The debate started with Eddie emphasising the need to pay for the land now. I pointed out to Eddie that if whites had paid for the land right in the beginning when they first took the land, we wouldn't be having any of the problems that we are having now.
In reply Eddie stated 'The Ndebele did not pay for a hectare of land in 1823 when they arrived – they just took what they wanted'. Eddie was clearly suggesting that whites had a right to take what they wanted.
I am very much tempted to simply reply to Eddie, 'so blacks have a right to take what they want now'. However such a retort simply does not paint the correct picture. Land reform can never be couched in terms of who has right to take what they want.
In the first place, Eddie is using entirely the wrong logic. The Ndebele did not massively displace people like whites did. He lives with the evidence of that right there in Bulawayo though he may not know how to recognise it. Most of what is called Matebeleland today is home to the Tonga, the Nambya, the Kalanga, the Tswana and the Venda tribes who up to the time European settlers came, had not been displaced by the Ndebele in any significant way.
What is called Mashonaland today was virtually untouched by Ndebele activities, with only parts of present day Masvingo and Midlands nearer to Bulawayo having suffered raids but not occupation and displacement. Also the area the Ndebele settled was at the boundaries of Shona and Tswana influence which means nobody had any particularly strong claims to it.
Secondly the Ndebele were not discriminatory to the extend that whites were. They incorporated people from neighbouring tribes into their own ranks. Of course like in any society there was classification but there was no absolute bar preventing those incorporated from rising within the society, like the Whites had their absolute colour bar.
In fact most of the people called Ndebele today are descendants of people incorporated from neighbouring tribes which is why their izibongo (totems) match almost one for one with totems used by neighbouring groups including the various groups that later came to be collectively called the Shona.
In contrast with white behaviour, most of the people in Zimbabwe today are not mixed race, simply because whites did their best to prevent inter-racial breeding. Whites did clandestinely father most of the coloured population, because of white men's lust for black women. However they mostly rejected responsibility for their offspring.
Most extended families today easily cut across tribes. I personally have relatives in Victoria Falls, Hwange and Filabusi who tradition requires that I should place ahead of unrelated Shona neighbours from my home district of Chikomba. Perhaps Eddie should have asked for a bit more education from Temba Bassopo-Moyo, who stated in one of his recent posts, that he is of mixed Shona-Nguni heritage. I bet Eddie did not even suspect that, whereas someone like me noticed the detail a long time ago just from looking at his name and surname.
Eddie should also understand that some Ndebele moved to settle within neighbouring communities without the use of violence. In my home district of Chikomba there is the Mpundumani family. As of today they are Shonas, speaking no other language but Shona, and following Shona customs in marriage and burial ceremonies. But they go by the totem Khumalo which, as many know, is the original totem of Mzilikazi himself.
In know this family very well because their grand-grand-matriarch is my maternal grand-grand-aunt. They are descendants of a man who settled in the area and married a local woman. Nobody really knows where that man came from but he said his totem was Khumalo. Even where whites, such as the Portuguese, settled amicably among the locals, they left behind known clans such as the VaNjanja whom I have talked about before.
Once you understand the prevalence of inter-marrying and cross-incorporation, among the various Bantu groups that migrated within the region, you will realise that it is impossible to ever compare any one of the Bantu movements, such as the Mfecane, of which the Ndebele migration was part, to the blatantly exploitative white settler colonialism.
Eddie's sentiments demonstrate that to this day, several centuries after they began colonising Africa, most if not all so called pure whites, are still blithely ignorant of the internal dynamics of the Bantu cultures surrounding them.
In fact whites do not even seem to realise that the Shangaani in south-eastern Zimbabwe and south-western Mozambique and the Ngoni in Southern Malawi also moved northwards as part of the Mfecane process which saw the Ndebele moving northwards.
Whites treated themselves as splendidly superior outsiders, which is why to this today they are still seen by most black communities as outsiders. In fact they still largely treat themselves, today, as splendidly superior outsiders. It is there very own choice, not something forced upon them by blacks. Blacks simply refuse to accept those feelings of splendid superiority to be de facto justified.
On the other hand, the Bantu quickly grow to see each other as locals because they inter-marriage and equality based interaction. Attempts to treat Ndebele as outsiders are usually arise from a narrative told from an incorrect white perspective, such as Eddie is trying to do in the statement above.
As evidence I cite the other Nguni-origin groups the Shangani and the Angoni whom whites show little interest in. Nobody would even realise that they ran away from Tshaka at the same time and for the same reasons as the Ndebele.
If you listen to the way white-influenced people talk today, you would think the Ndebele are less indigenous to Zimbabwe than the Shangaani are, or than the Ngoni are to Malawi. To call Eddie's statement above hogwash, would be an unbecoming insult to the bathwaters of a pig.
Sometimes we Bantu find it difficult to understand white mentality because they even reject their own descendants such as coloureds. In my culture it is total taboo to reject your own child, no matter whom you father them with. Every child is equal no matter what. There is no such think as an illegitimate child in Bantu culture. That is why the most important marker of relationship in Shona culture is paternal totem, not who the mother of the child was.
Eddie further claimed that, 'When my ancestors arrived there were less than 400 000 people living in the country – 90 per cent of it was just empty bush. You cannot undo history. Only build the future for all.'
How many were Eddie's ancestors? Maybe in the low hundreds. If you then base white land claims on numbers, what then gave them the right to claim the entire land ahead of the Bantu given that their numbers were even far fewer than the Bantu whom Eddie claims could not have owned the land because they were so few?
Secondly, what is Eddie's definition of 'empty'. Bearing in mind that the Bantu practised shifting agriculture with migratory animal husbandry practices as well. While the migrations were not annual in this part of Africa, groups shifted from time to time in search of better grazing. These migratory animal husbandry practices are still a source of conflict in some parts of East Africa.
Therefore land that Eddie's wants to define as empty for his ancestors to take, would have been land that was being left to recover for future grazing.
Lastly if the land was empty, how come Eddie's ancestors then found it necessary to forcible move blacks into native reserves and take some of their cattle (kuhesvura mombe) in an effort to limit the amount of land that blacks could use. If the land was empty, like in the Antarctica sense, then Eddie's ancestors could have moved in without ever interfering with the land use of blacks.
However Eddie's ancestors moving in was immediately a source of conflict, the First Chimurenga, the Matebele wars and others. This is a clear demonstration that the land was not empty but was occupied by people who did their best to defend it, despite being badly out-gunned then.
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