Narratives, Rituals and Political Imaginations: The Social and Political World of the Vashona of North-Eastern Zimbabwe from the 16th to the 19th Centuries

This article is about power in pre-colonial polities of the Chishona-speaking people who lived in the north-eastern parts of the Zimbabwean plateau from the late 16th century to the end of the 19th century. It is an examination of how ruling lineages rationalised their claims to authority and how their subjects and others contested those claims. Paying attention to chiefly lineages’ narratives and to ritual politics central to social health and to the actions and voices of individuals for whom rituals were performed, and those who performed them, the article demonstrates the limits of chiefly power and the power of autochthonous communities in these polities. Further, the article addresses questions of gender, fertility, politics and contestations over authority among the pre-colonial inhabitants of the Zimbabwean plateau. In this way, it shifts scholarly attention from ruling families to those who belonged to these communities but were not of the ruling lineages. More importantly, it demonstrates the ways in which we can use oral traditions and archives to write a social history of power among pre-colonial southern Africa’s chieftainship-based polities. The article moves beyond the empire- and dynasty-centric histories of pre-colonial Zimbabwe – histories that turn out to be more about the ruling lineages than they are about the many people who constituted these societies – while privileging local social processes in the making of pre-colonial Zimbabwean polities.