First Steps in The Oral Historiography of The Midlands: A Review of The Work of
Harald von Sicard
By
Gerald Chikozho Mazarire
(Department of History; University of Zimbabwe)
Paper Presented to the Historical Dimensions of Development in the Midlands Seminar,
Fairmile Hotel, Gweru, 2001
Abstract
For over 25 years Harald von Sicard made a sterling contribution to the history of
Mberengwa and adjoining areas. By1971 he had well over 23 articles on several aspects
of this area published in various languages and journals. He has been associated by
many with the antiquarian school that graced Zimbabwean historiography in the period
before the emergence of nationalist history. It has been alleged that this school of thought
was much wedded to the colonial pre-occupation with mobilization of labour, yet so far
as von Sicard works are concerned they border on the informative to the innovative at a
scale so far unsurpassed. This paper argues that there is so much to learn from this
school and indeed from von Sicard’s work on the Midlands and that apart from the
problem of scale, which rendered his work rather too confined, it is indeed this casestudy orientation, which makes his works important sources on the early history of the
Midlands. It is also the root of its weakness which happens to be a common problem with
ethnographic studies of this nature and their contribution to knowledge in general.
Introduction.
This paper attempts to critique von Sicard’s work on the Midlands region in general and
that, which focuses on Mberengwa in particular. Although treating this material in the
1
wider context of von Sicard’s work on other areas and topics, it does not pretend to be
exhaustive since it is very much preliminary thoughts based on work in progress. The
paper does not only concentrate on the significance of his works but on the didactic
elements that can be derived from it and their implications on future historical research in
the Midlands.
Over the years, it has been largely difficult to accord such prolific writers their fitting role
other than to simply refer to them as antiquarians that is; inexperienced enthusiasts or
non-professionals who study local cultures. To be more precise, these could be seen as
eccentrics with a passion for writing, an intimate inclination to know if not to understand
the cultures of their subjects of study1. In more recent pan-Africanist scholarship it has
become increasingly difficult to sustain both the definition and to defend these studies,
with some scholars advocating that all such anthropological pretensions were in
themselves a branch of the colonialist body politic. Then of what value can their findings
be to our own studies of pre-colonial Zimbabwe?
This paper will first seek to define the role of this tradition of scholarship in the political
economy of colonial Rhodesia and the production of knowledge on and about the
1
It will be acknowledged that this work comes in the wake of various other attempts at problematising the
antiquarian tradition, and will by no means pretend to be the first even on von Sicard himself. One of the
daunting tasks pertaining to von Sicard is the availability of this material, most of which is published in
very rare journals, in German, Swedish and even Russian. For a start, David Beach had collected most of
them and bound them in a volume that he donated to the Arrupe College at the time of his death and I have
since been tasked to reconstruct his collection for the College’s library. Meanwhile Dr. Heike Schmidt of
Humboldt University in Berlin, informed me that von Sicard’s son, who made a presentation of his father’s
works at a conference in Uppsala, invited her to assess his father’s material which is in his custody some of
which was never published, the idea being to come up with a research center or database of some sort. In
coming up with some of the ideas in this paper I am grateful to the discussions I held with Terry Ranger
Munyaradzi Mushonga Ezra Chitando, Fr. Steve Buckland and Heike Schmidt.
2
autochthonous people, how this fitted in the discourse of the period as well as the
intended audience for this work. It shall then attempt to place von Sicard’s work in the
wider context of the genre of oral tradition taking note of the fact that he remained largely
isolated from its historiographical developments. For von Sicard the task is a little murky
for he was neither a trained historian nor was he an integral part of the colonial
establishment, yet he contributed and read rather too much into Native Affairs
Department Annual the Rhodesian colonial journal hereafter referred to as NADA. One
would say he was coming onto the scene from a very compromised standpoint being
German at a time of the Nazist scourge in Europe and a missionary of the Swedish based
Lutheran Church. It would have been tempting to consider him right wing, with the
possibility of such ideology simmering into his work. It is interesting however that with
so much material to his credit, he seems to have had less influence on successive scholars
in his research area.2 Whether this is a sign of the irrelevance of his work is yet to be
established.
On Anthropological Approaches to African History.
History as a discipline in Africa is a latecomer, whose contribution to knowledge in
general in the early colonial period was less important than that of ethnography or
anthropology the two disciplines that had been institutionalized by the colonial
establishment as administrative tools in its quest to understand the African mind. Thus
even as there were official colonial historians such as Hugh Marshall Hole, their jobs
2
So far as can be observed many works of historic or ethnographic persuasion have not used much of von
Sicard’s material, this is true of the work of Diana Jeater, Ken Wilson, Ian Scoones and Billy Mukamuri
3
were far less crucial to the colonial establishment than that of government anthropologists
who on their part had become an integral part of the infamous Native Department. 3 In
academic circles it was not until the sixties that sources from Africa itself were
considered useful to the study of its past, indeed it was not until Vansina that oral
traditions came to be seen as legitimate sources of African history. This condemned first
generation historians of Africa to rely much on these pioneering anthropological
excursions into the ‘Dark Continent’, consequently, most historians in Zimbabwe as
elsewhere in Africa pay tribute to this by the sheer bulk of such sources in their
references while also frankly acknowledging that key aspects of their craft have been
borrowed from anthropology4. This is especially true of fieldwork, which has come to be
an important component of both disciplines.
At times due to the absence of oral material relating to the remote past, it is in this
material that pre-colonial historians have often sought refuge or even authenticity, thus
putting paid their pretensions towards source criticism. It is not the idea of this paper to
view the institution of anthropology as a bygone in African studies although I deal with
the debate regarding its fate below; rather it is the fact that it has undergone various forms
of transformation that is of interest. These transformations have not only complicated the
overlaps between anthropology and history, but have actually brought some of the
who have all been working on material related to that of von Sicard albeit at later time.
3
This has been dealt with broadly in A. Roberts; “The Imperial Mind” in A. Roberts (ed) The Colonial
Moment in Africa: Essays on the Movement of Minds and Materials 1900-1940 (C.U.P., Cambridge 1990)
p 41, see also G.C. Mazarire “Of Spelling Errors and Historical Distortions: Historians Museums and the
Way Forward’ Oral Traditions Concerning The Identity of Maziriri The Svikiro of the Chivi People”
Zimbabwea No. 6, 1999, pp4-5
4
I use the term first generation historians in the context of Thandika Mkandawire’s classification of the
generation of African academics. See his “Three Generations of African Academics: A Note” CODESRIA
Bulletin No. 3 1995 pp 9-12
4
methodological aspects of both disciplines into the spotlight. In this context the
uninitiated may fail to make a distinction between anthropology and history for they are
both concerned with the past and its peoples. In broad terms historians study a local
society for its own sake in order to obtain data about its past; which is an inside-out
approach. Anthropologists on the other hand study a society as a case in order to obtain
data pertinent to general theories; an outside-inward approach. It is precisely this
theoretical orientation that has put to question the value of anthropological conclusions
on Africa viewing them largely as externalist. But why this focus on anthropology? Is
there any visible relationship between antiquarianism and anthropology? V.Y. Mudimbe
for instance finds that it is the work of amateurs, who are mainly missionaries, which fills
the Central African anthropological bibliography5. Speaking of missionaries he argues
that, not only were they well educated, but also a great number of them were also well
read in the social sciences including scholastic anthropology. They in contrast to modern
anthropologists spent almost their whole lives amongst Africans. In Mudimbe ‘s view
there is essentially no difference in their interpretations except in the intellectual
particularity of their respective missions. Whereas the missionary preaches salvation
defined in a Western theology, the anthropologist’s methodology falls within the same
Western historical experience. The missionary seeks to reduce the primitives to his faith
and its cultural presuppositions while for the anthropologist the primitives constitute an
‘object topic’, which might or might not fit into a scientific framework and must be
accounted for. Fundamentally there are two main problems: one, of comprehending
5
V.Y. Mudimbe; The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, 1988) p.64
5
cultures, the other concerning the significance of the interpretation offered. 6 He adds, at
a basic level missionaries as well as anthropologists when they return from the ‘primitive
context’, refer to the same context. They cannot translate the local languages, which they
do not know. In principle the concept of a missionary as anthropologist is not
unthinkable, there is nothing to prevent a missionary from acquiring the necessary skills
of a good fieldworker. He could then practice anthropology, like any other specialist; that
is build bridges between two cultures, two ‘texts’, his own and the local one and thus
produce a clear representation of his own creative experience.7 By his training and
mission, the missionary is and must be an ‘unbelieving’ interpreter. The anthropologist in
principle should be ‘believing’; otherwise his scientific project no longer makes sense.
The missionary is concerned with the complete conversion of the text, the anthropologist
with the understanding of its internal rationality. It is because the missionary has been
generally a non-believer that the anthropologist tends to reject his interpretations as
approximations. In passing this judgement, the anthropologist often forgets what the
missionary or worse still, the ‘native’ might remind him-that he is not perfectly bilingual
and therefore despite his scientific background, his intellectual construction may well be
just a questionable ‘invention’.8 It is my conviction that the antiquarian school was born
out of this anthropological euphoria distinguishable in the nature of contributions found
in government-funded periodicals. Secondly and as has been outlined above, with special
reference to pre-colonial studies in Zimbabwe in general, these sources have had a
tremendous influence
6
Ibid; pp 65-66
Ibid; p. 67
8
Ibid; p. 67
7
6
Anthropology was shaped by theories of evolutionism and the comparative method. The
latter method involved comparing a range of presumably similar items in an attempt to
establish connections and relationships within the set. (Vail and White p.4) In their
evolutionist perspective, ‘savages’ and primitives were ‘living fossils’, the ‘living
ancestors’ of Western gentlemen, and therefore studies of contemporary ‘savages’ based
on the application of the comparative method had a special fascination to the educated
westerners interested in learning about the roots of their own mental processes and
psychology. (Ibid. p. 6)
In an intriguing article Archie Mafeje made a vitriolic attack on anthropology that was
more of a response-cum-review article to Sally Moore’s book Anthropology And Africa,
which raised a number of salient questions than it answered9. Among them:
Who are the makers of anthropology in the 1990s and for whom? Who are the objects of
anthropology and why? Why Anthropology and Africa and not anthropology and Europe
or America?10
It is Mafeje’s contention that the first generation of anthropologists in Africa, particularly
those coming from Britain, enjoyed as much power as the colonial administrators whom
they collaborated with in developing what became known as applied anthropology. They
were thus able to command the attention and the services of the “natives” at will. In more
ways than one, Anthropology got associated with colonialism because it was introduced
by people whose professional interests were similar to those of the colonial
9
S.F .Moore; Anthropology And Africa (University Press at Virginia Charlottes-Ville, 1994)
7
administrators.11 This raises questions as to how much of this was indeed historical as
compared to that, which could simply have been imported to suit particular narratives
concomitant with the worldview of the researcher. It is here that Mafeje has problems
with the structural-functionalist basis of anthropological approaches to the study of
African societies. In another monograph he contends that Anthropology as a discipline
was founded on studying the “other” as a thing of the past and thus he doubted also its
capability in dealing with the present. More to his concern however was the role of the
African anthropologist in post independent Africa, which he saw largely as highly
deficient, for in his view, they had not anticipated independence in their professional
representations. In many ways therefore, the passing of colonialism heralded the death of
anthropology and many African anthropologists sought “refuge in the departments of
sociology and engaged in micro or thematic studies away from the canons of the original
anthropological tradition.”12 However this was not so much of Mafeje’s discovery as it
had been a feeling shared by many established anthropologists since the late sixties. It
was also a time when the opposite was occurring in the historical arena when historians
of Africa were discovering new methodology that was short of guaranteeing the future of
their discipline in independent Africa.
In spite of its borrowings from anthropology historical methodology has largely failed to
conform to the field practices of the latter. Jan Vansina the pioneer of oral methodology
A. Mafeje; “A Commentary on Anthropology And Africa” CODESRIA Bulletin No.2,1996
Ibid. p8
12
A. Mafeje; Anthropology and Independent Africans: Suicide or End of an Era, Monograph Series 4/96
(CODESRIA, Dakar, 1996) pp1-2
10
11
8
in African academic history was forced to abandon the then recommended pattern of
participatory observation because;
…the pursuit of oral traditions meant that I was granting much more weight to what people said than was
then usual. Moreover, participant observation was clearly inadequate for the goal I was pursuing. It would
not do to study one or a few places in depth and generalize from this to the whole of Kuba lands. For
historical research one had to gather all the relevant oral traditions, not just some representative specimens.
One could not apply sampling procedures to this subject matter because traditions were not similar and
interchangeable units.13
It is this understanding that human nature is dynamic and in constant change that has
transformed historical thinking in the post-colonial era. As such it is more the production
of this knowledge that should inform its understanding more than anything else,
especially as the academic tradition continues to undergo various forms of paradigmatic
shifts. In fact in this production of knowledge the interests and perceptions of the
members of the society being studied should dominate the resulting description, and as
Bourdillon puts it; this concern against imposing external interests and categories on
others is relevant to any scholar interested in studying people14 He even goes further to
say, the scholar’s academic training itself makes him subjective in the sense that it
produces different perspectives and a different experience from those of the people he or
she meets. Thus he or she becomes part of the society and part of the story being told. As
a result the observer must be observed so that the insider’s perspectives are placed in a
much broader context i.e. that of their production and representation by the observer, who
in this case may either be the anthropologist or the historian. It is precisely in the light of
these considerations that we wish to look at von Sicard’s works in the wider context not
only of their content but the way in which they were produced.
13
J. Vansina; Living With Africa, (Wisconsin, Madison, 1994) p.24
9
A Day In The Life of an Antiquarian in Colonial Rhodesia
David Beach defines an antiquarian as an isolated, untrained, part-time researcher of
aspects of African society, although he re cognized that such a definition may be rather
too limited to cover most of the contributors to this body of knowledge in Rhodesia that
often found expression in NADA.15 He notes that although these individuals did dominate
the discourse of the time enough to influence their contemporaries and successors, by
creating an informal school of history, none of them did actually succeed in doing a
country history for various reasons. First, because many of them were obsessed with the
idea of a grand history of the Africans which, they however never seemed to find.
Secondly the antiquarian was not necessarily a trained historian and was more often
confined to a localized area from where he had to relate his findings to the greater part of
what he found being written by colleagues elsewhere as well as to his imagination. Lastly
they never thought of the African as being indigenous and thus never resisted the
temptation of linking them to other large-scale narratives. Very few had mastered the art
of referencing or even source criticism for those who cared to cite their sources, but
apparently a small fraction turned out to be quasi-historians although the many things
they dealt with concerned the African past. In several respects the antiquarian tradition
had much to do with the African as the ‘other’ race.
M.F.C. Bourdillon; “Anthropological Approaches to the Study of African Religion” in J. Platvoet, J.
Cox, & J. Olupona (eds); The Study of Religions In Africa: Past, Present and Prospects, (Roots and
Branches, Cambridge, 1996) p143
15
D.N. Beach; “NADA and Mafohla: Antiquarianism in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe with Special Reference
To the Work of F.W.T. Posselt, History In Africa, 13, (1986) p2
14
10
Ranger associates this group of scholars with the colonial preoccupation with the
mobilization for labour recruitment, which was the primary concern of the Native Affairs
Department. This was because, it was these “men who administered the Africans,
mobilized them for employment and kept them working who produced the authorized
versions of the African past, customs and of African personality”.16 However, although
this may be true of many employed within the field directly related to labour recruitment
or health such as J. Blake-Thompson whom Ranger reviews, the antiquarian net could be
cast far much wider to include other independent researchers, who were not part of the
government establishment. It is from this branch that the more ambitious ideas came
from, especially at such a time when suspicion ran high that “of all the areas in Africa,
Southern Rhodesia was the most backward in anthropological knowledge of its own
indigenous peoples”17 All the same Ranger’s thesis correctly reflects the thinking at the
time. In the process of establishing political control and trying to compel African peoples
to work to produce goods for the world market, a profound shift in attitude regarding
non-Westerners’ capabilities occurred turning towards ever-more negative stereotypes of
primitives and their presumed mentality. This was much reflected in the work of Dudley
Kidd whose; The Essential Kaffir (1904) sought to explain the Africans of Southeast
Africa using the evolutionist paradigm and the comparative method. His notional African
could not be trusted to be truthful, not out of malice but simply because, ‘childlike’, he
could not grasp the importance of truth. His mental abilities were undeveloped. He had
no sense of logic and was capable of ‘entertaining contradictory ideas at the same time’.
All this was prompted by Kidd’s recognition of the needs of a rapidly industrializing
T.O. Ranger; “ The Mobilization of Labour and the Production Of Knowledge: The Antiquarian
Tradition in Rhodesia” Journ. Afr. Hist.20,(1979) p. 507
16
11
South Africa for cheap unskilled black labour for whom western education would be
wholly inappropriate. (Vail and White pp. 6-8)
There was apart from the government anthropologists a far more distinct group of
antiquarians composed of white academic missionaries who according to Platvoet’s
classification of academic traditions on religion in Africa, were abandoning the orthodox,
exclusivist views of liberal theology for the new inclusivist views of liberal theology
because of the influence of Protestant academic theology which had been gaining ground
in Universities in Europe and North America. This development he argues had provided
the basis for the historical critical study of the Bible as a literary document and for the
historical and comparative study of other religions of mankind. As a result early products
of this new missionary approach were the descriptions of specific traditional religions of
Africa by missionaries living among certain ethnic groups and endowed, not only with
liberal views, but a gift for languages, a passion for ethnography, a deep respect for
African cultures and religions and an equally deep concern for their adaptation to and
integration in, the new contexts.18 These western missionaries strongly westernized and
christianized African thought patterns and religions after the model of the European
philosophies and theologies and thus shaped the indigenous cultures of Africa after the
‘Judaeo-Christian template’ of their own religion by representing them with the help of
categories and structures derived from the Biblical religions.19
17
Ibid. p 507
For a more authoritative treatment of this historiographical development, see; J Platvoet; “From Object to
Subject: A History of the Study of Religions of Africa” in J. Platvoet et. al. (eds) The Study of Religions in
Africa.
18
12
In addition to this there was also an emergent class of German and Austrian ethnologists
mostly the disciples of Wilhelm Schmidt, among them Schebester and more for our
purposes Leo Frobenius, who were championing the “culture history” approach in the
late 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. This approach like the ‘culture area’
approach developed by American anthropologists led by Melville Herskovits singled out
for study a geographical region with a number of socially separate societies that shared
common features especially in their mode of food production.20 Both approaches served
mainly museological purposes because they had been developed in areas which had
needed historical reconstruction, for instance in the Americas after the decimation of the
indigenous Indian race. In this way they proved largely inapplicable to Africa whose
cultures were largely intact by the end of the 19th century. Frobenius, who was then the
president of the Frankfurt Institute For the Study of Culture Morphology, was brought
into the country in 1929 to produce evidence of the influences of foreign ‘culture
complexes’ on Southern Africa’s remote past. He and others such as B. Ankermann had
put together available material in favour of succeeding waves of foreign influence
bringing in a series of different cultural elements to Africa.21 This was also based on the
‘Kukturkreis’ theory which Frobenius had suggested in his youth. This was the theory of
culture areas, according to which culture spreads out from various centres more or less in
concentric circles-the geographical diffusion of culture.22In the field of rock art for
instance, Garlake identified in his works an obsession with such concepts as the sacrifice
19
Ibid. pp. 112-113
S. Falk Moore; Changing Perspectives on a Changing Africa: The Work of Anthropology’ in R. Bates,
V. Y. Mudimbe and J O’Barr (eds.); Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to
the Social Sciences and the Humanities, (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993) p. 5
21
P.J.J. Sinclair; Space, Time and Social Formations: A Territorial Approach to the Archaeology and
Anthropology of Zimbabwe and Mozambique c. 0-1700 AD, (Societas Archaeologica Upsaliensis, Uppsala
1987) pp. 17-18
20
13
of divine kings and maidens to bring rain, and the moon cult among others, which he
claimed were found in Shona folklore. Frobenius strongly believed that these were
pointers to the fact that the Shona belonged to the Erythraa culture complex which
included such ancient civilizations as those of Southeast Asia, Egypt and Crete23
Although it remains true that the main reason why Frobenius’ work was dismissed in this
field was mainly because of these and other ludicrous claims, it also followed that the
language barrier-for most such works were published in German- and the eventual loss
by Germany of her overseas colonies in the First World War severely handicapped the
spread of ideas from this school. In this way as Sally Falk Moore has put it, German
anthropological work in Africa flowered early and terminated early leaving France and
Britain to dominate the Africanist ethnographic project for decades.24 There is no doubt
however that most of the controversies and debates in modern Zimbabwean
historiography emanated from the works by scholars from this school. Meanwhile it was
mainly in the missionary arena that such ideas were to continue influencing the
perceptions of the African culture and past even up to this day, and it is in precisely this
context that this paper will analyze the contributions of Harald von Sicard to Midlands
history. In addition it is also pertinent to this discussion to show how von Sicard himself
came to be influenced over time by ideas from the British schools of thinking to which he
was largely exposed.
Harald von Sicard and the ‘Culture History’ of the Midlands
22
A. P. Kriel; The Legacy of Leo Frobenius; (Fort Hare University Press, 1973) p. 2
P.S. Garlake; “The First Eighty Years of Rock Art Studies, 1890-1970”, in G. Pwiti (ed) Caves
Monuments and Texts,(Dpt.of Archeology and Ancient History, Uppsala, 1997) pp.43-44
24
S. Falk Moore; ‘Changing Perspectives on a Changing Africa’ pp. 4-5
23
14
Harald von Sicard was born in Germany and he studied at Dorpat, Greifswald, and Berlin
Universities. He ordained as a minister of the Church of Sweden Mission and rose
through its ranks to become its Dean. He worked in the then Belingwe reserve and on the
Limpopo since 1926 until his retirement to Sweden in the 1960s. Between 1941 and 1973
he published a total of 51 articles, pamphlets and books in various languages including
Shona. In honour of his sterling effort he was awarded The Order of The Northern Star
by the king of Sweden in 1961. Although by then he was an ailing man he still had the
energy to publish fourteen more articles between then and 1972. 25 According to Beach
von Sicard was heavily influenced by the aforementioned Leo Frobenius and the
Kulturkreise school and all its fascination with the Judaeo-Christian template which
manifested itself in local jargon as migrations of the Bantu from the Middle east
Diaspora.26
There is no doubt however that von Sicard had carved out the Mberengwa area as niche a
for applying the culture history approach alluded to earlier on. Quite unlike other
antiquarians of his time, he had apparently attempted his hand at a national thematic
history at the beginning of his career but never again. This is true of such works as those
N.A.D.A. vol.40, 1963 pp.128-129; see also Beach; ‘NADA and Mafohla’ p.4 and appendix at the back.
Beach; ‘NADA and Mafohla’ p.4. I am hoping to pursue this aspect even further in other area studies by
antiquarians of this school and others and how they came to influence other studies apart from religion and
history. Some scholars have already tried to deal with this in their respective fields, apart from Garlake,
Pikirayi’s “Pots, People and Culture; An Overview of Ceramic Studies in Zimbabwe” in Pwiti, Caves
Monuments and Texts, pp.69-70 identifies what he calls the ‘the antiquarian phase in ceramological
myopia’ characterized by scholars who never imagined the importance of local archeological material as
sources of evidence for local sites such as Great Zimbabwe.
25
26
15
on aspects like the Bantu drum the significance of the bird in Zimbabwe culture27 Here he
tried by all means to demonstrate the influence of external culture on that of the
indigenous people, he saw and even treated the Zimbabwean culture as a province of a
larger international religion, with the drum being ‘directly related to the fertility rites of
the ancient Negro and West African cultures, but was at later date also combined with the
cult of a divine king’. The bird on the other hand demonstrated that ‘in Africa particularly
in the Zimbabwe culture the bird is connected, just as in Europe and Asia, with the idea
of procreation, with the ancestors and with the sky. (My italics)28
For a start this could have given him enough confidence to pursue and locate the various
migrating groups in the traditions he gathered who nevertheless turned out to be the
Shona who eventually settled south after the fragmentation of confederacies such as
Mbire and Buhera. For von Sicard this fitted in well with his idea of diffusion of ideas
from the north through ‘hordes of Bantu invaders’. In this way a time frame for this had
to be identified resulting his construction of the tentative chronological tables which,
despite their ambitious beginnings do somehow give reasonable approximation that have
guided most southern Shona historians as we shall show below, the fact remains however
that they were at least meant to be tentative..29 This paper shall however leave out the
material he wrote that does not relate to the Midlands for now as this is still work in
progress. Suffice it here to say that in so far as he had begun the hyper-diffusionist
theories seemed to guide his conclusions and even then he had successfully wedded these
H. von Sicard; “The Ancient East African Bantu Drum”, Ethnos, 1-2,1942 pp.49-54 and “ The Bird in
The Zimbabwe Culture” Ethnos, 1943,3,pp 104-114
28
Ibid; pp54 and 114 respectively
27
16
to a reasonable chronological framework-reasonable at least in the last years-within the
realms of the memories of his informants in Mberengwa from where he was to begin his
influential work. Thus his productions were a direct result of the fading memory of his
informants and figments of his imaginations blended with diffusionist ideas.
His foremost and key contribution to the history of Mberengwa was the identification of
the ‘tribes’ within this culture history case study area. This was published in a series of
articles from 1948 to 1955 in NADA
30
This was a carefully done delineation of the
Mberengwa communities explaining in detail his sources especially his informants, their
location, position in society etc. Societies were identified by their clan names totems and
laudatory names and each was painstakingly related to a specific culture group that was
in almost all the cases foreign. There is every evidence to show that von Sicard was well
abreast with the developments in the ethnographic world, being able at all times to refer
to the latest editions of periodicals such as NADA, Ethnos, Paideuma, Anthropos among
others and thus he was by no means isolated if we are to revert to Beach’s definition.
Rather he was one representing the cultural zeitgeist of his time. He was in fact the first
among them to systematically and accurately reference his material. This Mberengwa
material had one thing in common, the circumstantial representation of a complex
peculiar to the area, which was supposed to represent its links with the outside world. The
coincidence was that most of the people in Mberengwa had totems in some way related to
H. von Sicard; “Tentative Chronological Tables” NADA, 23, 1946. He however seems to employ them
much in his later reconstructions such as; Sicard; “The Vuxwa Hills and Their Inhabitants”, NADA,
35,1958, p80
30
“
“ “The Origins of Some of The Tribes in The Belingwe Reserve” NADA, 25, 1948, 27,1950;
28,1951, 29,1952; 30, 1953; 32, 1955
29
17
the pool hence his identification of the so called “Dziva Complex”31 This seemed the
easiest way in which Sicard wove the interlink between the Romwe under Chief
Chingoma at Imbahuru, the Pfumbi under chief Matibi at Marungudze as well as other
groups in Inyanga, Umtali, Melsetter, and Chipinga sharing the same totem. He wrote:
We have every reason to believe that this totem (dziva-the pool) connects some of the oldest groups of
Bantu immigrants to the south east of our continent, and in the following we shall try to demonstrate that
their culture was fundamentally influenced by the dziva outlook. As a matter of fact the dziva conception is
in many respects the substratum of the Zimbabwe culture. It is therefore, of paramount importance for a
better understanding of the African mentality in our country32(my emphasis)
More importantly however and with special reference to this Dziva complex is the
manner in which von Sicard attempts to link it with the legends collected by Frobenius of
dziva and the Imbahuru cave, the so called zimbabwe princesses and the sacred regicide
carried out at Zimbabwe. He takes this further and relates it to van Warmelo’s assertion
that in Venda Dzimbahe meant Mabwe a Dzivha, further still relates this to Carl Mauch’s
identification of the ruin in the Great Zimbabwe plain which he claimed to be the house
of the king’s chief wife mumba huru. Thus to him Imbahuru was evidently the same as
Dzivaguru, in this way he comes up with the following conclusions for the people of
Chingoma in search for a universalistic application of the dziva complex:
As a matter of fact, from a certain aspect the Imbahuru cult seems to supersede the Mwari rain cult in the
Matopo, for in cases of persisting drought, when all supplications in the Matopos give no result, Chief
Mahlabadza is advised to go to Chingoma to ask for rain just as his neighbour Mutevhaidze in such a case
would send his messengers to chief Matipe Mbedzi’s Pfumbi rain priests at Marungudze hill in the south.
Indeed the rain god at Marungudzi is the same as the one whom Chingoma’s people invoke at Imbahuru. 33
Sicard, “Origins” 1950 pp7-12. Apparently this preoccupation complexes seems to have influenced most
scholars of the time and even today, the latest such attempt being E. Matenga “Images of the Fertility
Complex amongst the Shona” in Dewey (ed) Legacies of Stone:Zimbabwe 1890-1990 (Royal Museum,
Tervuren, 1997)
32
Sicard; “Origins”, 1950, p. 7
33
Sicard “Origins” 1951, p12
31
18
There are even more allusions to Frobenius’s legends of child sacrifice which Sicard is at
pains to explain:
I have also been assured that the sacrifice of children has been a part of the Imbahuru cult at least in the
past, the child being skinned and the skin pegged. The mother was then called some days latter to see the
dry skin. With her tears rain would come. 34
It is also evident at this stage in his career the museological inclination to collect material
culture relating to the area for safe keeping at the Bulawayo Museum through
collaborative visits to the Imbahuru site with the N.C for Belingwe and the archaeologist
Roger Summers. The result was a scientific confirmation by Summers that ‘…it is almost
impossible to doubt the correctness of Sicard’s interpretation that it (i.e. Imbahuru) is a
symbol of the mutupo dziva (the pool)’.35 These collaborative efforts produced the
elaborate descriptions and identification of archaeological sites in Chief Negove’ country
at Vuhxwa hill.36. He used the former discoveries to authenticate his assumptions about
the Lemba communities of Mberengwa whose burials he likened to those of ‘their kin’
the Abyssinian Falasha, who laid their men on the right and their women on the left. 37 He
pursues this theme in a further assessment of the sites of the Mzingwane and Beitbridge
areas38culminating in a complete survey of the Lemba clans of Mberengwa. Here he was
attempting to demonstrate the Arabic origin of the Lemba testing his hypothesis against
the evidence provided by Stayt39 He was simply pursuing a position he had made in 1953
when he had identified the Lemba ancestor Baramina, presumed to be so because the
Lemba close the prayers with the word Amen which is supposed to be the second part of
34
Ibid; p 12
R. Summers; “Imbahuru Hill, Belingwe” NADA, 1952 p.82
36
Sicard; “Places of Ancient Occupation In Chief Negove’s Country” NADA,33,1956, pp32-50, and 34,
1957, pp8-30, see also “The Vuhxwa Hills…” For a discussion of the uses of such traditions see D. N.
Beach, ‘Oral Tradition and Archaeology’ Zimbabwean Prehistory, 19, 1983, pp. 10-11
37
Sicard, “Places of Ancient Occupation”, 1957 p13
35
19
his name, who with his association with the chameleon he seemed to represent the link
between the Lemba and South, East and West African mythology.40 Although he was by
no means a trained archaeologist, and most of these sources seem to rely on
encyclopediac informants, we shall demonstrate below how this foreign origin of the
Lemba has dominated the debate about their identity in modern scholarship. And once
again the ‘hidden hand’ of Leo Frobenius is forever present in such conclusions.
Once again in the description of the Pfumbi under chief Machetu and Mketi he used the
Berlin Missionary archives of the expeditions by Schwellenus and Knothe, the maps
published by the likes of E.W. Smith
41
and various other publications including the
lessons of Jason Machiwenyika to conjure up all the images that might relate to their
external links. He produced the very first thorough genealogy of the Matibi with
approximate dates based on his tentative chronological tables. He did not skip his biblical
allusions but this time by implication accepting the possible contamination of Matibi
traditions by the Biblical teachings of the Berlin Missionary Society and Paris
Evangelists who had ventured there in the late 1880s. A clear testimony to his everimproving critical skills with time, but by no means the abandonment of the hyperdiffusionist stereotype. In one typical case, he stated:
This account reminds me of some Old Testament stories, especially that of Abraham and partly even that of
crossing the Red Sea. It may be explained by the fact that, before Nyangadzamene’s departure from Lassa,
the Berlin Evangelists had taught ‘Matipe’s sons, grandchildren and people’ the Bible stories from the
creation to Joseph in Egypt. 42
Sicard, “Ruins and Their Traditions on the lower Mzingwane and in the Beitbridge Area” NADA 1961,
38, pp50-73
39
Sicard; “Lemba Clans” NADA,39, 1962 pp. 68-80
40
Sicard; “The Lemba Ancestor Baramina”, African Studies, xii, 1953, pp57-58. See also “Shaka and the
North”, African Studies ,xiv, 4, 1955, pp 145-153
41
The Way of The White Fields in Rhodesia, (London, 1928)
42
Sicard; “Origins” 1952 p50
38
20
I wish to cut short the rather cursory assessment of von Sicard’s contribution to Midlands
history (which for now shall remain as negligible for its sheer bulk and complexity
deserves more time) on a related note, that is his increasing professionalism and closeness
to his sources. We may have alluded earlier on to his being one among a few antiquarians
in the earliest stages of this tradition with a propensity for referencing even the most
negligible sources whether they supported his evidence or not. This gets better with time
and it is noticeable that, the closer he got to his sources the more he wanted them to be
authenticated by others hence his inclinations especially after the 1960s to publish most
of his accounts in both Shona and the foreign language he uses for that particular
publication. His last publication is actually written in Shona completely, a development
that seems to be emulated by other missionary scholars in other denominations that came
after him.43 The other point to make is about von. Sicard’s increasing fascination with
matters deriving their authenticity in historical fact than in anthropological theory in the
later part of his career. This is true of his authoritative account of the Dumbuseya, a goup
of people adopted by Zwangendaba’s Ngoni when they passed through the Duma area
during their migration from Shaka’s Zululand. They broke away after Zwangendaba
clashed with another Nguni group lead by Nxaba in the Mazoe valley and since then,
employed the Nguni war tactics, they had learnt from the Ngoni to embark on a career of
mercenarism on the Zimbabwean plateau which influenced politics on the various
43
Sicard; Zvakaitika Kare zve Kereke Yama Luthere Munyika YeRhodesia, (Chiedza Press, Gweru, 1972)
see also a later attempt by N.J van der. Merwe; Kuvamba Nekukura KweKereke ye Reformed MuZimbabwe;
(Morgenster Press, Masvingo, 1987). Although these by and large denominational histories, their precision
in source referencing and criticism is commendable, and it is part of the plans of this project to compare the
roles of these two missionaries in what will become the final version of this paper.
21
emerging Shona polities of the south44. Of all his accounts, this was the most polished
and far much more well substantiated with localized evidence suiting his micro-scale
orientation of the culture history approach. Here he successfully put together events that
account for various fragments of the history of a number of southern Shona polities as the
Mhari, the Ngowa ,the Nemavuzhe Govera, the Pako, among others. It may be possible
he had been keeping abreast with developments in oral historiography, yet he does not
cite any of the key sources, much as it possible that he shared the growing
disillusionment in anthropological circles that we alluded to at the beginning of the paper.
Certainly the independence euphoria and its resultant historiography seemed to sound a
death knell on antiquarian scholarship and although he was retiring by the time he wrote
‘The Dumbuseya’ he certainly was far much less the antiquarian that he was in the 1940s.
The Impact of von Sicard’s works on Historical Studies Concerning Mberengwa.
The first most serious challenge to von Sicard’s ideas came in the wake of the increasing
debate over the meaning of Mwari in which a series of articles by various scholars were
published thus calling for a more critical historically based assessment of Shona
religion.45 A more engaging paper was Ranger’s ‘The Meaning of Mwari’ which tried to
demystify von Sicard’s Dziva complex by questioning the whole basis of these Hamitoid
or Semitic founders of the great Shona state systems thus in every way challenging Sicard
in the light of historical evidence about the Mwari cult being provided by the various
Sicard; “The Dumbuseya”, NADA ix, 5, 1968
See G. Fortune; “Who was Mwari”, Rhodesian History,4, 1973 pp1-20; D.N. Beach “Great Zimbabwe
asa Mwari Cult Centre” Rhodesian Prehistory, 1973, 11, pp11-12, N.M. Bhebe; “A Critical Review of our
knowledge of the Mwari Cult”, Henderson Seminar Paper no. 22, University of Rhodesia 1973
44
45
22
works by J.K. Rennie, S.I Mudenge, Inus Daneel, which was far much divorced from
Sicard’s ‘fanciful’ conclusions.46
So far, it will be contended that there has been one complete study of the district by Per
Zachrisson47 and by existing standards, one could consider the district to be lucky.
Although he does use Sicard’s material quite often in the earlier parts of his book, he
engages him less for his arguments than for the geographical description of the location
of tribes and archaeological sites. He does not dwell much on the Lemba, preferring to
identify them as people who had been in close contact with the Arab traders who
intermarried and borrowed some Arabic customs.48All in all his assessment of the
Mberengwa pre-colonial history is somewhat too rash, if at all he disregards Sicard‘s
work as overzealous antiquarian fetishism he at least fails to demonstrate why. Beach on
the other hand has offered a more contextualised history of Mberengwa and although he
uses von Sicard’s ‘The Dumbuseya’ far much more widely than any historian does, he
does not mince his words regarding any conclusions by von Sicard of difussionist
persuasion which he regards as ‘wrong’, and as only representing the views of the Shona
in their own local areas.49 A more thorough approach to the work of von Sicard and
others of his school has been Aviton Ruwitah’s seminal work on the identity of the
Remba, which has demonstrated in its review of the available literature and historical
fieldwork that most Remba traditions of origin have lost originality due to biblical
antecedents and other western influences grafted on to them. According to his findings
the Remba have rarely directly referd to themselves as Arabs, Jews or Falashas, and that
See Ranger; “The Meaning of Mwari”, Rhodesian History,5, 1974, pp5-17
P. Zachrisson; An African Area in Change: Belingwe 1894-1946: A Study Of Colonialism, Missionary
activity and African Response in Southern Rhodesia, (Bulletin of Department of History no. 17, University
of Gothenburg, 1978)
46
47
23
where these descriptive terms have been embraced they never at any time enjoyed
universal application, except where they appear to confer an advantage on the Remba
such as racial or ethnic superiority.50
The most depressing example of the continued representation of von Sicard’s ideas in
modern historical scholarship has been Aeneas Chigwedere’s series of texts which have
pursued these concepts of the Judaeo-Christian template relentlessly and these are
ironically more illustratively portrayed in his latest book aptly titled; The Roots Of The
Bantu51 As this is meant to be a continuing project we will perhaps leave the fuller
discussion for the final version of this paper. I had intended to pursue the discussion
further to cater for non- historical material emerging from the area in and around
Mberengwa touching upon some of the key issues dealt with by von Sicard their failure
to use his ideas.
Discussion. “The Culture Historiography Approach”
I had started this project on an ambitious note hoping to include most of the things I
intended to cover in a summary at this conference, but I hope I have just used enough to
encourage debate about oral historiography in Zimbabwe. But first perhaps, some general
conclusions; to begin with von Sicard’s importance lies not in the quality of his work but
its attempts to cover a small area to its minute detail. In many ways he had become a
Mberengwa man in any way that any one of us here could choose to be historian of
48
Ibid; p20
D.N.Beach A Zimbabwean Past,(Mambo, Gweru, 1994) pp 6-7
50
A. Ruwitah; “Lost Tribe, Lost Language? The invention of False Remba Identity”, Zimbabwea,5,
October 1997,pp53-71
49
24
labour, gender or of pre-colonial Zimbabwe, he had employed difussionist concepts in
any way that any one of us here would choose to be a Marxist or post-modernist, that is
in several ways he was a true product of his time. From this we learn two main things,
first that we may not understand the observed without understanding the observer, and
secondly the importance of the case study approach. There are several things about
Mberengwa that we cannot throw away from von Sicard’s package but sifting it amounts
to obfuscation and obfuscation in oral methodology is throwing the baby with the bath
water. What are the implications therefore for our oral methodology in this respect, now
that we have been rid of Western contamination; we have at our disposal capable students
armed with historical skills and a home grown understanding of the African culture,
unlike the foreign anthropologist that the antiquarian was? Researchers elsewhere
have suggested the ‘culture area approach’ and by culture area is implied the geo-political
space which a people of a given cultural identity have occupied. In this method students
are sent to their home areas to research on various themes, from the vantage point that
they know their cultures very well, and this approach is meant to afford the departments
the opportunity to create databases of areas so that over time they are able to use them for
comparative purposes.52 This method is however most likely to create cultural niches not
allowing non-autochthons to study other areas and thus render the comparative aspect
more viable and less subjective, it is more inward looking and of course fertile ground for
‘intellectual tribalism’. I wish to propose here there culture historiography approach,
which apart from merely looking for an authoritative history of a culture, seeks a broader
assessment of how a specific culture has been studied and by whom. This approach does
51
(Mutapa Publishing, Harare , 2000)
25
not need an insider but an assessor whose contribution would be to assess the production
of a culture history which is what is more important than a ‘no event no history
approach’. This yields much more for those seeking to know more about economic and
social history which the young department here at M.S.U. is supposed to be all about, this
will make the full year of attachment more interesting to the student in the culture areas.
For any further discussions on the improvement of this paper suggestions are welcome at
gmazarire@yahoo.com
F. Mbon; “Some Methodological Issues In the Academic Study of West African Traditional Religions”
in J. Platvoet, The Study Of Religins in Africa, pp175-178
52
26