Any reading of Ndebele protest poetry quickly reveals themes that revolve around the human condition in a situation of oppression: the need both for self-determination and for individual space in which to operate freely without the oppressive colonial presence. Nonetheless, a closer, more analytic, reading suggests that Ndebele experiences have changed little over a century of occupation, as if history keeps repeating itself. Jerry Zondo’s poem ‘Asingeke siyidilize imikhukhu yethu’ (‘We cannot pull down our shacks’) refers to the 1941 Land Husbandry and the 1943 Land Apportionment Acts, colonial acts that relocated the Ndebele to less hospitable, less productive agricultural areas. In independent Zimbabwe in 2005, there has been a similar dispersal of the Ndebele (together with other tribes of course) in a government initiative entitled Murambatsvina (literally “casting out the dirt”). Murambatsvina has violently ejected people from urban and semi-urban areas and unceremoniously sent them to rural areas where most of them have had no rural home or base. During these acts of dispossession, both governments made promises of a better future and justified their actions in these terms.
The Ndebele Past Revisited 
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