African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [2]
By 1900 there was Southern Rhodesia, bright pink all over, inside its neat boundaries, with Mozambique, or Portuguese East Africa on one side, Angola (Portuguese West Africa) and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (pink) on the other, and Northern Rhodesia (pink) just above it.
The Transvaal, arena for the Boer War, was to the south.
The same neat shape is now stamped Zimbabwe. The trouble is that these boundaries ignore a good deal of history, mainly to do with the Portuguese influence, for Portuguese traders, adventurers, explorers, travelled and sometimes lived in areas that later were painted pink. There were no frontiers then, and if any European country were to claim the territory by right of precedence, it should have been Portugal. These histories are in Portuguese archives, not so much in the British, and school children were not taught about the Portuguese in Monomotapa or the kingdom of Lo Magondi. Yet that the Portuguese had been before them could hardly have been overlooked by the British adventurers. There is a certain wonderfully fertile valley, still full of citrus groves planted by the Portuguese, who also brought in maize and other crops.
The boundaries also ignore the pre-European politics of the Shona–for instance the Mutapa state which in the sixteenth century included much of central Mozambique.
The picture of Mashonaland presented as history to the heirs of the Pioneer Column went something like this: When we whites came we found the Matabele, an offshoot from the Zulus. They had travelled north to escape from murderous Zulu kings, and taken land from the Mashona, whom they harried and raided. The Mashona were groups of loosely related clans always on the move, for they stayed in one place only long enough to exhaust the soil and scare away the animals. We, the British, brought the Mashona people peace as well as White Civilization.
In fact the Mashona were skilled farmers and miners, whose techniques are only now being investigated by researchers. It was necessary for the British to see them as ignorant savages who owed everything to their conquerors.
The British administered sullen populations, but not for long, for quite soon, in the early 1950s, resistance movements began to form. In the late ’40s people like myself, interested in the possibilities of black resistance, found very little, though there was ‘a dangerous black agitator’ Joshua Nkomo, who inflamed crowds with his oratory in Bulawayo and another called Benjamin Burombo. Ten years later the national movements were powerful. They had been given impetus by a frothy notion called the Central African Federation, which aimed at uniting Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland and Southern Rhodesia. The idea of this Federation appealed irresistibly to large numbers of idealistic souls, nearly all white. Yet it was attempting to unite incompatibles. The two northern countries were British Protectorates, and their black populations actually believed in promises made to them by Queen Victoria, that their interests would always be paramount, that their countries were to be administered for their good. It never does to ignore the explosive possibilities of ‘naive’ emotions like this one. Meanwhile Southern Rhodesia had always modelled itself on South Africa, adapting every repressive law passed there, fitting it into an edifice of oppression as comprehensive as South Africa’s. People who wanted to believe in uniting these three countries ignored the wishes of the blacks, and in fact the nationalist movements