Contemporary peoples classified under the rubric ‘Shona’ are varied and cover most of Zimbabwe and parts of Mozambique, stretching to the Zambezi River in the North and the Indian Ocean in the east. It is un- certain how the word/name Shona was arrived at. In some instances, it appears to have been used by the Ndebele in the middle of the nine- teenth century as they crossed the Limpopo northward to occupy the south-western parts of Zimbabwe. In this context, Shona was a deroga- tory name for the people they had defeated. It should be reckoned that the people called Shona today never referred to themselves as such and they initially disliked the name. Until today, historians dislike the term Shona; they prefer to identify various groups in the so-called Shona fam- ily by their chiefdoms or their dialect groups such as Karanga, Manyika, Zezuru, Korekore and Ndau. For African historians, the universalisation of the term Shona to all tribes native to Zimbabwe is a British innova-
tion at colonisation and afterwards, not an indigenous one.1 In this book,
we shall however use the term Shona, for it has become conventional. Also, it has always been used to refer to all the indigenous peoples of Zimbabwe, who are the subject of my research.
It is very important to acknowledge as we begin that we have scattered knowledge about how life broadly went on during the pre-colonial period to help us present a smooth account of the origin of the Shona people. The pre-colonial Shona society was not a writing one, thus kept its most valued traditional treasures in rituals, stories, sayings, songs, proverbs,
adages, among others.2
When the society became literate at the dawn of
1
Cf. Bourdillon, The Shona Peoples: Ethnography of the Contemporary Shona, With Special
Reference to their Religion, (Revised Edition). Gweru: Mambo Press, 1987, pp. 16-19; see also, C.M. Doke, Report on the unification of Shona Dialects. Government of Southern Rhodesia. Salisbury, 1931, whose report reveals that the Shona people were unified by the colonial government on the basis of the linguistic similarities from one dialect to the other; see also, C. Mwandayi, Death and After-life Rituals in the eyes of the Shona: Dia-
logue with the Shona Customs in the Quest for Authentic Inculturation. Bamberg: Univer- sity of Bamberg Press, 2011, Chapter One, pp. 37-53.
2
Cf. Michael Gelfand, Gowing Up In Shona Society: From Birth to Marriage. Gweru: Mambo Press, 1979; Gelfand, The Genuine Shona: Survival Values of an African Culture. Gweru: Mambo Press, 1999; J. Gombe, Tsika DzaVaShona, Harare: College Press Publishers, 1995; Cf. Kabweza, O. M. et al, Pasichigare: Essays on Shona Culture in Retrospect. Gweru: Mambo Press, 2002.
the colonial era, there wasn’t much interest in tracing the lives of the people prior to colonisation. The colonised were understood to be people without a history hence there was no need to invest time and effort in tracing the therefore ‘non existent’ history.
The few Western scholars that did some research on some aspects of the pre-colonial society however provide us with scant and disjointed infor- mation on the overall picture of the diverse aspects of life especially domestic labour and the general social, economic, religious and political organisation. These scholars certainly had a bias. They interpreted Shona past from their perspective and not the Shona perspective. As Europeans, first and foremost and secondly as superior colonial agents they had interests in writing the history of the Shona. And their interests as colonisers always are at variance with those of the colonised. Because of that, most of our information about the traditional pre-colonial com- munities is largely a colonial era anachronistic reconstruction based upon what was observable during the colonial era. Of course, there are some few earliest records written by the Portuguese, the first Europeans to have contact with the Shona around 1400. A. D. These are the sources that the later Western writers used and they have been highly rated as dishing out, unbiased authentic history about the Shona.
However, it should be known that these Portuguese were Europeans also and were biased against Shona culture, as they judged African societies according to European perspectives. In other words, they came to Zim- babwe in pursuance of their colonial and economic interests and not Shona interests. It is therefore impossible that their literature had no bias. In fact, at an elementary level, the bias is inevitable since they did not speak Shona language. They also did not know the culture of the people whom they wrote about. There is therefore an attempt by Shona scholars to sort of rewrite the history themselves using mostly oral tradi- tions and spirit mediums as sources, which undertaking does not go down well with European historians who dismiss these sources as ‘un-
scholarly’ or ‘unscientific’ hence of no historical value.3 On the other
3
Cf. D.N. Beach, Zimbabwe Before 1900. Gweru: Mambo Press, 1995, p. 20; For a detailed discussion on the weaknesses of the sources (literary accounts of the Portuguese trad- ers, British missionaries, explorers, travellers, and settlers and oral traditions) used in trying to reconstruct the lives and social organisation of the Shona by historians, see also Beach, The Shona and Their Neighbours. Oxford: The People of Africa Series, 1994, p. 9; Bourdillon, The Shona Peoples, pp. 3-6.
hand, African peoples regard oral tradition, divine oracles from spirit mediums as more authoritative and truthful than written words, espe- cially those written by foreigners. We therefore, have two competing narratives on certain themes about the Shona, as shall be observed below.
The Shona Communal Mode of Production (CMP)
In order to situate domestic workers’ struggles today, as representatives of the underclasses of the Zimbabwean society, I shall begin this section by discussing the key features and institutions of the Communal Mode of Production (CMP). It is my presupposition that each mode of produc- tion has different and prominent characteristic features and institutions which ensure its survival and operations. It is these that have to a greater extent influenced the nature of the struggle between various constituent elements. As such, the nature and character of the struggle between classes is dictated by the dominant mode of production.