Ndebeles a minority that needs protection

Ndebeles a minority that needs protection

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• Lance Guma: Mkhwananzi's mix of sense and non-sense

• George Mkhwananzi: Ndebeles and Zimbabwe national leadership

• Lance Guma: Lessons drenched in blood

• Black murder, white murder

• Dumisani Zifa Ndlovu: 'Mnangagwa has Matabele blood on his hands'

• Mnangagwa, Dabengwa clash over Mat massacres

• Mugabe faces class lawsuit over massacres

• Honour of journalist who first exposed Mat killings

By Khanyisela Moyo

ON AUGUST 10, 2005, a couple of months before the current MDC leadership rift, I responded to Dr Alex Magaisa’s opinion on civil society and diminishing political space.

In that paper I included an obiter statement to the effect that my problem with both MDC and Zanu PF is their common tribal and gender bias. That statement attracted a critique from two good friends of mine, who are leading lawyers in Zimbabwe (both of Shona origin), namely that I had sullied my case with my “tribal sentiments”

The differences between Shonas and Ndebeles have often been played down in Zimbabwe. This has been done in two ways. Firstly, in what I call the Zanu PF way; which is aptly represented in Nathan Shamuyarira’s “The false allegations of Tribalism in Zimbabwe: Report of British Intelligence”.

According to this viewpoint, tribal differences in Zimbabwe are an embarrassing fabrication of the former Rhodesians who use this to divide the two dominant Zimbabwean tribes, which are the Ndebele and the Shona.

The second statement of denial is what I call the MDC populist line, which is to the effect that we do not need division in Zimbabwe; there is an overriding need for unity and not tribalism. Zimbabweans are very busy with the serious business of doing away with a dictatorship and they ought not to be swayed from this by trivial tribal questions.

But in my view, the tribal question in Zimbabwe is neither instrumentally used by the so-called Rhodesian racists or a trivial divisive issue. I will not even bother to dignify the Zanu PF denial stance with a lengthy answer as it derives from a false premise that before the advent of colonialism, the Shona and Ndebele inhabitants of the territory that is now called Zimbabwe, were united.

My response to the populist rhetoric is that ethnicity is a real issue. It is one of the issues that the nation ought to deal with in its transition from the incumbent administration to something better. Tribal or ethnic prejudices do define the way people see themselves and interact with their neighbours.

These differences were clearly demonstrated in the political arena even before the country’s liberation. The historical examples that follow are graphically illustrative of this submission.

It is widely known that in 1979 the leaders of Zanu and Zapu consulted each other frequently and presented a joint position at important conferences held in Lusaka (Commonwealth), Havana (Non-Aligned Movement), and London (the Lancaster Constitutional Conference). Interestingly, at Lancaster, while Lord Carrington and his delegation made a good job of addressing the question of the welfare of the white minority in the event of black majority rule, Nkomo as the speaker of the Patriotic Front delegation seemed oblivious to the notion that since the predominant ethnic group in Zimbabwe is the Shona, the people of Matabeleland are a minority deserving constitutional protection.

Thanks to this imprudence, in the February 1980 election that the Patriotic Front fought separately, Zanu PF won. The distribution of the seats by province clearly reflected divisions within the country on regional, linguistic and ethnic lines. For example, Zanu PF swept all seats in Manicaland, Mashonaland Central, Mashonaland East and Victoria. Nkomo’s party won all seats in Matabeleland South and lost only one out of ten seats in Matabeleland North.

Seeing tribal resentments and rivalry as a possible threat to his nation-building process, Mugabe chose to use the Gukurahundi massacres as a tool for absorbing his party’s principal rival, Nkomo’s Zapu, thus creating a defacto one-party state. This move was a clear affront to the basic tenets of a liberal democracy. In my understanding, a liberal democracy is based on a voluntarily made social contract and not societal coercion.

Ever after the Unity Accord of 1987, which saw Nkomo’s appointment to the post of half vice-president, the Matebele have been fated to become a long-term politically persecuted minority. They are persecuted in the sense that their region has to suffer the consequences of bad policies made by a government that they have not chosen and have continuously shown their disapproval of. One can naively assert that the Zimbabwean political leadership is elected by the people at all levels.

The distribution of votes throughout Zimbabwe’s electoral history clearly reveals that the people of Matabeleland have consistently rejected the incumbent regime. Call that democracy and I will name it tyranny by the majority!

It is the potential to subjugate by the so-called democratic (majority-elected) governments that the concept of minority rights seeks to curtail.

In 1999, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was formed out of a coalition of dissenting voices. From its inception the party was alive to the country’s tribal question. Instead of seeing the Matebele dissatisfaction as an issue that their so-called democratic change should address, the founding fathers and mothers of the MDC chose to compromise. Having made an excellent political calculation that the leader of their party should come from an organization that had a nationally representative constituency at that time – the ZCTU, the next question they asked was who in the trade union leadership should be at the helm of the new party.

Surely, were it not for the precedent set by Zanu PF that only Shonas are the legitimate leaders of Zimbabweans, this question of who was to lead the party should not have arisen. Gibson Sibanda, as the then ZCTU chairperson should have been the obvious leader. It is reasonable to assume that Tsvangirai’s appointment as the leader of the party was ingenuity aimed at attracting the majority Shona vote.

Six years after the parties’s formation, the leadership is divided and the tribal issue has cropped up. There are even rumors to the effect that in order to garner national support the Gibson Sibanda/Welshman Ncube faction is scouting for a Shona leader. How sad! Politically correct commentators have aired opinions in different foras to the effect that the tribal issue is both less significant and insurrectionary; Zimbabweans must turn a blind eye to it.

In my opinion, the Matabele question is critical and cannot be cursorily thrust aside. It should be subjected to an intellectual and candid debate. Ethnic, linguistic and regional differences are not peculiar to Zimbabwe and Africa. Societies across the globe have adopted various constitutional devices to accommodate their minorities. These include, consociationalism, territorial independence, and minority vetoes among others. Since it is axiomatic that the Zimbabwean central government has failed to be properly representative of the needs of all Zimbabweans, it is hoped that the Matabele issue will not (for the second time in the history of Zimbabwe) be lost in the eminent transition from the incumbent government to an acceptable democracy.

I have argued for the rights of the Ndebele minorities, this is not to negate the fact that there are other minorities in the country, such as the whites, the smaller Asian community, those of Malawian origins and so on. Zimbabwe is unquestionably 'home' for almost all of these people. In as much as the nationalists were against the idea of the white community running affairs from a position of unassailable privilege, there is also a reasonable concern that the Shona are currently using their majority position in the political arena in a similar way.

Khanyisela Moyo is a feminist campaigner and Zimbabwean lawyer currently doing a Ph. D in transitional justice in Northern Ireland. The views expressed above are her personal views that should not be attributed to any organization that she is associated with. Comments on this article can be sent to: humandignityquest@yahoo.co.uk
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