In the 1950s, new political actors began to claim the Zambezi borderlands, which involved telling the history of state intervention in a very different way from Federal politicians and white popular writers. As a new educated African leadership emerged, they began to construct their own public histories, promoting their own connections to the landscape and protesting their exclusion. These new histories were cast in both ethnic and African nationalist terms; they gave momentum to the crystallization of two ethnic minority identities – Nambya in Hwange and Tonga in Binga – but they were also used in African nationalist mobilization, to legitimize the institutionalization of the Zimbabwean African People's Union (Zapu) in preparation for incursions by Zapu's armed wing, the Zimbabwean People's Revolutionary Army (Zipra).

The intellectuals who led these movements publicizing their history and culture had a powerful sense of their own marginalization, given the predominant discourse of Southern Rhodesia as a country of two African tribes. They also rallied against the stigma of being labelled primitive and accused the state of developmental neglect. Though the caricature of backwardness had been elevated in the popular writing on the dam, it had a longer history and was used by Africans as well as Europeans, as older pre-colonial political hierarchies and ethnic names had been overlaid with understandings of difference that hinged on a developmental continuum. The cultural assertion involved in these movements was encouraged by a shift in administrative policy in the early 1960s towards a traditionalist ethos hinging on the promotion of custom and tradition, and an elevated role for chiefs. Yet it was no accident that those living on the periphery of the state remained marginal in terms of the state's ethnic categories and understandings; rather, as Worby argues, it ‘reflects the degree to which the extension of state power and the refinement of ethnographic knowledge are processes that reciprocally reinforce one another’. The exclusion of those who complicated the state's predominant binary formulation of ethnicity was particularly stark in the way that language policy developed, especially when taken out of mission hands.

These ethnic mobilizations in the Zambezi borderlands were important for the emerging politics of landscape. As modernist cultural nationalist movements, they involved essentialized notions of culture that were territorialized and politicized.