'Where to touch them?' Representing the Ndebele in Rhodesian fiction

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Periodical article

Title:	'Where to touch them?' Representing the Ndebele in Rhodesian fiction
Author:	Chennells, Anthony
Year:	2007
Periodical:	Historia: amptelike orgaan
Volume:	52
Issue:	1
Pages:	69-97
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Zimbabwe
Subjects:	Ndebele (Zimbabwe) images literature political history
Abstract:	This paper examines representations of the Ndebele in Rhodesian fiction from the second half of the 19th century up to the 1970s. For nearly 50 years before the British South Africa Company's invasion of Mashonaland (present-day Zimbabwe), the Ndebele served different and even contradictory functions in the British imagination. Early missionaries and travellers represented them as superior to other people in the far interior. Only when they were seen as standing between Britain and Mashonaland, did more hostile representations prevail and then they were reported as simple savages. The most influential fictional representation of an idealized Ndebele were the Kukuana of H.R. Haggard's 'King Solomon's mines' (1885), who while being savages, showed a capacity for nobility from which whites could learn. Notes, ref., sum. in English and Afrikaans. [Journal abstract]