BOOK REVIEWS 685

The text consists of seven chapters, divided into four sections. The fIrst
section is a readable review of the state of research on aspects of Shona history in
the1970s as well as the contexts within which Beach gathered his infonnation and
formulated and reformulated his ideas. The bulk of the text (Section Two) provides
detailed microhistories of Shona dynasties on the Zimbabwean plateau and is
accompanied by two appendices-a discussion of the limitations in generational
dating, and ninety-six genealogies. Chapter Two covers the central and southern
Shona; Chapter Three covers the north-central plateau; and Chapter Four covers the
history of the southern plateau. These chapters show a bewildering history of
dynastic migrations and struggles over land. In fact, Beach notes that if one should
try to assimilate this material without prior knowledge, "severe indigestion may
result" (p. 27).
In Section Three, the author describes how oral historians, writers, and
mediums have refashioned oral histories to such an extent that much of the literature
is entirely unreliable. Section Four, the fInal section, is a reflective chapter on
Zimbabwean oral tradition as a genre. He concludes that the Shona audience will be
relieved to know that at least some of their oral histories are more or less true.
Chapter One is an interesting account of numerous aspects of Zimbabwean
historical studies and the context from which Beach's research emerged. It is
particularly useful for the descriptions of the history of the interest that the Rhode-
sian government's Department of Internal Affairs had long held in Shona history as
well as for his descriptions of how this, among many other factors, affected his
research. As an entertaining and frank: report, it will encourage readers to continue
reading as they begin to choke on the complexity of the next three chapters.
The detailed histories of movement across the plateau in Chapters Two,
Three, and Four, render any notions of ethnographic holism in Shona history
impossibly simplistic. Beach's study demonstrates that identity among the Shona-
speaking peoples is much more a matter of competitive affiliation with multiple
shifting local and regional allegiances than with the concept of a "tribe." Herein,
every microregion and totemic group described highlights a different history of
struggle between lineages over territory. Focusing on succession and the ways in
which dynasties compete over and claim territories, he shows how oral traditions
and ideas of political succession have changed as people have manipulated them for
political ends in different contexts. Hence he argues that one can better understand
the political positions taken by different chiefs at different junctures in history if one
fIrst looks at the ways in which they themselves came to power. Speaking to
anthropologists interested in succession, Beach concludes that there is no such
thing as a succession system for the Shona speaking peoples, merely a set of
conflicting tendencies played out differently in each succession dispute and ulti-
mately expressed in genealogy.
686 BOOK REVIEWS

In Section Two, Beach details some of the enormous variance in Shona

dynastic history. A few examples should suffice to demonstrate the type of material
he covers. Again, he emphasizes that there is no such thing as a Shona succession
system, rather that there is endemic conflict between brothers and sons over leader-
ship which can result in uneasy rotations of power between houses in the dominant
lineages. He describes innumerable examples of the diverse contexts of these
conflicts. For example, in one case he shows how political deadlock between ruling
houses resulted in an excluded faction recovering power only to lose it again by
fighting for both sides involved in the deadlock; later he details a case in which the
exceptionally long reigns of two chiefs without any succession disputes led to the
loss of knowledge of genealogies. Elsewhere Beach shows how although smaller
political units tended to be forgotten in the colonial period, one small dynasty
managed to extend its genealogy through the fame of the Chaminuka medium. In
the case of other small and relatively unimportant groups, he documents how some
of these dynasties have become important and retained their oral traditions as a
result of having been chosen for leadership as a matter of convenience by the colo-
nialadministration. In another case, he shows how an immigrant group came to
overshadow older dynasties, and in yet another account, he describes how a
dynasty that had been expelled before 1800 was still attempting to re-establish itself
in the context of the liberation struggle in the 1970s. Hence Beach is committed to
detailing complexity rather than in simplifying the data and constructing models of
Shona dynastic succession.
Shona dynastic histories reveal, it would appear, as many if not more
differences than similarities. In deconstructing the idea that lineages having the
same totems share a common history, Beach provides a multitude of examples that
make Shona political history enormously complex. These accounts will prove criti-
cal for the specialist reader. Beach has published broader and more accessible
overviews of this material in Shona and Zimbabwe 900-1850, in The Shona and
Their Neighbours (1994), and most succinctly and emphatically in Zimbabwe
Before 1900 (1984/1990). The general reader will probably be most interested in
Chapters 5 and 6, which are fascinating case studies of the ways in which histories
are constructed in different political contexts for different reasons-that is, in the
ways in which politics can influence the genealogies given in oral traditions and
written texts. He demonstrates how traditions are both "preserved" and "perverted"
by comparing Portuguese documents and oral histories recorded in the early colo-
nial era which have subsequently been elaborated upon in history books. The
important point he makes is that one can disceru why specific changes were made in
genealogies if one knows the political fields within which the histories were
recorded and the subsequent texts written.
Chapter Five was originally published in History in Africa (1983) and is
included here unrevised. Herein, Beach examines the construction of the Rozvi
traditions and the effect of these on subsequent histories of the Changamire Rozvi,
 BOOK REVIEWS 687

rulers of the most powerful state in Zimbabwe between the late l600s and late
l800s. He describes the earliest colonial collections of Rozvi oral traditions in the
l890s/l900s and the work of the fIrst literate Rozvi historians, and goes on to
demonstrate how these works and the ongoing political struggles over dynastic
leadership affected later Rozvi oral history traditions. Readers will fInd this an
absorbing account of changing versions of history, on the effect of history and
literacy on oral traditions, and also the manipulation and revival of history by
claimants involved in succession disputes who sought to revive the title of the
supreme ruler of the precolonial Rozvi in order to gain government subsidies.
Beach's conclusion is that precolonial histories have been signifIcantly altered by
the political contexts within which they were written-that is, in the conflicts within
dynasties, by the variable effects of the Mfecane raids from the south and subse-
quent colonial rule and, particularly, by revival movements as well as historians'
political motivations. In sum, Beach once again emphasizes that one has to read oral
traditions against the political contexts within which they were written.
Chapter Six is a revision of an earlier critique of Mutapa traditional history
published in History in Africa (1976). Titled, "The Changing Traditions of the
Mutapa Dynasty," this chapter is a thoroughly absorbing account of the feedback
between Native Depanment officers, historians, mediums, chiefs, and most
recently anthropologists in the invention of tradition. Through a critical analysis of
extensive information on the history of the Mutapa dynasty rulers, he compares
Ponuguese documents with the oral traditions and scholarly texts and shows that
the Mutapa oral tradition, the most widely accepted oral tradition of all (and one that
has been used uncritically by historians and anthropologists), is actually
"nonsense." In demonstrating how very cautious historians and anthropologists
need to be in interpreting oral traditions, Beach concisely and evocatively reviews
the growth and changes in this oral tradition over the course of four centuries.
This last chapter is particularly imponant for both historical and anthropo-
logical studies of religion and politics, for both Beach's empirical and non-relativist
positions. Through constraining historical speculation and employing rigorous
methodological doubt, he suggests ways in which the medium of Mutapa, George
Kupara, constructed his genealogy in order to authenticate his claims to territory in
the Dande province in the Zambezi valley. The result of this type of critique is to
have to push numerous previously accepted rulers of the Mutapa state "out of
'history' into the world of myth, invention and sheer carelessness to which they
belong" (p. 243). Here Beach incisively critiques the elegance of structuralist inter-
pretations of history (cf. David Lan's Guns and Rain: Guerillas and Spirit Mediums
in Zimbabwe, 1985) and argues, once again, that one has to understand the dynam-
ics of Shona politics in order to understand how genealogies are constructed
through ongoing succession disputes.
However, as Beach notes, the problem remains that Shona oral traditions
make little reference to spirit mediums, and as spirit mediums are so imponant in
688 BOOK REVIEWS

the succession process one might wonder how much history we really have here.
Indeed, a more detailed attention to the extensive studies of regional cults as well as
to the significant differences within Shona religion, as well as to the role of
marriage alliances, women, and ordinary people in dynastic politics, would be
especially useful here. In fact, his reference to the diversity within Italian dynastic
history as being analogous to that within Shona history is particularly revealing if
one tries to imagine what Italian history would be like without an adequate under-
standing of the relations between religion and politics and the marriage links
between dynasties.
Beach's skeptical approach to religion and history appears unassailable. He
rigorously seeks the "least unreliable" evidence through vigilant methodological
doubt, arguing that it is essential to be extremely circumspect about the material
from which one constructs academic history. Through assessing the reliability of
historical data and weighing oral traditions against documentary evidence, he
dashes the hopes that historians once held that they could trace Zimbabwean dynas-
tic histories back to the days of the rulers at Great Zimbabwe (125~1500).
Chastising the careless work of early researchers and the uncritical reliance of later
historians on these invented traditions, Beach demonstrates that the previously
established links with this period have resulted from the rewriting of oral traditions
in later centuries.
In conclusion, Beach notes that if both his foreign and local audiences
found Shona and Zimbabwe 900-1850 (1980) complicated, they will find A
Zimbabwean Past even more so, and furthermore, that even in their indigestion they
will complain that much of their history is still missing. More importantly, as he
suggests, many Zimbabweans will be far from happy about his relegation of so
much history to mythology or about his denial that mediums are actually possessed
by spirits and therefore accurate custodians of oral tradition. Though his decon-
struction of the way in which mediums, claimants for chieftainships, and historians
construct genealogies is both acute and fascinating, his rigid objectivist position on
truth and the illusory nature of possession will irk more relativist readers. There
would appear to be an irreconcilable difference between the academic and,nonaca-
demic vision of history, the former being unable to accept the fundamental premises
of the Shona spirit world as real. Because of this dilemma, and the book's critical
nature, I remain doubtful that the text will fulfill Beach's wish that it serve as a
bridge across which both academic and nonacademic Zimbabwean readers will
struggle towards a more reliable knowledge of the past The particular value of this
work will lie rather in its role in stimulating increasingly refined scholarship and in
illustrating the power of myth and politics in people's conceptions of history.

JONATHAN ZILBERG
University of lllinois at Urbana