1 - Introduction: The Basotho and the Politics of Belonging in Southern Rhodesia

Summary

When I began doing research on the Basotho community in the Dewure Purchase Areas in Gutu District in 2005, I was working under a number of assumptions. Some of the assumptions were that the Basotho migrants had largely been integrated into the local community; that they had lost their language and that nothing set them apart from the rest of the farmers in the Dewure Purchase Areas except ownership of their community farm, Bethel. My initial interviews seemed to confirm this image of an immigrant community that had almost seamlessly managed to integrate itself into the local community and had also adopted the local language. At that stage of my research, my hypothesis was that the Basotho community's sense of belonging was built on gradual integration into the local community, which was helped by their ownership of freehold land as well as their close interactions with the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) missionaries and colonial officials.

However, when I returned to do more fieldwork in 2009, I noticed a number of things I had missed in my initial fieldwork. One incident in particular captured the complex nature of the Basotho's, and, perhaps other immigrant groups’ sense of belonging in Zimbabwe. In August 2009, I had the opportunity to attend a memorial service of a deceased member of the Basotho community who had been one of my key informants in 2005. During this memorial service, I noticed that members of the community sang some hymns in Sesotho which may have been intended to exclude non-Sesotho speakers. As well as singing in Sesotho, they used their language when speaking among themselves, yet in their everyday interactions they ordinarily use Chikaranga (a local dialect of Chishona). Sotho etiquette was also used in interactions between kinsmen.

From this incident, it became clear to me that there were certain contexts where the Basotho (see explanation of the name on p. 13) expressed their ‘Basothoness’ more explicitly and others that constrained them. Thus although over the years the Basotho have seemingly been assimilated into the local community, this situation revealed that, alongside their interaction with their Karanga neighbours, they have also maintained a great deal of ethnic particularism. Basotho particularism was usually performed during funerals, memorial services, weddings and other gatherings where the Basotho retreat to their kinship networks, speak in Sesotho, adhere to Sotho etiquette and even sing church hymns in Sesotho.