My evidence is anecdotal, sketchy and based on unsourced information, but a boyhood spent there lends me confidence to back my hunch. My fears are sharpened by those in Zimbabwe to whom I have been speaking this week.

The majority Mashona tribe who occupy the richer, northern part of the country centred on Harare, may soon be urged by their leader, Robert Mugabe, and his Zanu (Patriotic Front) governing party into a genocidal bid to take from the southern Matabele (“take back”, he would say) the lands which the Mashona believe were stolen from them more than a hundred years ago. The situation has parallels with Kosovo. The plan would be to drive the Matabele, by terror and by massacre, over the southern borders of Zimbabwe whence (in some Mashona minds) they came.

A little history is useful here. Much is disputed and what follows is the white settlers’ version, and reality may have been cloudier: but this story of black-on-black aggression suits the modern, militant Mashona viewpoint among whom it has taken hold. It gives their tribal nationalism a narrative.

In the 19th century much of what is now Zimbabwe was inhabited by the Mashona people and smaller associated tribes. There was no central command structure, just a shared cluster of dialects around a recognisable language. They were pastoral people: subsistence agriculturalists.

To their south, in what is now South Africa, the Zulu people had coalesced into something like the Romans of southern Africa. So ferocious was Zulu imperial policy — the choice was between subordination and extermination — that splinter groupings fled in revolt from the hub. Thus were the Swazi people established in what is now Swaziland. And thus, under Chief Mzilikazi and others, around the middle of the 19th century, were the Ndebele (or Matabele) people established in and around what is now the south of Zimbabwe, centred upon Bulawayo, dispossessing the Mashona. All spoke, and speak, a Zulu-like language.

By massacre and pillage the Matabele pushed the less warlike Mashona north. But at the end of the 19th century, Rhodes, Empire and the British South Africa Police froze the tribal map along lines close to the present division between Mashonaland and Matabeleland.

Each of the two peoples in succession later rose in rebellion against the whites. The Matabele rebellion was brave, focused and short: a military campaign ending in total military defeat. Valiant Chief Lobengula (who had visited Queen Victoria with a tribal delegation to beg for his people’s rights) was killed. The Mashona rebellion was more insidious, slow-burning, sporadic and difficult to quell, but it was quelled. Mashona ideologues call this uprising against the white settlers “the first Chimurenga”. They call the uprising of combined Mashona and Matabele freedom-fighters against Ian Smith’s Government during the 1960s and 1970s “the second Chimurenga”, which they believe will not be complete until white farmers are removed from their land and it is given back to the Mashona and their friends.

Thus, tribal historians may think, comes the end of tribal history.

They may be wrong. A document I have seen gives chilling voice to what I know goes already with the grain of a Mashona version of the past.

The document speaks of “the third Chimurenga”. What this would be is all too clear: a Mashona crusade spearheaded by Zanu (PF) to drive the southern Matabele, of whom there are millions, off their land. The massacre (by North Korean-trained Zimbabwean Government forces) of at least 3,000 and up to 7,000 Matabele in the 1980s, well-documented yet somehow never properly noticed, could be a terrible augury.

The full document (see link on right) has been doing the rounds only recently among concerned people in Zimbabwe, but appears to date from the earlier years of Mugabe’s presidency. Its authorship is unknown and I cannot certify its authenticity — that it might be a Matabele scare story remains a possibility — but to me it has every appearance of having been written by a literate, well-educated tribal zealot of a racialist-fascistic turn of mind, with a vituperative if stilted command of English, Marxist jargon and a biblical style. I would guess the author is a mission-educated Mashona man: a “blue-skies” thinker and propagandist in Zanu (PF), not an active politician. The document seems intended for an inner-core and calls itself a “progress review on the 1979 Grand Plan”.

Mugabe is extolled as a Mashona Jesus, a “precious present” from history and “perfect embodiment of all our cultural norms and values” who has “an incredible consciousness of who we are as a people”. After a few pages of this and some routine attacks on Western imperialists, Tony Blair et al, the paper moves to its thrust: “For many years both the Ndebeles and Europeans were living under a shameful illusion that the crimes of their forefathers had been forgiven and forgotten ... Is it possible that such heinous crimes as those committed by these people against the Shona can just be swept under the carpet because it is politically expedient to do so?

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