Weaver Press

Mukai: the Jesuit Journal for Zimbabwe
No 57 August 2011
www.jescom.co.zw

Book Review

THE JOYS AND AGONIES OF BULAWAYO

Terence Ranger, Bulawayo Burning, The Social History of a Southern African City,
1893 – 1960.
Weaver Press – James Currey (UK), 2010, 261pp.

Reviewed by Marko Phiri

If anyone is looking for walk-about around Zimbabwe's oldest African ‘township’ Makokoba
from its ‘continuous existence’, between 1894 and 1960, the best place to look could well be
Terence Ranger's 2010 opus – Bulawayo Burning (Weaver Press). The book paints a beautiful
lyrical picture of this place that dwells in the hearts of many Bulawayo natives, be they soccer
players, musicians, businessmen, gangsters or indeed politicians. Ranger begins by telling us
that his effort is a ‘historian's’ response in ‘prose’ to the ‘poetry’ of Yvonne Vera's Butterfly
Burning set in the Bulawayo of the 1940s (p.5), which is why he calls it ‘Bulawayo Burning’.

As he says in an interview elsewhere: ‘Like Yvonne, I wanted to record the joys as well as
the agonies of urban life.’ This work is dedicated to the late award winning Bulawayo author.
And what emerges is an oxymoronic beautiful Bulawayo Burning, a ‘writing of history as
literature.’ He indeed succeeds in his attempts to make the book as readable as possible in
the literary form that he adopts. It moves from the typical historical texts that are usually
heavy reads used mainly as reference fodder for researchers and dwell on dates that lack
action packed pace of the genre of historical novels. Ranger's book is rather page-turning as
Bulawayo Burning is arranged and reads like a series of chapters of a novel, making it an
easy, at the same time compelling read.

No doubt a lot has been written about Makokoba, but Ranger attempts – with superb success I
think – to move his research to areas and crevices of this great historic place where not many
historians have looked and the result is no doubt an invaluable addition to the knowledge
about a place many have come to know merely as a dirty old place – and this is a place
which others have over the years actually suggested must be demolished to make way for
new urban housing. Ranger relies on diverse and very rich sources and juxtaposes Vera's
fictional characters with actual people who lived in Makokoba between 1929-1960. The oral
interviews with old Makokoba residents make this a unique contribution as the narrations give
us first hand insights from people who were part of that history when it was being made.

Ranger adopts a tone and style he says, resonates with South African author Jacob Dlamini's
Native Nostalgia (p.12), which is a historical narrative about South African townships
during apartheid. His then is a social history narrative about a Southern African township
(Makokoba) during the birth of nationalism. Ranger writes, ‘Sentence after sentence, in his

(Dlamini) book resonated with me: Nostalgia does not have to be a reactionary sentiment.
There is a way to be nostalgic about the past without forgetting that the struggle (about
apartheid) was just...’ (p.13).

This is a poignant reminder of approaches to the new world political order by contemporary
politicians whose nostalgia about the struggle sets them against the people as they – the
political elites – lose focus that ‘nostalgia does not have to be reactionary.’ Deriving from
its title, Ranger divides the book into different epochs of ‘Bulawayo’s burning,’ from the
Matebele King's capital (Old Bulawayo ironically was to again burn down in 2010), to the
1929 black-on-black violence to the 1960 Zhii Makokoba burnings which many historians
like to parade as the beginning of nationalist agitations but which Ranger obviously sees
differently.

This is a book that Education Minister David Coltart would do well and introduce into the
secondary school curriculum rather than have students waiting until they go to university to
study this piece of history before they pore with their young minds over this important work.
And this at a time when there is resurgence in the demand by the yesteryear nationalists for
a rewriting of the nation’s history, this time seen through pan-Africanist black lenses. It is
precisely Bulawayo Burning’s literary approach that would make it extremely readable for
young minds. But then because it is written by a white historian, so we are not likely to see
this in government schools for obvious reasons as Coltart has already been accused of doing
away with some texts favored by the nationalists from the school curricula!

From the narrative tour of the Landscapes of Bulawayo (p.56,57) on how this great city was
built, to the railways, (p.59), erection of abattoirs, you obviously question how the city has
been run down in the past few decades with the national railways now virtually dead, the Cold
Storage Commission dead, sewers dead.

The country obviously needs a book like this if we are to take a look at history through
lenses untainted by political correctness. For example, while a lot has been written about this
old township being a hotbed for political upheaval and nationalism, trade unionism, tribal
tensions etc, Ranger gives a human face to these events and makes it compelling to read about
such characters as Jerry Vera, Sipambaniso Khumalo, Jasper Savanhu, Charlton Ngcebetsha,
and many others who other historians have not given prominence in the labour activism,
political organisation, journalism of the time when in fact in this work they have starring roles
as central players in the bigger picture that was Makokoba of the 30s, 40s and late 50s.

But perhaps it is the intensive research that went into this work that utilised official council
records, archives and first person narratives that gives it its depth. It is here where we meet
the ‘Ndebele royals’ being forced to move in with common people, princesses and princes
arriving in Makokoba in the 1930s where they set up their new ‘homes’ with the white
governments and local administrators failing to understand that this was the bastardisation
of timeless cultures. It is here where we meet the 1929 Shona-Ndebele tribal clashes
(animosities that remain today), which Ranger says were ‘(a) clash between elements of
society in black Bulawayo and it rose out of the question of who was to determine its culture
and character.’ (p.84) ‘The Mashonas said that the Matebele have killed their people years

ago and that now they intend to kill the Matebele.’ (p.96) Ranger says the fights were
powered by mythic history. ‘But much more important than myth in defining “ethnicity” in
Bulawayo in December 1929 were job differentiation and ethnic hierarchies of prestige.’
(p.96).

We still get such sentiments in 2011, which have landed some Bulawayo activists in jail for
championing the cause of radical federalism. Ranger even quotes Charles van Onselom and
Ian Phimister’s The Political Economy of Tribal Animosity (Journal of South African Studies
6, 1 October 1979) who noted about the 1929 clashes: ‘Men did not fight each other because
they belonged to different ethnic groups. They fought each other because they had different
and competitive economic interests.’ This book locates these and other developments in a
black colonial township and offers glimpses for the present mapping of the nation-state. It
is here where we meet the birth of Highlanders, the city’s football giants and their ties to
the Ndebele royals (p.196), tensions between the Bulawayo municipality and the Rhodesian
government (p.210), (are we not seeing the same toady?), prostitution, illegal gambling,
gangsterism which ‘grew beyond the power of any policeman or social worker to restrain’
(p.150) and a lot more. Of course we meet Joshua Nkomo as a popular young politician, the
daring Masotsha Ndlovu’s defiance of the pavement laws. These were the racist laws which
prohibited blacks from using city sidewalks, the kind of laws we continue hearing about even
now by the nationalists who insist we must all be grateful to them for bringing black majority
rule now we can walk freely in the city centre! And oh yes, the cover says it all. It just blows
you away, everyone I know who saw the book quickly identified the picture on the cover as
Makokoba, and this picture having been taken more than fives decades ago! It shows just
how little the township has changed over these decades. With the ‘pacy’ Bulawayo Burning, a
picture indeed worth a thousand words.

Marko Phiri is a Bulawayo journalist and writer.