4
Board of Trustees, Boston University An Ill-Fated People: Zimbabwe before and after Rhodes by Lawrence Vambe Review by: Arthur Keppel-Jones The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1975), pp. 142-144 Published by: Boston University African Studies Center Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/217493 . Accessed: 09/05/2014 19:44 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Boston University African Studies Center and Board of Trustees, Boston University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.180 on Fri, 9 May 2014 19:44:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

An Ill-Fated People: Zimbabwe before and after Rhodesby Lawrence Vambe

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: An Ill-Fated People: Zimbabwe before and after Rhodesby Lawrence Vambe

Board of Trustees, Boston University

An Ill-Fated People: Zimbabwe before and after Rhodes by Lawrence VambeReview by: Arthur Keppel-JonesThe International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1975), pp. 142-144Published by: Boston University African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/217493 .

Accessed: 09/05/2014 19:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Boston University African Studies Center and Board of Trustees, Boston University are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.180 on Fri, 9 May 2014 19:44:30 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: An Ill-Fated People: Zimbabwe before and after Rhodesby Lawrence Vambe

142 BOOK REVIEWS 142 BOOK REVIEWS

communal system of rist would lead to more permanent social fixity and allow the development of absentee landlordism (pp. 230-231). The Amhara peasant "does not want to see his rights in land modernized" (p. 9). Several armed rebellions of recent years, the last in 1967-1968, opposed tax reforms constituting the initial phase of land reform which is to eventually result in the registration of individual titles to surveyed land. Many peasants object to such reforms because they view these changes as resulting in the blocking of the customary ambilineal chan- nels of upward mobility through increased use-rights to land and in their eventual domination by powerful controllers of commercially sold land. Finally, an additional contribution of this study is the intrigu- ing, but as yet undeveloped, idea that the rist system is a vital institu- tion of Amharization of non-Amhara peoples (p. 244).

In all, Allan Hoben's monograph deserves to be widely read by all who profess an interest in agrarian reform and by the far more restricted audience of devotees of cognatic kinship organization. The former will have their minds opened to new dimensions of social reality and the latter will be rewarded with rich depiction and analysis of nonunilineal systems. All readers will be left with a strong reminder that sound substantive and conceptual studies, such as Hoben's Land Tenure, need not be devoid of potential practical value and of potential benefits to the subjects of research.

FREDERICK C. GAMST

Rice University

AN ILL-FATED PEOPLE: ZIMBABWE BEFORE AND AFTER RHODES. By Lawrence Vambe, with a foreword by Doris Lessing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973. Pp. xxi, 234. $6.95.

This book is both less and more than a history. Some of it is history at first hand: the author's recollections of his childhood, his village, its life, its attitudes toward the white conquerors and others. These are recollections particularly of the 1920s. Some is secondhand; what the author heard in his youth from the elders about the rebellion of 1896-1897 and its aftermath, about the coming of the whites in 1890 and the halcyon days before that event. Some, again, is history as it may be gathered from standard works. The value of the book, and it is great, lies in the first two of these categories.

It lies also in the person of the author, who is almost uniquely qualified to interpret the Shona experience to the outsider. He could be excused extreme bitterness and a generalized hatred of all whites. The

communal system of rist would lead to more permanent social fixity and allow the development of absentee landlordism (pp. 230-231). The Amhara peasant "does not want to see his rights in land modernized" (p. 9). Several armed rebellions of recent years, the last in 1967-1968, opposed tax reforms constituting the initial phase of land reform which is to eventually result in the registration of individual titles to surveyed land. Many peasants object to such reforms because they view these changes as resulting in the blocking of the customary ambilineal chan- nels of upward mobility through increased use-rights to land and in their eventual domination by powerful controllers of commercially sold land. Finally, an additional contribution of this study is the intrigu- ing, but as yet undeveloped, idea that the rist system is a vital institu- tion of Amharization of non-Amhara peoples (p. 244).

In all, Allan Hoben's monograph deserves to be widely read by all who profess an interest in agrarian reform and by the far more restricted audience of devotees of cognatic kinship organization. The former will have their minds opened to new dimensions of social reality and the latter will be rewarded with rich depiction and analysis of nonunilineal systems. All readers will be left with a strong reminder that sound substantive and conceptual studies, such as Hoben's Land Tenure, need not be devoid of potential practical value and of potential benefits to the subjects of research.

FREDERICK C. GAMST

Rice University

AN ILL-FATED PEOPLE: ZIMBABWE BEFORE AND AFTER RHODES. By Lawrence Vambe, with a foreword by Doris Lessing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973. Pp. xxi, 234. $6.95.

This book is both less and more than a history. Some of it is history at first hand: the author's recollections of his childhood, his village, its life, its attitudes toward the white conquerors and others. These are recollections particularly of the 1920s. Some is secondhand; what the author heard in his youth from the elders about the rebellion of 1896-1897 and its aftermath, about the coming of the whites in 1890 and the halcyon days before that event. Some, again, is history as it may be gathered from standard works. The value of the book, and it is great, lies in the first two of these categories.

It lies also in the person of the author, who is almost uniquely qualified to interpret the Shona experience to the outsider. He could be excused extreme bitterness and a generalized hatred of all whites. The

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.180 on Fri, 9 May 2014 19:44:30 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 3: An Ill-Fated People: Zimbabwe before and after Rhodesby Lawrence Vambe

BOOK REVIEWS 143

white Rhodesians robbed his people of their country, then oppressed and humiliated them. The book describes parts of these processes as experienced at the receiving end. But Lawrence Vambe has not given way to mere racism-in-reverse. The judgments that he passes are objec- tive and discriminating. He retains only a grateful affection for the Jesuit fathers and Dominican nuns who gave him his education, but where there was any evil in what they did, he identifies it. A wide ex- perience brings him to this conclusion:

In the final analysis we are all brutes. My belief is simply that most men and women are "good" and "law-abiding" and help each other only if they are encouraged or compelled to do so by good laws and a corres- ponding climate of opinion. But otherwise I think it is the evil side of man which most easily comes to the surface and takes over; I believe that in a situation where racialism or the domination of one set of people over another is a cherished principle, it is the sadist and other such basically violent people who assume power for its own sake .... I do not expect that I would behave any differently if I were trapped into a posi- tion where I was expected to uphold the domination of one group of peo- ple over another.

Statements like this give credibility to his account of the particular case of the Rhodesian regime.

Vambe's is not a general account of the regime, not a bird's-eye view, but, if one may put it that way, a worm's-eye view--the impact of the conquest on three generations of people in a particular village. We get to know the author's grandmother, with her hatred and contempt of the whites and all their works, and her tolerant and totally unselfish husband. We see this old man roughly handled, handcuffed, and led away to imprisonment by a young white policeman for not paying his dog tax. Vambe's other grandfather was tortured to death after the rebellion in an attempt to make him reveal where arms were hidden.

There were times when the intruding white man was forgotten and domestic affairs absorbed all the attention. Vambe gives some charm- ing vignettes of village life, family disputes, the operations of the nganga (whether the competent kind or the quack), the visits of passers-by, black and white, to the village, and the resort of the people to the spirit-mediums in times of crisis. All this, whether personal rem- iniscence or the recording of oral history (more reliable in preliterate than in literate societies) is valuable primary material.

Doris Lessing, in her foreword, rightly emphasizes the importance of that oral tradition, but is a little disparaging in her references to "the history of the professors and the universities." Inevitably, though, Vambe had to borrow a little from that source to give background to his story, and this side of his book can be criticized for inaccuracies. For in- stance, he says on page 65 and passim that Lobengula claimed

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.180 on Fri, 9 May 2014 19:44:30 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 4: An Ill-Fated People: Zimbabwe before and after Rhodesby Lawrence Vambe

144 BOOK REVIEWS 144 BOOK REVIEWS

sovereignty over the whole of Zimbabwe in order to make the most of his deals with white concession-hunters. In fact, Lobengula at the beginning of his reign-long before the rush of concession-hunters- was telling the missionary T.M. Thomas that his eastern boundary was the Sabi.1

On page 1'38 is a reference to "individual soldiers whose orders did not include that of capturing rebel leaders alive." In fact, on June 18, 1896, General Sir Frederick Carrington issued an order that "0General Officer Commanding desires it to be distinctly understood by all ranks that... prisoners are to be taken whenever possible."2 The fault lay not in the order but in disobedience to it. Other specific instances could be quoted, but the contribution of professorial history would include also a modification of some of Vambe's generalizations about the white conquest of Rhodesia, its motivations and methods. They are more complex than this book would lead the reader to suppose.

This criticism must not be allowed to weigh very much against the favorable comments. The borrowings from the secondary sources are only incidental; the book is to be valued as a primary source, and as such is indispensable to the student of the subject.

ARTHUR KEPPEL-JONES

Queen's University

T.M. Thomas, Eleven Years in Central South Africa (London, 1873). 2 Colonial Office Confidential Print, African (South), C. 0. 879/47/520, Public Record

Office, London, 189.

MITTEILUNGEN DER BASLER AFRIKABIBLIOGRAPHIEN. No. 9 (December, 1973). Basel: Afrika-Verlag der Kreis, 1973. Pp. 88. DM 18.

Happily for the West Africanist, this volume of the Mitteilungen is a pleasant departure from earlier publications in this series, all of which dealt with South and South West Africa and were written almost en- tirely in German. The present volume is concerned primarily with Basel Mission materials for Ghana and these articles are wisely in English. Paul Jenkins provides a summary of the extensive correspon- dence at the Basel Mission (pp. 9-24). At the same time he indicates the value of the various Basel Mission publications for the study of Ghanaian (and Cameroun) history, particularly, I think, for the nine- teenth century.

A second contribution, by Jenkins and H. Max Trutenau, a linguist with a special interest in Twi and Ga, discusses the vernacular (mostly

sovereignty over the whole of Zimbabwe in order to make the most of his deals with white concession-hunters. In fact, Lobengula at the beginning of his reign-long before the rush of concession-hunters- was telling the missionary T.M. Thomas that his eastern boundary was the Sabi.1

On page 1'38 is a reference to "individual soldiers whose orders did not include that of capturing rebel leaders alive." In fact, on June 18, 1896, General Sir Frederick Carrington issued an order that "0General Officer Commanding desires it to be distinctly understood by all ranks that... prisoners are to be taken whenever possible."2 The fault lay not in the order but in disobedience to it. Other specific instances could be quoted, but the contribution of professorial history would include also a modification of some of Vambe's generalizations about the white conquest of Rhodesia, its motivations and methods. They are more complex than this book would lead the reader to suppose.

This criticism must not be allowed to weigh very much against the favorable comments. The borrowings from the secondary sources are only incidental; the book is to be valued as a primary source, and as such is indispensable to the student of the subject.

ARTHUR KEPPEL-JONES

Queen's University

T.M. Thomas, Eleven Years in Central South Africa (London, 1873). 2 Colonial Office Confidential Print, African (South), C. 0. 879/47/520, Public Record

Office, London, 189.

MITTEILUNGEN DER BASLER AFRIKABIBLIOGRAPHIEN. No. 9 (December, 1973). Basel: Afrika-Verlag der Kreis, 1973. Pp. 88. DM 18.

Happily for the West Africanist, this volume of the Mitteilungen is a pleasant departure from earlier publications in this series, all of which dealt with South and South West Africa and were written almost en- tirely in German. The present volume is concerned primarily with Basel Mission materials for Ghana and these articles are wisely in English. Paul Jenkins provides a summary of the extensive correspon- dence at the Basel Mission (pp. 9-24). At the same time he indicates the value of the various Basel Mission publications for the study of Ghanaian (and Cameroun) history, particularly, I think, for the nine- teenth century.

A second contribution, by Jenkins and H. Max Trutenau, a linguist with a special interest in Twi and Ga, discusses the vernacular (mostly

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.180 on Fri, 9 May 2014 19:44:30 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions