OUR columnist Dr Sekai Nzenza takes a critical look at the highs and lows of Zimbabwe’s protracted land question from the Land Apportionment Act to Command Agriculture.
We have the land. November is here. The rain is coming. Let us work hard. Kuti unzi murume, kunzi munda. To be called a man (or a woman) is to have land.
LONG before independence when land reform was a dream, my grandmother Mbuya VaMandirowesa stopped drinking beer, singing and dancing at the end of each October. You would see her shelling nuts and selecting the best red millet and maize seed. Some mornings, we saw her standing by the cattle pen, mumbling to herself saying. “Gore rino jongozi iri rinorima negejo?” This year, is this ox strong enough to pull the plough?”
Mbuya walked from one end of the field to the other. One time, we saw her with Sekuru Dickson, standing in the field that belonged to my mother. There was an argument about groundnuts. Mbuya was telling Sekuru that a woman, meaning my mother, must be allowed to grow her groundnuts. They walked to yet another field and we could see Mbuya angrily throwing her hands up and down and sideways, then shaking her head. My mother said they were fighting over land. Sekuru had four wives, with Mbuya being wife number one, VaHosi.
My father was her oldest son and the first to be allocated land when he married my mother. He was given a small piece of land which was not big enough for my mother to grow maize, millet and groundnuts. “Hausi murume kana usina munda,” Mbuya used to say, meaning, you are not a man unless you have land. But this saying did not apply to men only. You were not a woman or a mother unless you had a groundnut field.
Women grew all the crops, but groundnuts were and still are a woman crop. Our land was too small for a growing family. Sometime in 1971, my father wrote in his diary in ink: “We are suffering from land hunger. I shall educate my children so they can do something better for themselves.”
At that time, my grandfather Sekuru Dickson and Mbuya VaMandirowesa had something like four or five hectares of land. This land was allocated to them by Chisadza, a white envoy of the then Native Administrator. Mbuya used to tell us the story of Chisadza, one of the first white men to venture this far into the Tribal Trust Lands. Chisadza was not his real name. They called him Chisadza, meaning, one who gives sadza. Giving sadza was also the same as giving land.
Chisadza came here around 1940, 10 years after the Rhodesian government’s Land Apportionment Act of 1930. The Act ordered Africans to live in allocated Tribal Trust Lands or Native Reserves while the European settlers were given fertile land in good areas where there was plenty of rainfall.
After the First World War some British people came to Rhodesia to farm tobacco, maize and cotton. Later on more British settlers were supported by their government to come to Rhodesia and farm. There was an advertisement inviting people to migrate to Southern Rhodesia because there was plenty of good land and there was sunshine 365 days per year.
Mbuya said Chisadza arrived on his horse, accompanied by Native Assistants and Black Watchers or mabhurakwacha who rode on bicycles. They wore khaki outfits, pith Safari-type helmets and heavy brown boots. Many people had never seen a white man that close, let alone a fierce big animal called a horse, or bhiza. When others fled, Mbuya and several others stayed. Chisadza spoke in English and Mubhurakwacha translated.
The people were all ordered to sit under a big muchakata tree behind the village homestead. The horse stood nearby, while Chisadza told everyone that he had come to subdivide the land into individual fields. Each male head of the family was to be allocated munda, or fields of land where he would grow his maize, groundnuts, sorghum or whatever he so wished. But, terraces had to be built before anyone could plough because the land was rocky and rain washed away all the good soils. Terraces, or madhunduru as Mbuya and others used to call them, would safeguard the soils and stop it from being washed away to the rivers.
Chisadza rode his horse and his assistants followed behind placing big wooden pegs at the corner of each five or six acres for every male with a wife. Chisadza pegged the land from the river valley right up to the foot hills where we later built our village homestead.
In those old days, before independence, men left the village and travelled to look for work on the farms or in Salisbury. There was one bus that carried them along the road from Enkeldoorn, now Chivhu. On the right side there were thick jungles and virgin land.
The village bus also took us all the way to Salisbury for the occasional visit. From Chivhu we went through Charter Estates and we could see vast European-owned land full of tobacco and maize. Fat cattle grazed in the wide green pastures. We could also see tobacco barns and smoke coming out. The white farmer’s house was often a short distance from the main road and you could easily tell where he lived because there were colourful bougainvillea trees near the house. You could also see dams of water and sprinkler irrigation. The native workers’ little huts were crowded somewhere on the farm. As the village bus raced past the white owned farms without stopping, we used to see signs written: “Trespasses will be prosecuted.”
Later on, we discovered that the white farmers received a lot of support from the colonial government. In addition to all this support, there was legislation to benefit the settler farmer during the Great Depression of the 1930s. These included the Maize Control Acts and Cattle Levy Acts of 1931 and 1934. Then there was the Native Land Husbandry Act of 1951, which was responsible for controlling the utilisation and allocation of land occupied by Africans.
Our extended family has lived back here in the village since resettlement in the early 1940s. We have lived and farmed on this land, following the seasons. When November, the sacred month of the goat, mwedzi mbudzi arrived, no ceremonies could take place. The adults prepared for the coming of the rains. The rains came at the end of October or in early November. My mother and all the women and everyone in the village started work before sunrise.
We ploughed the fields and sowed maize, sorghum and groundnuts. The agricultural officers or Madhumeni came to the rural areas to monitor the use of lands and helped us conserve the natural resources. I recall times when we made madhunduru to help stop soil erosion and preserve the soil. Despite the poor soils, the land was productive because we added a lot of cow manure and mulch from the hills.
Today, most of our village land was inherited from my grandfather, Sekuru Dickson and all the uncles. The land is still not productive unless you add plenty of hybrid seed and fertiliser.
When land reform came, many people from around here moved to the resettlement areas on to land where most of the white men used to farm. They live on A1 farms, which is an average of six hectares each. A few of them managed to get A2 farms, which is an average of 40 or more hectares. Our uncle Babamunini Mabisho grows a lot of tobacco somewhere near Beatrice. He is a productive A2 farmer. We visited his farm during his daughter’s wedding in September.
Babamunini Mabisho is doing well. He has more than one hundred cattle, a big four-bedroomed house and a truck. His granary was overflowing with maize after the harvest. He made good money from selling tobacco this year.
During the wedding, Babamunini Mabisho slaughtered a whole beast, two goats and several broiler chickens for the guests. When his turn to give a speech as father of the bride came, Babamunini stood on top of a drum and reminded us about the time when Mbuya VaMandirowesa, my mother and the uncles used to fight for land back in the village.
Dressed in a shiny silver suit, white shoes and a red tie, Babamunini Mabisho said there was money to be made from the soil. “The white farmer had a loan given to him by the bank. He had knowledge and he used cheap labour. We do not have money, we have little knowledge, but we have energy,” he said. He then went on to praise the Government initiative called Command Agriculture and how he has benefited from it. People clapped hands.
Babamunini Mabisho said we must not forget to look back to the past and celebrate the hard work of our parents and grandparents. “Takapiwa minda. November asvika. Mvura iri kuuya. Ngatishande,” he said. We have the land. November is here. The rain is coming. Let us work hard. Kuti unzi murume, kunzi munda. To be called a man (or a woman) is to have land. ◆ Dr Sekai Nzenza is an independent
writer and cultural critic.