Lozikeyi Dlodlo, Queen of the Ndebele: “A very dangerous and intriguing woman”, by Marieke Faber Clarke, with Pathisa Nyathi. Bulawayo: Amagugu, 2010. 310 pp. ISBN 978-0-7974-4266-5. ZIM$20.00. (Distributed outside Zimbabwe through African Books Collective.)

Abstract

Lozikeyi Dlodlo, Queen of the Ndebele: "A very dangerous and intriguing woman", by Marieke Faber Clarke, with Pathisa Nyathi. Bulawayo: Amagugu, 2010. 310 pp. ISBN 978-0-7974-4266-5. ZIM$20.00. (Distributed outside Zimbabwe through African Books Collective.) On the front cover of this consistently interesting and engaging book is a striking photograph of Lozikeyi Dlodlo, King Lobhengula's senior queen, and after his death Queen Regent of the Ndebele. Taken around 1910 by the missionary Bowen Rees, it shows her confident and assertive, sitting alone in front of her cattle enclosure. The sense of authority is palpable. Yet the majority of the standard historical reference works on Zimbabwe make no reference to her at all. It is the aim of this biography to show that she was not just one of Lobhengula's many queens, but was an important political player in her own right, who was the moving spirit behind the War of the Red Axe (the Matabele Rebellion) in 1896, and who subsequently encouraged the renaissance of the Ndebele nation through embracing western education and then turning it against the European settlers in what had become Rhodesia. After her death during the great 'flu epidemic of 1919, she remained an inspiration to Ndebele freedom fighters, and Marieke Clarke tells us that during the liberation war of the 1970s bullets from the opposing sides were symbolically placed by her grave. One of the problems of writing a biography of someone who has effectively been marginalised or ignored by mainstream history is the sources. In terms of the written record, this was almost entirely the creation of Europeans, most of whom had little or no understanding of Ndebele culture or politics and who therefore tended to underplay the role that royal women such as Lozikeyi played. Nevertheless Clarke makes good use of such written sources as do exist, and in particular of the papers of the trader and adventurer Johan Colenbrander, who was also Rhodes's interpreter at the Indabas with the Ndebele chiefs in 1896, and of the L.M.S. missionary Bowen Rees who was also fluent in isiNdebele and who got to know the Queen well over a long period of time. Bowen Rees's testimony is particularly important because as a Welshspeaking Welshman at a time when English cultural imperialism was being forced on the Welsh, he was able to empathise with another small nation suffering under the same oppressor. Incidentally, on the basis of the evidence produced here, both Colenbrander and Bowen Rees would benefit from biographies of their own. Both were active in Matabeleland over a long period of time and were held in high regard by the Ndebele themselves, yet they made very different choices, Colenbrander effectively selling out to Rhodes, something one senses Bowen Rees would never have considered doing. But however, important these written sources are, it is obvious from the outset that this book is to a large extent based on oral history and tradition. From the time, over twenty years ago, when she first decided she wanted to write a biography of Lozikeyi, Clarke has built up a long list of informants, many of them linked by kinship with the Queen, and from these she has managed to create a remarkably detailed account of the different phases of the Queen's life. In this she has been greatly helped by Pathisa Nyathi, who has himself written extensively on Ndebele history and culture, and whose name appears in the footnotes far more than any other; in that sense, therefore, this book is a true collaboration. Of course, oral history, particularly at this remove of time, can have its own problems of interpretation, but Clarke has done her best to test the information she has been given, and on balance the majority of her conclusions seem as soundly based as it is possible to be given die nature of the evidence. The early chapters which discuss the political, cultural and religious makeup of the Ndebele kingdom, and which stress the importance of the complex ties of family and kinship which held it together, can be hard going for the unfamiliar reader, but fortunately at the end of the book is a whole series of family trees, genealogies and glossaries which are a real aid to understanding how and why Lozikeyi Dlodlo came to be Lobhengula's senior queen and the significance of the religious rituals in which she played a key part. …