Over a 1000 years ago three of my distant relatives who were tribal leaders on the Scottish Border with England, were taken prisoner by English troops and hanged for treason. Their crime? Supporting Robert, the Bruce in his struggle with England over Scottish independence. In the subsequent war, Bruce was defeated and my distant relatives fled Scotland and settled in County Cork, a part of what is now Northern Ireland. They were fiercely Protestant and formed the foundations of the Protestant/Catholic divide that has plagued Ireland for hundreds of years.
I am by descent a Graham of the Graham Clan in Scotland and have the right to wear a Kilt and attend Clan gatherings. We use the Clan motif of a shield and a heron as our “totem” with the inscription of “In God we Trust” on our letterhead. When I tell Zimbabweans that I have a “totem” and belong to a Clan by descent – they are astonished. Even more astonished when I can cite my ancestors back to 1036 AD.
Has this got any relevance to my life today as an African by birth and choice? In 1876 my Great Grandfather – G W Cross came out to South Africa in a sailing boat and took up the pastorate of a small Baptist Church in Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape. He never returned to Ireland and died in South Africa. All his working life in South Africa he regarded himself as an African. My Grandfather, even more so and played a key role in the country right up to his death in 1953.
I have no known relatives in Ireland or Scotland but when I visited Scotland for the first time with my family, I felt an uncanny sense of belonging in the Highlands. A sense that these people were somehow related to me – I get no such sense in England and Europe, in fact there I feel decidedly foreign. Dublin has the same effect on me. When my son went on a “walk about” in Europe one year, he disappeared for a few days in Belfast and a few years later married a girl who had been studying nursing there. She was born in Zimbabwe but is as Irish as you can be, we call her “Wonder Woman”.
In Africa, historical tribal roots are much more recent and influential. Before colonial settlement here in 1893, the tribes of southern Africa were in a state of almost constant conflict. When the Afrikaners, fleeing British colonial rule in the Cape, arrived on the Transvaal Highveld, they found it deserted, villages burnt and the land littered with skeletons. This followed a campaign by the Zulu King to dominate, assimilate or destroy the smaller tribes in the hinterland.
The States of Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana were created as “protectorates” by the Victorian State to protect their populations from the marauding Zulus and their compatriots. Even today, people who live in Zimbabwe remember the stories by their forefathers of the raids by the Impi’s of Mzilikazi and Lobengula. The elders in the Ndebele Tribe also remember the raids, but for a totally different reason.