This study is intended to be more than a narrative history of civil-military relations in the pre-colonial Ndebele society (located in what today is the Matabeleland District of Rhodesia): it seeks to stimulate interest in, and to develop a systematic framework for, investigating and evaluating the character of militarism in Ndebele society, and in pre-industrial, subsistence-level societies in general. Hopefully, it will provide insights for broader application in examining modern civil-military relations in both African and non-African societies.

The study has been developed within two methodological frameworks. The first endeavors to apply current theories of fragmentation and fragment societies (Hartz, 1964) to the study of non-Western society. The Ndebele were a Nguni fragment of the Zulu Kingdom (Omer-Cooper, 1966; Lye, 1969). Like the early white settlers in America, Canada, South Africa, and Rhodesia, they were forced to cope with problems of migration, conquest, settlement, and rapid incorporation and assimilation of indigenous peoples. Also, like the settlers, the Ndebele had to restructure some of the institutions of their parent Zulu culture to meet the challenges of their new environment. As a fragment people, they had to institute new formulae for self-identity, self-determination, and nationalism.

The second framework is a broad, interdisciplinary approach to the study of civil-military relations. It is assumed that civil-military relations of any society should be studied as a system composed of interrelated and interdependent elements. The most important of these are: the structural position of the military institutions in the society; the function and influence of the military in politics, in public administration, and the society at large; and the nature of the military ethic compared to the dominant political ideology of the society.