“Small House! The Cross’s Religiously Modified Institution.” A Historical Cultural Materialist Approach to the Genesis, Growth and Development of Small Houses in Zimbabwe

Abstract

The family is the most important basic social institution in any state since time immemorial. It is from this institution that clans, tribes and nations were born. It was the center of the means of production. Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular, the family system tallies with the religious or the ideological system or vice versa. African Indigenous Religion (AIR) is a religious ideology anchored on communalism and it is anti-individualism in the same way the African family system operates. Through the historical cultural materialist approach this paper argues that the “empire” (imperial states) disrupted, dismembered and destroyed the pristine African family institution through its pervasive tool; “the cross” and its willing agents. The cross (church/temple or Christianity) and its agents criminalised the communal family for the individualistic idealistic family. Individualism is not an African value, it is a foreign model and as such foreign models will not work to the expectations of Africans. Among other causes, the cross, through cultural hegemony gave birth to the “small house” in Zimbabwe. The church is an anti-structure institution to the Zimbabwean communal kinship system. It is the argument of this paper that the cross was developed and deployed to criminalise, shame and stigmatize the African family or kinship values (among them polygamy) resulting in nefarious clandestine legitimation of an illegitimate Western construct “small house”. A family is ideologically unique and as such the conception of a family with regard to the religion of the empire is individualistic as its Christian religious ideology is. The paper goes behind the present through solely focusing on the historical cultural and material conditions that led to the genesis, growth and development of the ‘small house’ in Zimbabwe as an offspring of the church. This chapter concludes by arguing that the small house is a genetically modified institution of the church.