Historiography Of The Rozvi.The history of the Rozvi has been for a long time shrouded by myth. Beach maintains that few groups in Africa have been inflated beyond their real strength as the Rozvi. Portuguese writers are partly responsible for this myth-making. Dombo Changamire’s successes against the Portuguese in the 1690s when he drove them from the feiras of Dambarare and Manyika, coupled with his victories against Maungwe in 1684, the Mutapa in 1693 and 1702, and Manyika in 1695, so impressed the Portuguese that they developed a profound fear of him to the extent that they claimed that he used magic. Although in the 17th century the Portuguese had viewed Dombo Changamire and his Rozvi followers as their ‘fatal’ enemy, in the 18th century their view of the Changamire Rozvi state changed due to the need to cooperate in trade. The Portuguese came to look upon Changamire as their ally against other rivals and on three occasions in the 18th

century (1743, 1772, 1781) Rozvi armies came to the aid of the Portuguese at Zumbo. Portuguese sources of the 18th century were thus basically friendly in their descriptions/view of the Changamire state. They described it as powerful, with its power based on the control of the large cattle herds and mines of the southwest of Zimbabwe. They considered Changamire as the overlord of all the Shona.

English-speaking travelers and missionaries who entered the Ndebele state from the south from the 1850s onwards were the next group of European writers to describe the Changamire state, but they were now recording oral traditions after the fall of the state, and were not aware of the existence of Portuguese sources. Most of the accounts they collected were now layered with myths relating to the power of the Changamire state, the nature of Rozvi influence, and the causes of the state’s fall. Not long after the fall of the state, Carl Mauch was already collecting oral traditions in 1872 that were linking the Rozvi with the fall of Great Zimbabwe and the anger of Mwari.

After the British occupation of the country, the Southern Rhodesia Native Department embarked on a short-lived program of historical research by its officials. Because the research was conducted on a local basis (in each NC’s district), there was a tendency for the NCs to assume that the situation that prevailed in his district was true for the whole country. Little effort was made to combine these district-by-district oral accounts of the Changamire state into a coherent historical account, until the writings of FWT Posselt and Charles Bullock in the 1920s. Posselt (NC Marandellas) collected oral traditions from the Rozvi communities in the south of his district and also plagiarized from Native Department files that contained the work of earlier Native Department researchers. Essentially, it was Posselt who founded the Rozvi ‘Empire’. In his ethnographic pamphlet

LATER SHONA STATES

THE CHANGAMIRE DYNASTY AND THE ROZVI STATE

Prepared by G. T. Ncube Office # 44 TEL-ONE ncubegt@msu.ac.zw

of 1923 he named some 17 Shona groups who he claimed were the subjects of the Rozvi. In 1927 he extended Rozvi rule to ‘all’the Shona. According to Posselt, all Shona rulers in Zimbabwe were appointed by the Rozvi in a ceremony known as kugadza ushe, and they all paid tribute to Changamire in skins, ivory and livestock. Later writers largely failed to criticize Posselt’s generalizations. Charles bullock, who was Posselt’s contemporary, managed at least to criticize Posselt’s work, apart from adding to it. Taking a more anthropological approach, and drawing most of his evidence from the Hartley and Lomagundi districts, Bullock was aware that the picture given by Posselt was not true everywhere. Buloock pointed out that in some areas the Rozvi exercised no control at all. He also pointed out that local factors governed the choice of other Shona rulers far much more than Rozvi appointments. However, Bullock also believed, like Posselt, that in cases where the Rozvi did actually install rulers, it was because they had some supposed religious power. Nevertheless, Bullock and Posselt’s works became standard Native Department texts and many Native Department officials who later collected Rozvi oral traditions were influenced by their writings. Thus by the 1930s the Rozvi had been blown beyond their real historical stature and influence.

Archaeologists of the 1950s also complicated the picture by accepting the claims of the Jiri branch of the Rozvi to have lived at Khami, and then using this claim to link the Rozvi with the foundation of the Khami culture. As we know, this is not true. Khami = Torwa.

Historians of the 1960s, writing at a time when African nationalism was on the rise, and anxious to show that African people had a past to be proud of, a time when portraying African ‘empires’ was in vogue, also tended to inflate the real stature, extent and influence of the Rozvi ‘empire’. The Rozvi empire enjoyed a special treatment. The Great Zimbabwe, Khami, Torwa, and Mutapa cultures and states were all associated with the names of Changamire and Rozvi in various ways. In their writings, the Rozvi were militarily strong, hostile to the Portuguese, and victorious over them. They were more peaceful than the Nguni of the 19th century. They were linked with Shona religion, especially the Mwari cult. They ruled over all or almost all the Shona-speaking peoples, and all rulers had to be confirmed by them. Here they were incorporating various aspects of earlier writers.

In the 1970s this image of the ‘power and glory’ of the Rozvi was significantly cut down to size by further research. In 1971 HHK Bhila triggered off a debate when he argued that the power and glory of the Rozvi emperors had been exaggerated by some earlier writers. S. Mudenge, who had worked on the Rozvi, vigorously argued otherwise and supported his view by drawing attention to the huge size of the Rozvi army (in 1743 a Rozvi army had been estimated at 2 000 men, and in 1781 at 3 000 men), and also to the frequency with which the Rozvi army was called upon to help the Portuguese, as a testimony to the efficiency of the army and the role that the Rozvi played as kingmakers. Beach has however significantly cut down the image of the Rozvi and argues that there was no empire in the sense of a large area dominated by any kind of regular administration. In Bhila’s opinion, both the views of Mudenge and Beach have been overstated. Bhila holds the view that there was an empire which was no less systematically and regularly

administered than the classic Holy Roman, Persian or Turkish empires, and the core of this empire comprised the regions of Rimuka, the Save valley, Wedza, Mbire and present-day Matabeleland.

Origins of the Changamire Dynasty.The first reference to a Changamire dynasty in the Portuguese documents related to the period from the 1480s –1540s when there had been a Changamire dynasty which rebelled against the Mutapa. The last that was heard of these earlier Changamires was their defeat in 1547-8. It is likely that the later Changamires were descended from them. The career of the Changamire of the late 17th century (Dombo Changamire) who founded the Changamire dynasty, gives us the only authentic case of state formation in Shona history that is supported by both documents and oral traditions, unlike the cases of the rise of the earlier Shona states of Great Zimbabwe, Torwa and Mutapa, whose rise can only be traced through archaeology and unreliable oral traditions. The founder of the Changamire dynasty and his Rozvi forces arose out of the upheaval of the mid-17 th century that accompanied Portuguese attempts to conquer the Mutapa and Torwa states. The Portuguese referred to the Rozvi leader at this time as Changamire and provided no other name. The Shona simply referred to him as Mambo. However, early Rozvi traditions commonly referred to him as Dombolakonachingwango, or simply as Dombo. In other traditions he was referred to as Chikurawadyembewu, or simply Chikura. Antonio da Conceicao wrote that Dombo Changamire was originally a herdsman of the Mutapa Munkombwe. He seems to have used the Mutapa cattle herds to attract a following. According to Bhila, Dombo Changamire began to gather followers around him self in the 1670s and to assert his independence from the Mutapa. He began building up his power by seizing some lands that had been under the Mutapa. Dombo Changamire’s rise to power was well advanced by the 1680s, at which time he was already involved in the conquest of the Torwa state (Butwa) in the South-West, as well as rebelling against the Mutapa. It seems clear that the Changamire was involved in the conquest of the South-West at the same time as he was at war with the Mutapa Munkombwe and the Portuguese.

The term ‘Rozvi’ was originally used by the Portuguese in reference to the warriors of the Changamire rulers of the 18th century and initially applied to the Changamire dynasty of the Moyo/Mhondizvo totem. However, the term was later extended to cover all members of the Moyo clan originating in the central Moyo nuclear area between the Mazoe and Nyadiri rivers, including some non-Moyo groups who also seem to have originated in the central Moyo nuclear area.

Portuguese sources (Antonio da Conceicao and Caetano de Mello de Castro) locate the origin of the Changamire Rozvi in the North-East of the plateau between the Mutapa state (Mukaranga) and Manyika, but closer to Manyika. Some Shona traditions have been in general agreement with the documents. A tradition of the surviving Changamire Rozvi of the Upper Save, which survives to the present, specifically names the area around the Zhombwe and Hurungwe mountains in the central Moyo nuclear area as the home of the Changamire dynasty before its conquest of the south-west. In Beach’s opinion, this was the most specific and reliable of the traditions of origin collected before Rozvi quarrels

and Rozvi historians began to confuse the issue. This North-Eastern grouping of the Rozvi in the late 17th century was in existence for only a short-time before Dombo Changamire began his conquest of the South-West.

Dombo Changamire and the Expansion of the Rozvi State

In 1684 Dombo Changamire conquered Maungwe and after that it became a Rozvi tributary kingdom. This rebellious action seems to have invited the attack made upon him by Mutapa Munkombwe in 1684. Changamire was also hostile to the Portuguese, whose numbers were beginning to increase in the 1680s and 1690s. In the 1680s the Portuguese in Manyika, who were paying tribute to the Changamire, refused to continue paying tribute, and were attacked and defeated by Rozvi forces in Maungwe. It was after this battle that the Portuguese began to refer to the Changamire as their fatal enemy. In 1693 Mutapa Nyakunembire invited Dombo Changamire to help him against the Portuguese. Changamire raided the Feira of Dambarare in November 1693 and killed all the Portuguese. When news of this attack reached all the other Portuguese ferias, the Portuguese deserted all their feiras except Manyika. The Rozvi burnt down the deserted feira of Masapa in the e Mutapa state. In 1695 Dombo Changamire invaded the Portuguese feira of Manyika and also conquered the Manyika kingdom in the process. The effect of these Rozvi campaigns of the 1680s and 1690s was that the Portuguese were expelled from the Zimbabwean plateau and never again attempted to re-establish their political control there until after the fall of the Rozvi Changamire state in the late 19th century. It was because of their profound fear of the Rozvi that the Portuguese considered them overlords of all the Shona. Portuguese fears that the Rozvi would attack Sena and Sofala never materialized because Dombo Changamire died in 1696.

The Conquest of the South-WestIt seems that after the Rozvi campaigns of the 1680s and 1690s against the Portuguese, Dombo turned his attention back to the conquest of the South-West. Earlier historians tended to think of Dombo Changamire as a Southwestern ruler who was in the process of conquering the Northeast to extend his power; but the fact is that Dombo Changamire at this time (1680s) was a Northeastern ruler who was in the process of conquering the Southwest. Traditions and documents confirm that the conquest of the Southwest was a rapid process. Moreover, it seems unlikely that Dombo would have devoted as much attention as he did to his Northeastern campaigns if the conquest of the Torwa state had been difficult. By the time of Dombo’s death in 1696 the Changamire dynasty had conquered the Torwa state and taken over its capital, which by the end of the 17 th century was no longer based at Khami but Danangombe and Naletale. We know little more than this about the conquest of the Torwa state by Changamire because no literate Portuguese observed it and it happened too long ago for oral traditions to be reliable as a source of information.

The Changamire Rozvi State in the South-West.Although the boundary of the Changamire state in the Southwest is not clearly known, the areas where close Rozvi control was exercised lay between the Mbembesi river, the sandveld and sodic soils of the Northwest and North, and an indeterminate line that ran

from the Upper Tokwe round to the southern edges of the great plateau. Within this area, the Changamire appears to have exercised close control.

The basis of power of the Rozvi state comprised of (i) its huge army(ii) external trade in gold(iii) its huge cattle herds.

(i) Army. The basic force behind the control of the state was the army of the Changamire. The evidence we have of the size of the Rozvi army indicates that Changamire could easily raise 2 000 to 3 000men for an expedition. In 1743 a force of about 2 000 Rozvi reached Zumbo, and Beach maintains that there were at that time other Rozvi forces in existence that were much stronger than 2 000 men. The second figure indicating the size of the Rozvi army comes from 1780-81 when Changamire dispatched 3 000 soldiers to support the Portuguese at Zumbo. Another large Rozvi force was dispatched to Manyika in the 1780s to protect the construction of a new fort by the Portuguese and to dictate the terms of trade between the Rozvi, the Manyika and the Portuguese. Reports indicate that Rozvi armies were well-armed and disciplined; they maneuvered in an organized fashion and were divided into groups under commanders of varying rank. The Portuguese who saw the army that had been dispatched to Manyika commented approvingly on the superb diplomacy of the commander and the strict discipline of the army itself on this occasion. The discipline of the Rozvi army was echoed in the traditions of the people. The army was called together by a kind of whistle made of wood, which was used to summon the regiments. This sounded in the first instance from the headquarters, and then signaled from home to home, and from division to division. The soldiers had battle axes, assegais, and bows and arrows. It is said that only the Changamire possessed guns. This suggests a tight control by the Changamires over the acquisition of firearms by their subjects. These factors made the Rozvi the most feared and respected fighters south of the Zambezi before the arrival of the Mfecane groups.

(ii) Gold. Evidence of the economic backing of the state is lacking, but Bhila has suggested that the external trade in gold was a source of the wealth and political and military power of the Changamires. Beach mentions that the only goldfields that were directly under the Changamire were those in Manyanga, and even these were becoming worked out as far as Shona technology could reach. Beach also doubts that the Rozvi state system was supported by tribute in gold, and also doubts that the Changamires exercised a monopoly over the gold trade. Bhila maintains that there is a need to interpret Rozvi politics and economy more critically than has hitherto been the case. The rigid exclusion of the Portuguese from Rozvi territory by the Changamires, who refused to let them re-establish their old trading feiras, has often been interpreted as a Rozvi monopoly of external trade. However, recent historiography on Rozvi politics and society (see S.I. Mudenge, ‘The Rozvi Empire and the Feira of Zumbo’; also Mudenge, ‘The Role of Foreign Trade in the Rozvi Empire’) shows that

the problem of the Rozvi ‘monopoly of external trade’ has been very much misunderstood. It was the Portuguese who characterized the refusal by the Rozvi Changamires to grant them authority to re-establish their old feiras, as a monopoly. Thus the Rozvi monopoly of external trade should not be construed as meaning that Rozvi subjects were required to obtain permission in order to trade in gold to their neighbours or to the Portuguese; neither should it be understood that Rozvi and foreign traders had to report to Changamire’s court before they dispersed into the interior. The whole matter revolved around the Changamire’s refusal to let the Portuguese re-establish their old feiras. It is clear from the three Portuguese sources from which our knowledge of this monopoly of external trade is derived, that the Rozvi rulers did not indeed allow the Portuguese, whom they had expelled from the Mutapa dominion at the end of the 17th century, to re-establish the old feiras of Dambarare and its neighbours. It is also clear that the Portuguese desired to re-establish these feiras because of the commercial advantages that would accrue to them from re-establishment. The question that remains to be answered is, why did the Rozvi rulers refuse to let the Portuguese re-establish their old feiras? So far there has been no satisfactory answer to this, but it has been suggested that the Rozvi rulers had learnt a lesson from Portuguese interference/intervention in local politics in the previous centuries, which they did not want to be repeated.

Consequently, the gold trade between Butwa and Zumbo was in the hands of middlemen, the vashambadzi. However, the existence of the vashambadzi cannot be used to adequately explain the so-called monopoly of external trade because, in any case, it was to the advantage of the Portuguese to trade through the vashambadzi in the absence of feiras where the Portuguese traders could reside; furthermore, the vashambadzi knew the land, the people, and the local politics better. One of the Dominican Friars, Frei Pedro da Trinidade, who settled at Zumbo between 1726 and 1751 accumulated a lot of wealth from long distance trade with Butwa, then ruled by Changamire. He traded through the African agents, the vashambadzi, whom the Portuguese referred to as ‘Mussambazes’ in their writings.

(iii) Cattle Herds. Another possible basis for the power of the Rozvi was cattle herds, given the location of the state on the South-West of the plateau which has always been a major cattle breeding environment, and also given the fact that the Changamires had started as cattle herders in the North-East, and furthermore, they had inherited the famed large cattle herds of Butwa/Torwa. Bhila mentions that Butwa had a reputation for huge cattle herds and also maintains that the main boast of the Rozvi state was its very large cattle. In 1648 Fr. Antonio Gomes reported that Butwan cows were so big that one had to stand up in order to milk them.

The Fall of the Changamire Rozvi state The late 18th and early 19th centuries had seen an overall economic decline in progress in the Changamire state. The goldfields were almost worked out. It has been observed by

Bhila that the gold trade, which had been a source of wealth and political and military power for the Changamires, dried up when they needed it most, during the era of civil wars at home and in the tributary kingdoms from 1795 to the late 1820s. The civil wars 1795-1820s) that resulted from the death of the Rozvi Changamire Rupandamanhanga contributed significantly to the economic decline of the Changamire Rozvi state. As a result of these wars the Rozvi economy was run down, particularly the long distance trade, and this helped to render the Changamires politically impotent. The period which witnessed the most intensified civil wars in the state was characterized by attacks by the Hiya which disrupted the gold trade between Butwa and Zumbo. There is ample evidence that the Hiya attacked traders along the Butwa-Zumbo trade route. In 1802 the capitao-mor of the feira of Zumbo, Jose Pedro Diniz, wrote that the interior of Butwa was in total decadence because of the Hiya wars and five years of successive hunger which the whole country had experienced. In 1808 Joao de Souza, who succeeded Diniz as capitao-mor at Zumbo, also corroborated this decline of trade with Butwa when he wrote “because of the continuous wars that have been taking place there [Butwa] the mines have almost all been shut down and we are unable to draw profits from there [Butwa] as in the past.”

The greatest single factor that sapped the vitality of the Rozvi Changamire state, however, was the Mfecane. Beach has observed that, while the Mfecane subjected many of the states and peoples north of the Limpopo to the passage of many groups of Ngoni and Sotho, the Changamire state was particularly unlucky because it was crossed by at least six such groups in a decade, either because of its geographical position or its wealth. Moreover, just at the time when Changamire Chirisamhuru had been killed by the last of the Ngoni groups, two large sections of the Ndebele, which had separated south of the Limpopo, came together on the western border of the Rozvi state and established the Ndebele state there. The first set of Mfecane assailants who attacked the Changamire state included the Sotho of Mpanga, the Ngwana Maseko Ngoni, Zwangendaba’s Ngoni, all these within a couple of years. There followed the Nguni of Nyamazana, who killed Chirisamhuru. It is important to note that the state did not come to an end with the death of Chirisamhuru, as some historians have claimed. Then came Nxaba’s Ngoni, who passed very rapidly some time after 1836. Beach’s claim that at this time (1836) the basic structure of the state remained intact after these successive attacks is questionable. Disruption of agriculture? Leaderless? Furthermore, Chirisamhuru’s death had thrown open a succession dispute at a time when the state was at its weakest since foundation, and, as Beach observes, neither the Tumbare nor the Mavudzi or the Nerwande houses were in a position to lead the state since theirs was essentially a supportive role, not meant to replace the Changamire. The coup de grace was delivered to the Rozvi state by the arrival of the Ndebele in 1839.

We will pose at this point in order to trace Ndebele history from South Africa up to the time that they settle in South West, before discussing the Ndebele impact on the Rozvi Changamire state.

END