Manyika Identity and the Migrant Labour Factor

I have argued above that the expansion of missionary Manyika into other areas, carried as it was by teachers and evangelists from Makoni and Umtali districts who enjoyed privileged access to it, went a long way to build a common sense of Manyika identity among them. But it was the Jesuit takeover of Triashill in 1929, with the accompanying introduction of the Chishawasha church and school books in the Zezuru dialect, that provoked by far the most articulate expression of a Christian sense of Manyika self-identity.

The Triashill teachers tried to defend their leadership of a Manyika church. 'Trouble is brewing among the teachers', wrote O'Hea in September 1930, 'as may be clearly seen from the set we have here doing their course. One or two have openly declared that they will never teach children from a Chizezuru book.' One of these teachers announced in class that if Msgr. Brown 'doesn't give us everything we want' and restore the Manyika church, he would 'give up the whole thing'. 'To my way of looking at it,' exploded O'Hea, 'they are treated FAR too softly. I wouldn't give that chap a chance of giving up—I'D FIRE HIM AT THE END OF MY BOOT. Close his school and give a jaw to the Christians who were any good around about it, letting them see that such bolshies brought nothing but trouble and unhappiness.'^[79]

But the most active pan of the protest was taken by migrant labourers from the Triashill zone of influence. Very many men had taken their mission education with them to the towns of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. Now they intervened in the crisis at home. "The boys of Jo-burg', wrote O'Hea, 'have sent unsigned letters to boys about here to stir up protests at the church on Sunday and to get the teachers on their side against the use of Chizezuru books in Manyikaland. "You are taking away our language . . . our King Mtasa . . . the religion of our forefathers" . . . all this high-sounding rot is being pumped out at various kraals.'^[80] Triashill, wrote the Johannesburg migrants, 'belongs to us black people, not to the whites'. The Jesuits had come 'to spread divisions, because they have come like intruders to despise us, as we have made no agreement with them. . . . See how these Jesuits are stepping into our possessions and snatching them from us! We, the owners of these things, how are we being treated by them? We are being looked upon as nobodies.' The teachers were urged to write 'many and countless letters' to Fleischer, now bishop in Natal, 'for he knows Chimanyika', and through him their case would reach 'the Holy Father'. 'Announce this to all the people, assemble together at all times.'^[81] Patrick Kwesha, the leader of the Johannesburg migrants, wrote to Brown himself to complain that people at Triashill 'are forbidden their own tongue and forced to use a tongue which we never knew nor our fathers'; that the Jesuits were closing down schools and were 'not the means of teaching us or serving us or raising us, but the means of destroying us and killing us.'^[82]

Meanwhile, the economic depression was forcing many of the migrants back home. These men joined in the protest against the Jesuits:

There is a certain amount of trouble, of a Bolshi sort, brewing and coming to the surface among the Manyikas [wrote O'Hea]. . . . The Young Ethiopians, the ICU and a few local societies are talking a great deal of hot air in the Reserves. . . . Boys back from Capetown and Johannesburg are particularly active and it is really astonishing to hear the clear echoes of Moscow out here in the wilds. The missionaries, of course, are merely for the sake of drugging the blacks to make them the slaves of the whites. . . . A fairly good grasp of the theory and practice of 'class war' being in the hands of the black . . . it is easy to be understood how the slightest grievance is seized upon and ventilated to the full. One of these grievances is the language question.^[83]

The combination of teachers, labour migrants, returned labour migrants and the general congregation confronted O'Hea with a populist Manyika movement, expressing itself both in Makoni and Inyanga. O'Hea called down curses on the whole idea of the Manyika identity:

Nothing but a rod of iron is any use for these people. . . . They are utterly blinded by the most foolish vanity. It is a poison that has its roots in history—they the most despised of the despised Mashona are given a chance at last, owing to the coming of the white man, and they now openly declare that they are the cream of the black race!!! Trouble that has its roots deep down in history is big trouble. As far as I can gather Bro. Aegidius fostered this idea, if he did not hold it himself, among them. . . . We had a great discussion the other day in the Makoni Reserve and there were a number of pagans present. . . . One fellow envisaged the rising of the kingdom of Mtasa, claiming independence.^[84]

All this was the most spectacular manifestation of migrant 'Manyika' identity: after all, in addition to the Jesuit intervention, the Triashill missionaries had made

more contact with the zones of subsistence production and labour migration than had the Anglicans or the Methodists. Still, both these missions had also prepared young people to carry their skills of literacy into labour migration. Because of these skills, Anglican and Methodist migrants had access to much desired jobs in domestic service and in hotels. The churches kept in touch with them in ways which heightened their sense of Manyika identity. 'The little intercession paper printed here in their own tongue every quarter', wrote Buck from St Augustine's in September 1914, 'has reached a circulation of 2000 and goes to Manyika boys and girls as far away as Johannesburg and Kimberley.'^[85] The American Methodists found in the mid-1930s that they were 'every year drawing from the Reserves hundreds of the best of the boys and girls, training them, and seeing most of them return not to their homes to enrich the life there, but to the town', going into 'cooking, waiting table, carrying messages or wheeling babies in the park'.^[86]

So many Old Umtali pupils were to be found in Salisbury that the AMEC sent one of their ministers there to preach to them in Manyika. Rather than having to join 'Zezuru' Wesleyan Methodist congregations, 'to conduct our own evangelistic services, to sing our own hymns, to be free to develop in our own way, would make our preacher and our people rejoice'.^[87]

An engaging and unusual insight into the network of the American Methodist Manyika migration is given in Katie Hendrick's little-known The Bend in the Road . Katie was a coloured woman, daughter of a Manyika labour migrant to Cape Town, Mandisodza. Mandisodza and his elder brother, John, both attended Old Umtali school. But:

In the dry dusty reserve near Umtali . . . the people went naked and struggled with the land to yield a mealie crop . . . Necessity forced on father and his people the first lesson in economics; to buy food . . . they had to have money. To get money they must go to work for the white man.

Brother John went to work as house-boy to a settler family in Rhodesia, whose service he left after sixteen years to return to Old Umtali and eventually to become an American Methodist minister based in Maranke. The younger brother had more wide-ranging ambitions: 'The many Manyika natives in Cape Town were earning more pounds than they had dreamed of in Mashonaland and they wrote home glowing reports. Father, like many of his contemporaries, became obsessed with the idea of reaching the Cape.' So he worked his way slowly south, taking hotel jobs in Salisbury, then jumping trains to reach South Africa: working for a time for a Constantia farmer and eventually getting a domestic service job in Cape Town by means of his contacts among the Manyika there. Some time in the late 1920s Katie was born to a 'Cape Coloured' woman with whom Mandisodza had established a liaison. Thereafter Katie's story is obsessed with the Manyika and with the idea that Manicaland should be her home. At eighteen years old she has an affair with a Manyika house-boy—'his high-sounding English I found irresistible . . . my weakness for English and Manicas got me into trouble'. Later she visits her uncle John at his mission in Maranke, feeling instantly at home. Uncle John gives her a letter of introduction to an American Methodist Manyika in Cape Town, Willie Marangha from Makoni district; she meets Willie; they marry; and the book ends with their return to Makoni in the early 1950s, where Willie begins a transport business and Katie learns to fit into 'Manyika' society.^[88]

By no means all migrants from the eastern region were mission Christians, of course. But it was to the advantage of such migrants to attach themselves to the growing 'myth of the Manyika' in the towns of southern Africa, with their

irresistible 'high-sounding English'. In the urban and industrial ethnic hierarchy the 'Manyika' came to be thought of as 'natural' domestic servants. "The Wamanyika are in great demand as domestic servants', noted the Native Commissioner, Inyanga, in 1929, 'and they obtain good wages for this class of labour. . . . The wage for this unproductive labour is generally higher than for other productive work.'^[89] Chief Native Commissioner Bullock gave official backing to the myth: 'These Wa Manyika . . . now supply the best houseboys to South Africa.'^[90] During my field research in Makoni district I found that very many informants had worked as waiters in South Africa and retained photograph albums to prove it. They also retained memories of the 'Manyika' networks along which they were able to move from job to job and town to town.^[91]

All this meant that the realities of the migrant labour market made an impact even on the most stubborn 'traditionalist' groups in Makoni district. Thus the Rozvi chief, Tandi, and his people were very reluctant to accept even a Makoni identity, let alone a Manyika one. They were concerned to argue that they had always been autonomous of Makoni, and they were regularly involved in schemes to re-establish the Rozvi paramountcy. But as chief Tandi and his councillors told me in 1981, they ceased to speak Rozvi and came to speak what they now call Manyika 'because we had to marry foreign women. And when our young men went to town they had to accept that they were Manyika.'^[92]

Similarly, at one level of politics within Makoni district the old distinctions between 'Waungwe' and 'Wamanyika' retained their importance in the 1930s. Thus in 1936 there erupted a great controversy between chief Makoni and chiefs Mandeya and Mutasa. Makoni claimed that Chikumbu, a headman in Inyanga district, was his nephew and should be recognized as subordinate to him:

This matter is wholly inspired by head-of-kraal Chikumbu [wrote the Native Commissioner, Inyanga], who for some years, has been proselytising amongst the Va-Manyika in his vicinity. . . . All this people will contend they are Va-Hongwe if asked, although their names and dialect are of the Manyika.^[93]

This micro-level campaign to change Manyika identity into an Ungwe one infuriated chief Mandeya, whose men assaulted headman Chikumbu and his supporters. It also ran quite counter, of course, to the irresistible pressures at the macro-level which were compelling all men from Makoni to define themselves as Manyika in the towns.

In September 1913, for example, a cluster of self-described 'Manyika workers' at the Argus Printing Company in Salisbury, which included men from both Umtali and Makoni, wrote in protest to the administration:

There are three of Manica girls here and they have no thing to do. They are not working. Their work is to commit all sorts of evil going from one man to another. We wish you could report it to Native Commissioner in Salisbury and have them sent back to Umtali; or sir if it please you send us a letter that we may carry it over to Native Commissioner in Salisbury. Also we wish if there is a law that shall never allow a Manica girl to come here and not let one of them ride the train from Umtali, or from any of the stations and sidings, such Odzi, Rusapi and etc save she that has her husband.^[94]

In Salisbury boxing and other recreations were 'organized around a number of "tribal" clubs, comprising the WaKorekore, the MaBlantyre, the WaManyika on the some side, the WaZezuru and WaBudjga on the other'.^[95] More radical groupings existed also. 'There are societies established in the following towns', wrote the Native Commissioner at Inyanga, in November 1930, 'Cape Town,

Bulawayo and Salisbury known as the Young Ethiopian Manica Society. The objects are political and many of the younger Natives of the district belong to one or other of the branches in the towns.'^[96]

There was little point in maintaining a distinct Makoni or Ungwe identity in the towns, and little possibility of doing so. Certainly other African workers lumped everyone from Umtali, Makoni and Inyanga districts together. In Bulawayo, for example, 'Manyika' migrants had entered domestic service and other employment from the turn of the century. Their access to good jobs had caused them to be disliked by Ndebele workers. Thus the Superintendent of Natives, Bulawayo, explained the great 'faction fights' in Bulawayo in 1929 as 'an attempt to oust the Manyikas and the Natives of Victoria District, large numbers of whom are employed in the town, and because they are good servants, were preferred by employers at good wages. Also because these men attracted Matabele girls because they were in a position to do so financially.'^[97] In 1930 rumours flew that there would be a renewal of fighting at Christmas time. It was rumoured that a meeting of Ndebele had agreed 'that the following tribes must be wiped out, or so terrorized that they would leave Bulawayo and the general labour field to the Ndebele, viz., Abanyika, Makorokori, Blantyre, Amabemba.'^[98] Such reports made many migrant labourers from Makoni district flee Bulawayo and return home to avoid any such attack on the 'Manyika', an identity which had become for a time disadvantageous. But in rumour at least, 'a number of Manyikas are coming down from Salisbury at Christmas time to assist the members of their tribe in Bulawayo against the Matabele'. 'On the part of the Mashonas,' it was reported, 'the daring and defiant ones hail from Victoria and Umtali Circles who consider they are a match for the Matibili and are quite ready to meet them.'^[99] It is clear, then, that by the 1930s the idea of an extended Manyika identity, which included the men of Makoni district, was very much alive, not only in 'Manicaland' itself, but throughout Southern Rhodesia.

It is also clear that for some men this 'Manyika' identity was not just a convenient reference group, but an ideal which sustained them during their migration. There was, for example, Patrick Kwesha, spokesman of the Manyika workers of Johannesburg in their protest against the Jesuits. Kwesha used 'to convert people in Johannesburg. . . . Many, many were baptized. These people were nearly all labour migrants from Manyikaland. There may have been some South Africans too but what he was really interested in was the Manyika.'^[100] Kwesha's 'only wish which led my whole life', was to go back to Manyikaland and to set up an all-African missionary order there:

I wanted God to be fulfilled . . . and his great servants to rise up among them, and that some of them as apostles may swarm over the whole of Manyikaland, as the bees, and banishing all heathenism, protestantism and superstition, and establish a pure and holy kingdom of God and glory of Mary so that from that our God may be called God of Manyikaland as He was called God of Israel, and Our Lady be called Queen of Manyikaland as She is called queen of angels and saints.^[101]