Conveying relief. Whew. Not that I am provided with cover, but that my obvious sins have been corrected before the graver ones are revealed. I mean, the obvious sins in my argument in my second chapter corresponding to the flood inward of an idea of heightened interest in place and defense and wider alliances/bigger chiefdoms, called rozi. I had to decide whether to go against JV and say, "I believe it is based on Shirazi," and so dates back to Great Zimbabwe, which is then ipso facto apparently suggested as having hosted a "Shirazi" dynasty, etc. You get the picture: it looks from a distance like walking into the Hamitic Hypothesis volume two. Even so, I can't get out of my mind the odd coincidence of relatively rare r --- names. Even so. Even so, I gave up.
Gone is everything that can't be shown without a thorough survey of Shona and Setswana and Sesotho usages a la the Schoenbrun and Ehret and JV approach. Yet it turns out that the disagreement between Ehret and JV is bigger in JV's view than their agreement, and they are the masters of the lexicostatistics etc. approach. Let me put this delicately: I have some . . . problems with establishing proto-meanings for conceptual words etc. with their approach. But I grant it is great for sheep and goats and types of sorghum.
So I've just saluted them all from afar now, so to speak, in my revision. Now, all I say is something that JV has no objection to in principle: the argument that rozvi - rozi - rotse is a continuum of phenomena, that the continuum bridges Shona-"highveld" i.e. Tswana - Sotho - Pedi languages, that Shona v. S.A.'n highveld has been overemphasized to create a false image of tribal organization on the highveld. And the twin-court reading of oral tradition. So it is much shorter now . . .
To return now to this commentary. The historian always has to ask him or herself, "What do I believe actually happened." This is very important. If that cannot be answered honestly, you cannot go forward. I believe that ethnicity has blinded scholars to wider shared phenomena and that rozvi - rozi - rotse are related, but developed differently in different places. I accept that Shona ZCP sites are more complicated than highveld settlements as lines written in mud and stone. But I do not accept the binary: Shona developed civilization of ZCP in Mapungubwe and Zimbabwe, while plus sa change highveld settlements were and remained tribes.
The same kinds of associative devices productive of a torwa could make alliances into brotherhoods in the language of the highveld, and even alter genealogies. That much I learned in Lerala years ago. When one considers that writing freezes memory, we have to assume there is a palimpsest and that the usual rules of less clarity and richness in the middle period is followed i.e. the "hourglass." There is a trans-ethnic kind of phenomenon, where blood descent has blinded historians of the SA and Zim elevated agrarian towns' relationships and mutual intercourse, showing the complexities of the development of forms of self-rule.
Most of all that there was a real politics operating that reached back before extant tribes, and that real ancestors were recollected all the time by highveld chiefs and their minions, and that genuine wisdom about the past and so the future was contained in their oral traditions. This leads to the argument re motebele.
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