The Relationship Between Bukalanga and the Shona: Are We Really a Shona People?

[The]Makalanga in the region of Southern Rhodesia… seem to be of different stock from other Mashona tribes and apparently are of alien origin. [They]… have preserved their distinct physical features, so many of the royal families of Rhodesia seem to have retained “Hamitic” characteristics for some time. The early Portuguese noticed the difference in appearance between the Batonga, Barwe, and Monga on the one hand, and the Makalanga on the other, the latter appearing to have been “not of a very black color” and “men of great stature”. Many other physical attributes have been ascribed to the Makalanga in order to distinguish them from the other natives; “They are a noble race, and respected among the Negros”; “they are very strong, light and agile” and “are very proud” and “each one seems to be a king of the woods” – H. A. Wieschhoff 1941 The Zimbabwe-Monomotapa Culture in Southeast Africa.

When reading Zimbabwean school history textbooks, one finds everywhere plastered the word Shona in connection with vast swathes of the country’s precolonial and postcolonial history. One is told that the people with whom the Portuguese interacted beginning in the 16th century were the Shona. From school history books to Wikipedia entries, one finds the record that it was the Shona who were responsible for the Zimbabwe Civilization, claiming that the Shona built the archaeological sites of Maphungubgwe, Khami, Great Zimbabwe and others. One is informed that the Monomotapa, Togwa and Lozwi polities were Shona institutions. In fact, one would say that all of the pre-colonial history of Zimbabwe is attributed to the ancestors of the people called Shona today.

One finds nothing about the Kalanga recorded, and yet, going back to the earliest recorded sources available, one finds countless sources mentioning the Kalanga. One finds the Kalanga mentioned in association with Portuguese trade in the region, and as the race that was responsible for the Zimbabwe Civilization. Yet, reading school history, one hears absolutely nothing about them, or they appear just in footnote form. The only exception among the Wikipedia entries is the one on the precolonail history of Zimbabwe. It is perhaps one of the only Wikipedia entry that tells a precolonial history of Zimbabwe that is in line with the primary sources. The entry states:

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It is believed that Kalanga speaking societies first emerged in the middle Limpopo valley in the 9th century before moving on to the Zimbabwean highlands. The Zimbabwean plateau eventually became the centre of subsequent Kalanga states. The Kingdom of Mapungubwe was the first in a series of sophisticated trade states developed in Zimbabwe by the time of the first European explorers from Portugal. They traded in gold, ivory and copper for cloth and glass.

From about 1250 until 1450, Mapungubwe was eclipsed by the Kingdom of Zimbabwe. This Kalanga state further refined and expanded upon Mapungubwe’s stone architecture, which survives to this day at the ruins of the kingdom’s capital of Great Zimbabwe. From circa 1450–1760, Zimbabwe gave way to the Kingdom of Mutapa [the Monomotapa Kingdom]. This Kalanga state ruled much of the area that is known as Zimbabwe today, and parts of central Mozambique. It is known by many names including the Mutapa Empire, also known as Mwene Mutapa or Monomotapa and was renowned for its gold trade routes with Arabs and the Portuguese. However, Portuguese settlers destroyed the trade and began a series of wars which left the empire in near collapse in the early 17th century. As a direct response to Portuguese aggression in the interior, a new Kalanga state emerged called the Rozwi [or Lozwi] Empire.

Relying on centuries of military, political and religious development, the Rozwi removed the Portuguese from the Zimbabwe plateau by force of arms. The Rozwi continued the stone building traditions of the Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe kingdoms while adding guns to its arsenal and developing a professional army to protect its trade routes and conquests. In 1839, the Ndebele people arrived while fleeing from the Zulu leader Shaka, making the area their new empire, Matabeleland. In 1837–38, the Rozwi Empire along with other Shona states were conquered by the Ndebele, who arrived from south of the Limpopo and forced them to pay tribute and concentrate in northern Zimbabwe (Wikipedia, Online).

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The question at hand for now is: what is it that Portuguese documents contemporary to the times under discussion tell us? We know that obviously there is no mention of the Shona because the word Shona was not in existence then. But, do we find anything at least in those documents that identifies the people that are called Shona today? Perhaps in the 18th and 19th century documents. Here and there we find references to some of the Shona dynasties that we know to exist today. But it seems that prior to 1700, there is hardly anything that can be pointed out as referring to the Shona. We do not hear much about them. And this is as it should be, for as we shall see later, the Shona only arrived in the Zimbabwean plateau at the opening of the eighteenth century.

But who are the Shona people? According to Professor George Kahari, former Professor of African Languages and Literature at the University of Zimbabwe and a Zimbabwean diplomat:

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Shona is an artificial term used by linguists to refer to an agglomeration of mostly, but not completely, mutually intelligible dialects found within and outside Zimbabwe. Within the borders of Zimbabwe, the language consists of six clusters: Korekore in the north, with ten dialects; Zezuru in central areas; Karanga in the south; Manyika in the northeast; Ndau in the southeast; and Kalanga in the west. Outside Zimbabwe the language is spoken in Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique ... Today the total number of Shona speakers exceed 9 million within Zimbabwe (Kahari 1990, 5).

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On googling the word Shona and checking the Wikipedia entry, one finds the following information given:

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Shona is the name collectively given to two groups of people in the east and southwest of Zimbabwe, north eastern Botswana and southern Mozambique … The Shona people are classified as Western Shona (Bakalanga) and the eastern Shona. The western Shona are called the Bakalanga and is agreed that it is the oldest Shona cluster … It should be known that Western Shona and eastern Shona languages are distinct ethnic groups who happen to have been one ethnic group hundreds of years ago. The use of the term usually neglects the western Shona which might confuse a lot of people even in historical documents. For example, it is said that Venda is a conglomeration of Shona and Sotho; it is meant western Shona (Wikipedia, emphasis mine).

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As the Wikipedia entry above indicates, Kalanga is deemed the oldest of the “Shona langauges.” The writer further states that:

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The Shona-speaking people are categorized into seven main linguistic groups: Zezuru, Manyika, Karanga, Korekore, Ndau, Kalanga, Nambya. These groups are all mixed up and there is hardly anything to distinguish them except the dialects. Many people who are Karanga, Zezuru, Ndau, are from the Western Shona (Kalanga) who migrated east after the destruction of the Rozvi state by the Ndebele. Shona speaking people were also taken to Matabeleland as captives and regard themselves as either Kalanga or Ndebele. Previously, these differences did not exist as all these groups referred to themselves as Karanga. The Mutapa State which was in the area that is now Zezuru/Korekore was referred to as Mukalanga just as much as the western state was Vhukalanga. The term Shona is as recent as the 1920s. The Kalanga and/or Karanga had, from the 11th century, created the empires and states on the Zimbabwe plateau. These states include the Great Zimbabwe state (12th-16th century), the Torwa [Togwa] State, and the Munhumutapa states, which succeeded the Great Zimbabwe State as well as the Rozvi State, which succeeded the Torwa State, and which with the Mutapa State existed into the 19th century … The major dynasties were the Rozvi of the Moyo (Heart) totem, the Elephant (of the Mutapa State), and the Hungwe (Fish Eagle) dynasties that ruled from Great Zimbabwe. The Kalanga who speak TjiKalanga are related to the Karanga possibly through common ancestry. Some Shona groups are not very familiar with the existence of the Kalanga hence they are frequently not recognized as Shona today (Wikipedia, Online).

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There can be no doubt that there are elements of truth in the Wikipedia entry above, though, when we compare its claims with the body of evidence available on the history of the Zimbabwean plateau, we find that it is fraught with two major inaccuracies: that the whole group of people referred to as Shona was once called the “Karanga”, and that the “Zezuru, Korekore, and Ndau” are offshoots of the Kalanga. There is of course truth in the statement that these groups have been heavily intermixed as a result of the convulsions that swept Southern Africa in the 19th Century.

But now, a number of questions arise, if the Zezuru and Ndau (and presumably Manyika) are offshoots of the Kalanga, in what way then are the Kalanga considered a “Shona” group? Should we not actually say that the Shona are a Kalanga group? The usual argument is that the term ‘Shona’ is a ‘universal’ one just like Nguni, referring to a people group with mutually intelligible languages. But, are Kalanga Group Languages really mutually intelligible with the Shona Group Languages? In any case, is it true that these people share a common ancestral origin, or if they do, did they settle in the Zimbabwean Tableland at the same time? And even if it were so, in comparison, is it possible to create a ‘standard Nguni language’ out of Xhosa, Zulu, Swati and Ndebele? To answer these questions, let us begin with a consideration of the idea that TjiKalanga is a Shona dialect.

The Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference (SRMC) held its first meeting in 1903 with a view of developing a Shona orthography, and in doing so, it advocated the unification of a number of dialects that were considered to be mutually intelligible for the purposes of publishing one version of the Bible which could be understood by the speakers of all the supposed main dialects of Shona: Zezuru, Karanga, Manyika, Korekore and Ndau.

In 1913, one of the missionaries, the previously mentioned Rev Neville Jones, proposed a motion to the conference on the need for the compilation of vernacular readers for use in both Mashonaland and Matabeleland. By 1927, the missionaries had managed to get the cooperation of government in the teaching of indigenous languages. Pursuant to that, the Native Commissioners Conference was held in the then Salisbury which endorsed the missionary idea of creating one language out of a diverse number of supposedly mutually intelligible dialects. The Colonial Secretary and the Director of Education at the time are reported to have been interested in the value of vernacular education and also in the unification of Shona dialects into a common language (Kahari 1990, 11-12).

In 1928, the Conference passed a resolution which advocated the standardization of Shona orthography, but could not come up with conclusive action on the way forward as there was no agreement that indeed all the considered languages could fit into the ‘Shona’ corpus, for there wasn’t total mutual intelligibility amongst the considered languages. It was then resolved that expert advice be sought to help on the matter, and the International Institute for African Languages and Cultures (IIALC) was approached to conduct research and advise the conference on the matter. Professor Clement Doke, then Professor of Bantu Studies at Wits University, was tasked with this job. He conducted a year-long intensive and extensive study of the language groups across the country that were considered to be of the Shona cluster.

Professor Doke’s research findings revealed that there were ‘five’ main ‘Shona language’ divisions, namely, Korekore, Zezuru, Ndau, Karanga, and Kalanga. However, his research into the structure of TjiKalanga showed that it is phonetically different from the other dialects and was of such a divergent vocabulary that it was seen not fit that it be included in the Shona language group with the other dialects which all showed an underlying common vocabulary, as well as phonetic and grammatical features (ibid.,12). In his own words after research, Professor Doke stated that Kalanga, comprising the so-called Kalanga proper, Talawunda, Lozwi/Rozwi, Nyayi, Lilima, and Peri, was sufficiently different from the other clusters to preclude its participation in the Shona unification. Let us quote his own words to capture this point well. He wrote:

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In 1929 a survey of the linguistic position of Southern Rhodesia was undertaken, resulting in the acceptance of a new unified orthography and proposals for unification over most of the area. Western Shona was excluded from this unification owing to too great a divergence from the other clusters … It was further decided that the unified grammar be standardized on the basis of Karanga and Zezuru, while for vocabulary purposes words from Zezuru, Karanga, Manyika, and Ndau be drawn upon, the introduction of words from other dialects being discouraged … This western type of Shona (Kalanga) was sufficiently different from the other clusters to preclude its participation in the Shona unification (Doke 1954, 23, 205., 252).

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Since the time that Professor Doke concluded that TjiKalanga could not be regarded as a Shona dialect, an almost 100 year-battle has been raging on about the same question. In the modern era on the frontlines of that battle as far as arguing that TjiKalanga is a Shona dialect is a group of scholars at CASAS - the Center for Advanced Study of African Society - among whom are Professor Herbert Chimhundu, one of the architects of Zimbabwe’s assimilationist language policies. The other leading figure there is Professor Kwesi Prah, a believer in the creation of a few African ‘super-languages’ through the assimilation of the so-called minority languages. On the opposite side has been man and women working with the Kalanga Language and Cultural Development Association (KLCDA) and the Nambya Language and Cultural Organization (NALACO) who, happily, have scored a number of successes with the Ministry of Education in opposing the idea of CASAS that a ‘super-Shona language’ be created by assimilating Bukalanga Group Languages (TjiKalanga, TjiNambya, TshiVenda) into Shona, and creating one standard Shona which would then be taught across the country.

Of course for those of us who have been involved in this kind of work for some time now are aware that this is part of a broader plan to turn Zimbabwe into Shona country. For what this amounts to is that once CASAS’ goal is realized, from Plumtree to Mutare, from Venda to Victoria Falls, and from Gwanda to Chirundu, the so-called ‘standard Shona’ will be taught, and a few years down the line, government might turn around and say after all there is no more need for IsiNdebele in this country since the majority of people currently learning the language in the schools are Bakalanga, BaNambya, and Vhavenda. After all, propositions are even being made by certain Shona elites and scholars that TjiKalanga is a “corrupted version of Shona”, supposedly corrupted through the influence of IsiNdebele, despite the fact that TjiKalanga hardly contains any Ndebele words. But as we shall see throughout this chapter, this is part of the Big Lie that ‘Shona history’ generally is.

Having said that, we now need to be asking: if indeed Zezuru and Manyika are offshoots of the Kalanga as stated in the Wikipedia entry above, how is it then that Kalanga, which is not a Shona (Zezuru and Manyika) dialect, be regarded as a variant of Shona? And since TjiKalanga was the state language of the Monomotapa, Togwa and Lozwi Kingdoms, how then is it that a language that has been in existence for no less than 1000 years, be regarded as a dialect of an artificial language created less than 100 years ago out of the amalgamation of dialects with which it is not mutually intelligible? That Kalanga is a very old language as currently spoken in Zimbabwe and Botswana is beyond doubt. We saw the Wikipedia entry above stating that Kalanga is the oldest of the ‘Shona’ dialects. But how old is it? The answer was provided in Chapter One when we considered the earliest settlements of Bukalanga in the Zimbabwean Tablelalnd, namely the Leopard’s Kopje Culture. But that is as far as archaeology goes. What do contemporary Portuguese documents say about the ethnolinguistic history of this country and the sub-region in the 1500s when written records started being made?

Obviously, we don’t expect to find any mention of the Shona, for as we have already seen, Shona is a word of recent origin. But do we find mention of any people group that perhaps was the ancestors of the present Shona tribes? Or, are the Makalanga the ancestors of the modern Shona? To answer these questions let us begin with the works of Dr Theal with a focus on answering the question of the date of arrival of the Shona in the Zimbabwean Tableland, still keeping in mind that by Shona we mean specifically the Zezuru and their close counterparts the Manyika. The Ndau, whilst also identified as Shona, are mostly descendants of Nguni migrants who left Zululand under Soshangane. They can easily be identified by their Nguni surnames.

When did the Shona arrive in Zimbabwe?

Let us start off this section by telling a little bit of who Dr Theal was so that we can decide on the reliability of his information. Dr George McCall Theal was Professor of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and Foreign Member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Utrecht, Holland. He was also Corresponding Member of the Royal Historical Society in London; Honorary Member of the Literary Association; the Leiden Commission for preparing a History of the Walloon Churches, and the Historical Society of Utrecht. In addition to the preceding, Dr. Theal was formerly Keeper of the Archives of the Cape Colony and Historiographer of the Government there. His translation work of Portuguese documents resulted in his vast volume, The Records of South-Eastern Africa first published in 1898. According to him, he had done what was at that time arguably the most extensive study of Bantu peoples of Southern Africa. His works are highly commended to those who would like to know more about the history of Zimbabwe and Southern Africa. British archaeologist Dr David Randal-McIver, in highly recommending Dr Theal’s work, wrote in 1906:

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My report [on the Zimbabgwe Ruins], being wholly independent and original, may be judged upon its own merits, and it will be sufficiently clear why little or no reference has been made to various books which it was impossible to praise and would have been invidious to criticize. A single honorable exception must be made. There is one work of sterling scholarship which ought to be known to all who profess an interest in these subjects, namely, Dr. G. M. Theal’s Records of South-Eastern Africa...”(David Randall-McIver, Mediaeval Rhodesia, 1906).

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Concerning the time of the arrival of the Portuguese on the east coast of Africa and the ethnolinguistic situation in the region in the early 1500s, Dr. Theal wrote in 1896:

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About the close of the fifteenth century, white man encountered a number of groups in southern Africa, and there were three major groups of these people. There were the Bushmen, the Hottentots and what became known as the Bantu. The Bantu occupied a greater part of southern Africa south of the Zambesi for many generations, and not having intercourse with each other, naturally developed differences. The Bantu tribes could be classified into three groups, though it should be remembered that there are many trifling differences between the various branches of each of these.

In the first group can be placed tribes along the eastern coast south of the Sabi River, and those which in recent times have made their way from that part of the country into the highlands of the interior. The best known of these are the Amaxosa, the Abathembu, the Amampondo, the Amabaca, the Abambo, the Amazulu, the Amaswazi, the Amatonga, the Magwamba, the Matshangana, and the Matebele. This group can be termed the coast tribes, although some members of it are now far from the sea. The second group can include the tribes that a century ago occupied the great interior plane and came down to the ocean between the Zambesi and the Sabi rivers. It will include the Batlapin, the Batlaro, the Barolong, the Bahurutsi, the Bangwaketsi, the Bakwena, the Bamangwato, all the sections of the Makalanga, and the whole of the Basuto, north and south. This group can be termed the interior tribes.

The third group will comprise all the Bantu living between the Kalahari and the Atlantic Ocean, such as the Ovaherero, the Ovampo, and others. These have no mixture of Asiatic blood. They are blacker in color, coarser in appearance … The individuals who composed the first and second groups varied in color from deep bronze to black. Some had features of the lowest negro type: thick projecting lips, broad flat noses, and narrow foreheads; while others had prominent and in rare instances even aquiline noses, well developed foreheads, and lips but little thicker than those of Europeans. Among the eastern tribes these extremes could sometimes be noticed in the same family, but the great majority of the people were of a type higher than a mean between the two. They were of mixed blood, and the branches of the ancestral stock differed considerably, as one was African and the other Asiatic (Theal 1896, 39-40).

[In a later work Dr Theal wrote]

In 1505, when the Portuguese formed their first settlement on the southeastern coast, the Makalanga tribe occupied the territory now termed Rhodesia and the seaboard between the Zambesi and the Sabi rivers. Before the commencement of the eighteenth century that tribe was broken up by wars … and about that time a considerable immigration began to set in from the north … These immigrants, who were the ancestors of the people now called by Europeans Mashona, came down from some locality west of Lake Tanganyika in little parties, not in one great horde. The first to arrive was a clan under a chief named Sakavunza, who settled at a place near the town of Salisbury. The details of this immigration were not placed on record by any of the Portuguese in the country, who merely noticed that there was a constant swirl of barbarians, plundering and destroying, and replacing one another; and when recent investigators, like Mr. R. N. Hall, of Zimbabwe, and Mr. W. S. Taberer, the government commissioner, endeavored to gather the particulars from the descendants of the immigrants, it was found impossible to obtain more accurate information from them concerning the events of distant times than the general fact that their ancestors came down from the north about two centuries ago (Theal 1907, 63. Italics mine).

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The outstanding statement as far as the topic of when the Shona arrived in Zimbabwe is concerned is the one that has been italicized in the paragraph above. It clearly sets the date of the arrival of people now called Shona in Zimbabwe in the 1700s, the 18th century. The record of Sakavunza is also attested to by F. W. Posselt. Posselt served as Native Administrator in Matabeleland from 1908, and was transferred to the then Marandellas [in Mashonaland] in 1922, where he served for ten years before being again transferred to Plumtree in 1933. He also stated that several Shona tribes have traditions of their ancestors arriving in Zimbabwe under one Sakavunza, corroborating the Portuguese record of Dr. Theal.

That the Portuguese record is indeed true cannot be doubted, for it is supported by the oral traditions of the Shona themselves, though this is the kind of tradition that today one will not find referred to in Zimbabwean school history books. One such tradition was recorded by Professor Stanlake Samkange concerning the Zwimba people who are considered the real MaZezuru, or Central Shona. Of the Zwimba people Professor Samkange wrote:

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In the land of Makonde, in the Chinhoyi district, near the Chitombo-rwizi Purchase Area, towards the Karoyi River, are people known as The People of Zvimba who live in their land called Chipata. These people are real MaZezuru. Their cognomen or Mutupo is Ngonya pa Nyora. Their honorificus - Chidawo is Gushungo; or Owner of the fruit forest, Pachiworera, Tsiwo, Terror of the Waters! … Now where did these people come from? Listen! Hear! These people of Zvimba came from Guruwuskwa. No one can tell you the exact location of this place called Guruwuskwa. All our elders only point to the North saying: “This way, that is where Guruwuskwa is, this way” (Samkange 1986, 1).

Samkange states that when the then District Commissioner inquired as to the history and origins of the Zezuru people in 1955, he was told by one Mr. Chakabva, who was the elder brother of one Headman Dununu, that “Neyiteve, the son of Chihobvu, the Progenitor, left the area where Chihobvu lived in Guruwuskwa and came west in search of new land. At that time, the Rozvi’s ruled this country. A Mu Rozvi named Tumbare [Tumbale], gave land to Neyiteve when Neyiteve said: “My feet are swollen.” He became the first Zvimba” (Samkange 1986, 5). The District Commissioner also wrote in 1965 of the Zwimba people that “These people formed part of the general migration from the north. They say they came from a place named Guru Uskwa (probably in Tanganyika). They were led by one Nemaunga and his son or younger brother Neyiteve. The country they occupied was originally occupied by Chief Svinura’s people (Chiwundura?) but they were driven out by the VaRozvi” (Samkange 1986, 5).

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There are two points of interest here. If the ‘Chief Svinura’ is indeed Chiwundura as Samkange thinks, then the proposition raises very interesting questions about the date of the settlement of the Shona in the Zimbabwean Tableland. Chiwundura is the Shona rendering for the Kalanga King Tjibundule, [called Netshiendeulu by the Venda]. Tjibundule is known to have been conquered by Mambo Dombolakona-Tjing’wango Dlembewu Moyo in the late 1600s (Rennie, in Schoffeleers 1978, 260). We of course know that half of Zimbabwe was at that time under the leadership of King Tjibundule, with the other half having been under the leadership of the Monomotapa. Whilst Tjibundule was a dynastic title dating back to the 1500s or so, here the tradition collected by Professor Samkange clearly states that when the Zezuru arrived it was around the time at which the reigning Tjibundule was overthrown by the Lozwi, and the country under Lozwi rule, with Tumbale allocating them land. That would have been in the late 1600s, for that is the time the Lozwi Mambos took over power from the Tjibundules, and the mention of Tumbale confirms this date, for he is was the leading medicine-man and army general at this time.

The other point is that of the place named Guruwuswa. Where was the land of Guruwuskwa? In Lozwi-Kalanga traditions we are told that it is a place where the people, in their migrations, could not find firewood, and had to use grass for wood. They then exclaimed, “guni buhwa!”, meaning we can also use grass in the place of firewood as fuel, in TjiKalanga, Guruwuskwa being the Shona rendering. We know that this is a place in southern Zimbabwe because we are told that it was near the Crocodile River, that is, the Limpopo (Posselt 1935, 143-144). In Kalanga oral traditions collected by Mr. Kumile Masola, the region is also identified as southern Zimbabwe, for we are told that the Lozwi/Nyayi crossed the Tuli River before they conquered the Togwa Kingdom of the Tjibundules.

But was the land of ‘Guruwuskwa’ of the Zezuru the ‘guni buhwa’ of the Kalanga? That seems very unlikely and confusing. For if the Shona Guruwuskwa was in the north as pointed by their elders, how could it be in the south at the same time? That is, south of Makonde where the traditions by Professor Samkange were collected. Is it not possible that some Shona oral informant had heard about the guni buhwa tradition from the exiled Lozwi-Kalanga, and assumed that it was the place of Shona origin? That seems very likely since “it was found impossible to obtain more accurate information from them concerning the events of distant times than the general fact that their ancestors came down from the north about two centuries ago” when enquiry was made into their particulars.

Zimbabwe’s former Education and Culture Minister, Mr. Aenias Chigwedere, in one of his works (From Mutapa to Rhodes) identified Matabeleland as the land of Guruwuswa of Shona oral tradition (Chigwedere 1980, 2). Of course Mr. Chigwedere got this information from the highly unreliable works of Mr. Donald P. Abraham who first came up with the idea that Guruwuskwa was a province in the south-west of Zimbabwe, yet according to the traditions collected by Professor Samkange, the Zwimba elders pointed to the north as the location of their Guruwuskwa (Samkange 1986, 1). How could they have come from the north and south at the same time? This also in a sense proves as false the proposition that one sometimes hears made that the people now called Shona (specifically in northern Zimbabwe) were once all “Karanga” who migrated to the north from the south of Zimbabwe. It is clear their elders pointed to the north as their original homeland, and they certainly could not have migrated from the north and south at the same time. This of course has a huge bearing on the common proposition that the so-called Matebeleland was once Shona land, a proposition we have already dismissed as false.

In The Karanga Empire, Chigwedere identifies Guruwuswa as a region “to the west of Lake Malawi” with “tall grass and rather few trees”. Chigwedere identifies this region as the place where the Mbire, the ancestors of the Shona according to him, temporarily settled in after they “started to trek out of Tanganyika towards the Zambezi River” in 900 A.D. (Chigwedere n.d.,32). Interestingly, Chigwedere comes up with this new position in 1982, two years after he had identified Guruwuswa as Matabeleland in From Mutapa to Rhodes in 1980, but he does not attempt to make any explanation for his new position!

Commenting on the term guruwuswa, Professor Beach pointed out that “Guruwuswa was first noted as a land of [Shona] origin in 1904, and further references appeared in the 1920s, 1940s and 1950s. The publications of Donald Abraham in 1959-63 converted Guruwuswa into the province or empire of Guruwuswa [modern Matabeleland], writ large on the political map of the Zimbabwean plateau, and school books have now made this place of origin very well known indeed” (Beach 1994, 259-269).

It is partly on this basis that the Shona claim that Matebeleland was once their land that was stolen by the Ndebele. But it is interesting to know that the Shona have never at any point in history settled in Matabeleland, a region which has always been Bukalanga as we have already seen in previous chapters. The histories of Abraham, later popularized by other writers, and more specifically Chigwedere, have come to thoroughly influence the Zimbabwean school history syllabus, and indeed to impact on the political economy of the country, distorted as they are!

We also have more evidence that the Shona indeed arrived in what is now Zimbabwe about 300 years ago in the works of Professor Beach. After conducting extensive research among the various Shona dynastic chieftaincies in the 1980s and 1990s, Professor Beach wrote: “For all I knew, it might not have been possible to get any sort of coherent pattern any earlier than about 1750 … ” (Beach 1994, 8). Beach’s research findings revealed that virtually all Shona dynasties that have no Kalanga or Tonga connections could not provide any coherent oral tradition that dates back to anything before 1700, and this is the case amongst dynasties in Mashonaland and Manicaland today. With reference to the Central and Northern Shona (the Zezuru and Manyika) and the dating of their dynasties, Professor Beach wrote:

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According to the traditions, we have a series of migrations, nearly all moving from the north-east to the south-west, which overcomes very nearly all of the aboriginal inhabitants [Bukalanga] of the area in the period 1700-1850. This, one could say, is practically the stereotype of Shona traditions. Yet there are some odd features about the southern plateau history. Although it is most unusual for Shona genealogies to go much further back than 1700, even without the help of Portuguese documents it is possible to see that some dynasties in the center, north and east, have genealogies starting at about 1700… (Beach 1994, 133).

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The obvious question that arises from the above is: if the Shona have been in this land for as long as they claim today, why is it that none of their dynasties has a history going back beyond 1700? Or are we to assume that all their informants forgot their pre-1700 history in the land that is now Zimbabwe? Is that just not testimony enough that there is actually no such history in the first place? The challenge is for Shona scholars and students to tell us what happened to lead all their informants to forget the pre-1700s history if that is what we are to assume.

Professor Beach has also raised a very interesting point in this regard. He informs us that in his extensive researches amongst the Shona groups, except in a very few instances, he did not find any oral traditions whatsoever that linked their dynasties to the Zimbabwe Ruins. No traditions existed amongst the Shona about the origins of the Zimbabwe Ruins, even though in some places Professor Beach found that the communities were living close to the edifices. He noted that “Apart from the case of the zimbabwe on Gombe mountain in Buhera, there is no connection between the dynasties of the shava belt and any zimbabwe-type buildings, and their history cannot be projected back to the Great Zimbabwe period” (Beach 1994, 29).

The shava belt that Professor Beach is referring to is made up of the following Shona groups that are found mainly in Mashonaland and Manicaland:

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[I]n Bocha, in the angle of the Odzi and Save, Marange; in Buhera, on the south bank of the upper Save, the Nyashanu and Mutekedza dynasties, once part of the Mbiru dynasty; south of Buhera, the Munyaradze dynasty; west of the watershed…the Mushava, Nherera and Rwizi dynasties; … on the middle Mupfure, the Chivero dynasty; far to the west of Chivero, in the angle of Munyati and Mupfure, the Neuso dynasty; and west of the Munyati, on the Mafungabusi plateau, the Chireya, Njerere, Nemangwe, Nenyunga and Negonde dynasties, … the NeHarava and Seke dynasties of the upper Mhanyame, the Nyavira dynasty of the Gwizi flats and the Hwata and Chiweshe … dynasties of the upper Mazowe (Beach 1994, 28).

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The same trend reported above is similar for most of the Shona dynasties that Professor Beach studied. For all we know, most of the Zimbabwe Ruins were already constructed by 1700, except for a few that were constructed in the 18th century. This explains a lot about the date the Shona groups should have arrived in the country, for it would be impossible for them to have been in the land before 1000 A.D. and yet have no traditions about such major historical edifices as the Zimbabwe Ruins. Interestingly, traditions connecting Bukalanga to the Ruins in the south and south-west of Zimbabwe, where most of the ruins are located, are in abundance [please see Chapter Eight]. Towards the conclusion of his book, Professor Beach wrote:

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I began this chapter [Chapter 7] on an optimistic note, and it is on the same optimistic note that I wish to end it, and to bring this book to a close. Leaving aside details to an appendix, I can sum up by claiming that Shona oral traditions give us a reasonable basis for a history of the Zimbabwe plateau, but one going only back to about 1700 and often not as far (Beach 1994, 273).

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One thing is very clear from the evidence presented above - from Portuguese documentary records, Shona oral traditions, the research of Professor Beach and archeology - that the ancestors of the people called Shona today arrived in the Zimbabwean Tableland around the 1700s, at least 1500 years later than the Kalanga peoples. Is it possible then to reasonably identify a people whose migration was separated by such a long period of time as one and the same people, or to classify the earlier immigrants as a subgroup of the latter? Can a son be older than his father? And in any case, assuming that the Shona were descendants of the Kalanga, why then is nothing mentioned in school history books about Bukalanga, and why has none of the Shona scholars made any reference to that Kalanga ancestry? Why is the record in school books talking of the Shona and not Bukalanga? Shouldn’t we actually be saying that Shona is a dialect of Kalanga instead of the other way round, if indeed the Shona are descendants of the Kalanga? Do we say this father looks like his son or this son looks like his father when we are making comparisons in a father-son relationship? This last statement applies especially to the proposition that TjiKalanga sounds like ChiShona. Is it not Shona that sounds like TjiKalanga? And does not the fact that Shona is intelligible to the Kalanga whereas TjiKalanga is not intelligible to the Shona not speak volumes about the origins and age of and influence on the languages?

With which People Group did the Europeans First Interact in the 1500s; and were Bukalanga and the Shona the Same People Group?

When we go back into the earliest records on the history of southern Africa, we find it recorded that the Kalanga were the people inhabiting the land now called Zimbabwe as early as 1506, and archaeology pushes that date back to at least 900 A.D. We have also argued in Chapter One that that date can be pushed back to earlier than 100 A.D. How then could it be that the history concerning all of that era is taught as Shona history today, when it is apparent that the Shona have no history in Zimbabwe dating back any earlier than 1700?

Could it be that the names of the Shona groups, for example Zezuru, are also so new that they were unknown at the time of the Portuguese entrance in Southeast Africa so much that there is no record of them? Or could it be that the Portuguese were actually referring to the Shona too as Makalanga? But then why would the Shona have to be grouped together under an artificial name, Shona, centuries later? And if by Makalanga the Portuguese referred to the Shona, why up to date has not someone amongst the Shona protested the Shona name and said we are not Shona but Makalanga, since all that portion of history is recorded as Makalanga or Bukalanga history in Portuguese documents? And in any case, why was it so difficult for the Shona to recall events of distant times if they had lived in the land for as long as current history books claim? These are just some of the questions that come to one’s mind when trying to reconcile the record of Portuguese documents with Shona history claims as taught in Zimbabwean schools.

In the following section we will try by all means to unravel and bring out in the open this portion of Bukalanga history recorded by the Portuguese. As a starting point, we turn to the earliest known record on Bukalanga: the letter of Diogo de Alcacova, to the King of Portugal. We have already seen that he says the kingdom they interacted with was the Kingdom of Bukalanga. Later writers such as Father Joao dos Santos, writing in the old Portuguese fashion, referred to Bukalanga as the kingdom the ‘Kingdom of Mocaranga’. In many of his works, Dr. Theal states that the English reading for Mocaranga is Makalanga. Shona scholars have seized on the Portuguese rendering Mocaranga to conclude that the people that the Portuguese dealt with were the Karanga, and therefore supposedly Shona. But, as we shall see later, we will learn that up until the early 1700s, there was not a single people group called the Karanga. Instead there were the Kalanga, or Makalanga, from whom are descended a great portion of Vakaranga.

Another major writer on Southern African history, Dr Sidney Welch, agrees with Dr Theal’s translation and translates the word Mocaranga as Makalanga. Just so we are sure that Welch is a reliable source, we will quote below what he had to say about his researches in the foreword to his book, South Africa Under King Manuel: 1495 - 1521. He wrote:

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The researches on which this and my other volumes are based began in the year 1894, when as a youth I went to Lisbon to study the Portuguese language and literature, learning also to know the people and to value their glorious history … On my return to South Africa I had the good fortune to know Dr Theal, who encouraged me to continue these studies, lending me some of his rare editions of the Portuguese sources of history … Since then I have been in constant touch with the fine work of Portuguese, too little known outside Portugal … This has been supplemented by three long visits of research to Europe in 1907, 1926 and 1937. On the occasion of the last visit I had the honor of being admitted a member of the Portuguese Academy of History (Welch 1946, v-vi).

With reference to the early Portuguese documents, Dr Welch wrote:

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Among the surviving documents the first hint of European pioneers in the interior of Mashonaland comes from Diogo de Alcacova in 1506. Writing to the King from Cochin on the 20th of November he relates what he had done whilst working with Pedro da Naia, and how his information was gathered on the spot, when he was the factor of Sofala. After telling the King that malaria had compelled him to leave Sofala, and that he had deposited with the King’s agent in Cochin a present of gold from the Sheikh of Sofala, he gives an account of the gold fields of the land, which he calls Vealanga … The country of Vealanga as he pictures it, [is] “a very large kingdom with many large towns besides a great number of other villages”, [and] indicates that all the territory between the Limpopo River and the Zambesi, where the greater chiefs and indunas gathered large kraals about them, whilst the smaller kraals were scattered far and wide. Within this rough circle we discern what we now know as Matebeleland, Mashonaland, and that part of the present Portuguese territory which is south of the Zambesi (Welch 1946, 180-181).

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In no uncertain terms, Dr. Welch translates Mocaranga as Makalanga. For he writes: “Alcacova calls the kingdom or state subject to these rulers Vealanga [V being interchangeable with U in some European languages]. These natives, whom the Portuguese first met, were Makalanga, whom the Portuguese generally spoke of as Mocaranga” (Welch 1946, 236). In a later work Dr Welch stated:

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Was Mocaranga, our modern Makalanga, the generic name of all the tribes along these great rivers from the Zambesi to Delagoa Bay? It seems likely, because even today the name is applied to a large number of tribes in that part of Rhodesia which adjoins Portuguese territory. Theodore Bent found that all the tribes in the Zimbabwe area and down the Sabi River to the sea, when questioned as to their nationality, called themselves Makalangas. In the days of King John III their paramount chief seems to have been at the head of a loose confederation of tribes, which was commonly called the empire of Monomotapa. This obvious inference from the facts recorded is confirmed by the Father John dos Santos, who wrote some thirty years after Perestrelo, “The Monomotapa and all his vassals are Mocarangas, a name which they have because they live in the land of Mocaranga, and speak the language of Mocaranga, the most polished of all the Negro languages that I have seen in this Ethiopia” (Welch 1948, 278).

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Reporting on his travels in the modern-day Maswingo region in the early 1890s, excavator JT Bent recorded that the vast population of that area identified itself as Makalanga when questioned as to their nationality. He wrote:

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We left Fort Tuli on May 9 1891, and for the ensuing six months we sojourned in what is now called Mashonaland [Zimbabwe was then divided into Matebeleland and Mashonaland] … [where] we had ample time for studying the race which now inhabits the country, in as much as we employed over fifty of them during our excavations at Zimbabwe, and during our subsequent wanderings we had them as bearers, and we were brought into intimate relationship with most of their chiefs. The Chartered Company throughout the whole period kept us supplied with interpreters of more or less intelligence, who greatly facilitated our intercourse with the natives, and as time went by certain portions of the language found its way into our own brains, which was an assistance to us in guiding conversations and checking romance.

…All the people and tribes around [Great] Zimbabwe, down to the Sabi River and North to Fort Charter - and this is the most populous part of the whole country - call themselves by one name, though they are divided into many tribes, and that name is Makalanga. In answer to questions as to their nationality they invariably call themselves Makalangas, in contradistinction to the Shangans, who inhabit the east side of the Sabi River. ‘You will find many Makalangas there, ‘A Makalanga is buried there,’ and so on. The race is exceedingly numerous, and certain British and Dutch pioneers have given them various names, such as Banyai and Makalaka, which latter they imagine to be a Zulu term for reproach for a limited number of people who act as slaves and herdsmen for the Matabele down by the Shashi and Lundi Rivers. I contend that all these people call themselves Makalangas, and that their land should by right be called Makalangaland (Bent 1892, 31-32).

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Arguing that indeed the name Makalanga is the same as Mocaranga as found in some Portuguese documents, Mr. Bent wrote:

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In this theory, formed on the spot from intercourse with the natives, I was glad to find afterwards that I am ably supported by the Portuguese writer Father dos Santos … He says, ‘The Monomotapa and all his vassals are Mocarangas, a name which they have because they live in the land of Mocaranga, and talk the language called Mocaranga, which is the best and most polished of all Negro languages which I have seen in this Ethiopia.’ Cauto, another Portuguese writer, bears testimony to the same point, and everyone knows the tendency of the Portuguese to substitute r for l. Umtali is called by the Portuguese Umtare; ‘blanco’ is ‘branco’ in Portuguese, and numerous similar instances could be adduced; hence with this small Portuguese variant the names are identical (Bent 1892, 32-33).

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That the Portuguese had a tendency of replacing l with r is well attested. We find the word ‘Mocaranga’ first used by Father Joao Dos Santos in his Ethiopia Oriental following the old Portuguese rendering. Diogo Alcacova, eighty years earlier, had referred to the Zimbabwean Tableland as the ‘Kingdom of Ucalanga’ [or Bukalanga]. Having been a learned Roman Catholic clergyman well versed in Latin, we would expect Father dos Santos to have followed the rule that was common to Latin languages at that time of replacing l with r.

This particular form of old Portuguese writing has been captured by Dr Devon L. Strolovitch who in August of 2005 presented his Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in the United States titled ‘Old Portuguese in Hebrew Script: Convention, Contact, and Convinvecia’. Arguing that the Portuguese indeed replaced r for l, Dr Strolovitch stated:

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Many modern Portuguese words contain consonant clusters whose second element /r/ derives from the etymological /l/. These sound changes are attested by many items in the Judeo-Portuguese corpus that also preserve the change in Modern Portuguese … Yet the texts contain several instances of vernacular spellings whose etymological /l/ has been restored in the modern language (Strolovitch 2005, Online).

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Dr Strolovitch then gives examples of words in which the Portuguese substituted the letter r for l as follows: resprandecente = resplendente = resplendent; praneta = planeta = planet; pranta = planta = plant; koprinda mente = completamente = completely; prazer = placere; branko = blanku; pobramentos = populamentu = populacao = populations; pubriko = publicu = publico = public.

That indeed Theal, Welch and Bent were correct in identifying the people associated with much of our precolonial history as Makalanga is well attested. We have the testimony of the German explorer Herr Karl Mauch. In his 1871 to 1872 journals, Karl Mauch reported that the people he found inhabiting the region surrounding Great Zimbabwe were Balosse or Makalaka by name, Makalaka being the Sotho rendering for Makalanga (Bernhard and Bernhard 1969, 173ff). A number of other writers are also agreed that indeed, the people that were associated with the Portuguese were Kalanga. Before going to their work, a few points are worth mentioning here concerning the concentration of Bukalanga settlements in the south. As a result of the Arab and Portuguese slave trade, the Kalanga later concentrated themselves in the south far away from the coast, and this became the center of their power with the rise of the Lozwi in the late 1600s. This concentration in the south and south-west also coincided with the arrival of the ancestral Shona, who later would migrate further south, overruning the aboriginal Kalanga groups in southern Zimbabwe as we have seen in Professor Beach’s writings (Beach 1994, 133), hence the formation of the Karanga language, which would later be further Shonalized through the colonialists’ standardization of what would become Shona.

Let us now turn to the testimony of Messrs Richard Nicklin Hall and W.G. Neal. Writing about the precolonial ethnolinguistic position in Zimbabwe in 1904 they stated with reference to Bukalanga:

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Several writers, including Sir John Willoughby, Dr. Schlichter, and Messrs. Selous and Baines, call the Makalangas by the name Makalakas, and many recent writers on Rhodesia, who do not pretend to be authorities on this particular matter, follow their examples in writing of these people. It would seem Amakalanga is the correct name, though the people themselves are in many districts thoroughly conversant with the name Makalaka. Mr. Herbert J. Taylor, the Chief Native Commissioner of Matabeleland, states that Makalaka is merely the Sechuana name for these people, as the natives of Bechuanaland still speak of the Makalangas as Makalakas … the greatest number of admitted authorities agree in stating that the correct name of these people is Amakalanga…De Barros (1552), Dos Santos (1570), Livio Sanuto (1581), give the name in Portuguese fashion as “Mocarangas.” Dr. Theal states that evidently “the early Portuguese in rendering native names were unaware of the construction of the Abantu language” (Hall and Neal 1904, xxxiv).

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Mr. Hall had spent six months travelling throughout Maswingo. His testimony, and that of the other aforementioned writes, is supported by that of Major Sir John Willoughby, who himself also conducted excavations at Great Zimbabwe. In his own account of Bukalanga he wrote:

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There are one or two points concerning the present inhabitants of Mashonaland, upon which I may touch without presumption before concluding this narrative, although many of my opinions must differ from those already expressed by Mr. Bent, and particularly as to the question of the generic or national name of the natives. He states that their real name is ‘Makalanga’ and that ‘Makalaka’ is a corruption for which certain Europeans are responsible. Now, such a word as ‘Makalanga’ is absolutely never used by the natives of the country. Throughout the low country, from Tuli to Victoria and even much further north, on the high veldt the natives invariably term themselves ‘Makalaka’ (Willoughby 1893, 31).

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Of course to an African history student the argument presented by Sir Willoughby is immaterial, for it is more like arguing on whether the the Hebrews or the Habiru. He probably was confused by the pronunciation as one might be confused today with the way the Venda pronounce the letter /l/. They pronounce it as if it were an /r/. But Sir Willoughby also notes that in northern Zimbabwe [that is, Mashonaland], the name Makalaka was rare, and that the natives of the regions as one travelled further north into Zimbabwe did not use the name Makalanga or Makalaka, but only gave the name of their chief when questioned as to their nationality. He wrote:

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Further north still, the use of the term ‘Makalaka’ is very rare, and the natives, when asked their name, never get beyond that of their tribal chief, which, as one approaches the Zambesi, ceases to be dynastic, each succeeding chief retaining his own name, and consequently causing great discrepancy and confusion in the names of the places on the various maps in existence…Almost each tribe has its own peculiar dialect, and that of the neighborhood of [Great] Zimbabye is hardly intelligible in Northern Mashonaland (Willoughby 1893, 34).

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It is worth noting the last statement from the quote above: Almost each tribe has its own peculiar dialect, and that of the neighborhood of Zimbabye is hardly intelligible in Northern Mashonaland. If indeed the people who lived in the Great Zimbabwe area were Karanga, speaking their dialect as they do today, a dialect which is doubtless a mixture of Kalanga and Zezuru, their dialect should not have been hardly intelligible to people in Northern Mashonaland where we heard from Theal and Samkange that the real Shona people settled about the 1700s.

Another statement worth noting is: Further north still, the use of the term ‘Makalaka’ is very rare, and the natives, when asked their name, never get beyond that of their tribal chief, which, as one approaches the Zambesi, ceases to be dynastic, each succeeding chief retaining his own name. This settles for us the lingering question: could it not be possible that the name Makalanga also referred to the Shona, as some authors seem to imply? Well, Willoughby gives us the answer. And not only him. Bent tells us that in his travels up north towards Salisbury in Makoni’s country, “The best interpreter to be had was kindly placed at our disposal by the Chartered Company, as the language in those parts differs essentially from that spoken at Zimbabwe and the Sabi, a certain portion of which by this time had penetrated into our brains” (Bent 1892, 284). Twenty years earlier, Karl Mauch had reported the same thing about the people he found in those parts of the country. He had written on his way passing via Mashonaland in an attempt to get to Sena on the Zambezi that “the dialect [spoken here] differs considerably from Sikalaka” (Bernhard and Bernhard 1969, 234). It is important to note that Mauch says the language spoken in the modern province of Maswingo at that time was Sikalaka, which is the same as TjiKalanga, and Karanga remains the closest “Shona dialect” to TjiKalanga even today!

We would surely be right to think that there would have been no need for any new intepreters if the people who occupied southern Zimbabwe had been Shona as is currently taught in Zimbabwe. But because the Maswingo region language was TjiKalanga/iKalanga, there absolutely would have been a need for an interpreter. And again, if Kalanga were a Shona dialect, it should have been intelligible to the people of Mashonaland, but it was not, and still is not. This certainly points to a tribal variation, and it flies in the face of those who say that TjiKalanga and Shona are mutually intelligible. In fact, one needs not pour over volumes of history to understand that, they just need to stand amongst the Shona and speak TjiKalanga and hear if it is as intelligible to them as some Shona elites and scholars love to claim. I have been amazed at how many of them will go blank when one is speaking TjiKalanga! Speaking of the people he found in northern Zimbabwe, Mr Bent wrote in 1892:

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[W]e came upon a nest of native kraals, and alighted to inspect them. There are those who say that these people are the real Mashonas, who have given their name to the whole country. This much I doubt; at any rate they are different from the Makalangas, with whom we had hitherto been entirely associated, and have been here only for a few years. When Mr. Selous first visited this valley on one of his hunting expeditions in 1883, he found it quite uninhabited, whereas now there are many villages, an apt illustration of the migratory tendencies of these tribes. They are quite different in type to the Makalangas, and, as I should say, distinctly inferior in physique. They build their huts differently, with long eaves coming right down to the ground. Their granaries are fatter and lower, and made of branches instead of mud, these two facts pointing distinctly to a tribal variation (Bent 1892, 286-287).

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Surely, the names Makalanga or Bukalanga could not have been used by the Portuguese to refer to the Mashona, for if it did, why would there have been a need to give them an artificial name, Shona, when there was already a name that dated back almost four hundred years in record, and over 1000 years by the findings of archaeology, a name which the Kalanga have retained to this day? Again, Shona scholars have a lot of explaining to do in this regard.

In fact, one of theirs, the “chief Shona historian” so to speak, has already given us some explanation. That is, Aenias Chigwedere, a man well known in Zimbabwe. In most of his works (From Mutapa to Rhodes, 1980; Birth of Bantu Africa, 1982; and The Karanga Empire, n.d.), Chigwedere seeks to promote a Shona agenda that sees every people group sweeping from the Limpopo to Nigeria as ‘Shona’. His works have been very influential in shaping the Zimbabwean school history syllabus whilst he was serving as Education Minister. Be that as it may, Chigwedere makes a stunning admission on the question of the Kalanga-Karanga-Shona relationship and as to which people group the Portuguese dealt with. He wrote in The Karanga Empire:

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We have important names bandied about in this country. One of them is certainly KARANGA. The Portuguese make constant references to it in their documents after 1500; one of the names debated by the settler regime for possible assignment to the whole of Mashonaland just before 1930, was KARANGA: we have a whole region today that claims to speak a dialect called CHI-KARANGA; we have yet another region or district that indeed speaks KALANGA today…May I point out that…I make no distinction between KARANGA and KALANGA for indeed, there is no difference between them. The original name was KALANGA. But the Shona language, like every other language, has been evolving and continues to do so. One result of this has been that the letter “L” has been dropped and substituted for “R”. The original name KALANGA inevitably changed to KARANGA. The letter “L” has however been retained in the Plumtree area where the language spoken there is still very close to the original KALANGA language…large numbers of descendants of the original KALANGA people are still in that area to this day (Chigwedere n.d., 6-7).

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What further evidence could one require? With all this evidence, it is patently clear that the people associated with that portion of history up to at least the 1700s were the Kalanga. The Shona, or at least the ancestors of the people called Shona today, especially the Zezuru, only arrived in this country by the late 1600s to 1700s as recorded in Portuguese documents. There can be no question about that, and the natural implication is that the Zimbabwean history school syllabus has to change to reflect the truth about the history of Bukalanga and Zimbabwe. How is it that we can continuously misappropriate the history of another community this way since it is so clear that the people who the Portuguese wrote about are the Kalanga? Why do we teach school children that it was the Shona, or even the Karanga associated with that portion of history? OK, in the case of Karanga we might say that we are making allowance for language change which saw the Shona rendering of Kalanga change to Karanga, but why then do we have to deny Bukalanga children the right to know that it was actually the Kalanga that are being referred to, for they ought not to be affected by the Shona’ization of the name of their ancestors. That surely is a serious travesty of justice, if not a human right violation. The linguistic and cultural rights of Bukalanga are being trampled upon, and worse still, the distortion and misappropriation of their history used to marginalize them as they are branded Ndebele, and by extension, unwanted foreign settlers!

Going back to the Bukalanga-Shona relationship, we can, with certainty, conclude that Bukalanga and the Shona are two different groups, contrary to the claims of some Shona political elites and scholars. Even if the two groups had migrated from the same place or shared an agnatic relationship somewhere in the interior of Africa, it is unjustifiable that a people whose migration is seperated by over 1500 years could still be said to be the same ethnic group. Neither is it justifiable to claim that the language of the earlier immigrants is a dialect of that of the later ones. Perhaps we could argue that ChiKaranga, though a shonalized version of Kalanga, is more a dialect of Kalanga than it is of Shona. In any case, as we saw in the previous chapter, millions of the people identified as Karanga today have Bukalanga ancestry, inasmuch as millions of those identified as Ndebele are of Bukalanga stock. This particular piece of information actually leads to an interesting conclusion, that is, Bukalanga is perhaps the second largest nation in Southern Africa after the Zulu, the only difference being the diversity of our languages from Venda to Victoria Falls from Tshivenda to TjiKalanga to TjiNambya.

Whilst such a distinguished historian like Dr Theal could have made a statement like “The people we call Mashona are indeed descended from the Makalanga of the early Portuguese days, and they preserve their old name and part of their old country” (1896: 122), it is apparent that this was just in keeping with the view of certain other writers (before the research findings of Professor Doke as shown above) that Bukalanga Group Languages are of the same group with the Shona ones. Judging by Dr Theal’s other statements as presented in this book, such as those concerning the date of the arrival of the Shona in the Zimbabwean Tableland, it shows he was here refering to Bukalanga, not necessarily to the whole lot of the Shona. If he were refering to the Shona we do not expect to find him saying that “they preserve their old name and part of their old country”, for we certainly know that the Shona do not call themselves Makalanga and have never at any point in history occupied all of Zimbabwe such that it can now be said they occupy “part of their old country”. Instead, we still do have the Makalanga, who once occupied all of Zimbabwe - in their various tribes - still existent to this day, and occupying a great portion of the country that is now called Zimbabwe, and still referred to by their southern neighbors the Sotho-Tswana as Makalaka as in the past, and this Sotho-Tswana name for the Kalanga in itself speaks a lot.

Even if we were to allow for some latitude and say the European writers incorrectly recorded the national or generic name of the builders of the Zimbabwe Civilization - Bukalanga or Makalanga - then how would we explain the name by which the Sotho-Tswana refer to us, that is, Makalaka? The letter /r/ is so prominent in the Sotho-Tswana languages that it would be very far fetched to suggest that they were somehow refering to the supposedly ‘Shona’ Karanga by Makalaka and were failing to pronounce Kalanga as I have heard some suggest in private conversations. And it is not only the Sotho-Tswana who referred to us as Makalaka, but we find the Tembe in the Delagoa Bay region speaking of their origins in the “Kalanga country” and greeting each other as “n'Kalanga”, as the Reverend Junod found out. Professor G. P. Lestrade and N. J. van Warmelo found the Venda claiming origins in Vhukalanga too, and the Lobedu also told Dr J. D. Krige and his wife Eileen Jensen Kridge that their origins are to be traced in Vhokalaka, and so on, which claim has been lately made by Professor Mathole Motshekga. I think it would be a very audacious claim to make to suggest that all the European recorders from the Portuguese days in the early 1500s to the British in the 1900s all got it wrong!

This also again raises the question that we previously asked: does it mean that the names of the Shona groups - the Zezuru - are so new that they were never heard of to these neighboring peoples? Does this not just prove that they were not yet in the land, which the Venda still refer to as Vhukalanga up to this day? It remains with the reader to make their own judgment, but what we can satisfy ourselves with now is that Bukalanga and the Shona are two different people groups, and Bukalanga are certainly not a Shona group!

But how to we Explain the Relative Language Similarities?

Now, having said that, let us go straight into explaining the relative similarities between the languages of Bukalanga and Shona, for the next big question is: if Bukalanga and the Shona are not the same peoples, how then do we explain the relative similarity of their languages? This is a question that is asked by many people whenever the subject of the relationship between the Kalanga and Shona is brought up. We have seen above that the settlement of the ancestors of the Shona and those of the Kalanga in the Zimbabwean plateau is separated by at least 1500 years. But how can their languages be so relatively similar?

It has been rightly stated by that student of Shona history, Charles Bullock, that Shona is a conglomeration of various languages comprised of the languages of East Africa (notably Kinyarwanda, Kirundi and Western Swahili), Portuguese, TjiKalanga and even IsiNdebele. There is certainly an element of truth in that statement. But our major concern in the present context is TjiKalanga and its relationship to Shona. There are basically three ways the language of the Shona peoples has come to be so similar to Kalanga, which as we have already seen above is perhaps the oldest Bantu language spoken in Zimbabwe for an extended period of time.

First, once the ancestors of the Shona had settled in Zimbabwe, they obviously intermixed and intermarried with the Kalanga who were then inhabiting the whole of the Zimbabwean plateau, though concentrated mostly in the south and south-west of the country where the land was less humid and suitable as grazing land, mining and other activities. In this way the Karanga language came into being, and for those who know the various Shona dialects and Kalanga, they know that Karanga is more a variant of TjiKalanga than it is of say Zezuru or Manyika. Some have argued that Kalanga is a variant of Karanga that came about as a result of an intermix between Karanga and Ndebele in the 19th Century, but what they overlook is the fact that TjiKalanga was the state language of the Maphungubgwe, Monomotapa, Togwa and Lozwi Kingdoms, as well as the liturgical language of the state religion - the Mwali Religion - dating back to at least the 10th century, and still is today!

Secondly, as we saw above how the so-called Standard Shona was created, Karanga - being a mixture of Kalanga and the Shona dialects - was incorporated into the new language. As a result, naturally thousands of Kalanga words, which were now forming the Karanga language, entered into the new language. I have often been amazed by those who say that Kalanga is a Shona dialect, and wondered if they have tried to compare Kalanga with Zezuru. Whilst Zezuru, and many of the Shona dialects are intelligible to the Kalanga, TjiKalanga is in many cases unintelligible to the Shona.

Thirdly, TjiKalanga language would have heavily infiltrated the Shona dialects during the one hundred and fifty years that the Lozwi, of whose TjiKalanga was a state language, were the rulers of all tribes then inhabiting the Zimbabwean Tableland. It is very common for the language of the rulers to infiltrate the languages of those upon whom they are ruling. This was an easy process since then no chief could rule without the previous sanction of the Kalanga-Lozwi rulers, and in many cases the chiefs were of Bukalanga stock, which is even why many Shona chiefs are originally Kalanga-Lozwi. A similar scenario can be pointed out to in our era. Under the overlordship of Ndebele and Tswana chiefs, we have seen TjiKalanga driven to the verge of extinction as these chiefs insist on the use of IsiNdebele and Setswana in their courts, or their languages inflitrates the languages of those upon whom they are ruling.