Plumtree

Plumtree is the Zimbabwe side of the Ramokgwebana crossing from Botswana, a railway town of about 14,500 people that most drivers see only through a windscreen. It grew up around the railway station of the late 1890s, but the ground around it is older history: Kalanga country, and the gateway through which every hunter, trader and missionary had to ask the Ndebele king's leave to come in. The memorials, the old mission and the school make more sense once you know that.

1. About 1050 to 1683

   The Kalanga trace their ancestry to the late Leopard's Kopje farmers of around 1050, and are linked to the early states of Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe and Khami. Their Butua kingdom collapsed in 1683 when Changamire Dombo, himself part Kalanga, marched his army on its capital. source

2. 1864 to 1890

   From 1864 to 1890 the Ndebele kings Mzilikazi and Lobengula made every outsider come in by one route, the Hunters' Road from Tati through the Mangwe Pass, and wait at a kraal on the road until the king 'gave the road', usually in return for a gift such as a salted horse or a musket. The hunter John Lee farmed in the Mangwe valley and acted as the kings' customs and immigration man; he moved his house north of the Mangwe drift in November 1870. source

3. 1887

   Jesuits under Father Peter Prestage opened Empandeni Mission on land Lobengula granted them. Few came and there were no converts at first, and Prestage withdrew, then returned in 1890 with the Pioneer Column that occupied Lobengula's country. In the hungry years of 1896 and 1897 he wrote that ten of the twenty-four people he had baptised had died soon after, and he put it down to starvation. source

4. 1896

   In March 1896 the Ndebele rose against the British South Africa Company, in the war also called the First Chimurenga. The Mlimo, their spiritual leader, blamed the settlers for the drought, the locusts and the cattle disease rinderpest, and ordered the Mangwe Pass left open and unguarded so the settlers could be driven out through it. An informant told Bonar Armstrong, Native Commissioner at Mangwe, where the Mlimo's cave was. source

5. 1897

   The railway north from Mafeking reached Bulawayo by way of Plumtree in 1897. George Pauling's construction train No 289 pulled into Bulawayo on 19 October and the line was opened there on 4 November, a year earlier than the contract date. source

6. 1902 to 1930s

   The Railway Mission started Plumtree School in 1902 for railwaymen's children, in a rondavel (a round thatched hut) in the garden of the S. J. Smith family. Under Bob Hammond, headmaster from 1906, it was rated among the ten leading schools in the Commonwealth by the 1930s, and many of its leavers joined the Native Administration Department as native and district commissioners. source

7. 1983 to 1987

   Gukurahundi reached this district too. The Fifth Brigade, a North Korean trained army unit answering to Prime Minister Robert Mugabe's office, killed thousands of civilians (most scholars put it at twenty thousand or more) across Matabeleland and the Midlands, and Kalanga as well as Ndebele people were targeted. A 2021 paper by Thembani Dube looks at the part the police played in Bulilimamangwe District. The Unity Accord of December 1987 ended the fighting. source

8. 2003 to 2022

   Bulilimamangwe District, nearly 300,000 people, was split in 2003 into Bulilima and Mangwe districts and Plumtree town, with the railway line through town as the boundary between the two. The 2022 census counted 14,459 people in Plumtree, up from 11,660 in 2012. source

Languages

The town speaks TjiKalanga and isiNdebele, with Setswana heard mostly along the Botswana line. The baKalanga (Kalanga people) had their own name for the town, Getjenge. source

Kalanga as an official language

Kalanga became one of Zimbabwe's 16 official languages in the 2013 constitution. Something over 300,000 people speak it in Zimbabwe and as many again in Botswana, where it has no official status. Nobody has ever run a language census in Zimbabwe, so those numbers are estimates. source

Rain and Mwali

The Kalanga are known for rain-making through Mwali (Ngwali), their Supreme Being. At the Njelele shrine the Wosana, high priests of Mwali, come from Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa to plead for rain, in black skirts for the dark clouds heavy with rain and white for the raindrops. source

The town's names

Wild plums, ntungulu in TjiKalanga, grow all round the town with the marula trees. The town is often called Titji, meaning station, after the railway that came through around 1897. source