 n.88, 131, 142 n.51 Cape Province, 226 Capitalism, 4, 5, 65, 66, 185 Carbutt, Col. J., 174, 195 Carpentry, 39, 155 Carroll, Lewis, 119 n.55 Cash, 45, 92, 94, 149; needed to pay taxes, 44 Cash economy/money economy, 38, 40, 146; monetization, 149, 150 Cash wages, 160 Catechism of Health (Mrs. E. M. Lloyd, 1926), 183 n.49, 221 Catechisms, 60, 65, 67, 72, 165 Cattle, 3, 24, 26, 27, 39, 40, 43, 45, 91, 93, 94, 100 n.76, 101 n.88, 149, 157, 227; beef herds, 153; restrictions on movement, 153, 154; separately allocated (husband-wife), 154, 162 n.41 Cattle disease, 41 Central Africa, 4 Central government, 187 Changamire Empire, 22, 23 Chanock, Martin, 117 n.25 ChiBaba (Shona spoken by missionaries), 199 Chibi, 221 Chicago, 179 Chief native commissioner (CNC), 52 n.21, 54 n.63, 84, 86, 108, 126, 173, 174, 187, 194–95, 196, 207, 208, 212 n.17,

213 n.32, 215, 216, 224, 226, 227; report (1917), 153 Chiefs, xv, 26, 39, 46, 51 n.10, 79, 86, 110, 127, 208, 221; dispersal of people, 38; find missionaries useful as providers of education, 160; judicial role, 79–80, 97 n.14, 160, 164 n.81; relative power dynamic, 108; remained powerful, 159; ritual and political authority, 38; role as arbiters, 207; terminology, 128, 130, 138 Chiefships, 22–23, 108, 110, 126, 145, 220 ChiKaranga (language), 172, 177, 183 n.47, 184 n.61; vocabulary (Springer, 1905), 59–60 Chikore, 51 n.16, 52 n.17, 62, 151; closure of boarding school (1910), 159; evangelized as never before (1909), 67, 74 n.44; failure to make conversions, 67 Chikore, Big Tree shrine, 31, 39, 57 Chikore Bible School, 67, 106 Chikore Church, 64, 69, 75 n.54, 104, 106 Chikore Mission, 105–6 Chikore School, 55, 56, 66, 72 n.1, 74–75 n.54, 104; curriculum, 156, 157 Chikore Station, 76 n.76 Chikukwa (prison warder), 451 Chikukwa dynasty, 32 n.19, 92–93, 108 ChiLapalapa (kitchen kaffir language), 3, 11, 50, 188, 201 n.9; “that dreadful thing,” 184 n.62; use, 49 Children, 11, 27, 39, 40, 48, 53 n.48, 55–57, 61, 90, 106, 132, 195, 224; learning the English language, 65–66; white, 49, 50 Chilimanzi, 84 Chimanimani: meaning pincers, 21; previously known as Melsetter, 1 Chimanimani District, 22, 26, 33 n.39, 38, 49, 75 n.59, 103, 155, 233. See also Melsetter District Chimanimani mountains, xii, xiii, 3, 6, 11, 37, 152; historical background (1820–97), 21–34 Chimanimani paramount chief, 183 n.45 ChiManyika (language), 172, 177, 184 n.61 Chimhundu, Herbert, xvi, 181 n.3

INDEX Chimurenga wars (1896–97), 43, 46, 53 n.56, 81, 98 n.22, 109; songs, 235 ChiNdau (language), 11, 49, 50, 57–61, 63, 67, 73 n.19, 104, 110, 121, 136, 159, 163 n.50, 166, 172, 177, 197, 213 n.35; educational and evangelical materials, 165; examinations, 167–68; focus on translating, not on speaking or thinking, 167; hymnbook (1907), 60; means of (religious) communication, 72; no literature, 58; preaching, 64; readers (manuals, 1914, 1917), 58, 165, 168; translation from English, 168; translations of religious text, 72; use in education and evangelism, 122; used in evangelical and teaching work, 71; variant of chiShona language, 3 Chinyana, 45 Chipinga, 91, 196, 199, 203 n.59, 228; NC’s office, 196, 203 n.58 Chipinge, 39; new name of the original Melsetter township, 34 n.58, 37 Chipunza, Edward, 183 n.49 Chiremba (native doctor), 135–36; used today to mean doctor or hospital orderly, 142 n.48 Chiremba (spirit medium), 219 Chirorodziva pool, 224 Chishawasha, 178 ChiShona, xv, 2, 3, 50, 171, 174–76, 197, 199, 235; language of many variations, 196 Chisi days, 39, 132 Chitema: neologism, 183 n.49; used by missionaries to denote sin, 174 ChiZezuru (language), 172, 177 Christian conversion, 11–12, 16, 49, 55, 56, 58, 103, 114, 152; meaning, 68 Christian converts, 35, 61, 70, 76 n.76, 104, 105, 111, 121, 154, 174, 185; orthodoxy, 67; ownership of their local church, 69; reading material, 171; second wives, 155 Christian demonology, preEnlightenment, 115 Christian ethics, 97 n.16 Christianity, xvi, 13, 21, 35, 36, 104, 106, 111, 121, 122, 148, 151, 154, 158, 166,

249

185, 199, 200; African interpretations, xiii; conflicting concepts, 62; indigenous/indigenized, xvii, 14, 55, 72; local interpretation, 55, 57, 62, 63, 155; reexpressed within African framework, 12; rules, 16; training and initiation into, xiv; translation (Mt. Silinda Mission, 1895–1909), 55–76 Christian Literature Society (London), 159, 165–66, 168 Christian Mission in Africa (Smith), 176–77 Christian orthodoxy, 67 Christians, 54 n.70, 152, 154 Christmas, 98 n.22 Church attendance, 68 Citizenship, 87, 185 Civil cases, 50, 77, 78, 80, 89, 93, 97 n.8, 134, 208, 209 Civilization, 3, 13, 16, 103, 107, 111, 126, 179, 180, 192, 205, 216; outward adoption, 161; poor translation, 185; translation, 178 Civil law/jurisdiction, 78, 79, 81, 207; codification not wanted, 80; European, 148; not distinguished from criminal law by Africans, 87, 90–91 Civil servants/civil service, 168, 187 Civil Service examination, 194; legal and administrative issues, 199 Civil Service Law Examination, 198 Civil society, 191 Cladistics, 222, 230 n.44 Clarke, Miss, 158 Class, 4, 5, 145, 207 Classics (Greek and Roman), 227 Classification, 107–8, 115, 122, 131 Clerks, 43, 90, 187, 197, 196, 199, 216, 228 Clientage, 26, 39, 45 Cloth, 41 Clothing, 68, 76 n.76, 104, 105, 157 Cobbing, Julian, 53 n.56 Code of Native Law (mooted), 84 Codes of conduct, degree of absorption by African women, 158

250

INDEX

Codification, xii, 125–43; African legal principles, 16; African legal systems (Africans did not pay much attention to), 130; African traditions (by Europeans), 236 n.1; arguments in support, 126–27; attempt abandoned (native law and custom), 210; language, 235; social and legal practices, 190; standard work never produced, 126, 127, 140 n.11 Cognition, 12–13, 180; determined by language, 19 n.13 Cognitive categories, 5 Cognitive structures, 10, 138 Cognitive systems, 8, 9 Cohen, David William, 97 n.2 Colonial governments, 215 Colonial policy, 147, 215 Colour Bar (Nielsen), 224 Comaroff, Jean, xvi, 5, 8, 19 n.10, 20 n.35, 117 n.16 Comaroff, John L., xvi, 5, 8, 20 n.35, 117 n.16 Command, 11, 16, 178 Commodities, 45 Common sense, 227, 228 Commonwealth, 18 Communication, xv, 15, 116, 173, 178, 181; appropriate (between whites and local people), 3; closing down, 235; echo chamber has not gone away, 236, 236; effective, 4, 123, 188, 197; effective, had not taken place, xiv; effective, required entry into African modes of thought, 168; everyday, 138; exchange of ideas is what matters, 50; limited in vernacular, 72; verbal, 17; whites-Africans, 172; written, 17 Communication failure, 6, 233 Communication skills, 71 Comparative linguistics, 59, 61, 63, 166 Compensation, 87, 91, 93, 94, 100 (nn.71, 76), 206, 208 Compliance, 163 n.49; colonial, 13; European, 12, 170; indigenous, 169; translation, 12 Conceptual translation, 71 Concoctions, 136

Condy, Mrs. Madge, 201 n.34 Congo, 129, 182 n.19, 188, 202 n.57 Congregationalists, 2; American Congregational Church, 179 Constables, names rarely recorded, 50–51 Consumer goods, 153, 160 Consumerism, 154 Contact (Africans-whites), 155, 160 Contract: African ideas, 155; fixed, 88; sanctity of, 145–64 Contract law, 94 Contract-renegotiation, 150, 151 Conversation/dialogue, 60, 65, 167–68, 193, 198; avoided, 58, 63; ceased, 181; vernacular, 178 Cooper, Frederick, 54 n.66 Corruption, 81 Cosmology, 37, 175 Court cases, 33 n.35, 38, 39, 50, 82, 87, 88, 99–101, 134, 143, 154, 156, 162 n.35, 162 nn.40–41, 206, 212 n.11; approved procedures, 205; claims on women, 26–27, 33 n.31–32; medicine, 137; precision of translation (importance), 189 Court interpreters, xiv, 2, 77, 123, 130–31, 132–37, 139, 160, 186, 187; African, 189–90; confusion, 134; effective, 190; senior, 190; two-tier salary scale (1922-), 190 Court procedures, 208 Court records, 90, 92, 93, 133, 137, 140 n.12, 164 n.81, 208; read as examples of translation, 77 Courts, 135, 142 n.54; adversarial system, 87; chiefly, 80, 89, 90, 92, 209; conservatism in African responses, 78, 97 n.2; heavy reliance on Africans, 190; hierarchical distinctions not made by local people, 80; rural, 190; white, 207, 208 Cows, 44, 45, 89, 91, 93, 104 Crehan, Kate, 117 n.16 Crime and punishment, 78 Criminal cases, 77, 78, 80, 90, 91, 97 n.8, 142 n.40 Criminal code, 81, 83

INDEX Criminal court, 79, 100 n.68, 130, 131, 132, 154; forum where liability was established, 93–94 Criminal justice, 78, 129 Criminal law, xiii, 80, 81; not distinguished from civil law by Africans, 87, 90–91 Cripps, L., 195 Critical thought, 67, 68 Crops, 25, 26, 90, 111, 147, 153–55, 160; failures, 41 Cross-purposes, 10, 15, 77, 93, 96 Cultural capital, 10 Cultural contact, points of, 63 Cultural references, 65; reinvented in mouths of colonial officers, 10 Cultural transformations, 185 Culture, 104, 114, 161; African, 96, 126, 172, 173, 176, 192, 218, 228, 233; blurring the boundaries, xiv; Dutch, 48; forces driving change, 146; local, 48, 57; oral, 88, 99 n.54; recording and understanding, xii; vernacular, 60; white/ European, 6, 130, 139, 173, 176, 216 Cursing, 70, 76 n.92 Custom/tradition, xv, 6, 84, 96, 101(nn.88, 96), 107, 126, 213 n.35, 236 n.1; Dutch, 48; repugnant, 83. See also Native law and custom Customary law, 77, 94, 129 Data constraints/problems with sources, 10, 12, 14, 41, 211, 221, 234–35 Death march (1889), 27 Defendants, 88, 89, 90, 92, 95, 207, 212 n.11 Deity, concept more likely to reflect African idea, 12 Dense superstition, 111 Department of Agriculture, 162 n.27 Department for Native Development (DND, 1920-), 152, 155, 162 nn. 27, 29, 217 Despotism, 81 Development, 148, 212 n.13, 224 Dialect, 175; as defined by missionaries, 169

251

Dictionaries, 132–34, 136, 142 n.54, 178, 180, 199; listed, 141 n.35; reflected ambiguity and fluidity of thought, 132; Shona, 203 n.79 Didacticism, 176 Dimbana, 44 Direct rule, 82, 216, 224, 225, 235 Discipline, 86, 157 Disease/sickness, 47, 56, 106, 111 Divination, 113, 136, 138 Diviner/s, 38, 109, 112, 132, 133, 139, 142 n.50, 160; crucial word for translation, 134 Divorce, 87, 99 n.49; marital breakdown, 94 Doctors, 56, 57, 111, 133; African aspirations, 156, 163 n.48; primary roles (European culture), 136 Doke, Professor C. M. (Clement), 222, 226; standardization of Shona dialect, 197; textual rather than oral exercise, 197 Doke Commission, 198; orthography, 170, 182 n.32 Doke papers, 203 n.61 Domboshawa, agricultural training school, 197 Domestic servants/workers, 41, 52 n.21, 158, 188 Dos Santo (Portuguese commentator, 1580s), 119 n.48 Doyle, Denis, 29 Drought, 33 n.28, 41, 65, 112, 153, 154, 224 Dube, Jimmy, 236 n.3 Dubow, Jessica, 117 n.16 Dubow, Saul, 225–26 Due process, 88, 89, 208 Durban, 105, 188 Durkheim, Émile, 219 Dutch Reform Church (DRC), 48, 169, 171 Dutch settlers, 38, 136 Dynastic legitimacy, 22 Dynasties, 24, 32 n.19 Dysart, J. P., 135, 141 n.35, 166, 168, 170, 178; background, 151; syllabus involved little conversation, 167; translation of theological concepts, 168–69

252

INDEX

Dysart, Mrs., 166 Dysentery, 111, 114 Dzotsera (blind diviner), 134, 135, 142 n.50 Dzukuso, Frank Hlabati, 155 East Coast Fever, 153, 154 Economic development, 155 Economic growth, 210 Economic life, 6 Economic pressures, 130 Economic slump, 208 Education/schooling, xiv, 55, 57, 58, 68, 122, 123, 155, 157, 158, 160, 216, 217, 227, 236; African, 171; demand outstripping (mission) supply, 146, 159; English-language, 48, 189; formal, 131; literary, 177; role in defining African role in economy, 176; vernacular, 64 Educational opportunities, 121, 146 Edwards, W. E. (Wiri), 85, 113, 203 n.61, 211, 220; bridewealth payments, 209, 210; knew more but didn’t publish, 218; language examiner (resigns in disgust), 199; my custom, 220; NC Mrewa District, 197 Eland, 131 Elders, xvii, 14, 86, 109, 138, 146, 159, 221 Elliott, F. G., 151, 189, 201 n.34 Elysium, 230 n.26 Emerald Farm, 154 Empires (intra-African), 22, 23, 24 Empiricism, 21, 105–7, 111–14 Employers, 49, 51, 100 n.68, 188, 194 Employment/work, 27, 31, 43, 186; agricultural and manual, 177; clerical, 66; fitness for, 148; semi-skilled, 185, 188; skilled, 185, 188 Empowerment, 11 Engelke, Matthew, 75 n.65, 76 n.91, 159 England, 134 English language, 3, 11, 49, 50, 59, 63, 65, 121, 129, 132, 167, 170–72, 175–79, 184 n.62, 188–90; access to, xiv; African fluency not welcomed, 48–49, 54 n.70; confusion, 134; first-language speakers, 131; lingua franca, 189; priority as means of communication, 173; reading

in, 66; translation of African beliefs and laws, 77; vast storehouse of knowledge, 159, 179 Enkeldoorn, 172 Enlightenment, 8, 106, 137 Environment: physical, 57, 107, 109; social, 57, 107; spiritual, 57 Epidemics, 111, 114 Epistemology, 5, 12, 13, 17, 20 n.35, 96, 107, 111, 114, 115, 138, 218, 223; big questions raised by translation, 7; bridge between European and African, xvii-xviii; empirical, 16; rational-scientific, 137 Etheridge, ArchDeacon, 169 Ethiopianist churches, 216 Ethnicities, invented, xvi Ethnographers, 28, 139 n.6, 195, 222 Ethnographic nostalgia, 105 Ethnography, xiii, xv, xvi, 17, 35, 78, 82, 96, 180, 196, 220, 234; preservation of information, 138; purpose, 219; scientific, 172, 228; Victorian, 28. See also Southern Rhodesian ethnography Ethnology/ethnologists, 191, 217, 220, 221 Etiquette, 156–57 Eucharist, 65 Europe, 107, 110, 155 Europeans: belief in their superiority, 6; dependence on Africans to teach them, 96; intellectual tradition, xii; perceived as rational/scientific, xii, 16; terminology, 175; terms used to describe themselves replete with ideology, 174–75 Evangelism, 3, 58, 62, 71, 133, 151, 159, 172; opportunism for, 111; vernacular, 64 Evangelists, 43, 71, 155, 168, 178, 185; African, 3, 63, 207; African (own definitions of Christian life), 70; American, xvi, 55; local, 71; oral ministry, 65; salary, 53 n.40, 64; white, 14; Zulu, xvi, 55, 60, 64, 75 n.73, 160; Zulu (non-native status), 73 n.35. See also Missionaries Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 9, 19 n.22 Evidence under oath, 81 Evil, 61

INDEX Execution, wrongful, 191 Expertise: African discounted, 229; claims to, 211; ethnographic, xv, 15; local law, xv Exploitation, 11, 150 Fabian, Johannes, 18 n.10, 19 n.25, 58, 75 n.65, 129, 182 n.19, 202 n.57 Fair play/fairness, 16, 114, 149, 155 Falsehood, 174, 181 Family, 23, 44, 85, 94, 105, 157 Famine, 63, 72 n.1, 146, 151, 208 Famine relief, 55, 57, 167 Farmers, 47, 121; African, 41, 51 n.16, 155; agriculturalists, 192; dependence on Africans for food, 15; impoverished, 11. See also White farmers Farming communities, 116, 133 Farming methods, 39 Farmworkers, 188 Ferguson, Mr. (vet), 207 Ferreira, Louis, 131 Ferreira, Martinus L., 131 Fertility, 21–23, 32 n.14, 151–52, 155, 172 Fines, 87, 153 Fixed Establishment (civil service), 198–99 Fleisch, Brahm David, 231 n.64 Foggin, L. M., 194, 202 n.49 Food, 39–41, 46, 153, 157 Forests, 2, 26 Forgery/fraud, 66, 75 n.59, 77, 137 Fort Victoria, 41 Fortune, G., 203 n.79 France, 215 Franz (teacher), 155 Fruit, 40, 154 Fuller, Rev., 64, 71, 146, 154, 159, 166, 168, 177 Funding, xi, 18, 177 Game Preservation Ordinance, 131 Gaols/prisons, 44, 45, 46, 53 n.43, 112, 130, 137 Garahwa, 31, 160 Garahwa chiefship/dynasty, 22, 32 n.19 Garden of Eden, 140 n.21 Gaza Empire/Gaza overrule, xiii, 1, 2, 3, 11, 24–31, 46, 122, 157; appropriations,

253

24, 26; economy, 24, 25, 27; enforcement, 24; exaction of tribute, 24; imperial capital, 24; Ndau death march (thousands died, 1889), 27; resisted, 24, 25, 43; scattering and impoverishment, 45; transformed gender identities, 28. See also Ngungunyana Gaza law, 24 Gaza raiding, 87 Gaza state, 44; afraid of spiritual threats to its authority, 25; despotism, 31; faltered (mid-1890s), 31; systems of rule persist under colonial regime, 39–40 Gazaland, 27, 28, 29, 49, 50, 54 n.65 Gender, 28, 132, 133–34, 138, 152, 154, 155, 198; school curriculum, 147–48, 157–58 Genealogies, 108, 114 Geography, 82 Germans/Germany, 19 n.25, 151 Gesifan (a diviner), 112–13, 118 n.46 Gikuyu communities, 147 Gikuyu dictionary (Barlow, 1914), 14 Gikuyu language, 198 Gilmour, Rachael, xviii n.9 Gilson, 163 n.67 Gilson, Miss, 157 Ginzburg, Carlo, 19 n.23 Girls, 56, 104, 157–58 Goats, 31, 34 n.59, 44–46, 78, 91–94, 101 n.88, 149 God, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20 n.26, 56, 113, 130, 168, 233; translation, 12, 61, 169. See also Holy Spirit Goke-Pariola, Abiodan, 18 n.10 Gona (medicine horn), 137 Good life, 104, 106, 111 Goods, 158, 206 Goody, Jack, 65, 107 Goromonzi district, 40, 207 Gospel of the Plow (Alvord), 151–52, 154 Gospel truth, 106 Gossip, 89, 90 Grain, 26, 44, 45, 47, 153, 154 Grammar, 71, 98 n.22, 167, 229; correct, 182 n.19, 197; standardized, 199; study of, 198 Grammars (manuals), 58, 178, 199

254

INDEX

Grass-burning, 46, 48, 79 Greek language, 59, 60, 62, 63, 67 Great Tree at Chikore (shrine), 23, 25, 61, 65, 110 Great Zimbabwe, 171 Grievous bodily harm, 93, 150 Gugunhanna, 27 Guhune communal area land, 212 n.13 Guilt, 91, 92, 94 Gutu, 24, 157 Gwabuya, 106 Gwanda, 53 n.44, 210 Gwelo, 100 n.67 Gwelo District, 34 n.39, 153 Hades, 230 n.26 Haggard, Rider, 47 hakata divination dice, 135; luridly translated as “bones,” 223 Hallen, Barry, 139 Halley’s Comet, 47 Harare, 203 n.61, 235 Hartridge, D., 201 n.34 Hastings, Adrian, 20 n.26 Hatch, Mr., 59, 60, 62, 165, 166, 167; translation of theological concepts, 168–69 Hatch-Wilder translation of Gospels (1910), 60, 62 Headmen, 30, 39, 40, 42, 44, 80, 84, 127, 156, 208; terminology, 128, 140 n.12 Healers, 134, 136, 163 n.48, 223 Healing, 21, 111, 135, 136; exchange of knowledge, 113; local ideas, 57; spiritual aspects, 223 Health and healing, post-Enlightenment European concepts, 136 Health and safety, 188 Hearts and minds, 9, 17 Heathenism/Heathens, 47, 71, 72, 103–6, 111, 113, 114–16, 117 n.22, 151, 152; not abandoned, 145; rationalism and uncomfortable white people, 103–19 Hegemonic project, xii, 4, 5, 7, 10, 15, 17–18, 108, 146, 148, 152, 179, 205; effective, 9; insertion of European norms into African cultures, 8; literacy not effective tool, 159

Hegemonic translation, 96 Hegemony, xvi, 4–5, 7, 13, 38, 65, 122, 123, 186, 234; British (attempt to impose over Dutch), 48; colonial, 9; European, 130; potential of literacy, 158; question (whether possible of successful), 4; rationalist, 116 Herbs/herbalists, 112, 136 Hermeneutic loops, 61 High Court, 79 Highlands/Highlanders, 27, 28, 38 Highveldt, 24, 27, 29, 31 History, 21–34, 83, 98 n.28, 220, 233; colonial context, 1–20; hegemony and translation, law, language, science, 1–20; memorized, 88; oral, 22, 98 n.28; tribal, 108 Hlabiso, 156 Hlatcwayo, Jonas, 42–43; alternative renderings of surname, 52 n.29; beaten for desertion, 43, 52 n.29, 62; career (1908–21), 74 n.43; helper (to Wilder), 62; hymn-writer, 62; store-owner (1912-), 74 n.43, 149, 161 n.16 Hlazo, S., 173 Hliziyo, Mtini, 172 Hoernlé, Mrs. A. W. (Winifred), 218–21, 228 Hoes, 45, 95, 101 n.88, 149, 153 Hofmeyr, Isabel, xviii n.10, 75 n.67, 181 n.6 Holleman, xi Holy Spirit, problem of translation, 169–70, 182 n.31. See also Jesus Christ Honesty, 149, 150–51, 172 Horton, Robin, 156, 163 n.51 Hountondji, Paul, 96, 101 n.98 Housework, 157, 158 How to Become a Witch Doctor (Burbridge), 219 How Natives Think (Levy-Bruhl, 1926), 222 Howman, E. G., 89, 126, 211; bridewealth payments, 129; father of Roger, 131, 139 n.7, 217; knew more but didn’t publish, 218; request for codification, 139 n.8 Howman, Roger, 89, 97 n.20, 99(nn.49, 57), 131, 139 n.7, 217 Hugo, Rev. H. C., 174, 176, 183 n.47, 221 Hulley, T. B., 85

INDEX Hunting, 24–26, 40, 44, 142 n.48; prohibited, 46 Hut tax, 38, 79, 82, 83, 158 Hyatt, Stanley P., 75 n.59, 104 Hygiene, 106, 111, 114, 156, 157, 158 Hymnbooks, 58, 67, 165 Hymns, 60, 62, 65, 72 Ideal Native community, terminology, 176 Ideas, 50, 51, 65; alien/familiar, 9; Christian (translated into vernacular texts), 62; exchange, 60; indigenous, xv, 59, 60–61; ordering of, xii; supernatural, 193; theological, 61 Identities: ethnic, xvi-xvii; political, xvii; social, 198 Identity politics, xi Ideology, 8, 159, 173, 180 Idiom, 61, 71 Ignorance, 35, 83, 152 Illiteracy, 40 Imagined communities (Anderson), xvi Imperial measures, 148 Impis, 30, 39, 43, 46 Imported goods, 151, 158 Imprisonment, 44, 53 n.43, 91, 153 Indaputa, 45 Independent churches, 185 Indian Ocean, 21, 22 Indigenous people: better government of, 215; terminology, 173 Indirect rule, xvi, 82, 191, 224–26 Indunas, 40, 78 Industrial economy, 27 Industrial manufacture, 103, 105, 114 Industrial sectors, 217 Industrial work, 217, 151; curriculum subject, 155–56 Industrialization, 115, 226 Industries, indigenous, 146, 222 Infanticide, 83, 225 Informants, 126; recognized, 127 Information, 35, 48, 138 Inhambane (Bilene), 23, 27, 29 Inheritance, 81, 83–86, 126, 155, 186, 205, 206 Inheritance debts, 208

255

Initial encounters/first encounters (1890s-1900s), xiii, 1, 17, 35–119, 220, 233; judicial, 90, 96; violent (Meredith and African man, 1896), 2, 3, 4, 5, 11 Injustice, 92, 190–91 Inkosi (new rulers), 42 Insanity, 110, 118 n.37 Institutions, 16, 219, 221 Intellectual bridge, xvii-xviii Interaction, 181, 211, 221, 229 Interpreters, 43–44, 49, 64, 136, 192; names rarely recorded, 50–51 Invention of tradition, 186, 234, 236 n.1 Inyanga District, 108 Irrationality, 115, 139 Irrigation, 41, 51 n.16, 154, 160, 162 n.36 Isitupa, 149 Ivory, 21, 23, 24, 136 Jackson, H. M. G., 100 n.67, 101(nn.88, 96), 173, 174, 189, 190, 191, 202 n.45, 205, 225, 227, 231 n.53; brother of S.N.G., 99 n.49; CNC, 194, 195, 216, 217, 224 Jackson, S. N. G., 85, 86, 87, 99 n.49 Jacob (Genesis 24), 85 Jameson Raid, 48 Jeater, Diana, xviii n.3, xix n.11, 4, 58, 73 n.21, 76 n.90, 99 n.49, 122, 201 n.18, 202 n.56, 234; arrival in Zimbabwe, 235; bridewealth practices, 210, 213 n.22; dictionaries (use by social historian), 141 n.35; expert status selfquestioned, xi-xii, 18, 233, 235; focus on ineffectiveness of white rule rather than its injustice, 234; introduction of two new items to Zimbabwean historiography, xvi; language interpretation, 141–42 n.38; NMO (1917), 140 n.10, 140 n.23; parallel systems of criminal law, 141 n.36; raised questions that matter, 235; solidarity with national liberation struggles, xi; translations of Holy Spirit, 182 n.31; turning language into linguistics, 200 n.2 Jesuits, 178 Jesus Christ, 62, 64, 65, 67, 106, 180. See also God

256

INDEX

Johannesburg, 27, 82 Jollie, Ethel Tawse, 190 Jones, Rev. Neville, LMS, 223 Jones, Todd, 7, 8, 180 Journal of Southern African Studies, xix n.11 Judicial process, 90, 190 Judicial system, 37 Junior Certificate Examination, 194 Jurisprudence, 37; African, 89, 94, 96; European, 87, 94; European model that didn’t fit, 85; indigenous, 89; local, 234; systems of, 207; universal application of uniform rules, 94 Justice, 78, 79, 87; administration of, 23, 126, 133; European forms, 77; fair and impartial, 94; ideas of, 94, 95–96; miscarriages of, 209; quality of, 81–82; systems (local versus European), 92; unfair white, 95; Justices of the peace (JPs), 34 n.60, 42–43, 78, 79 Kaffir language, 201 n.9 Kalanga languages, 59 Keigwin, H. S., 152 Kenilworth farm, 34 n.58, 37 Kenny, E, 160, 211 Kenya, xvii, 19 n.25, 151, 198; markers of difference, 189; need to maintain boundaries, 49 Key concepts, 6, 148, 152, 179; enshrined in law, 126; failure to convey, 181; religious, 168–69; translation, 9, 171, 178 Khoi-Khoi people, 12, 130 Kimberley, 26 Kin/kinship, 27, 69–70, 87, 95, 156, 218 Kincheloe, Mr., 197–98 King, Mr., 57, 60, 62, 64, 70 King, Mrs., 60, 62, 157 Kingdom of God, 105 Knowledge, xii, 65, 234–35; boundarysetting, 196; comparative, 225; English-language, 159; linguistic, 82; white attempts at appropriation, 18 Knowledge codification, 186 Koziboni, ill-gotten vest, 69, 105–6 Kraal cases, 209

Kraal people, 70 Kraal services, 63 Kraals, 40, 46, 54 n.63, 56, 113, 152, 167, 188 Krige, Sue, 227, 231 n.64 Kubvuma, 178 Kuchena (whiteness), 175 Kudzidziswa, 178 Kuklick, Henrika, xvi Kungerwa, 45 Kuper, Hilda, xvi, 128 Laager, 46 Labels (interchangeable), 202 n.57 Labour, 5, 31, 39–40, 42–44, 66, 122, 194 Land, 2, 29, 31, 35, 40, 42, 55, 59, 74(nn.43, 48), 78, 107, 122, 185, 186, 192, 206, 217, 224, 234; private property, 38; seized by whites, 153–54; seizure (intra-African), 22 Land Apportionment Act (1930), 186 Land Apportionment Bill (1929), 200 n.1 Land Commission Report, 176 Land ownership, 22, 57 Land redistribution, 212 n.13 Land tenure, 117 n.22, 154, 155; awaiting study (1925), 206 Landau, Paul S., xvii, 14, 140 n.15, 141 n.31, 142 n.51, 202 n.38, 219 Landholders, 45 Landlords, 116; duties and obligations, 55, 57 Language/s, xiii, 4, 16, 28, 37, 60–61, 96, 129, 148, 177, 180, 186, 188; classification, 182 n.19; colonial language, 10; complexity of use, 10; determines cognition, 19 n.13; focus for action, 200; hegemonic tool, 5; importance (encounters between whites and Africans), 3; local, 96, 234; manipulation by Africans, 19 n.11; norms and values not necessarily accepted, 6; opens door to culture, 195; oral, xvii; orally-acquired expertise, 192; parallel use, 9, 19 n.22; playfulness of African uses, 234; precise meaning (importance in court cases), 189; reflection of modes of thought, 6, 19 n.11; standardization, xv, xvi; standardization constantly con-

INDEX tested, xvii; supposed to be understood (Peterson), 15–16; temple, 5–6; underpins cognition (Sapir-Whorf), 7; weak/strong typology, 10–11 Language acquisition: laissez-faire attitude in crisis, 192; problem of association with Natives, 195–96 Language examinations, 197; no oral component, 194 Language unification, 177 Law/s, xv, 16, 35–36, 46, 138, 186, 224; administration of, 127; African, xiv, 81, 122, 126, 211; African concepts, 205, 206; African experience, 96; Africans did not distinguish between criminal and civil law, 87; codification, xiv, 123; fair administration of, 87–88; indigenous/local, xiii, 81, 82, 84, 85, 89; literature, 77; need for standardized rulings, 84; oral-based, 99 n.53; practice of, required performance, 130; principles of, 208; rarely applied, 130; repugnant, 83; required translation of ideas, xii, 16; search for standardized rules and regulations, 82; text-based, 88, 96, 99 n.53; uniform application, 87–88; universal and non-negotiable, 129; white concepts, 206. See also Statute law Law and courts, 77–101; translation matter of life or death, 77 Law Department, 190, 205, 206, 208; defined itself as expert on Africans, 212 n.10; direct challenge to NAD, 212 n.10; Legal Department, 138 Law and order, 79 Lawrence, Dr., 33 n.39, 68, 70, 106, 111, 163 n.67, 166 Laws and customs, 98 n.28 Laziness, 47, 68 Learning: mutual (African/European), xiii; on-the-job, 192, 198, 225 Leaving heathenism, 69 Leedy, Todd H., 162 n.36 Legal contracts, 88 Legal disputes, xiii Legal ideas, African, 125 Legal procedure, African definitions, 208

257

Legal systems, 35, 85; African, 127, 138; European, 91; indigenous, 77, 91, 220, 227; local, 2; text-based, 207 Legal terminology, xiv, 125 Legalism, 150; application of rules, xii, 16 Legislation Affecting Natives (examination paper), 211 Legislative Assembly, 190–91, 195, 199 Legislative Council, 127, 190 Lenthall, E. G., 80, 93 Lestrade, 231 n.63 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 222 Lexemes, indigenous, 13 Lexicography/lexicographers, 129, 130, 170, 227 Lièngme, G., 34 n.46 Lienhardt, R. G., 19 n.22 Lifestyle, 58, 59, 72, 103, 148, 152, 158, 161, 178; Christian vs. heathen, 6; post-conversion changes, 68–70 Limbo (type of cloth), 41, 45, 104 Limpopo River, 24, 82, 226 Lingua franca, 129, 171, 177, 188, 189 Linguistic parallax (Lienhardt), 19 n.22 Linguistic skills, 34 n.49, 57–58, 186, 193, 209, 235 Linguistics, 130, 167, 209, 225, 229 Linguists, xiv, 180, 227 Literacy, xiv, xvi, xvii, 39, 58, 65, 66, 75 n.64, 76 n.76, 145, 146, 151, 158, 160, 161, 185, 200; African, 187; African motivation, 68; English-language, 188; not effective hegemonic tool, 159; not straightforward conduit for white values, 158; teaching, 165, 181 n.3; uses, 67 Literature, 179 Livestock, 25, 92, 147, 151 Livingston, Julie, African agility, 234 Livingstone, David, 8, 223 Lloyd, Mrs. E. M., Catechism of Health, 183 n.49, 221 Loans, 40, 44–45, 149 Lobengula, 24 Lobola. See Bridewealth Local knowledge, 82 Locusts, 3, 40 London, 2, 17, 159, 165, 227, 235

258

INDEX

London, International Institute of African Languages and Culture (IIAL&C), 197, 215, 217, 219 London, SOAS, xi, xv, 183 n.44 London School of Economics (LSE), 215 Longden, H. W. D., 33 n.36, 34 n.49, 51 n.6, 54 n.60 Longden, William, 27, 29, 31, 33 n.36, 34 n.46, 41, 51 n.16, 73 n.35, 87, 110, 136, 149; on African contact with whites, 157; court cases, 50, 92, 94, 95, 100 n.76; educational opportunities, 146; established farm in South Melsetter, 49–50; fluent in Afrikaans, 49–50; intellectual benefits of working in the mines, 107; marriage law, 88; NC, Melsetter District (1909-), 89, 90, 104–5; Nguni informants, 46; not fluent in Zulu, 30, 34(n.49), 49; raised Boer commando group, 46–47; regarded as fool by Meredith, 48; resident magistrate, 37–38, 90; on witchcraft, 134 Longman’s, 159 Loram, C. T., 225 Lourenco Marques, 147 Louw, Rev. A. A., Jr., 169, 178, 203 n.61, 223 Louw, C. S. A., 132, 133, 141 n.35 Lowe, Chris, 128, 140 n.14, 142 n.51 Lowlands, 25, 29, 30, 63 Lubkemann, Stephen, 33 n.37 Luedke, Trudy, xix n.11 Lugard, Lord, 224 Mabhonirokisheni (people born in towns), 198 Mabota, spirit of, 23 Mabvakure, 175 Macdonnell, Sir Philip, 209–10, 211, 217 MacGonagle, Elizabeth, 25, 32 n.2, 86; main argument, 28, 34 n.43 Machaze/Madanda area, 27 Maclean, Iain S., xviii n.8 Magic, 115, 134, 135 Magistrates, xiii, 15, 37–38, 48, 77, 97 n.8, 100 n.67, 129, 157, 201 n.9, 212 n.11; Resident magistrates (RMs), 49, 78, 90, 96

Magistrate’s court, 79, 90, 91, 208, 209, 212 n.17 Magora, 41 Maguywane: defeated by Portuguese (1897), 38; Gaza commander, 31, 46 Maize, 26, 51 n.16; corn, 40; green mealies, 44; mealie meal, 41; mealies, 83 Makaripa, 100 n.79 Makoni District, 38, 40, 50, 98 n.28 Makuza, 54 n.77, 57, 118 n.32; also known as Neseni, 110, 118 n.33; installation, 112; secular claimant to Musikavanhu succession, 39, 50, 109–10 Malaria, 3, 25–26, 37 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 227–28 Mangundi, 74 n.53, 105 Manners, 148, 156–57, 158, 163 n.63 Manyika identity, xvii Mapangisana, Tom, 63, 64, 65, 160 Maps, 29, 82 Mapungwana, Chief, 26, 29, 30, 37, 38, 43, 108, 109, 142 n.52 Mapungwana chiefship/dynasty, 22, 32 n.19 Mapungwau, 45 Marais, Professor J. S., 226 Marandellas (Marondera), 175 Marimandia, 45 Markers of difference, 185, 189 Market economy, 66 Market gardening, 147, 154, 155, 160 Markets, 186 Marriage, 25, 69, 78, 81, 84, 85–86, 95, 149, 155; African, 125; African (definition), 127; failure to register, 128, 129; second wives, 69; terminological difficulties (African context), 125, 126, 127, 130, 138 Marriage arrangements, 45 Marriage certificates, 66 Marriage contracts, 86 Marriage customs, 213 n.23 Marriage registration, 86, 128, 139, 140 nn.23, 25 Marsh, Mr. and Mrs., 198 Martin Trek, 30, 31 Marwendo (headman), 44 Masculinity, 28, 43, 153, 156

INDEX Masenga, 92, 93, 100 n.79 Mashave spirits, 170, 219 Mashona: Indigenous Natives of Southern Rhodesia (Bullock), 139 nn.6–7, 211, 219 Mashona language, 59 Mashona people, 81 Mashonaland, 59, 83, 86, 105, 129, 169 Mashonaland Quarterly, 123, 171–78, 183 nn.48–49, 191–92, 198, 216, 221; did not provide Africans with increased access to knowledge of English, 176; discussions about language unification, 177; editorials, 172, 177; excluded African readers, 177; lexical analysis of racial categories, 173–81, 183 n.44; target readership, 173–74, 176–77; translation problems, 183 n.47; use of term black, 173; voice allowed to African contributors limited, 172–73 Masowe Church, 67, 75 n.70, 76 n.91 Masterson, Leslie Clifford, 141 n.32 Masvikiro (spirit mediums), 22, 38, 87, 160 Matabele, every man his own divorce court, 87, 99 n.49 Matabeleland, xvi, 151, 193 Matanga, 74 n.53 Material conditions, xiii-xiv Material culture, xiv, 161, 186 Materialistic modernism, 147 Matopos, 23, 25 Maxwell, David, xvi, 108 Mazrui, Ali A., 19 n.25, 49, 54 n.70, 99 n.53, 181 n.2, 189, 203 n.80 Mazrui, Alamin M., 19 n.25, 49, 54 n.70, 99 n.53, 181 n.2 Mberengwa/Zvishavane District, 34 n.39 Mbesa, Alice, 162 n.20 Mbonyeya: also known as Munotswa, 118 n.33; junior member of chiefly house of Musikavanhu, 109–10, 118 n.32; rainmaker, 112 McCulloch, Jock, 118 n.37 Measurement, 114, 132, 145, 148, 150, 155; European systems, 160; very condition of knowledge, 107 Mechanics, 106, 115, 155, 156 Meddlesomeness of professors (Burbridge), 215–32; origin of phrase, 228

259

Medical fees, 149 Medical hybridity, xix n.11 Medical mission, contribution to conversion, 111 Medical services, 48, 55, 104 Medical texts, 168 Medicine: African, 156; scientific, 111; use of term, 136–37, 138; Western, 106, 111–12, 219 Medicine man, 142 n.54 Medicines, 132, 136 Mediums, 25, 108, 109 Melsetter (new site, 1897-), 37, 52 n.21; Sunday school (1911), 64 Melsetter (original site, pre-1897), 15, 31; named after ancestral Moodie homestead, 30; renamed Chipinge (1897), 37 Melsetter Agricultural Show, 41 Melsetter burghers, 42, 43, 46, 47; regarded as disloyal, 48 Melsetter District, xiv, 2, 41, 42, 49, 50, 52 n.21, 58, 77–79, 84, 86, 90, 91, 94, 96, 121, 122, 130, 136, 137, 140 n.23, 141 n.36, 145, 147, 151–52, 156, 165, 188, 189, 192, 197, 208, 211, 224; Africans rarely used text-based legal systems, 207; court interpreters, 131; courts, 133, 138; Dutch community, 201 n.34; Dutch farmers (community and church bonds), 53 n.48; farming land, 153–54; legal records, 88, 99 n.52; list of chiefs and subchiefs (Meredith, 1900), 40, 51 n.10, 107, 108; literate and skilled Africans, 146; Nguni invasion, 1; now known as Chimanimani, 1. See also Chimanimani District Memoirs, 26, 228 Men, 42, 86, 133; husbands, 56; junior, xvii, 82, 151; junior (embraced Christianity as way of asserting independence), 14; senior, 82, 129, 151, 156–57, 162 n.29; young, 25, 28, 43, 44, 56, 69, 86, 152, 156–57 Mentalités, 5, 12, 176, 196, 220, 226, 228; connection with language, 7; primitive, 224; primitive (Levy-Bruhl), 222, 223; yawning gap, 193

260

INDEX

Mentality gap, 223–25 Mentally-deficient speakers, 192–93 Meredith, Llewellyn, 13, 47, 50, 53 n.42, 114, 115, 142 n.52, 211; civil disputes, 16; court cases, 80, 89, 92–95, 99 n.52, 135; court interpreter, 112, 131; divination role, 136; hostility toward chiNdau spiritual leaders, 160; laws and customs (Makoni District), 98 n.28; list of chiefs and subchiefs (1900), 40, 51 n.10, 107, 108; many men needed loans to pay taxes, 44; Musikavanhu succession dispute (1897), 109–10, 118 nn.32–33; native commissioner (Melsetter District), 2, 38, 78, 81, 104; no time to contribute to dictionary (1905), 58; paramount chiefs had very little authority, 87; on rainmaking powers, 112–13; rationalizations of local politics, 128; regarded Longden as fool, 48; relations with missionaries, 48; returned briefly as NC (1923), 118 n.32; stopped men working on road in lieu of tax, 43; supervisor over other chiefs, 40; translation work, 77; tree shrines, 32 n.14; understanding of entitlement, 39–40; upset by shamwari exchange of daughters, 86; use of term witchfinder (1899), 134; village reorganization, 108–9; violent encounter with African (1896), 2, 3, 4, 5, 11 Meritocracy, 152 Messengers, 3, 43, 164 n.78; names rarely recorded, 50–51 Methodists, xvi, 23 Mfundisi (teacher, reverend), 180 Mhlanganyiso, 62–64, 70–71, 74 n.44, 76 n.90 Middle class, 145, 207 Middle East, 60 Middleman move (Jones), 7, 9, 10, 139, 223 Midzimu spirits, 170–71, 219 Migrant work/workers, 35, 42, 44, 63, 152–53, 194, 190 Migration, 27–28; to Bulawayo and Johannesburg, 27 Military regiments, 156, 159

Military service, 27, 43 Military training, 32 n.20 Millet, 26, 40 Mineral rights, 29 Mines, 3, 39, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 63, 86, 105, 107; better wages offered, 147; higherpaying work at, 53 n.43; South Africa, 28 Mining, 27–28, 45, 146, 217 Mission stations, 210 Mission texts, 197 Missionaries, xiii, xvi, 5, 6, 9, 31, 35, 36, 39, 47, 49, 54 n.70, 116, 121, 113, 170, 175, 198, 220, 222, 226, 228; American, xiii-xiv, 15, 16, 28, 56–57, 63, 68, 105, 150, 166, 167; attempt to reduce influence of, 227; continually fell out with Meredith, 48; core values, 68; derision of local beliefs, 97 n.16; did not understand people around them, 57; European, 207; felt isolated from civilization, 15; flaunting their expertise, 195; little enquiry into local beliefs, 63; loss of control over expression of Christian ideas in vernacular texts, 62; mendacity, 76 n.91; Ndau, 150; obsessed with textual precision, 63; point not to reinterpret Christianity, but to reinvent Africans, 11, 68; rainmakers of competing power, 8; regard themselves as experts on local culture and language, 168; relationships with helpers, 62–63; romanticization of African societies, 227; self-control difficulties, 75 n.73; superstitious, 233; Swiss, 34 n.46; text-oriented group, 233; unable to translate their ideology into local terms, 180; wanted local people to understand Christian worldview, 50; white, 64–65; Zulu, 56–57, 63, 68, 150, 162 n.20, 166, 167. See also evangelists Missionary networks, 235 Missions, text-based, 197 Misunderstandings, 6, 9; could have serious consequences, 77 Mittlebeeler, Emmet V., 19 n.23 Modern problems (course), 216 Modernity, xv, 207, 212 n.13, 216, 220, 224, 226; impact could be ignored, 229

INDEX Modernization, 148, 212 n.13, 227 Modes of thought, 1, 66, 107, 108, 115, 131, 152, 223, 229; African, 96, 150, 168, 199, 225; European, 151; European (African non-capitulation to), 130; rational, 109, 114; rationalist, 111; taxonomic, 129; thinking black, 165–84; thought, European, 85; vernacular, 167 Moffat, H. U., 227 Moffat, Robert, 208 Moment of marriage, 127 Moodie, Dunbar, 29, 30, 31, 78; deemed himself a JP, 42–43 Moodie, Tom, 30 Moodie Trekkers, 30 Moral economy, 149 Moral improvement/transformation, 103, 105 Moral superiority, 103, 104 Morality, 68, 81, 86, 104, 149, 158; Christian, 148; ways of defining, 150 Morgenster, 171, 178, 203 n.61, 224 Moses (an African indigene), 45 Mossurize/Mozzurize area, 27, 33 n.37 Mount Darwin, xvi Mount Silinda Mission, 3, 11, 33 n.39, 34 n.58, 35, 41, 42, 48, 103, 105, 106, 130, 146, 147, 152, 153, 155, 159, 160, 162 n.41, 197, 203 n.61, 233; adult education, 56; agricultural output, 55; annual report (1907), 63, 74 n.44; booklet on native customs (translation issues), 213 n.35; church (edifice, 1897), 63; conference to debate appropriate translations for key religious concepts (1915), 168–69, 171; congregationalist (from USA), 2; crisis (late 1900s), 70; curriculum, 159; dependence on local people for grain, 55, 72 n.1; dependence on African advisers began to wane, 168; dictionary (1915), 132–33, 135, 136, 163 n.50, 168, 178; doctors, 111; early history, xvi; educational and evangelical materials in chiNdau, 165; employment opportunities for Africans, 43; EnglishChindau vocabulary (1915), 104, 168, 178; failure to meet local expectations,

261

57; farm, 104; few ordained Africans, 155; history of (case study), xvi; Language Committee, 166, 167–68; language syllabus and examinations (chiNdau), 167; legal right to land, 55; limited initial interest in agriculture, 151; outstations, 159–60; printing department, 166; role in developing irrigation projects, 162 n.36; schools, 39, 55; shoddy treatment of Zulu staff, 150, 162 n.20; substations/outstations, 57, 64, 74 n.53; Sunday services (poor attendance), 57; tenants, 55–56; translation (1895–1909), 55–76; translation project (limitations), 66–67; translation projects, xiii; Zulu staff excluded from category native, 158 Mount Silinda School, 55, 70, 106, 113, 147–48, 159, 188; annual report (1911), 163 n.67; curriculum, 155–56, 157, 158, 163 n.48–49; roll, 56; standards, 158 Moyomuti, 119 n.54 Mphungu, refugee Gaza aristocrat, 31 Mrewa District, 113, 197 Mtamkuni (Ndau man), 105 Mtanga, 62, 70 Mtisu (teacher-evangelist), 155 Mucheke, 92 Mud huts, 3, 55, 104, 106 Mudimbe, V. Y., 16, 19 n.10, 97 n.16 Mudzimu, 169–70 Mufara, 44 Mugabe, Robert, 18, 233, 235 Muhlanga, Rev. Samuel, 221 Mujumeya, 45 Mundiyetu v. Madzonga (court case, 1911), 95, 101 n.92 Munjakanja (Musikavanhu paramount chief), 25, 37, 108; arrest and release, 30, 34 n.49; charismatic claimant to Musikavanhu chieftaincy, 23; death (1895), 31; not paying tribute, 34 n.49; ritual power, 25 Muranda arrangements, 26, 45 Murder, 25, 79, 91; ritual murder, 84 Muroyi (witch): muroi, 132, 133; murowi, 132; meaning (legal difficulty), 132–34; terminology, 10, 19 n.23

262

INDEX

Musikavanhu chiefship/chieftaincy, 74 n.43, 155, 160, 180; charismatic claimant (reinstalled 1923), 155; charismatic claims, 115; paramountcy, 110, 128, 118 n.37; premier rainmaker, 23; ritual versus charismatic role, 23, 118 n.32; Saviour of the People, 118 n.36; secular versus charismatic claimants, 31, 40; succession, 22, 31, 40, 47, 109, 118 n.32 Musikavanhu people, 51 n.11 Musikavanhu rainmaking spirit, 47 Musikavanhu shrine, 21 Muswazaenda, 45 Mutambara, 37, 39, 80, 154, 158, 160, 212 n.13 Mutambara dynasty, 32 n.19 Mutapa dynasty, 22 Mutema, 22, 24, 37, 45, 108, 109, 110, 128, 160; Chimanimani paramount chief, 183 n.45 Mutema chiefship/dynasty, 22, 23 Mutema traditions, 32 n.13 Mutema’s people, 63 Mutema’s territory, 31 Muti (medicine), 10, 136–37, 138 Mutiguri, 45 Mutombo, 136 Mutonono mine, 44 Muwengwa, 44 Muwusha, Chief, 83 Muwushu dynasty, 32 n.19 Mwali shrines, 25 Mwari, term used by mission to translate God, 61 Mwari cult, 23, 46, 53 n.56, 169 Mwari-Wedenga, 169 Mystical outlook, 222 Myth, 108 Mzila, 24 Mzilikazi (Khumalo ruler of Ndebele), 24 Nagai, Kaori, xviii n.9 Naming: Adam’s activities, 140 n.21; involved definition and appropriation, 129–30; means of limiting fluidity, 129 Nanga (witchdoctor), 133; n’anga, 135–36, 142 n.54 Nannies, 41, 52 n.21

Natal, 3, 23, 30, 35, 71, 80–81, 83, 84, 103, 105, 129, 151; law codes, 85–86 Natal Native Department, 82 National liberation struggles, xi Nationalism, 234, 235 Native administration, 178, 211, 227; introduction of science, 218; need for a workable uniformity, 127; practical, 218 Native Adultery Punishment Ordinance (NAPO 1916), 128, 130, 141 n.26 Native Affairs Commission (1910-), 121 Native Affairs Department (NAD), 2, 82, 84, 92, 94, 121, 122, 151, 157, 162 n.27, 179, 186, 190, 194, 199, 203 n.61, 207, 225, 226; anxieties about African advance, 216–17; court procedures, 208; decreasing direct contact with Africans, 188; dictionary, 58; direct challenged by Law Department, 212 n.10; employees/officials, 193, 198, 223; firewall created, 200; gamekeeper approach towards African culture, 220–21; insecurity, 196; interested in validating its legal expertise, 205; knowledge acquired from native experts rather than from Africans themselves, xv; linguists, 187; more rule-bound, 198; native policy, changing, 217; needed to protect its monopoly, 195; new recruits, 187–88; orally-based, 197; paucity of white linguists (1923), 189; period of uncertainty, 191; reorganized (1898), 51 n.8; translation, ambiguity, codification, 125–43 Native Affairs Department Annual (NADA, 1923-), 126, 139 n.6, 147, 149–50, 170, 171, 174, 178, 195, 196, 206, 209–11, 217–21, 227, 228; changing purposes, 220; editorials, 224; ethnographic data, 220–21; internal conversation between whites, 177, 178; utter lack of mutual understanding, 175 Native Agricultural Demonstrators (1927-), 192 Native Annual Meeting (1908), 70 Native civil disputes, 33 n.32, 88 Native Code (Natal), 84

INDEX Native commissioner’s department, 35; instructions, 39 Native commissioners (NCs), xiii, 31, 33 n.32, 34 n.58, 36, 37, 42, 44, 46, 48–50, 56, 77–81, 85, 86, 107–8, 113, 115, 148, 149, 157, 159, 187, 189–93, 196–98, 206–11, 220, 226, 228, 233; annual reports, 140 n 23; anthropological training, 217–18; court, 79, 208; did not get much respect from academic professionals, 219; difficulties in understanding African legal decisions, 223; engagement with Africans, 78, 97 n.8; guiding Africans to rationalize their traditions, 221; judicial practices, 87–96, 100 nn.67–68; linguistic requirements, 199; new dictionary (1932), 203 n.63; overwhelmed by paperwork, 198; pupils of Africans, 84; retreated from attempting to understand African notions of law, 209; romanticization of African societies, 227; seeking basic information about African societies, 15; senior, 126; set themselves up as Kaffir chiefs, 82; translation, ambiguity, codification, 125–43; trying to find out basic information, 82–83 Native Customary Law (Northern Rhodesia), 206 Native customs, 83, 86, 129, 168 Native Customs and Administration Examination, 198 Native Customs Examination (1922-), xv, 129, 190, 210, 233; syllabus (1933-), 211 Native development policy, 185 Native dialects, 209 Native disputes, 142 nn.40, 52 Native Education Policy, 176 Native experts, xv, 186, 211, 235; anecdote (versus general systems), 220; divided over role of science in formulating policy, 227; experts, xi-xii, 85, 96, 168, 169, 205, 217, 221, 225, 226, 234; resentment at privileging of claims of theoreticians, 228; talking among themselves, 17 Native interpreters, 3 Native Language Examination (civil service), 190, 193, 198–99; failure to

263

pass (consequences), 203 n.69; rule-bound, book-learned skill, 200 Native Language examinations, 196–97; oral component, 199; syllabus and system of training, 199; proficiency earned without direct contact with Africans, 199 Native law, 79, 125, 129, 217 Native law and administration (course), 216 Native Law and Courts Act (1937), 186 Native law and custom, xv, 78, 80, 93, 126, 131, 198, 209, 225; Africans no longer approved source of information, 210–11; missionary conference (1925), 206; opinion of native not wanted, 205–13; remains robust/fails to atrophy, 205–7, 210. See also Custom/tradition Native Law and Custom Examination, 211 Native Laws, Customs and Administration Examination (Unisa), 226, 229, 231 n.63 Native Laws and Customs Commission Report (Cape Colony, 1883), 101 n.88 Native Laws, Customs and Superstitions (examination paper), 211 Native leader and superintendent, 172 Native Marriages Ordinance (1901), 85–86, 88, 94, 95, 127 Native Marriages Ordinance (NMO, 1917), 127, 128, 130, 140(nn.10, 23, 25), 210 Native mind, 66, 72, 112, 166, 191, 195, 206, 235; closure of intellectual bridge, xviii-xviii; cultural (not racial) attribute, 61; invention, xvi, xviii, 17–18; missionaries reluctant to engage with, 61; substitute for engagement with African thought processes, 18; theories (1923–35), 215–32; uncharted territory, 71; unfathomable nature, 186 Native political organizations, 193 Native policy, 192, 195, 225, 228; differences in perspective, 226; new thrust, 191 Native risings (rumoured), 47, 54 n.60 Native status, basis of classification as, 158, 163 n.63 Native warder, 112 Natives, 175; become competitors (to Europeans), 216; cultural, not racial, definition, 160; detribalized, 216; terminology, 173–74

264

INDEX

Natural justice, 81 Natural law, 112 Ndanga District, 89 Ndasikwa, 93 Ndau children, 113 Ndau exiles, 108 Ndau Folk Lore stories (Sithole), 168, 170 Ndau helpers (for missionaries), 59, 61, 75 n.54 Ndau identity, 28 Ndau label, 28 Ndau people, 24, 31, 38, 48, 105, 150, 168, 221; death march (1889), 27; migrants, 28; preachers, 64; readers, 66; religious superstitions, 61; teacher, 70; women, 25; young men, 27, 63 Ndau porcupine totem (Nungu), 52 n.29 Ndebele, 24; sought legitimacy from Mwali shrines, 25 Ndebele Empire, 4, 28 Ndebele society, 211 Ndhlondhlo, 64, 65, 74–75 n.54 Ndunas, 24, 25, 29, 39; new (European), 30, 31, 45, 80; Ngungunyana’s, 87 Needlework, 39, 158 Nema, 174 Neologisms, 12, 137, 169, 183 n.49; unnecessary, 174 Nepotism, 81 Neseni. See Makuza Networks of relationships, 206 Nganga (medicine man), 136 Ngorima, 24, 25, 38, 39, 108, 156; hoeing with spear, 32 n.20 Ngorima dynasty, 32 nn.19–20 Ngungunyana, xiii, 24, 30, 64–65, 87, 108, 153, 156, 159, 160; agreement with BSACo/Rhodes, 29, 31; defeated by Portuguese (1895), 31; forcible removal of thousands of people, 27; harsh application of judicial power, 25; Ndau death march (1889), 27; usurpation, 25; white petitioners/supplicants, 28–29. See also Gaza Empire Nguni language, 175 Nguni people, 27, 38, 48, 174; practice of taking local women as wives, 53 n.48; battle ritual, 64; battle skills, 24;

ethnicity, 28; expansion, 23; identity, 28; incursions, 40, 46 interests, 25; offshoots (of Zulu polity), 23; overlords, 11; raiding, 24, 29; spirits, 25; warriors, 28, 31 Nhema (black), 174 Nida, Eugene A.: “Do not argue with informant about language,” 11; theorist of Bible translation, 8, 150 Nielsen, Peter, 174, 184 n.65, 197, 203 n.59, 222–23, 224, 228, 230 n.44; saw Africans as contemporaries in process of change, 227 Niezen, R. W., 67 Nigeria, 224 Njuzu, 219 Nkomo, Simbini M., 179, 180, 195; dangerously untrustworthy (because highly-educated), 179, 189; proposed school, 179, 184 n.73 Northern Rhodesia, 206, 217, 231 n.64 Nwandwe (Zulu evangelist), 76 n.90; misrepresentation of Christian life, 70 Nyamusoro, 133, 142 n.48 Nyeri people, 158 Nyika, terminology, 176 Nyika language, 59 O’Neil, J. A., SJ, 202 n.56 Oberlin Theological Seminary, 151 Objectivity, 107 Odendaal, Petrus J., 131 Odendaal, W. N., 42–43, 150 Odysseus/Tiresias, 219 Odzi valley, 25, 33 n.28, 41 Oral tradition, 25, 96, 98 n.28, 110 Orality, 17 Orange Free State, 26, 29, 30, 35, 42 Ordeal, 142 n.50 Order: imposition (limits), 108; rationalist, list-based, 108; rationalized, 129 Order in Council (1898), 79, 126 Ordinances, 138; words understood in varying ways, 130 Orner, Rev. A. J., 106, 135, 141 n.35, 166, 167, 168, 178 Orthodoxy, linguistic, 198 Orthography, 167, 169, 197, 199

INDEX Otherness, xv, 2, 7, 103, 115–16, 191, 224, 227 physical markers, 104–5 Ownership, 206 Oxen, 91, 154 Pacific Islanders, 227 Paramount chiefs, 23, 25, 38, 80, 84, 87, 98 n.28, 109–10, 118 n.36, 128, 183 n.45 Paris, 17 Pass law, 79 Passover story, 47 Patriarchy, 84 Patronage, 25, 26, 37, 40, 41, 94, 95, 149, 159; debt-based, 45 Patten, Secretary, 71 Pay, 28, 42, 149, 198 Payment, 92, 94 Peasant production, 38, 41, 45, 154, 224, 234 Peel, J.D.Y., 9 Penhalonga, 172, 203 n.61 Penhalonga, St. Augustine’s Mission, 177, 178 Pentecostal inspiration, 64 Perception, xii, xvii, 1, 48, 78, 134, 174, 234–35; African, 49, 96, 145, 155; Africans and whites (previous backgrounds and experiences), 38, 48; injustices, 209; shifting, 133 Performance (Summers), 66, 75 n.64 Perjury, 79, 131, 189 Persephone, 230 n.26 Peterson, Derek R., xvii, 14, 15, 147, 151, 158, 198, 207 Philology, 216 Philosophy, 96 Phonetics, 28, 167, 197, 198 Phonology, 199 Physical conditions, 103–4, 105 Physiology, 106, 111 Pike, Charles, 19 n.25 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan, 1678/1684), 75 n.67; chiNdau translation, 165–66, 181 n.6 Pioneer Column, 16, 29 Plaintiffs, 79, 88–92, 100 n.76, 207, 208 Plow-owning class, unlikely to flourish, 153–54 Plumtree School, 193, 194

265

Poaching, 48 Points of contact (1895–1909), 37–54, 71; reasons, 44 Poison, 137 Police, 3, 31, 34 n.58, 37, 39, 43, 45, 79, 80, 91, 133, 190, 207 Policymaking, 234, 235 Political economy, 25, 27, 37, 42 Political interests, 115 Political will, 236 Politics, 113, 114, 128, 186, 189, 207 Polygamy, 47, 69, 70 Polygyny, 68, 69, 81, 111, 154, 168, 179, 185 Poor families, 45 Poor whites, 192–93 Portuguese East Africa (PEA), 4, 23, 27–30, 38, 46, 64, 65, 91, 105, 112, 132, 160, 221; vibrant café society, 147 Portuguese Intendente, 34 n.46 Posselt, F.W.T., 196, 217 Posselt, J. W., 54 n.63 Possession, demonical, 113, 115, 119 n.48 Pound sterling, 52 n.34 Power, 15, 16, 42, 78; administrative, 108; chiefly, 38; lost in translation, 129; political, 14, 21, 22; rational allocation, 108; ritual, 25; supernatural, 118 n.36 Power imbalance, 5, 13 Power relationships, xii, 3, 7, 10–12, 41, 128, 162 n.29; reversal, 195–96 Praise songs, 88, 99 n.54 Preachers: African, 65; Ndau, 64 Preaching, 55, 67, 178; vernacular (two forms), 64 Precedent (legal practice), 79 Prices/inflation, 130, 151, 153 Priestesses, 23, 61 Primers, 58, 159, 196 Printing press, 58, 60 Progress, 147 Proletarianization, 146, 191 Promotion prospects, 198 Pronunciation, 167 Property, 88, 206 Prosecutions, 130, 140 n.23, 156, 160 Prostitution, 141 n.26 Protestant tradition, 67 Psychology, 7, 223, 225–26

266

INDEX

Punishment, 92, 94, 130 Pupils, 164 n.74, 159 R. v Ernst Theodor Ferdinand Julius Angelbeck (1911), 201 n.9 R. v. Mujuchwa (1928), 133 Race, 158, 163 n.63, 181 Rachel (Genesis 24), 85 Racial mentality, 165 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 215, 217, 221 Rain, 25, 47, 53 n.43, 56 Rain spirit, 110 Rain stones, 23 Rainmakers, 8, 23, 110, 118 n.37, 142 n.52, 223 Rainmaking, 16, 22, 25, 32 n.13, 47, 109, 113, 155; exercise of legitimate authority, 8; translation, 8 Ranger, Terence, xvi, xvii, xviii n.5, 38, 40, 53 n.56, 236 n.1 Rape, 80, 90–91, 93, 97 n.14, 114 Rathbone, Richard, 117 n.25 Rationalism, xiii, 13, 16, 21, 36, 103, 106, 109, 114–16, 156, 222 Rationality, 107, 110, 113, 115 Reading, 65 Realpolitik, 110 Reasoning, 114, 148, 222–23, 224 Redwater, 45 Reis e Gama, 86 Religion, xiii, 83, 161, 186 Religion and Decline of Magic (Thomas), 134 Renck, Günther, 10 Rennie, J. K., 23, 24, 25, 32 n.2, 13, 33–34 n.39, 34 n.49, 51 n.16, 52 n.29, 54 nn.65, 77; Makuzas chiefship, 110, 118 n.32 Rent, 31, 42 Reserved land, 177, 192, 217, 220, 224 Respect, 3, 142 n.48, 156 Respectable citizens, 179–80 Rheinallt Jones, J. D., 222, 227 Rhodes Livingstone Institute, xvi Rhodes, Cecil John, 2, 28–31, 48, 78 Rhodes, Col. F. W., 83–84, 98 nn.28–29, 200 n.6, 211 Rhodesian Advertiser, 46, 147 Rhodesian Native Quarterly, 171, 177 Rhodesian Teachers Association, 194

Rhodies, 235 Richardson, J. P., 191 Rinderpest, 3, 43, 45 Ritual, 16, 22, 23, 25, 38, 46, 64, 47, 84, 223. See also Musikavanhu chiefship Ritual cleansing movements, 130, 140 n.22 Roads, 41, 42, 58, 52 n.26 Robinson, L. K., 190–91 Roman Dutch law, 79, 87, 90, 91; criminal justice, 131; wife unable to stand witness against husband, 97 n.14 Roora. See bridewealth Ross, Robert, 163 n.63 Routinization of religious authority (Engelke), 66–67 Rudzi, 176 Rufimbi, 114, 115, 136, 136–37 Rule of law: meaning in pre-colonial context difficult to pin down, 87; not in crisis, but in motion, 88 Rules, 87, 108, 127 Rural districts, 45, 128, 152, 189, 210, 236 Rusape mission, 183 n.49 Rusitu mission, 60, 165, 166, 169 Rusitu River, 25 Sabi River, white-settler name for Save River, 32 n.1 Sachs, Wulf, 118 n.37 Sadowsky, Jonathon, 118 n.37 Salaried posts, 128 Salaries, 45; helpers, 62, 74 n.42 Salary increments, 199, 203 n.69 Salisbury, 39, 81, 121, 171, 216 Sanctions for disobedience, 6 Samkange, Thompson, 172, 195, 235 Sanneh, Lamin, xvii, xviii n.8, 11–13, 14, 169 Sanza, 141 n.32 Sapir, Edward, 7, 9, 19 n.13 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 7, 19 n.13 Save District, 76 n.76 Save River, 21, 24–25, 28–31, 34 n.42, 35, 41, 46, 78; drought, 33 n.28; less fertile, 38; same as Sabi River, 32 n.1, 65; sporadic Nguni overrule, 24 Scanlen, Thomas, 98 n.38 Schapera, Isaac, 218 Schmidt, Elizabeth, 40, 52 n.19

INDEX Schmit, George, 12, 130 School attendance, compulsory, 55–56, 66 School curriculum, 155–56, 159, 163 nn.48–49, 193, 194; gendered, 147–48, 157–58 Schools, 48, 55, 58, 60, 157, 165, 193, 196 Schumaker, Lyn, xvi, xix n.11, 231 n.64 Science, xii-xiii, xiv, 16, 36, 103, 106, 107, 115, 116, 151, 156, 171, 180, 222, 223, 228, 233; anthropology, 215; important on two levels, xiii; philosophy of, 112; rhetoric of, 110 Scientific American, 47 Scientific fact, pre-Kuhnian truth of, 106 Scientific method, 107, 109, 115, 148, 224; as system of rule, 17 Scotland, 30 Scriptures, 106, 170, 166; Acts, 165; Corinthians, 60, 62, 165; Gospels, 60, 62, 63, 72, 165; New Testament, 58, 67, 199; Old Testament, 67; parables, 167; Pentateuch, 85; psalms, 60, 165; Romans, 165; Ten Commandments, 60; translation into chiNdau, 59, 165. See also Bible Sebungwe, 86 Seduction, 80, 90–93 Segregation, 177–78, 186, 187, 191, 217, 224 Selukwe, 43, 53 n.44 Sena (Portuguese garrison), 23 Separation phase (1920s-1930s), xv-xvi, 185–232, 233 Serfontein, Jan Hendrick Brand, 50, 54 nn.72, 76 Servants, 75 n.60; language used by whites to, 3 Sexual morality, 69–70, 75 n.73, 86, 106, 157; breakdown in agreement about meaning, 70–71; sanctions not spiritual, but material, 71 Shabani, 141 n.26 Shamanistic practices, 142 n.51 Shamwari arrangements, 26, 45, 86 Shangaan language, 3, 11, 48, 49, 50; version of Zulu, 2. See also SiZulu Shangaan people, 28, 160 Sheep, 53 n.42, 101 n.88 Shepstone, Theophilus, 82

267

Shepstone system, 82, 86 Shire, Chenjerai, 34 n.39, 183 n.44, 198 Shona, neologism, 174 Shona dialect, standardization, 197 Shona people, 196 Shrine cults, 61 Shropshire, Rev. Denys, CR, 223 Simango, C. Kamba, 221 Sin, 61, 69, 70, 72, 181 SiNdebele (language), 172, 173, 189, 194, 197, 199; proverbs, 223 Sinoia/Sinoia caves, 139 n.7, 224 Sithole, Watch, 168, 170 SiZulu (language), 3, 39, 50, 57, 60–65, 67, 71, 73 n.19, 104, 121, 159, 165; limited literature, 58; missionaries medium of teaching and evangelism, 49; texts, 60, 61, 62, 65; Zulu language, 3, 11, 30, 59, 166, 189. See also Shangaan language Skills, 147–48, 160, 200; industrial, 105; marketable, 39, 43 Skin colour, 175, 181 Slaves, 42 Small businesses, 66 Smith, Edwin W., 5, 176–77 Soap, 158, 159 Social anthropologists, 222; refusal to become interested in culture as accretion of past, 220; rival source of authority to NAD, 226; unpopular in Southern Rhodesia, 225 Social anthropology, 215, 217–18, 226; purpose, 219 Social distance, 186 Social relationships, 66, 92 Social science/scientists, 126, 195 Social survey methods, 227 Social systems, 196 Society, 186, 220, 224 Socioeconomic structures, 178 Sociology, 195 Sodipo, J. O., 139 Sofala (Portuguese garrison), 23 Sombulana (person), 59 Soothsayer, 142 n.52 Sorcerers, 132, 133 Soshangane (d. 1858), 23; expanded his empire, 24

268

INDEX

South Africa, 83, 136, 141 n.31, 187, 192, 195, 206, 216, 225–27; migration from Southern Rhodesia, 28; mines, 27; native state, 163 n.63; school examination in Xhosa, Zulu, SeSotho and SeTswana, 194 South Africa Native Affairs Committee (SANAC), 33 n.34, 47, 69, 101 n.88 South African General Mission, 60 South African Health Society, 165 South African Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union, 216 South Melsetter, 42, 43, 46, 49–50 South Melsetter Farmers’ Association, 48 Southern Africa, 107, 142 n.51 Southern chiefs, 108 Southern Rhodesia, xi, 67, 70, 81, 107, 136, 191; administrative failure, 224; approximate distribution of tribes and languages (1927), 196; constitution (1898), 51 n.8; encounter, translation, separation phases, xiii; ethnography, 17; government budget, 139 n.6; highwage sectors, 224; Law Department, 39, 126; Legal Department, 78–79, 127; modern state (mid-1920s), 185; new recruits, 139 n.6; new state, 46; political problems, 195; Responsible Government (1923-), 139 n.6, 192, 224; school curriculum, 193, 194; statute law, 95; wealth, 185 Southern Rhodesian ethnography, 77, 171, 186; game warden approach, 126; origins, 82–83, 96. See also Anthropology Southern Rhodesian state, 43, 44, 77–80, 83, 96, 108, 110, 115, 116, 122, 130, 135, 160, 171–72, 192, 193, 209, 210, 212 n.13, 224, 225, 227, 233, 235; codification attempts, 190; control over women, 129, 141 n.26; cut itself off from the people, 200; failed to control real thoughts of real Africans, xvi; ideology, 143 n.60; knowledge accumulation, xiv; knowledge about African laws losing its currency, 205; language, 189; moved from charismatic to bureaucratic phase, 138; native development policy, 185; not interested in African agency, 198; not powerful (BSACo era), 4;

poorly-resourced and under-staffed, 1, 234; segregation policy, 177–78, 186, 187, 191; translations used by, 127–28; unaware of extent of failures, 234 Speaking, 58 Spear, Thomas, 117 n.25, 236 n.1 Spirit, 61 Spirit beliefs, 221 Spirit mediums, 38, 54 n.65, 219 Spirit possession, 110 Spirit rituals, 46 Spirit-Bound Rhodesia (Burbridge), 170–71 Spirits, 21, 47, 63, 151, 152, 155, 230 n.26; ancestral, 169, 170 Spiritual beliefs, 58 Spiritual leaders, xv, 221; chiNdau, 160 Spiritual powers, 160 Spiritual weakness, 67 Spiritual world, 135 Spirit worship, 152 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 20 n.35 Springer, Mrs. H. E., 59–60, 73 n.27; ChiKaranga vocabulary (1905), 59–60, 132, 136, 141 n.35 St. Francis, 172 Standard Reader at Standard V (Longman’s), 159 Standardization, 149, 186; linguistic, 196–98 Standards, anxieties about, 185 Standing, T. G., 194, 202 n.49 Stanley, Daniel Macnee, 207, 212 n.11 Status, 75 n.64, 89, 153, 159; Nguni forms, 145 Statute law, 82, 84, 95 Steele, Murray Cairns, 97 n.20, 99(nn.49, 57), 139 n.7 Steen, Mr. (farmer), 74 n.43 Steiner, George, 6, 9, 202 n.38 Stereotypes/stereotyping, 35, 37, 47–48, 210; civil law, 80 Steyn, Johannes J., 131 Stoler, Ann Laura, 54 n.66 Stone shrine, 51 n.11 Stores (shops), 74 n.43, 149, 161 n.16 Straight lines, 106, 114, 151, 158; hegemonic importance, 117 n.16

INDEX Subchiefs, 39, 45, 51 n.10 Summers, Carol, 54 n.70, 75(nn.64, 73), 155 Sunday school, 55, 64 Superintendent of Natives (SN), 34 n.39, 209, 212 n.17 Superstition, 13, 17, 54 n.63, 61, 81, 83, 103, 109–13, 115, 116, 117 n.22, 136, 139, 148, 151, 152, 174, 211; problems of terminology, 145 Survey of Native Tribes of Southern Rhodesia (Posselt), 196 Svikiro, 26, 38, 142 n.52 Swahili, 54 n.70 Swanapoel (company), 30 Swartz, Sally, 118 n.37 Swaziland, 128 Syntax, 180, 198 Taboos, 152 Tagart, E. S. B., 209–10, 211, 217 Taguta, 45 Tambo, Cyprian, 172 Tambudza, 93, 100 nn.79–80 Tanganyika, 19 n.25 Tax collection, 50 Tax demands, 70; did not require new forms of thought, 46 Tax rates, 53 n.42 Tax registers, 164 n.78 Taxation, 24, 31, 34 n.59, 38–40, 42, 43, 46, 66, 74 n.48, 79, 108, 216; indirect, 158; late-payment, 150; non-payment, 148 Taxes, 5, 45, 47, 51, 57; doubled (Chikore, 1903), 56; loans needed to pay, 44; non-payment, 44, 53 n.43; point of contact (Africans and the state), 44 Taxonomic hierarchies, 17 Taxonomy, colonial, 129 Taylor, Guy A. (editor of NADA), 155, 223, 209, 218, 220 Taylor, Herbert J. (CNC), 127, 194, 208, 210, 215, 216, 224 Tazireka, 44 Teachers, 64, 66, 70, 74 n.42, 74–75 n.54, 164 n.74, 166, 172, 174, 177, 194, 195; African, 207; salaries, 43–44 Teaching, 178, 213 n.35 Technocratic authority, 152

269

Technology, xiv, 114, 115, 151, 155; Territorial cults, 21 Tete (Portuguese garrison), 23 Text/s, 66; chiNdau, 58, 65; Christian, xv, 65; educational work, 58; interface with translation and local interpretation, 55; purpose, 58–59; use of, difference between modern and savage society (Goody), 65 Text and translation (thinking black, 1915–25), 165–84 Textuality, 17, 107 Theal, George McCall, 119 n.48 Theft, 79, 83, 94, 100 n.68, 166, 191 Theological concepts: mapping of indigenous ideas about spiritual matters onto, 60; translation, 59–60, 61, 74 n.37 Theology, critical, 68 Theories of Primitive Religion (Evans-Pritchard), 9 Thinking black, 165–84 Thomas, Keith, 134 Thompson, E. P., 181 Thompson, Dr. W. L., 106, 111, 130, 149, 156, 158, 167, 177, 182 n.14, 203 n.61; of the American Board, 31; lack of language skills, 73 n.18 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 119 n.55 Time, 81, 95, 132 Time and space, 141 n.31 Tobacco, 26, 91 Tokwe River, 25 Torwa dynasty, 22 Totems, xi, 52 n.29, 219 Tracey, Hugh, 223 Trade, 1, 21, 23 Trade unions, 217 Traders/trading, 25, 31, 40, 44, 82 Training, 152, 176; industrial, 151; postgraduate, 179; as teachers and evangelists, 189 Translating civilized values, 145–64 Translation, xii, xiii, xv, xvi, 11, 12, 16, 43, 116, 125–43; accuracy (life-and-death consequences), 131; accurate, 139; African concepts barely figure, 172; appropriation shading into

270

INDEX

Translation (Cont.) expropriation (Steiner), 6, 202 n.38; became monologic process, 17; change of meaning, 128–29, 130; codified modes of thought, 129; communication of worldview, 131; core activity of missionaries, 168; cross-cultural transference of ideas, 190; crude, 160, 176; day-to-day secular encounters, 15; designed to make sense to whites, not Africans, 174; effective, 8–9, 61, 122, 169, 233; embedding Christian principles into local culture, 68; failure to render African concepts English, xiv; genuine attempts, 17; informed not by African concepts, but by European preconceptions, 175; interface with text and local interpretation, 55; involved converting ideas, 50; of key terms, 138–39; metaphor for colonial penetration, 9; metaphor for moulding of indigenous cultures to support European ideas, 7; model of colonial relationship, 6; Mount Silinda Mission (1895–1909), 55–76; mutual recognition (extent), 122; needed to become cultural, as well as linguistic, exercise, 71; possibility, 7; presumes agreed meanings, 129; problems of, 115; purpose (understanding versus conversion/command), 11; required boundary crossing, 72; searching for cultural parallels, 6; set of local meanings already attached, 68; vernacular, 179, 181 Translation phase (1910s–1920s), xiv, 121–84, 233 Translation process, 59; raises big questions about epistemology, 7 Translation projects, xvii, 13, 180; failure, 123, 181, 186, 218, 229; thinking black (1915–25), 165–84 Translation Report 1908 (Wilder), 59 Translation theories/theorists, 7, 8, 12 Translators, 192, 225; names rarely recorded, 50–51 Transport, 42, 154 Transvaal, 27, 42 Tredgold, Clarkston, 125 Tree shrines, 23, 32 n.14

Trekkers, 2, 3, 136, 137, 192 Tribes, 17, 84 Tributary relationships (intra-African), 22 Tribute, 22, 31, 35, 39, 40, 42, 44; claimed by African dynasties, 22; created hardship, 45; exaction (by African empires), 24; innovations, 46; intraAfrican, 34 n.49; right to exact, 38 Truth, 81, 106, 107, 148, 223 Tui-qua (deity), 12, 130 Tullach, Rev. J., 173 Twins, murder of, 83, 225 Uganda, 49, 54 n.70 Umtali, 27, 41, 58, 84, 154, 160 Umvumvumvu River, 160 Understanding, xii, xiii, 9, 11, 17; cross-cultural, 191; different ways, 4; failure, 218 United Kingdom, xi, 177, 215; British colonialism, 54 n.66; British government, 30; Colonial Office, 191; treaty with Portuguese (1891), 29 United Methodist mission, 158 United States, xiii-xiv, 2, 68, 103, 155, 176, 177, 221; ideas of morality and women’s work, 158 Universities, xi, 195 University of Cape Town (UCT), 213 n.23, 215–16, 228; Advisory Committee on Bantu Studies and Research, 217; short courses, 216, 217–18, 226, 228 University of Illinois, Agricultural Department, 151 University of South Africa (Unisa), 199, 226, 231 n.63; Lower Diploma in Bantu Studies, 199 University of Zimbabwe, 18, 203 n.61 University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), 197, 222; anthropology department, 218; vacation courses (1924-), 215–16, 217–18 Urban areas, 41, 128, 209, 210 Uroyi, 183 n.48 Vachena (white people), 175 Vadzimu (ancestral spirits), 170 Vail, Leroy, 99 n.54

INDEX Vakuru, 205 Values, 122, 156, 161; African, 121, 159; Christian, 179; European, 13, 151; hard to define, 146–47; literacy not straightforward conduit for, 158; white, 155 Vanhu (people of this place), 174, 181 Varumbi kana vatema, 175 Varumbi na vatema, 174 Varungu/vaRungu, 175, 181 Vasinamabvi, 175 Vatema/vaTema, 173–74, 175, 181 Vatswina, 174 Vaughan, Megan, 118 n.37 Vaughan, Olufemi, 117 n.25 Vazungu, 175 Venda kinship, xi Vernacular languages, xv, 8, 28, 35, 49, 57, 71, 127, 130, 165, 171, 174, 177, 178, 180–81, 181 n.2, 187, 192–98, 202 n.49, 203 n.59, 225; approved, 197, 198–99, 200; codification, xiv; literacy, 158; reinvention to mean alien things, 175; safeguard, 10–11; standardization, 233; translation (African advantage over missionaries), 12; unsanctioned acquisition, 193, 200; white claims to expertise, xiv; white person presented as listener rather than speaker, 183 n.60; white teachers versus African speakers, 197; would enable the authorities to get inside the minds of the people, 190 Vernacular press, 216 Victoria (Southern Rhodesia), 191 Vijfhuizen, Carin, 32 n.13 Vila de Manica (Portuguese garrison), 23 Villages, 39, 63, 108, 160, 177 Viswanathan, Gauri, 20 n.35 Vocabularies, 58, 129, 176, 236 Vocabulary of Dialects of Mashonaland in New Orthography (Barnes, 1932), 203 n.63 Vokudenga (sky-gods), 224 Vumbaras family, 41 Wage-earners, 44, 188 Wage-earning capacity, road to prosperity, 147–48

271

Wages, 43, 44, 47, 148, 152, 208 Ward heads, 44, 84 Waterfalls (homestead), 30 Weberian terminology, 138 Webster, William, 131 Wedenga, 169 Wescott and Hort’s text, 59 West Africa, 163 n.51 Wheat, 40, 154 White, John, 172, 176; campaigning missionary from Marandellas, 175; use of meaningful vernacular terms, 177–78; use of term Vachena, 175; White, Landeg, 99 n.54 White anxieties/fears/insecurities, 1, 14, 49, 112, 139, 189, 196; African claims on white-collar jobs, 147; African divination practices, 135, 137–38; African progress/modernity, xvi, 147, 185, 200, 216; African uses of medicine, 136; African ways of thinking, xv-xvi, 225; Africans who had contact with whites, 157; irrational, 46–47; lack of understanding of Africans, 130; supernatural powers of Africans, 114, 115, 233 White farmers, 29, 30, 31, 35, 37, 43, 44, 50, 53 n.42, 75 n.60, 151, 162 n.27, 188; destitution, 40–41; Dutch-speaking, 11, 15, 28, 40–41, 42, 48, 49–50, 53 n.48, 133, 151; sharp practice, 150. See also Agriculture White people/white settlers, xii, xiii, 4, 107, 139, 139 n.6, 185, 225; advice to, 196; aspirations about African economic life, 147; claims to expertise, xiv; claims to legitimacy, 16; defining themselves as more scientific than Africans, 96; did not understand Africans, 130; did not want local people to speak European languages, 48–49; divided about how they wanted Africans to behave, 146–47; Dutch, 113; economic migrants, 26; mastery over local languages (consequences), xiv, 165–84; mistrusted as sources of information, 221; monologic conversation, 13–15; no longer necessary to listen to Africans speaking the vernacular, 181; no understanding

272

INDEX

White people (Cont.) of African peoples (Mugabe), 18, 233, 235; not always as rational as self-image would suggest, 113–16; not as rational as they liked to believe, 36, 234; not a unified hegemonic assault on local culture, 48; practice of taking local women as wives, 53 n.48; rules of causation genuinely different in Africa, 138; social and economic values (communication to local people), xiv; of suspect loyalty, 193; tensions and conflicts within, 13; terminology, 175 White Queen (Through the Looking Glass), 119 n.55 White rule, 141 n.31; justification undermined, 185; project to get Africans to accept, 5; resisted and resented, 43 Widows, 94, 155 Wilder, Clio, 66, 104 Wilder, Rev. G. A., 30, 31, 33 n.34, 34(nn.46, 49), 50, 52 n.29, 54 n.77, 65, 69, 74 n.48, 113, 119 n.48, 162 n.20, 166, 168, 180; aimed not to speak with local people, but to produce texts, 58; of the American Board Mission, 29; Bible study group (Chikore), 67; chats with Musikavanhu Makuza, 57; on chiefly power, 117 n.22; chiNdau concepts (lack of understanding), 60; chiNdau vocabulary and grammatical notes (1906), 60; evidence to SANAC (1904), 47; exercised by marriage-debt relationship, 56; hymnbook, 165; inconsistencies, 47–48, 54 n.65; linguistic skills, 34 n.49, 57–58; Musikavanhu succession (1897), 109–10; NAD dictionary, 58; Ndau religious superstitions, 61; rarely names helpers, 62; routinization of religious authority (Engelke), 66–67, 75 n.65; stereotyping by, 47–48; text-as-object, 67; translation of Gospels (1910), 60, 62; translation of theological concepts, 59, 60, 168–69; translations, 66–67, 72 Wilson, N. H., 217 Witchcraft, 70, 80, 84, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 126, 141 n.36, 152, 174, 185, 186, 211; complex and fluid concept, 131;

laws on, 139; negative connotations, 183 n.48; problems of terminology, 145; terminological difficulties (African context), 125, 131–39 Witchcraft cases/accusations, 135, 138, 142 n.50, 160 Witchcraft Regulations (1895), 133, 135 Witchcraft Suppression Ordinance (WSO, 1899), 133, 160 Witchdoctors, 46, 54 n.58, 133, 134, 138, 175; Burbridge’s famous analysis, 219; terminology, 135, 136 Witches, 25, 109, 112, 132–35; terminology, 138 Witchfinder, implied witches to be found, 134–35 Witchhunts, European, 135 Witnesses, 89 Wizards, 132–34, 142 n.48 Wodehouse, Mr., 160 Women, xvi, 2, 25, 27, 28, 31, 39, 40, 45–49, 52 n.21, 53 n.48, 63, 75 n.73, 81–83, 91, 92, 97 n.14, 100 n.76, 110, 129, 132, 138, 143 n.60, 166, 198; alleged legal minority, 85; claimed by African dynasties, 22; debt-related pledging, 56, 69, 70, 86, 95; defined as legal minors, 84; degree of absorption of American codes of conduct, 158; domestic employment, 153; economic opportunities, 41; employment, 44; less likely to use Shangaan, 3; native (needs some definition), 158; property themselves, 84; role in agricultural production, 154; rural, 235–36; seizures ceased, 46; senior, 85; wives, 94–95 Women’s work, 158 Wood, Douglas, 166, 167 Word of God, 55–76 Words: different meanings (European versus African), 9; meanings ascribed (differences), 122–23; translation provides evidence about how far whites and African shared worldview, 131; vernacular, 12 Worger, William H., xviii n.8, 74 n.37

INDEX Workers, 27–28; African, 50; clerical, 176; industrial, 216; manual, 176; migrant, 216; recruitment, 29; Shangaan, 27, 31, 33 n.36; Shangaan, 43; shortage, 146; skilled, 26, 43, 146, 147, 156, 217; unskilled, 43, 156; waged, 38, 43, 156 Working life, 193, 202 n.36 World War I (1914–18), 153, 192, 225; post-war era (1918-), 192, 225 Worldviews, 6, 66, 107, 116, 122, 190, 236; African, 14, 50, 96, 168, 206; African (exposure of white children to), 196; colonial, 15; Eurocentric, xiv; European, xiii, 5, 17, 148, 185; European justice system, 96; rationalist, 139; Shona, 203 n.79; social function, 218 Writing, standardization, 182 n.19

273

Xhosa language, 20 n.26 Xhosa policemen, 31 Zambezi River, 22, 226 Zawaya, 45 Zimbabwe, xi, xvii, 235; autocratic decisions, 236 n.3; young academics, 236 Zimbabwe plateau, 21 Zimbabwe trading empire, 21 Zingwanda, 45 Zionist churches, 163 n.49, 216 Zonzo, Tom, 160 Zulu discipline, 86 Zulu Empire, 28 Zulu employees/staff, 63, 153, 154 Zulu people, 64, 82 Zulu polity, Nguni offshoots, 23 Zvobgo, C.J.M., xvi

About the Author DIANA JEATER is Head of the School of History and Principal Lecturer in African History, University of the West of England, Bristol.