The Sunday News
Vincent Gono Magazine Editor
ONE of Zimbabwe’s renowned custodians of history and scholar, Pathisa Nyathi has written to the effect of pointing out that, a man without history is like a tree without roots and to neglect history is as good as leaving one’s self and posterity unprotected. And perhaps mindful of that, Nyathi through his publishing house Amagugu Publishers has documented the history of the Babirwa in a book entitled The History and Culture of The Babirwa of Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
He is now looking for $10 000 to see through the whole project that aims at publishing 500 books. The money that is required, he said, was for editing, printing and typesetting. He therefore, appealed to the ethnic members to donate for the completion of the project.
In an interview with Sunday Leisure, Nyathi said it took him two years to complete his research on the history of the Babirwa.
He said he started the project by serialising the history and culture of the Babirwa in his column Cultural Heritage in the Sunday Leisure before he considered the idea of lumping together the stories into a more comprehensive book.
“I started the project almost two years ago. I did the research, getting some of the information through oral tradition before I started serialising them. The research on the topic was influenced by personal interest. This is much so because I was doing the project that was relevant to my own history.
“This is the greatest work I have done so far. I am filled with a feeling of satisfaction because I have managed to research and document the history of my own ethnic group — Babirwa,” he said.
Nyathi added that the compilation of the history of Babirwa was part of efforts to make ethnic history more accessible.
He said the Babirwa ethnic group cuts across the boundaries of Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe. He added that this was so because the colonial project in Southern Africa did not consider ethnic groups, making sure the boundaries did not result in related groups belonging to different territories.
He posited that the so called Sotho-Tswana today was an inaccurate term as it lumps together the ethnic BaSotho and the numerous Sothoised generic BaKalanga whose members stretched from the Indian Ocean right to the eastern extremities of the Kalahari Desert in the west.
He urged more sustained and complementary research involving history, in particular oral research, archaeology and ethnography.
