The Sunday News
Vincent Gono, Features Editor
MATOBO District in Matabeleland South Province is far from being just an administrative district in the country. The workmanship of God has created astonishing hills of inter-locking balancing rocks that has seen visitors marvel at how the rocks sit on one another with natural ease and sometimes at precarious positions yet enduring the test of time and seemingly laughing in hushed tones at agents of weathering.
The district is one where the country’s history can holistically be looked at and given different perspectives.
King Mzilikazi grave and history
To the indigenous people, a section of the district — the Matobo has a lot of spiritual significance as it is where the remains of King Mzilikazi the revered father of the Ndebele nation are interred. It also plays host to the important rain making Njelele Shrine.
It is from the exploits of the warrior King Mzilikazi that the Ndebele State was born and became an important part of the country’s nationhood and history.
A brief history will suffice. The region later named Matabeleland is famed for being the land where Mzilikazi decided to set base after his revolt and break away from King Tshaka in Zululand present day KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) in the early 1820s.
Upon settlement in the region he organised his state in a centralised system of government where he became the sole centre of power, although he would often delegate authority. His death in September 1868 refused to coincide with the European gathering in Berlin in 1884 where Africa was partitioned.
The name Mzilikazi therefore, remains hallowed and etched in the history of the country as a powerful, courageous and skilful warrior and a founder of the Ndebele State. It was his genius as a military man and leader that created an important part of Zimbabwe. That fact alone deserves recognition.
His interment in the Matobo was done according to the spiritual rites, values and norms of the Khumalo people who had chosen the Malindandzimu Hill as the site to lay their great leader — a leader who was revered and who still enjoys so much respect more than a century after his departure. His grave is not alone but there are two others. That of Chris Nguboyenja Khumalo and Prince Sidojiwe who were his grandsons — King Lobengula’s sons.
Like any African leader of his stature they did not want his burial site to be lost to history and the memory of him cast to the winds that whip tirelessly down the mountains and the slopes. Therefore, the choice of the stony Matobo site meant solidity. It meant that his story will continue to be told. It meant an eternal memorialisation of his story as a father of a nation, of a people and that story could only be told from his solid grave.
His grave has remained like that for more than a century. Although the rocks at the mouth of his grave are cemented, it is far from being the modern grave that people expect to see. There is no tombstone. The rocks seem haphazard. The grave look neglected, unkempt. It looks derelict by all standards and in comparison, to Rhodes’.
The road does not qualify to be called one. It’s a double dusty footpath characterised by natural vegetation growth where one has to close their eyes and push their way by constantly hand-blocking a criss-crossing web of branches from pricking their face.
The state of the grave and even the road that leads there has irked a number of visitors into the Matobo section of the country’s history as they cannot resist but make fitting comparisons with the neat and well-kempt one of Rhodes and his men.
From an ordinary visitor, the grave is crying out for some sprucing up.
Questions that come to mind are such as why the custodians of the area the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ) seem to be blind to such a glaring anomaly.
Is it a loud statement that our history as a people is not important? Or it’s just the colonial mind, that of trivialising what is African and valuing what is European? Or are we still suffering from the inferiority complex that has fogged our minds to accept the hallowing of Rhodes more than our own hero?
What remains true is that the fighting legacies and histories that are juxtaposed by the magnificent balancing stone boulders in the Matobo that seemed to be in a perpetual menacing countenance tell a story of stubbornness that Rhodes and what he stood for understood.
Rhodes’ grave and what it stands for
Although Mzilikazi died 16 years shy of the Berlin West Africa Conference that portioned Africa among European powers and 30 years before Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company discovered that the gold belt in the Witwatersrand area stretches beyond South Africa into Zimbabwe and decided that he was going to exploit the gold, Rhodes later sought to conquer not only the land and exploit its resources but its people and its history too.
Although he did not come into direct contact with the great Ndebele warrior King Mzilikazi, he tried to undo and break whatever Mzilikazi had established by deliberately defiling and desecrating the spirituality of the Matobo.
A concession — the Rudd Concession of 1888 that was penned by Charles Rudd, an emissary of Rhodes that Lobengula was made to sign, led to the occupation of the country by the British. The occupation led to a protracted fight on both ends as the whites sought total control of the country, its resources, its people and its history.
After his death in South Africa in 1902, Rhodes willed that his tomb be in the Matobo. He did that after seeing the grave of Mzilikazi and of course after researching about the revered great warrior king.
And according to historian Pathisa Nyathi, Rhodes’ grave sat at the top of Mzilikazi’s. He said Rhodes knew too well that topographically, power is expressed by height and by setting himself at the pinnacle of Malindandzimu Hill above Mzilikazi’s grave he was expressing himself as a victor, a more powerful figure than Mzilikazi.
Rhodes seemed to be telling Mzilikazi in eternity that he had broken his power, desecrated his spiritual dwelling place and subjugated his people.
“No one grave is higher than that of Rhodes”. It is followed by that of Dr Leander Starr Jameson, the Allan Wilson memorial and that of Charles Patrick John Coghlan who was the first Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia in that order and height,” said Nyathi.
It was his submission that by putting his grave on top of that of everyone, including King Mzilikazi, Rhodes was declaring his importance above everyone. He was writing a history of his political conquest that sought to vilify the Ndebele nation.
He believed like he put it in his own words that the place that he chose was, “for those deserving well for the country.”
And by choosing the same Malindandzimu Hill which was the royal family’s burial shrine and demanding that his grave be drilled on a solid rock he sought not memorialisation but to desecrate it, to defile it spirituality and to make it useless.
He was saying his history is more important than that of King Mzilikazi, he was shouting his perceived victory to the world.
The two graves — a contrast
Although there seem to be a contrast and concern with regards to the treatment and upkeep of the two graves with Rhodes’ grave seemingly getting more attention than that of King Mzilikazi, Nyathi said that was not a problem as the two figures represented totally different cultures.
He said burial places of such revered figures as kings in Africa had very spiritual significance and were not public places that every Jack and Jill could walk into and or past.
He gave the pyramids of Egypt which stood even now as respected sites as examples. He said unlike Western history which was materialistic, African history can not be divorced from spirituality, anthropology and geography.
“That is why if you read the history written by Europeans you hear about the Stone Age. They focus on materials and not the people who defined that era. They want people to have a warped thinking that the stones curved themselves or the iron in the Iron Age as if it smelted itself. They do not give us the totems and totemic praises; they pay no particular attention to origins as Africans do,” he said.
He added that Mzilikazi was both a national and family figure and therefore whatever the nation does to his grave was in consultation with the family.
What it means is that the family still wants the burial place of Mzilikazi to be a secret and most importantly a spiritual place and not a public one.
His sentiments were echoed by NMMZ director Dr Godfrey Mahachi who unpacked the whole story about the two graves in an interview.
He said it was true that there was a striking difference in the treatment of the two graves even by his department much so because of the spiritual sensitivity associated by African cultural values.
He said in African culture, the graves and graveyard were not for every stranger. The burial places for Africans were infused by spirituality and anything that seemed to be a threat to that belief was not tolerated.
He said his department, in as much as they may want to spruce up Mzilikazi’s grave, they have to do so in consultation with the family.
“The two are national monuments but they represent completely different cultures. Rhodes’ grave is a tourist attraction because it is culturally acceptable from where he comes from. As a department we observe those intrinsic cultural values and we adhere to them with particularity. We are not there to distort the cultural values. Therefore, Mzilikazi’s grave has custodians who we work closely with. They define our parameters and we follow.
“For example, our staff are not allowed to cut grass there. There are certain rites that should be followed such as that when one decides to visit, they should be clean. They should have refrained from sex. So how do I ensure that my staff are clean? How do you ensure the visitors are clean if it is to be opened to the public?
“We have been told not to fence it off because doing so will restrict the King’s spirit. It will confine him. So, yes, we have been accused of being colonial but that goes with people not understanding the sensitivity and spiritualism associated with African history. Some would want to go there and perform rituals that are not sanctified by the family so opening such places to the public poses a lot of challenges some of which are beyond us,” said Dr Mahachi.
He added that they were going to meet the Khumalos and deliberate on some aspects with regards history, interpretation and management of some of the sites.
