Detecting, Analyzing, and Contextualizing Oral Originals in European Documents

One of the most neglected methodological fields in the academic historiography of Sub-Saharan Africa is the use of early written European sources in the study of African historical contexts. A systematic methodological approach to these sources did not exist until the mid-1980s, when this lacuna was partially remedied by publication of the proceedings of the symposium on “European Sources for Sub-Saharan Africa before 1900,” which took place at Bad Homburg, in July 1986. To this day, the proceedings of this symposium serve as the foundation of the methodology for using early European sources.Footnote ⁸ Special emphasis at the symposium was placed on distinguishing and defining the concepts of sources “external” and “internal” to the African contexts of interest. Initially, recorded oral traditions and archeological evidence were defined as “internal” sources, unmediated by outside observers, whereas all the various sources written by Europeans were defined as wholly “external.” By contrast, according to conference organizers Beatrix Heintze and Adam Jones, “[a] great deal of the material we have about pre-colonial African societies probably originated from information given by Europeanized Africans or Africanized Europeans; and this grey zone makes it almost impossible to distinguish neatly between external and internal sources or between data deriving from the literate environment and from an oral one.”Footnote ⁹

In Gérard Chouin’s work on accounts by seventeenth century travelers to the Gold Coast, he contested the assumption that it is almost impossible to distinguish between the internal and external sources of the data in early European documents.Footnote ¹⁰ Using tools of discourse analysis, specifically the dialogic principle developed by Bakhtin, Chouin emphasized the need to deconstruct travelers’ accounts according to the different discourses or dialogues present in them. He argued: “When thinking about these documents as a patchwork of data related to different microcontexts, we penetrate their intimate structure, and far beyond the smoothed, ordered and unified literary surface, we observe the discourse in the making.”Footnote ¹¹ In this way he demonstrated that, indeed, we are still able to deepen our understanding of local thought.

The methodology presented in the paper is a continuation of Chouin’s effort, although it uses different tools to identify and analyze diverse components of meaning or informative units in early Portuguese accounts from the Zambezi valley.Footnote ¹² Based on information provided by the authors of the documents examined in this article, and on a textual analysis of excerpts from ethnographic descriptions found in them, we learn that substantial portions of the information in these documents originated from statements provided orally by indigenous informants, in their own language. In this paper, we show that we can detect and sort out these vernacular excerpts based on the types and degrees of translation and editing that the original information underwent. Using tools of discourse and textual analysis, we can reconstruct local voices, perceptions, and cultural conceptualizations relating to various political institutions, as expressed in vernacular form, from these excerpts.

If one of the following conditions are met, we can assume with a high degree of probability that a description contained in a Portuguese document was based on information obtained originally from a local person: (a) the author identifies his informant as such,Footnote ¹³ (b) the text contains local terminology, (c) the author provides an explanation attributed to a local point of view, using expressions such as they say or they believe, or (d) we find an uncomprehendingly literal translation of a local term in the text.Footnote ¹⁴ At least one of these conditions is met by every citation from Portuguese documents used in this article.

To extract local voices from Portuguese documents of the Zambesi Valley, we must understand the types and degrees of translation and editing that the local informant’s original information underwent before reaching its extant form in the Portuguese document.Footnote ¹⁵ We can detect whether certain information in the Portuguese document provided by a local person underwent literal or idiomatic translation.Footnote ¹⁶ If the original information underwent literal translation, the text is consistent with local terminology and concepts used in parallel sources. However, when the text purports to describe given practices or structures, it will not be consistent with their description in other sources. It is possible to detect whether information provided by a local person underwent idiomatic translation, or a statement of meaning rather than wording, because in this case descriptions of given practices or structures are consistent with other sources.

Content editing occurs when the editor eliminates information in the text that he deems to be irrelevant, or when he tries to clarify certain information for his readership. All the Portuguese authors omitted information that they thought was irrelevant to their purpose of describing local societies. To delete inconsistent or wrong information, the author had to know that certain information was inconsistent or wrong. The more knowledge the Portuguese authors thought they had about local populations, based on interactions with them or with local Portuguese with strong, but not necessarily knowledgeable, opinions, the more information they deleted from the text as inconsistent or wrong. As a result, a local concept is closest to its vernacular form in texts that are the products of uninformed literal translations.

Literal translations can be identified because of multiple meanings of a term in the source African language.Footnote ¹⁷ In a literal translation, the translator, who has not observed the context he describes, elects to translate one of the meanings irrelevant to the context into the target language, in this case Portuguese. If we detect an irrelevant translation in a Portuguese document we know that the Portuguese author did not witness the event he describes. For example, the word Mucaranga in different Shona dialects can be translated as “wife,” although it was applied to both men and women. It thus means a subordinate or dependent person of either gender. Portuguese authors who did not see the Mucaranga their informants described always translated the term as denoting a female, because for a contemporary Portuguese a “wife” could only be a female. A text that is the product of literal translation is a local vernacular description containing indigenous concepts in their original form – in this case, dependency or accountability regardless of gender – written misleadingly in Portuguese. It is mistranslated oral evidence from the period in which it was recorded.

Extracting a vernacular ethos or concept from extant Portuguese documents of the Zambezi Valley can be done only by comparing these distorting literal translations with other contemporaneous Portuguese documents that are products of idiomatic translation of the exact same practices or understandings.Footnote ¹⁸ Information transmitted orally by a person in his own language, describing a practice or purpose, includes elements of the basic ethos or tradition that validate the practice or ritual described. For example, a Christian person’s description of the Eucharist contains references to the Last Supper. The elements of the practice are arranged in a chronological sequence that correlates with the sequence of the narrative described in the tradition. For example, in the Eucharist, the element of the sacramental bread always comes before the element of the sacramental wine, because, according to the Evangelists, during the Last Supper, Jesus refers first to the bread and then to the wine.

The main phases and elements of the political ethos that explains the creation of any Zimbabwe can be extracted from an eighteenth-century systematic ethnographic description titled Descripção do Imperio de Manamotapa daquem do rio Zambeze. Footnote ¹⁹ we suggest that the passage in this document describing the funerary practices of the Monomotapa is the product of literal translation and linguistic editing of information transmitted orally by a local participant in the polity.Footnote ²⁰ Because this local person described a formal or collective ideological practice, the main elements of the political ethos that validate it are embedded in the description. The elements are arranged in a sequence of linguistic and cultural patterns that correlates with the chronological narrative sequence of the commentary that validates this practice. The text is as follows:

This text contains four principal sub-themes in the funerary practices for the deceased heads of the political entities composing the Mocaranga. To recover their original meaning as a local tradition, we compare each sub-theme with other descriptions of similar practices in Portuguese documents of the region that are products of idiomatic translations. This comparison will provide a vernacular explanation of the creation of the first Zimbabwe and of all the subsequent Madzimbabwe derived from it. The four sub-themes that compose this tradition are:

1. 1. The bereavement and the funeral of the Monomotapa;

2. 2. The installation of the widowed “empress” as guardian of the Monomotapa’s grave;

3. 3. In time, the site of the grave becomes populated;

4. 4. The death of the guardian “empress” and the installation of a new one by the then-reigning Monomotapa.

According to this vernacular tradition, the death of the Monomotapa and his funeral represent the creation of a Zimbabwe. It is perceived as the grave of the Monomotapa or as the dwelling of his spirit. The installation of the “empress” as the guardian of the grave explains the residing of the heads of any of the political entities composing the Mocaranga at a certain location. The mention that the site of the grave becomes populated in time illustrates how these locations became political centers and the way the relation between the population in them and their heads as guardian or successors to the deceased came to exist. The death of the guardian “empress” and the installation of a new one by the later Monomotapa substantiate the ongoing relations between the succeeding heads of the political entities and their ancestors on the one hand and with the local population on the other. This was done by providing them with legitimacy based on the contact established with the creation of the Zimbabwe while the successors are regarded as the embodiment of their predecessors in the position. The next part of the article attempts to decipher and contextualize the bereavement and funeral of the Monomotapa. It does so by detecting the literal translations in this part of the text and by recovering their original, idiomatic meaning.

The Grave of the Monomotapa as the House of his Spirit

The first clue suggesting that the text of the Descripção is a literal translation is found in its initial sentence, where the author states that the body of the deceased emperor is to be buried inside his own “house” (na sua propria caza). The translation is misleading. We have descriptions of the funerary practices of the populations of the southern portion of the Zambesi Valley dating back to the sixteenth century and modern anthropological research that contradict the statement that the heads of the political entities were buried inside their houses, or dwellings, or homes.Footnote ²² For the period when the Descripção was written, these descriptions included four of the five main political entities that composed the Mocaranga. These were the Monomotapa, Kiteve, Manica, and Barue. On the fifth political entity, the Sedanda, the documentation is relatively scarce.

The most extensive Portuguese documentation concerns the funerary rites of the Kiteve. Descriptions of these practices are found in Carlos José dos Reis e Gama’s Resposta das questoens sobre os cafres, sent by the district governor of Sofala to the general governor of Mozambique, Diogo de Sousa, in July 1796,Footnote ²³ another correspondence between the ambassador of the Kiteve, Xagora, and the district governor of Sofala, Jose Joaquim de Araujo Aranha e Oliveira, in March and April 1808;Footnote ²⁴ and in Senhor Ferão’s Account of the Portuguese Possessions within the Captaincy of Rios de Sena from the first decade of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁵ Slightly later descriptions are found in Sebastião Xavier Botelho’s Memoria Estatistica Sobre os Dominios Portuguezes na Africa Oriental, published in 1835Footnote ²⁶ and in João Julião da Silva’s Memorias de Sofala, written in the 1830s and 1840s.Footnote ²⁷

All these documents report that the Kiteve was buried inside a cave, where all of his predecessors were also buried. The cave was located on top of a mountain variously called Mugamo, Mungomo, and Maôe. The body of the Kiteve was taken there in a procession of his “lords,” who were led by the chosen successor. Before the body was taken to the mountain it underwent a detailed excarnation until only the bones were left, and these were then wrapped within the skin of a black cow. It was the role of the successor to deposit the remains of the deceased Kiteve, which according to Botelho were called Ruesso,Footnote ²⁸ inside the cave. The successor must also verify that the remains of the predecessors deposited in the cave have not been damaged.Footnote ²⁹

Confirmation that the burial place of the sequence of Kiteve was on top of a mountain is found also in documents from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Footnote ³⁰ In Ethiopia Oriental,Footnote ³¹ published in 1609, the Dominican Frei João dos Santos claimed that the body of the Kiteve was taken after his death to be buried on a mountain located near a town called Zimbahoe, where all his predecessors were buried.Footnote ³² Santos also mentioned that every year, in the month of September, the current Kiteve, with all of his lords and subjects, climbed this mountain to the location of the grave of the Kiteves and performed certain ceremonies in veneration of the spirits of his ancestors. Santos explains that during these festivities the Kiteve converses with a possessed person who speaks for his father.Footnote ³³

We have less information about the funerary practices of the heads of the other political entities composing the Mocaranga. Nevertheless, what we have seems consistent with the funerary rites of the Kiteve. The texts of Senhor Ferão and Sebastião Xavier Botelho describe the funerary rites of the Matema of Quissanga.Footnote ³⁴ On the Chicanga of Manica, the most detailed account found is in a document called Descripção Corogràfica do Reino de Manhica, seus custumes e leis. Footnote ³⁵ As in the case of the Kiteve, these texts describe the grave of the Chicanga and of the Quissanga as located on top of a mountain called Mugoma. Footnote ³⁶ Their remains were deposited inside caves that contained great treasures, guarded by lions.Footnote ³⁷ The anonymous author of the Descripção Corogràfica do Reino de Manhica described the processing of the body of the deceased Chicanga before it is taken to the grave in detail. The body is left to excarnate on a platform, covered with a white cloth. After only the bones remain, it is wrapped in a sack made out of the skin of a cow. These prepared remains of the Chicanga are taken to the burial place by his lords and princes.Footnote ³⁸

The later documents on the location of the grave of the Macombe, head of the Barue polity, are also consistent with the descriptions regarding the Kiteve, the Quissanga and the Chicanga. For example, in the 1890s, the German explorer Carl Peters claimed, as had Santos regarding the Kiteve, that yearly festivities were held at the locations of the graves of the local chiefs on the tops of hills and mountains.Footnote ³⁹ Peters also visited the Macombe in his compound, which was located in a town of five thousand inhabitants situated at the foot of a hill, which Peters and the Macombe climbed in order to seal a pact of brotherhood.Footnote ⁴⁰ We do not have sufficient information about the Sedanda, head of the last political entity that composed the Mocaranga.

Documents about the funerary practices of the Monomotapa are scarce. Except for the Descripção and Dionízio de Mello e Castro’s Noticia do Imperio Marave e dos Rios de Sena from 1763,Footnote ⁴¹ there exists Albino Manoel Pacheco’s diary from the 1860s that gives a fuller description. Pacheco specified that the Monomotapa and his lords were buried in a cemetery, or a designated plot of land, in graves, and not inside the houses where they had lived.Footnote ⁴² However, the most important description of the funerary practices of the Monomotapas is provided by an actual Monomotapa in a response sent to the Portuguese governor of Mozambique by Monomotapa Changara, in 1771.Footnote ⁴³ The response is in the form of a letter delivered by a Portuguese officer named Alexandre José Pereyra, who served at the Portuguese garrison of Changara’s Zimbabwe. Monomotapa Changara explained the procedure necessary to bring the body of his predecessor, Monomotapa Cariza, to a proper burial.Footnote ⁴⁴ The response by Monomotapa Changara clearly contradicts the statement in the first sentence of the Descripção, which claims that the Monomotapa was buried inside his own “house,” in the sense of a residence. At the same time, his response correlates exactly with all the descriptions of the hill- or mountain-top locations of the burial places of the heads of all the other political entities composing the Mocaranga. It reads: “Regarding the burial of the blind king, the emperor says he will not give that order unless the Nemessecha will say to the Matumbzes to carry his body to Mount Nhangoma, or Chumbe, where his Masanza will be made.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This passage shows that the proper grave for a Monomotapa was at the top of a Nhangoma mountain named Chumbe. The body must be carried there in procession by the lords of the land, and his Masanza should be made in that location.

It is clear that the heads of all the political entities that composed the Mocaranga were buried on mountain or hill tops. In the case of the Monomotapa, the Kiteve, the Chicanga, and the Quissanga, this mountain was called similarly Mungoma, Mungomo, or Nhangoma. Footnote ⁴⁶ The consistency in the elevated locations of the burials of the heads of the Mocaranga derives from the fact that all these procedures were validated by the same tradition recounting the migration of the founding ancestor of the entire population of the Mocaranga. The fullest account of this constituting tradition in the extant documents of the period is in the diary of Albino Manoel Pacheco, relating that this ancestor, called Mutota, had died during the conquest of the land on top of a mountain named Chitácaxangõnha. Footnote ⁴⁷ Based on the consistent descriptions of mountaintop burials of deceased heads of the Mocaranga polities, we can conclude that the literal translation of the “house” in the first sentence of the Descripção as a residence is wrong. We saw that neither the Monomotapa nor the heads of the other political entities of the Mocaranga were buried inside the houses in which they had lived.

But the statement by the anonymous author of the Descripção that the Monomotapa was buried inside his own house was not accidental; it is a misinterpretation of an indigenous concept. This misinterpretation derived from two of the referents of the word Imba or Nyumba in the local languages, to the dwellings of the dead as well as to those of the living, that is graves, or houses of spirits, as well as residences.Footnote ⁴⁸ To understand this double meaning in the word Imba, it is necessary to understand the local perception of death and the living spirits of ancestors.

One of the basic premises in the local cosmology, prevalent during the period of the Descripção, and at least since the time of the earliest written documents, is that the death of a person is not the end of existence but represents a physical transformation into continued ambient presence, as what the Portuguese saw as a spirit.Footnote ⁴⁹ The ancestral spirits, which are called Vazimo or Mhondoro, exert significant influence on the daily lives of their descendants and their communities. The dialogue between the presence of the dead and the communities of the living occurs at places where the spirits – or their memories – are perceived to reside. This site, indeed their grave, is described as the “house” of the spirits. For example, Botelho explained that “[t]hey believe that the spirits or Vaginos [sic.], as they call them, go to the grave with the bodies and there they stay as long as the most fragile relics are conserved.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Silva believed similarly that “[a]fter death all is transformed into a spirit, called Muzimo, which is present eternally in the grave together with the bones.”Footnote ⁵¹

The vernacular homonymy between house and grave (or house of a spirit) is clear in the Descripção, because the anonymous author mistakenly used the Portuguese word caza (house) instead of the word for grave a second time. The second time the word caza appears, the mistake is even more evident:

Translating the word Imba or Nyumba as “house” is wrong here, as it is made clear by comparing the practices of veneration described in this paragraph with practically every document in the Portuguese corpus.Footnote ⁵³ From the first Portuguese documents mentioning the practice, the offerings described by the author of the Descripção occur at the site of the grave and not outside a dwelling.

In Portuguese documents before the late nineteenth century, the word used most commonly to describe the palaces, courts, and towns of the Monomotapas, Kiteves, Sedandas, Macombes, and Chicangas is the word Zimbabwe (Zimbahwe).Footnote ⁵⁴ Most of modern research since the rediscovery of Great Zimbabwe explains this name as a composite of the words dzimba dze mabwe, which translates literally as “houses of stone,”Footnote ⁵⁵ but in Elliott’s Dictionary of the Tebele & Shuna Languages, from 1897, the word Dzimbahwe is translated “graves of the great.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The word Dzimba is the plural Shona form of the word Imba, dwelling, grave, or house of a spirit. The word Mabwe or Maôe, which da Silva and Reis e Gama described as the name of the mountain on which the Kiteve was buried, refers to both stones or important persons. Another possibility is that the word is composed of the prefix zi (the zi-ma or madzi class used to magnify a noun) and the word Imba. In this case, the meaning of the word Zimba is a “great house” (or a “great grave”). The ahwe is composed of the genitive particle (r)a-a and the possessive pronoun Kwe (rendered “hwe,” or his). Thus the word Zimbahwe can mean “his great house (or grave).” Note that the first sentence in the excerpt cited above from the Descripção reads: “After dying of illness, the Emperor is buried inside his own house.”Footnote ⁵⁷

The convergence between the palace of the head of a political entity and his grave is pronounced in the following passage of Antonio Bocarro’s Decada XIII, one of the most important mid-seventeenth-century documents on the Monomotapa: “They have another kingdom joint to this Mocaranga, which is the kingdom of Beza, in which the palaces of the past Manamotapas are situated, which the kaffirs believe to be a divine thing, inside them they bury all the Manamotapas and they serve as their cemetery.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Here Beza is not a kingdom per se but a Pondoro or the spirit of the first, or all preceding, Monomotapa. Albino Manoel Pacheco explained that No-Beza is the name of the spirit of Matópe, son of Mutota, the ancestor of all the Mocaranga.Footnote ⁵⁹ In a document called Relação da discripção dos limites da villa de Zumbo, written by José Pedro Dinis in 1801, it is mentioned that the populations surrounding the town of Zumbo had five Pondoros, which he described as the “souls” of the dead kings and princes. These were named Beza, Namaseca, Namacova, Nhamatoca, and Samarengo, and Beza was the superior among them.Footnote ⁶⁰ If we compare the attribution of superiority to the spirit of Beza with Bocarro’s identification of it as the burial place of the Monomatapas it becomes clear that the “palaces” or the Madzimbabwe of the late Monomotapas, specifically the Zimbabwe of Pondoro Beza, served as the graves of all the Monomotapas, and also as the palace or “house” or Zimbabwe of their spirits. Albino Manoel Pacheco explains that after Matópe died his spirit received the name No-Beza and that “at that site, until the present, his Zimbane exists, populated by many nanhae of both sexes.”Footnote ⁶¹

The fact that the Shona original word used by the informant of the anonymous author in the first sentence of his Descripção was indeed the word Zimbabwe can be inferred by comparing the syntax of the first sentence with the first sentence of a chapter called “Formalidade do enterro do Imperador” in Dionízio de Mello e Castro’s Noticia do Imperio Marave e dos Rios de Sena, from 1763.Footnote ⁶² The first sentence in the Descripção is: “Morrendo [1] o Imperador de doença [2] he enterrado [3] na sua propria caza [4] (…)”Footnote ⁶³ The first sentence of de Mello e Castro’s description of the funeral of the Monomotapa is: “Falecendo [1] por cauza de alguma molestia [2], hé sepultado [3] no seu proprio Palacio de Zimbave [4] (…)”Footnote ⁶⁴ All the words noted with the same numbers in the two texts are synonyms. Morrendo and falecendo both mean “dying;” de doença and de alguma molestia mean “of illness;” enterrado and sepultado mean “buried.” The last words, Caza and Palacio de Zimbave, are also synonyms that refer to the residence of the Monomotapa.Footnote ⁶⁵

The first sentence of the “Formalidade do enterro do Imperador” thus gives the Shona “Zimbave,” meaning place of burial, that confirms that the literal translation of the Descripção in Portuguese is inconsistent with the Mocaranga understanding of the practice it purports to describe. Its meaning in the local language, however, is accurate and corresponds with the local conceptualization of death, according to which the spirit of a deceased Monomotapa lives on at his place of burial, the grave being his “house,” or domain. This sentence explains the initial creation of any Zimbabwe, which is the death and burial of a Monomotapa, as well as his transformation into a spirit and the obligatory construction by his survivors of a “house” for his spirit. The next section will address the way in which the political relations or the local notion of sovereignty between the head of the system and its immediate subordinates is established.

The Widow of the Monomotapa as the Guardian of his Zimbabwe

Following his misleading explanation of the funeral of the Monomotapa, the author of the Descripção describes the role of the “empress” as the guardian of his grave no more accurately, as follows: “After this was done they catch the empress and they put her at that same place along with other four or five wives and with some men, so they stay there for all of their lives and guard the dead emperor.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This phase captures the local perception of the creation of the political entities composing the Mocaranga during the period under study, as attested by the fact that the sentence is also a literal translation of information originating with a local informant. We can attempt to recover the original meaning of the text by pointing out the multiple meanings in the local language of the terms used by the informant. The original meaning of the sentence correlates conceptually with the installation practices of the heads of the political entities composing the Mocaranga. The installations of a successor follow the funerary and bereavement rituals for the deceased heads of the local political entities and are perceived as inseparable extensions of them. They are validated by the same tradition that explains the funerary rites.

In the description of the placement of the widow as guardian of her husband’s grave, it is easy to identify some of the original terms used by the informant. The original word translated as “wives” was Vacaranga, the plural form of the word Mocaranga. Compare the above sentence with the equivalent one in Dionízio de Mello e Castro’s text from 1763: “This palace keeps serving as the place of gathering for all his concubines, governed by the most senior (…) the mentioned concubines have the obligation every day to put at the grave of the deceased emperor a big bowl with a beverage called Pombe and a plate with dough made of millet flour.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The idea behind both passages is the same: after the Monomotapa dies, his wives, led by his senior concubine or his empress, guard his grave and venerate his legacy. But although these two sentences are thematically parallel, their literal meanings in Portuguese are somewhat different, and the two authors use different terms. Mello e Castro’s use of the word concubines, as opposed to the wives in the Descripção, enables us to identify the same original word used by both the authors’ informants. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Antonio Pinto Miranda explained that “The wives [of the Monomotapa] are called Mucarangas, whose number is uncertain and at many times they surpass two hundred.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The author of the Descripção claims that: “The concubines are innumerable and they are for the enjoyment of the emperor, his vassals, and his soldiers, and all of them have the title of the emperor’s wives, which have the name of Mucarangas.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Friedrich Posselt later suggested that in certain contexts Mu-Karanga and Va-Karanga can also refer to a son or all the sons of these wives.Footnote ⁷⁰

From both earlier and later documentation we know that the word Mucaranga, which often refers to wife, can be applied to both biological males and biological females. It denoted all the people, males and females, who, according to modern scholarship, belonged to the ethnic group known as Karanga. Footnote ⁷¹ At least until the middle of the seventeenth century the Portuguese were aware of the usage of the term applying to a wife in the local language to refer to both males and females belonging to the polity. For example, Francisco de Monclaro, in the 1570s, and father Cesar Vertua, in the 1620s, noted that the Monomotapa referred to all the Portuguese as his wives and as his children.Footnote ⁷² The Jesuit Father Manuel Barreto, who served as inspector of the government of Mozambique and as Superior of the Zambezi River town of Sena, wrote in 1667 that “Mocranga is the name of the famous kingdom of the emperor of the Monomotapa, and the natives are called Mocrangas (…).”Footnote ⁷³ João dos Santos wrote in 1609 that “[t]he Manamotapa and all of his vassals are Mocarangas, the name they have because they live in the lands of the Mocaranga and for speaking the language called Mocaranga.”Footnote ⁷⁴

We suggest that the references to “wives” in the Descripção and in Mello e Castro’s text are literal translations because the objective situations they connote, a village or a population consisting of females governed by a female, do not correspond with the populations of both genders whom the Portuguese encountered. In the same period, the 1790s, when the Descripção was written, Carlos Reis e Gama discredited rumors concerning populations and armies composed exclusively of women circulating since the beginning of the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁵ These rumors had been refuted by João dos Santos, in the late sixteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus, the literal translation as “wives,” in Portuguese, in the Descripção contradicts Mello e Castro’s text of the observed normal populations the Portuguese found in the region. We infer that the vernacular word Vacaranga, used by the informants of both Mello e Castro and the author of the Descripção, denoted a general population of both males and females. The explanation for the mistranslation is that the vernacular referred to people, of either gender, in relationships to the Monomotapa analogous to a “wife.” The vernacular term referred, in fact, not to individuals but to a category of political standing.

Note that Mello e Castro mentions a fact that does not appear in the Descripção, namely that the location of the grave of the Monomotapa serves as a place of gathering for all the “concubines” or Vacaranga of the deceased Monomotapa.Footnote ⁷⁷ According to our interpretation, this means that all the people, men and women, who belonged to the Monomotapa remain after his death at or near the location of his grave or Zimbabwe. The individuals would have included everyone whose standing related to the deceased.

The original term used by the informants, translated by the author of Descripção as “empress” and as “senior concubine” by Mello e Castro, was probably Nehanda,Footnote ⁷⁸ the first wife or great wife of the Monomotapa.Footnote ⁷⁹ In 1766, Antonio Pinto Miranda wrote:

In Pinto Miranda’s text, the description of Neanda, the first wife of the Monomotapa, correlates exactly with the corresponding sentence of the Descripção and with Mello e Castro’s text. Nehanda is the empress, and rules over the other Mucarangas of the Monomotapa, who serve her. According to Pinto Miranda’s text, she is also a Mucaranga.

From the middle of the seventeenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century, Nehanda is consistently mentioned as one of the great wives of the Monomotapa. In 1649 Antonio Bocarro provided the names of all the nine great wives of the Monomotapa, who according to him “have houses of their own, with all the functionaries the king has and many lands and vassals, and some of them have kingdoms attached to their houses.”Footnote ⁸¹ This description of the great wife as a sovereign, and with a domain of her own, with the same officers that the Monomotapa has, is entirely consistent with those mentioned above.

To understand the plural meanings of the title Nehanda and that of the great wives of the Monomotapa we must explain the roles and functions of the great wives and the circumstances in which the title of Nehanda was created according to Pacheco. Since the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had been aware that the title of the great wife of the Monomotapa and of the Kiteve was given to males, especially to individuals who ruled over populations on behalf of the Monomotapa or the Kiteve. For example, Francisco de Monclaro wrote that the Monomotapa in the 1570s designated Governor Francisco Barreto as his great wife.Footnote ⁸² He also wrote that one of the male officers of the Monomotapa, who was sent as part of his embassy, also had the title of the king’s great wife.Footnote ⁸³ According to João dos Santos, “This captain [of Massapa] is called by the king his great wife, a name by which he honours the Portuguese, whom he esteems and holds in great respect, such as the captains of Sena, Tete, and Mozambique.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Santos also explained that the local populations show great respect to these males, who are referred to as the king’s wives.

The meaning of the term great wife as a male authority is also found in correspondence dictated by the Monomotapas in the seventeenth century. For example, in 1620 Monomotapa Gatsi Lucere explicitly addressed the Portuguese governor of the island of Mozambique, Dom Nuno Alvares Perreira, his wife, and all the Portuguese subordinate to his wife as their common children.Footnote ⁸⁵ The most important document that describes the great wives of the Monomotapa is the Decada, written by Antonio Bocarro (1612–1617). Cross checking each of the nine names mentioned by Bocarro as the great wives of the Monomotapa with other documents shows that these are males embodying spiritualized, or abstract, entities.Footnote ⁸⁶

The circumstances in which title Nehanda was created can be found in Albino Manoel Pacheco’s 1860s diary. According to Pacheco, on his death bed, on mount Chitácaxangõnha, Mutota called his three male sons, Namangóso, Samarengo, and Matópe, and told them that the one who wanted to succeed him should marry their sister, Inhamita, whom he named as his heir. The only son of Mutota who agreed was Matópe. Following his accession to the throne, he gave his sister-wife the title of Nehanda, who became the first great wife.Footnote ⁸⁷ Note that in all the oral traditions captured in Portuguese documents that explain the constitution of the Mocaranga, four brothers are mentioned. The four brothers represent the Monomotapa, Kiteve, Sadanda, and Chicanga political entities of the time.Footnote ⁸⁸

To understand the title of Nehanda, we must examine the etymology of the name Inhamita, the first wife to hold the title of Nehanda, in the documentation.Footnote ⁸⁹ According to Pacheco, only Matópe agreed to marry his sister Inhamita, while the other brothers refused. In the oral traditions that precede Pacheco’s diary it is mentioned that the father of the four brothers, Mutota, sent three of them, Kiteve, Chicanga, and Sadanda to govern distant regions because they refused to recognize his sovereignty.Footnote ⁹⁰ When the father died, the son who remained with him at the primal court (or Zimbabwe) inherited his kingdom. According to descriptions dating from the early nineteenth century, the ceremonial recognition of the sovereignty of the head of the local political entities by the representatives, or headmen of their components during his installation is called Inhamatar or Inhamatações. Footnote ⁹¹ These Portuguese formulations derive from the vernacular word Inhamita.

During the Inhamatações, the insignia that symbolizes the recognition of sovereignty by the constituting lords is a hoe.Footnote ⁹² The author of the Descripção wrote that “[t]he way of their marriages is such that the father of the male speaks with the father of the female wanting to pass him a sign that is called Mufunhiva or hoe, after which the marriage is concluded.”Footnote ⁹³ Thus, the act of recognition of sovereignty, which according to the Portuguese documents occurs during the installations of the new Monomotapa, Kiteve, Macombe, and Chicanga, is represented by a constituting “marriage” between males representing an abstract (male) authority and a (female) population accepting it. The story of the marriage between Matópe and his sister, Inhamita, states the political partnership within which they acted.

The oral genealogy behind the sentence cited from the Descripção concerning the forced placement of the “empress” at the site of the grave describes the process of installing the heads of the political entities composing the Mocaranga, as revealed in the Portuguese terms used to describe this forced placement. The Portuguese author uses the word pegão, which means that she is grabbed by force against her will and positioned for the rest of her life at the location of the grave. Portuguese documents of the period contain parallel descriptions of the installations of the Macombe and the Kiteve, and also a few descriptions of those of the Chicanga and the Monomotapa, thus all of the political entities composing the Mocaranga. The act of grabbing the chosen successor of the deceased king by force, and his placement inside a house, is also repeated in these descriptions.

According to Botelho (Reference Botelho1835), during the installation of the Kiteve, before sunrise the queens enter the place where the chosen contender sleeps; they grab him by force and say: “We lock you here because we want you to be the king and to govern these people.”Footnote ⁹⁴ He then refuses to accept the appointment three times, claiming that he does not know how to govern. The fourth time he accepts the appointment.Footnote ⁹⁵ In 1857, Antonio Gamitto wrote that the ceremony installing the Macombe was initiated by locking the chosen candidate inside a house, where he remained for three days in solitude. He was then moved and locked in another house filled with smoke. Next, he is moved and locked inside yet another house that contains a tied crocodile on which he was seated as the new Macombe.Footnote ⁹⁶

According to Gamitto, following this seating the new Macombe in the same house was forced or tricked into committing incest with a sister. The following morning the sister departed to her own kingdom and was never seen again by the Macombe.Footnote ⁹⁷ Botelho mentions this constituting act of political incest again in his description of the installation of the Kiteve. He wrote that the new Kiteve must cohabit with each of his sister-wives for eight consecutive nights, after which the sister-wives also depart to their own component domains, or “kingdoms” as Botelho mis-translated them.Footnote ⁹⁸ João Julião da Silva also described the act of incest between the new Kiteve and his sister-”queens” during an installation in the 1830s and 1840s.

His description is almost identical to the contemporaneous one provided by Botelho, but Silva adds that it was called Cupenga Passa. Footnote ⁹⁹ According to the Dicciónario Cafre-Tetense-Portuguez from 1900, the word ku-Pinga means to hold an object tightly so as to not let it fall.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The word p’aza means hoe.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thus one prominent aspect of the procedure was grasping the fertility of the polity. Antonio Gamitto explained that during the seating of the new Macombe, he was positioned on a lion’s skin, called quitte, which was his access to the powers he thus controlled, in front of his lords and people and selected one of two objects: an arrow, which symbolized war, or a hoe, which symbolized peace and prosperity. According to Gamitto, the Macombe always grabbed the hoe, thus orienting his polity toward providing safety and continuity for its people.Footnote ¹⁰² Botelho also reported that in the following night each of the lords of the Kiteve, one by one “go Inhamatar with the king to repeat their declarations of obedience and vassalage.”Footnote ¹⁰³ As noted, the term inhamatar derives from the name of Inhamita, the first sister-wife of Matópe. According to the oral tradition reported in Pacheco, the marriage between the two siblings occurred at the death bed of their father, Mutota, and determined his successor.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

To understand why the author of the Descripção translated the forced positioning of the empress mistakenly as at the grave of the Monomotapa, we must consider two facts. First, according to the grammatical dictionary Arte da lingua Cafre, written in the 1680s, “This language, being very limited and lacking many words, does not have masculine, feminine, and neutral genders in its adjectives.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Thus, unless the Portuguese author of a text saw a “great wife” in person, he would not know whether his informant was referring to a male or a female person or political position. Second, in Portuguese documents the great wives of the heads of the Mocaranga political entities are defined as their sister-wives. According to the modern Dicciónario Cafre-Tetense-Portuguez from 1900, two phrases can mean “sister:” M’bare-mukazi and Mfumakazi. Footnote ¹⁰⁶M’bare and mfumo are said to mean brother, and the word Mukazi refers to a wife. Thus, the word sister can also mean brother wife. The most common title for a minor chief in the Mocaranga was fumo, or brother.

In A Political History of the Munhumutapa, Stan Mudenge attempted to explain a generic succession scheme in the political entities composing the Mocaranga.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He claimed that Portuguese ethnographic descriptions of the Monomotapa since the sixteenth century reported that the succession was based on primogeniture. He also showed, however, that in twenty-eight cases of succession between 1692 and 1902 recorded in Portuguese documents there was only one instance in which a son succeeded his father; all the other successions were recorded as results of military coups. Mudenge explained that, according to the Shona oral traditions, the succession system was based on an Adelphic collateral model in which a brother succeeds a brother until an entire generation of brothers has succeeded to the throne, after which the position reverted to the first son of the first-born brother of the previous generation. According to Mudenge, based on twentieth century oral traditions, each brother in the first generation represented a chieftaincy.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Although Mudgenge’s model is not consistent with the historical processes of succession reflected in Portuguese documents, his “Adelphic collateral” model corresponds exactly to our interpretation of the Descripção and Mello e Castro’s delineations of the great sister-wife or wives of the Monomotapa succeeding him. Each great wife who succeeded in the first generation created a new “house” or political domain. According to the oral traditions before Pacheco in the mid eighteenth-century, this was how Kiteve, Sedanda, and Chicanga had originally separated from the Monomotapa.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Although there are several second-hand descriptions of female sovereigns or “governors” with the prerogatives of “kings” in more than four hundred years of Portuguese documentation in the region, not one is based on eye witnesses. On the other hand, several Portuguese documents, from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century describe the Zimbabwe or the graves of the heads of the local political entities as guarded by a population living in towns near the mountains on which the graves were located. These populations are described as being ruled by a governor or mayor, who is explicitly described as the guardian of a Zimbabwe grave.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Since the sixteenth century, the ritual or practice of coerced placement of the empress dowager at the location of the grave, as depicted in the Descripção, is usually described not as a guardian but as an inhumation. Santos explained in 1609 that “[w]hen the Kiteve dies, his great wives have the obligation to die with him in order to serve him and to live with him in the afterworld, which is another one of their brutalities.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The same sacrifice is reported by the Jesuit father Francisco de Monclaro in the 1570s, with reference to the wives of the Chicanga: “It happened at the time I was there that the king of the Manica died, and they said that of their own will many of his wives committed suicide saying that they have to serve him in the other world. This I have only heard from a black.”Footnote ¹¹² Silva described this same ritual in the nineteenth century with reference to the Sedanda, but with one small, but important, difference, namely that the wives of the Sedanda were buried inside his grave: “Their kings or chiefs are buried in deep graves, and in them some of their most esteemed wives, so that they can serve him in the other world.”Footnote ¹¹³ In the 1860s Albino Manoel Pacheco refuted a notion common among the Portuguese referring to this same practice. Pacheco claimed that neither the wives nor any other person was buried with the Monomotapa inside his grave.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Note that the verb ku-Ika in the chiNyongwe dialect means both “to guard” and “to bury.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Analysis of the second sentence quoted from the Descripção regarding the forced placement of the “empress” at the site of the grave showed that its literal meaning in Portuguese was not consistent with African practices as observed by the Portuguese. But when we reconstructed the vernacular sense of this description we found that it corresponded to local conceptualizations of the installations of the heads of the local political entities composing the Mocaranga, and with the oral traditions describing the creation of these entities. The first sentence quoted above concerning the burial of the Monomotapa inside his home explains the circumstances of the creation of a Zimbabwe as the domain – or “house” – of the spirit of a dead Monomotapa. The second sentence explains the creation of the political entities composing the Mocaranga that he left. The heads of each of these political entities were perceived as guardians of the house of the spirit – or legacy, that is, the polity he had embodied – of an ancestor Monomotapa.

The Grave Becomes a Town

The following sentence in the Descripção requires little clarification: “After some time this place becomes populated and also has its lords.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ This is how a grave (the Zimbabwe) becomes a recognized political unit. As noted, until the end of the nineteenth century, the word Zimbabwe in Portuguese documents is translated most frequently as residence of the heads of the political entities composing the Mocaranga. The mention of the “lords” as emerging at the gravesites over time is important. In the Descripção these lords appear as the senior officers at the residence of the Monomotapa, which is his Zimbabwe. We saw earlier that Bocarro claimed that the great wives had “houses,” domains or Madzimbabwe, of their own, in which they had the same functionaries and officers as the Monomotapa.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The sentence in the Descripção describes the following stage in the process of creating a Zimbabwe, as the populations banished to the gravesite became recognized components of the polity over time.

The last phrase of the paragraph of the Descripção – “and when the said empress dies the current emperor has the obligation to give the title to another and to put her in the same Masanza, and as such they recognize her”Footnote ¹¹⁸ – describes the process of maintaining the memory of the deceased Monomatapa, as a component of the predecessors of the current one. Antonio Bocarro cites the same maintenance of the memory in the seventeenth century: “All these are the great wives of the king (…) and when one of them dies another whom the king puts in her place replaces her in the same house, state, and name.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ That is, when the Monomotapa’s great wives died, the successor received the name of her predecessor. We saw that the position of great wife may be held by a male, which explains the reference to “kings” in the following description by Santos regarding similar inheritances of named positions among the Kiteve: “This king they call Kiteve, a common name for all the kings of this kingdom. In this way, they lose the names they had before being kings and they are not recognized by them anymore.”Footnote ¹²⁰ This same emphasis on positional succession appeared in 1796 in Reis e Gama, and he adds that the names of the “queens” (or great wives) are inherited similarly.Footnote ¹²¹ Santos explains further that “The king who succeeds to the throne also succeeds as the husband to all the wives who were left by the dead king (…)”Footnote ¹²² Based on our understanding of the term Mucaranga as “wife,” this passage means that when a head of one of the political entities dies, the entire population is inherited by his successor, which creates political systems transcending individual lifetimes. The last element in the Descripção supplies the connection between the past and the present, a sense of recurrence and continuity. The current Monomotapa, Kiteve, Sedanda, Chicanga, Macombe, and the heads of all the other political entities composing the Mocaranga are perceived as the current guardians of the spirits of their respective predecessors, the deceased Monomotapas, buried in their Madzimbabwe.