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Maps, names, and ethnic games:the epistemology and iconographyof colonial power in NorthwesternZimbabweEric Worby aa International Centre for Living Aquatic ResourcesManagement , DhakaPublished online: 24 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Eric Worby (1994) Maps, names, and ethnic games: the epistemology andiconography of colonial power in Northwestern Zimbabwe, Journal of Southern African Studies,20:3, 371-392, DOI: 10.1080/03057079408708408

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Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 20, Number 3, September 1994 371

Maps, Names, and Ethnic Games: TheEpistemology and Iconography of ColonialPower in Northwestern Zimbabwe1

ERIC WORBY(International Centre for Living Aquatic Resources Management, Dhaka)

Whatever else it may be, ethnicity, conceived as a practice,2 is fundamentally about thepower to name others. In colonial Zimbabwe, as indeed in many other parts of the colonisedworld in this century, the power to name was increasingly bound up with an imaginaryknowledge of the relationship between ethnic identities and socio-geographic space. Justbefore and after the Second World War, the instrument of that knowledge was a uniquepractice that we may now retrospectively call ethnic mapping, or, to invent a more ennoblingdisciplinary name for it, ethnocartography. The use of tribal maps to represent relations ofpolitical power over social space, I will argue, has been an important means through whichacademic constructs have been used as instruments of colonial domination. By affixing namesto discrete territories, such maps served to both encode and represent the implicit, silentvantage point of the colonial state in relation to the subjects over which it presumed ordesired to hold authority.3

In this paper, I want to reveal this process not by analysing where and how ethnic mapscharted the scope and vision of colonial domination most effectively, but rather by looking ata region of Zimbabwe where both power and knowledge fell short of their goals, a placewhere colonial subjects persistently refused to be located in a determinate cartographic space- a place where they refused, and still refuse, to be named. That place lies in the north-western quarter of Zimbabwe. Once known as Sebungwe, it is now known as Gokwe.Anyone who opens a copy of Bourdillon's standard modern ethnography of the Shona peo-

1 This paper condenses chapters seven and eight of my doctoral dissertation, 'Remaking Labour, ReshapingIdentity: Cotton, Commoditization and the Culture of Modernity in Northwestern Zimbabwe', Ph.D. thesis,McGill (1992). An early version was presented at the annual meetings of the Canadian Association of AfricanStudies held in Toronto in May 1991. I am grateful to Jaqueline Solway, John Galaty, Jrme Rousseau, ColinScott, and the late Roger Keesing, who made specific comments on the manuscript. The insights and editorialhelp of Gul Rukh Selim, with whom I conducted both the fieldwork and the archival work on which this studyis based, were, as always, invaluable.

2 See G. Carter Bentley, 'Ethnicity and Practice', Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, 1 (1987), pp.24-55. I have tried to develop a theory of ethnicity as a discursive practice in '"Not to Plough My Master'sField": Discourses of Ethnicity and the Production of Inequality in Botswana' presented to the InternationalCongress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Qubec City (1983, revised 1984). In a similar vein,see Edwin N. Wilmsen and Rainer Vossen, 'Labour, Language and Power in the Construction of Ethnicity inBotswana', Critique of Anthropology 10, 1 (1990), pp. 7-37.

3 See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn.(London, 1991).

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372 Journal of Southern African Studies

pies,4 will discover, by looking at the map on its endpapers, that this place is the do-main of a people named 'the Shangwe'. I will be arguing that the place of the Shangwe(plural, Vashangwe) in maps such as these, as well as in ethnographic texts, provides aready way of reading the relation between subjectification and subjugation over theninety odd years of the colonial presence in Gokwe. But I will also be arguing thatthose named in this process, have shifted identities in ways that elude the mappingimperative itself and thus dissolve the subjects that such mapping and naming consti-tutes. The practice of ethnicity thus comprises not only the power to name, but itsantithesis as well: the power to refuse to be named by and for an Other.

Maps and Models: Locating the ShangweI made many efforts to locate the Shangwe within both the cognitive and the cartographic

maps of Zimbabweans - including anthropologists, immigrant farmers, and out-posted civilservants, as well as the so-designated Vashangwe themselves. The 'Shangwe' turned out tobe a slippery entity, hovering on the fuzzy margins of the more focused classification of theShona peoples. Reviewing the published evidence at hand, it seemed to me at first as thougha fairly straightforward taxonomy of names had consistently been assumed by colonial offi-cials and regionally-based ethnologists - one I have diagrammed below (Table 1). A funda-mental opposition would be assumed between Africans (formerly 'Natives') and Europe-ans.5 Together with the marginal categories of Coloureds and Asians, these defined the

Table 1: Taxonomy of Shona peoples, derived from map in Hilda Kuper, A. J. B. Hughesand J. Van Velsen, The Shona and Ndebele of Southern Rhodesia (London: 1955)

Level IRaces

Africans

EuropeansColouredsAsians

Level IITribes

Shona

NdebeleTongaVendaetc.

Level IIShona Groups

Kalanga GroupKaranga GroupKorekore GroupZezuru GroupManyika GroupNdau Group

Level IIITribes/Clans

Kalanga tribes/clansKaranga tribes/clansKorekore tribe/clans(incl.Shangwe)Zezuru tribes/clansManyika tribes/clansNdau tribes/clans

4 M. F. Bourdillon, The Shona Peoples, 3rd rev. edn. (Gweru, 1988).5 These categories had a status that was the subject of legally differentiated rights and obligations under the

Southern Rhodesian constitution. The small Asian and Coloured categories, which exist at the same taxonomiclevel, were differentiated for purposes of census, settlement, education, and conditions of employment in thecivil service, although they enjoyed political rights as part of the European community as long as they couldpass a literacy and a property means test. For the case of Asians, see Floyd and Lillian O. Dotson, The IndianMinority of Zambia, Rhodesia, and Malawi (New Haven and London, 1968), pp. 311 -320. Informal divisionsisolated the Afrikaaners from other Europeans, and the latter were further divided upon the basis of national orregional origin (Irish, Scottish, Greek, etc.); these divisions were gradually subordinated to a broader SouthernRhodesian nationalism by the 1950s. See D. J. Murray, The Governmental System in Southern Rhodesia (Ox-ford, 1970), pp. 2, 14.

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The Epistemology and Iconography of Colonial Power in Northwestern Zimbabwe 373

semantic field of races.6 Africans would then be broken down into a fundamental tribalopposition between Shona and Ndebele. The Shona were then divided into sub-groups(the now familiar set of macro-identities that includes the Kalanga, Karanga, Korekore,Zezuru, Manyika, and Ndau), and these might then be sub-divided again into 'tribes'on the basis of chiefly territories or even clan-names. The other major tribes such as theTonga and Venda, were of minor political or numerical consequence and hence notsubject to further analysis. And the vast numbers of rural farm workers of extra-territo-rial origin - probably constituting with their families nearly 20 per cent of the popula-tion at Independence - were essentially invisible in this schema. Known most often bythe names of their countries of origin (Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, and Angola),and being virtually without recognition by the state, they were excluded entirely fromthe ethnic map that served to arbitrate arguments over territory, heritage and patri-mony.

This taxonomy would seem to fairly represent the classificatory logic at work in theminds of those who produced the map accompanying the ethnographic survey of theShona and Ndebele in 1955. Note that Level 1 in my taxonomy - which categorisesracial difference - is invisible on this map, but is an assumed precondition of the entiremapping exercise.

It was the Africans, conceived in a racial sense, who were being mapped here, notthe total field of political entities and social identities.7 The map represents tribal at-tachments to land as natural, eternal relations. The fact that it lays a continuous net oftribal appellations over vast areas of land that had already been in European hands forone or two generations suggests a willful suppression of history. The map speaks in ahypothetical voice, as if the, jurai alienation of land on the basis of racial difference hadnever occurred. Yet in other discursive contexts - particularly those in which questionsof political entitlement were at stake - this naturalization of ethnicity in its relation tospace was just as vehemently denied by the Rhodesian settlers. It was often argued, forexample, that Europeans had rightfully displaced the Ndebele people by virtue of con-quest in the same way that Ndebele had displaced the Rozvi Shona rulers half a centurybefore. History and ethnography, thus, were often drawn upon as discrete rhetoricalresources in settler colonial discourse. The former was used to justify settler entitle-ment to sovereignty according to rules they presumed to share with natives, while thelatter was used to convert the natives into an object of distanced contemplation, knowl-edge, and manipulation.

What of the place of the Shangwe in all this? In the map reproduced (over), which isbased upon the linguistic classification developed by Doke,8 the boundaries between'Shona Groups' are marked, and the Shangwe are shown to occupy the western reachesof the area occupied by the 'Korekore Group'. But there seemed to be some disagree-

6 The Coloured category, reserved for the offspring of unions between Africans and Europeans, makes it evidentthat more is at stake at this taxonomic level than the continent of ancestral origin (many Europeans in modernZimbabwe and South Africa proudly emphasize that they are, in this sense, Africans). It is, rather, a theory ofbiological distinctiveness that is being asserted.

7 Ironically, it was only such a 'total social field' - including other racial groups - that constituted an acceptableframework for a proper sociological analysis in the view of the major ethnographers of south central Africa ofthe time: Clyde Mitchell and others trained under Max Gluckman at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. Seebelow.

8 C. M. Doke, Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (Salisbury, 1931). See also D. T. Cole, 'Doke'sClassification of Bantu Languages', in C. M. Doke and D. T. Cole, Contributions to The History of BantuLinguistics (Johannesburg, 1961). Doke himself disavowed the utility or even the validity of making strongdistinctions between dialects. See below.

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SHONA Juro NDEBELEcv

SOUTHERN RHODESIABased on Df Doke's Distribution of the

Shona-speaking Peoples, I93iScale i/2.