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Panelist Hetty ter Haar |
Madheruka Immigrants and the Shangwe: Ethnic Identities and the Culture of Modernity in Gokwe, Northwestern Zimbabwe, 1963 -1979 Pius S. Nyambara, Jackson State University,
MS In colonial Zimbabwe, administrative
officials often couched the rhetoric of ‘modernization’ in
ethnic terms. They regarded immigrant Madheruka farmers as the embodiment
of modernization because they had been exposed to forces of modernization
in their areas of origin, while both officials and immigrants alike
regarded and disparaged the indigenous Shangwe as ‘primitive’, ‘backward’ and ‘resistant
to change’ because they were ‘reluctant’, for various
reasons, to accept new farming techniques which included the cultivation
of cotton. One of the central arguments is that there was an interconnected
process in Gokwe by which ethnic identities were constructed alongside
the adoption of new economic practices. The construction of Madheruka
and Shangwe ethnic identities can be dated primarily to the early 1960s,
with the influx of immigrants and the introduction of cotton in the
Gokwe region of northwestern Zimbabwe. The indigenous Shangwe defined
the immigrants as madheruka, a term whose origins lay in the eviction
of the immigrants from crown land by colonial officials in the 1950s,
while Madheruka termed the indigenous peoples, shangwe, or backward.
Each group perceived itself differently, however, Shangwe claiming
that the term Shangwe referred to a place rather than to their ethnic
identity and Madheruka claiming to belong to authentic Shona groups.
The guerrilla war that characterized the 1970s in Zimbabwe witnessed
an attack on modernity as the guerrillas and their sympathizers regarded
immigrant farmers as colonial collaborators. |