adminClaude Maredza Correspondent
Let’s make this even more interesting.
Let’s assume that in one Moyo Chirandu family, a Moyo Chirandu brother was in Dombodzvuku’s army and therefore became a Rozvi, Dhewa and Moyondizvo/Mondizvo but another brother joined the Moyo Chirandu group that ended up in Uteve at Chimoyo in Mozambique and became a Duma on return to the mainland; What then do you have?
In one family you end up having a Rozvi, a Dhewa, a Mondizvo and a Duma from the same mother and father.
In fact, in the case of the Rozvi/Dhewa/Mondizvo brother of the same family, he is the same person with all these descriptions as they are mere descriptions of the same military which he was partof!
Now isn’t that laughable!
While its clearly laughable, it is also clear testimony of the meaninglessness of these Rozvi, Duma, Dhewa descriptions as they pertain to the Moyo Chirandus as they are useless descriptions whose only achievement is ending up dividing the Moyo Chirandu people more than uniting them, a totally undesirable prospect indeed.
In fact, the Moyo Chirandu confusion particularly as it regards the Rozvi part has so confused people, inclusive of Zimbabweans themselves, that you actually hear some funny arguments in various places.
One of the many arguments one hears is the misguided argument that the Rozvi didn’t build the Great Zimbabwe Monuments.
Such an argument is a result of total ignorance of what Rozvi means and how the term Rozvi came about, a matter which we have tried to illustrate above.
Again this usually comes about as the deliberate and intentional distortion which is brought about by white writers when they write about black people as we have illustrated at length above.
Great Zimbabwe was built around 1100AD.
At that point, there was nobody referred to as Rozvi as we have clearly demonstrated that Rozvi was a mere description of the military modus operandi of General Mutinhima Dhewa “Dombodzvuku’s” army as they pursued the Portuguese and in the process punished those Zimbabwean chiefs who had allowed themselves to be vassalised by the Portuguese.
This first Chimurenga to oust the Portuguese happened between 1675 and 1695, nearly 600 years after Great Zimbabwe had been constructed.
But the most important thing to remember is that General Dombodzvuku was the progeny or offspring of the same people who built Great Zimbabwe.
So, indeed, General Dombodzvuku and others aligned to those who built Great Zimbabwe through consanguinity have the bragging rights that their forefathers built Great Zimbabwe and therefore they can go on to say “we built Great Zimbabwe” even if their people who actually built the great city did so nearly 600 years before General Dombodzvuku’s time.
In other words, General Dombodzvuku belongs to his ancestors who built Great Zimbabwe and looking at the whole group as a collective, indeed therefore General Dombodzvuku can claim to have built Great Zimbabwe from the perspective of belonging to the collective which built Great Zimbabwe, which stretches 600 years backwards from General Dombodzvuku’s time.
Most importantly, we have clearly demonstrated that the term Rozvi is a description of General Dombodzvuku and his army and General
Dombodzvuku is a descendant of those who built Great Zimbabwe.
To then take the description Rozvi and then try and assign to it some strangeness to the general polity and populace of Zimbabwe of then and even now is not only very naïve and uninformed and ignorant but totally erroneous.
This is a white man’s distortion of black history.
It is like saying a branch from the same tree is now a tree by itself which has no bearing to the mother trunk of the main tree that branch is attached to.
That is clearly wrong because saying that misses the whole collectiveness of that tree and all its branches and roots.
In other words, it’s like saying a branch of a mutamba tree becomes so estranged from its being a mutamba tree branch to the extent of totally losing its identity and becoming a mushuku tree branch even if it’s still clearly a mutamba bearing the fruits matamba and not a mushuku bearing the fruits mashuku.
That’s clearly ridiculous but that’s what the argument that VaRozvi didn’t build Great Zimbabwe really amounts to.
VaRozvi is not a tribe. It’s a description of soldiers who are the offspring of the people who built Great Zimbabwe and these people got described as VaRozvi almost 600 years after Great Zimbabwe was built by their forefathers.
And being called VaRozvi was a mere description.
They were not assigned a new tribal name or a new tribe for that matter.
They remained the same Moyo Chirandu people (in the main because of General Mutinhima Dhewa Dombodzvuku, himself a Moyo Chirandu but the commander of the Zimbabwean national army of that time which was pursuing the Portuguese hence the term VaRozvi being more associated with the Moyo Chirandu) who originated from Dlembeu, the first Moyo Chirandu, himself another descendant of those who built Zimbabwe and other soldiers who were not Moyo Chirandus but were under the overall command of General Mutinhima Dhewa Dombodzvuku and these soldiers also came to be described as VaRozvi as this was a term used to describe the modus operandi of soldiers under General Dombodzvuku NOT a tribe.
So VaRozvi is not a tribe but a description of the modus operandi of soldiers.
So in that regard, while the description of VaRozvi came way after Great Zimbabwe was built, the descendants of those who built Great Zimbabwe who include those who were being described as VaRozvi have the inalienable right to brag that their forefathers indeed built Great Zimbabwe and by extension and inheritance and therefore as a collective, indeed the VaRozvi built Great Zimbabwe even if they were physically not there when Great Zimbabwe was actually built, but they were there by proxy, through their forefathers.
It is like a Zimbabwean child born after 1980.
Can that child not boast that “we” fought and defeated the British, who had colonised us and got independent from Britain in 1980 even if that child never actually witnessed the war of liberation?
That child is connected to that war by proxy through his mother or father or any relative of his/hers who fought in that war in whatever capacity and therefore indeed that child has the bragging rights even if he/she himself/herself never fought in the war of liberation against the British and those bragging rights derive from the fact that the collective of which this child is a member fought in the war of liberation against the British.
So it’s totally wrong to say the VaRozvi didn’t build Great Zimbabwe because they did by proxy through their forefathers who built Great Zimbabwe.
Claude Maredza is a member of the Moyo Chirandu (Duma) dynasty, specifically of Norumedzo Village ( KuHarurwa), Bikita, Masvingo, Zimbabwe and is in fact a Crown Prince of the Norumedzo Moyo Chirandu (Duma) Kingdom Royalty. He has doctoral level formal education and everything else below that besides other professional qualifications. He is also a well-known published author and film writer/producer/director/actor. Claude Maredza’s contact details are: e mail: [email protected]; phone: 00 263 (0) 77 2 382 099.
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