The Movement Towards a Shona Identity

It seems plain, then, that by the 1930s the Manyika identity was a reality in Makoni, Umtali, and Inyanga districts and in the migrant diaspora. It had arisen as a result of the operation of the main forces which transformed Makoni district under colonialism—participation in peasant agriculture, labour migration and

education. It had arisen as a result of the emergence of local entrepreneurial and church elites, but it also allowed for wider protest against the manifestly failing colonial political economy in the 1930s. Whites and especially missionaries had played a key role in the definition of the Manyika identity but in such a way that the idea was open for all sorts of use by Africans.

It is plain, too, that by the 1930s there was hardly any sense of a wider Shona identity. Commenting on the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1925, the Chief Native Commissioner contrasted the impact of his appearance before Ndebele and Shona chiefs respectively. To the Ndebele the event was 'a natural outcome of their unforgotten traditions of personal fealty', but 'to the disunited Mashona tribes a message of different import seemed to be conveyed. To them the occasion was charged with unity under one head as a fact which they have been slow to realize.'^[102] But during the 1930s a number of forces, some African and some European, combined to work for the creation of a single Shona language and hence the sense of a single Shona identity.

On the African side, the main impulses came from men who found employment in government service and could be posted anywhere in the territory, and from young teachers and trainees for the ministry, who wanted to contest the prestige of the older generation of teachers and evangelists by mastering and controlling a new language of their own. On the European side the chief impulse arose out of the need to communicate effectively beyond the limits of one of the dialect provinces.

Benedict Anderson, in his brilliantly suggestive Imagined Communities, has discussed the interactions of language development and national feeling. 'Print-languages', he writes, 'laid the bases for national consciousness'. Yet my own data up to this point has been very different from his. In Anderson's case, what he calls 'print-capitalism' created large unified languages where there had been an oral multiplicity:

In pre-print Europe, and, of course, elsewhere in the world, the diversity of spoken languages, those languages that for their speakers were (and are) the warp and woof of their lives, was immense; so immense, indeed, that had print-capitalism sought to exploit each potential oral vernacular market, it would have remained a capitalism of petty proportions. But these varied idiolects were capable of being assembled . . . into print languages far fewer in number. . . . Nothing served to 'assemble' related vernaculars more than capitalism which, within the limits imposed by grammars and syntax created mechanically-reproduced print-languages, capable of dissemination throughout the market.^[103]

In the case I have been describing, printing had actually broken up a common language into distinct and competitive dialects. Anderson tells us that at the root of ethnic nationalism in Europe lay the demotion of 'the old sacred languages—Latin, Greek and Hebrew', now forced 'to mingle on equal ontological footing with a motley plebeian crowd of vernacular rivals'. In the Southern Rhodesian case, the written or printed vernacular functioned in the first place as a sacred language in itself. The mission printing presses, constrained by lack of finance, were not true representatives of 'print-capitalism'. Initially, the various churches were more concerned to Christianize intensively in their own particular zones than to create a territory-wide market for missionary literature. It was the use of literacy by labour migrants which linked this process with the industrial political economy.

But after the 1930s Anderson's ideas of the direct impact of 'print-capitalism'

and of the secularizing character of language development become more and more relevant to Southern Rhodesia. First the state, and then capitalist enterprises began to wish to reach the widest possible market with vernacular publications and in these publications the printed vernacular was widely employed for the first time to communicate a whole variety of secular messages. Hence a drive towards 'Standard Shona' began.

Yet, of course, the mission churches themselves were also parties to this movement. As the Anglican and Catholic churches became more truly 'national', so they pressed for a language more generally useful. Take, for instance, the change that had come over the school at St Augustine's. As we have seen, this had begun with pupils drawn only from the 'Manyika' zone. By the 1930s the situation was very different. St Augustine's had become an elite school for boys from all over Southern Rhodesia:

Three languages are spoken in the Diocese, viz. Chishona in one or other of its dialects . . . Sindebele . . . and Sechuana. In addition to these we have boys in the school from Nyasaland and two different districts of Northern Rhodesia. Many educationalists nowadays stress the value of the teaching being given in the vernacular. This is entirely impossible in the higher of our standards in the schools at Penhalonga, owing to the varied linguistic groups from which the pupils are drawn, so English has perforce to be the medium of instruction . . . St Augustine's, Penhalonga, is the only Church school of its type between the Zambezi and the Limpopo, and between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. The problem of race and language is also seen among the African clergy of the Diocese. Not only have we Mashona, Matabele and Bechuana, but we also have a Nyasaland native and a Mundao . . . yet they all get on amicably together, and with a little tact in placing them the language difficulty is overcome . . .

It must be recognized that in this part of Africa, at any rate, the difficulty of language does not arise from the difficulty of learning another speech, but from racial pride and tribal animosities; a centre where Africans of different races are collected may easily prove a place where faction fights break out. . . . It says much for the Christian character and influence of our Mission schools that these people who comparatively recently were members of tribes at war with one another are now amicably meeting together under the aegis of the Christian church.^[104]

The solution for St Augustine's was to use English in teaching rather than to employ a 'Standard Shona'—and one must recognize that command of English had a great deal to do with the emergence of a nationalist elite. But it was also significant that Anglicanism had ceased to see its role as propagating Manyika. And many Anglican missionaries took a leading part in the movement towards unifying Shona that commenced in the 1930s. These developments coincided with the generalization of ethnic identification in the towns, and particularly in Bulawayo, where 'Ndebele/Shona' rivalries became established.

All these factors—the aspirations of a second-generation African elite, 'print-capitalism', the enlargement of urban ethnicities, and so on—meant that the movement towards a unified Shona language and a sense of wider Shona identity became irresistible. If in the 1930s no one in Makoni would have described themselves as 'Shona', by the late 1950s, when the nationalist movement came to the district, very many people thought in such terms. Yet if the movement was irresistible, this is not to say that it was not resisted. African vested interests in Manyika were strong and the new language policy was much resented.

Jeffrey Peires, in his account of the Lovedale Press, has shown the devastating impact upon the first generation of mission converts of the 'great orthographic upheaval which struck Africa in the 1930s' as a 'result of the work of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures founded in 1926 . . . [which] sparked off a new quest for language standardization throughout the continent':

By comparison with other languages, which were severely mauled by ill considered attempts at dialectical unification, Xhosa was fortunate [writes Peires]. . . . Nevertheless, problems with regard to matters such as tone and aspiration had led to inconsistencies in spelling. . . . Far-reaching changes were adopted. . . . However satisfactory these new arrangements may have been from a purely linguistic standpoint, their social implications were disastrous. The manner in which the regulations were imposed awakened deep resentment among educated Africans. . . . The awesome effect of the 'New Orthography' was to turn every literate African into a functional illiterate.^[105]

No one has yet done the research in Southern Rhodesia to determine whether the language changes of the 1930s constituted 'ill-considered attempts at dialectical unification'. But there is no doubt that the changes were deeply resented. There is plenty of evidence that both local missionaries and local African Christians clung to Manyika as best they could.

In March 1934, for example, a visitor from Triashill—even under its Jesuit dispensation—came to talk with Edgar Lloyd at St Faith's. Both men were 'dead keen to stop the objectionable "new language" stunt. . . . It is silly to force it, by printing all sorts of special papers in it, which the natives don't understand and want to read. The Diocesan Intercession forms, the Mothers' Union prayers, etc besides school things.'^[106] American Methodists, whose influence remained focused in the eastern districts, not surprisingly, especially resisted language standardization. In 1940 their Commission of Worship and Music under Amos Kapenzi demanded that 'Choirs should make it their practice to sing Chimanyika.' And in 1947 one of the Old Umtali missionaries wrote to the Scripture Gift Mission, thanking them for sending illustrated lessons in standard 'Chi-Shona':

I find that our educated people can use them, but the common people, common because there are so many of them, cannot understand these lessons as written. The vocabulary is often beyond their understanding, beside the foreign spelling of words they might know. All our people consulted are as puzzled as I about what dialect they may be. They feel that it is highly seasoned with Sindebele, and must come from the extreme South or West border of Rhodesia. . . . Unfortunately, it is so far removed from the whole Eastern section in its composition that it is not understood by the peoples of this section. It is supposed to be Unified Shona, worked out by a committee from the different sections, but some were not called in for the committee meetings, and so these sections were not represented.

The missionary sent a text in Manyika, confident that it 'will meet the needs of a large section, not only of Southern Rhodesia but also of Portuguese East Africa.'^[107] Thus the sense of loyalty to Manyika and to a Manyika identity continued underneath the rise of Shona cultural ethnic awareness and Zimbabwean political nationalism.