Agricultural History of Rhodesia

     Shona were in general skilled agriculturalists who enjoyed a degree of prosperity.  However, Shona agriculture was vulnerable to Shangwa (droughts or disasters).  Both their agrcultural skill and their vulnerability in the face of a harsh environment, explain the eagerness and rapidity with which the Shona availed themselves of the opportunity to become peasant producers at the end of the nineteenth century. 

     Shona farmers produced a wide variety of crops.  The basic grain staples were finger millet and bulrush millet.  Also widely grown were sorghum in white Southern African terminology.  Rice was grown by the Ndau group of Shona-speakers.  In various parts of the country tobacco, cotton, groudnuts, yams, cassava and sugar were also produced. 

     The Shona were exceppent hunters and fishermen.  Numerous wild foodstuffs were also collected from the plant and insect life.  The Shona made intelligent use of their harsh environment, and consequently were very responsive to the new markets created by the arrival of the Europeans. 

     Long-distance trade routes continued to run north-eastwards Tete and the other Portuguese settlements on the Zambezi.  Many Shona felt aggrieved when British occupation gradually brought an end to the gold trade with that area.  There was also a very great deal of local trade.

     The Shona's system of land rotation cultivation was that the land first used was abandoned and allowed to revert to fallow for an average of fifteen years, but it was deplored by the European settlers.  There were differences between Shona and European concepts of land tenure and the rights and obligations which went with the possession of land, and much subsequent conflict stemmed from these differences.  In Rhodesia, a European cannot sell 'his' land to an African; while in Shona society no one can dispose of rights to land to a third party, except to the next of kin in the case of senility or death.  Europeans tended to hold land as part of a very small community, generally the nuclear family; while in Shona society land was held by a much larger community. 

        Some Sona Trading with Europeans, c. 1890
                  (National Archives of Rhodesia).
 
 
 
 
 
 

                            Shona village, c. 1892 
                     (National Archives of Rhodesia).

                     Ndebele Village, c. 1897 
                (National Archives of Rhodesia).

     Though the Ndebele were basically agriculturalists, cattle played an important role in Ndebele society.  By 1890 the herd numbered around a quarter of a million, and it is probable that the Ndebele settled on the Matabeleland high veld precisely because it was free of tsetse fly and was ideal cattle county.  Since they were not beef eaters, cattle were killed mainly on ceremonial occasions.  Also cattle were sold to white missionaries, traders and, after 1890, to the newly arrived setters.

     In some areas, cotton was grown, from which the Ndebele made durable garments, and there were no villages without a tobacco garden.  They provided the main market for the thriving tobacco industry of the Shangwe (Shona-speaking) people of Inyoka, near Gokwe. 

     The Ndebele discovered a system of underground granaries- later raided by the Europeans- which were well disguised, water- and air-tight, in which corn is preserved sometimes for many years.  The Ndebele occasionally stored up food enough to keep themselves active during years of scarcity. 

     Ndebele villages were moved approximately every ten years, when either the arable land had become exhausted or the accumulation of cattle was too great.  The people would then move and in the new villages they would build their huts in the relative position they occupied in the old, and the lands would be disributed in the same way. 

     Twenty years after the Europeans occupied Rhodesia, they started to offer serious threat to African cultivators, because their energies were directed almost exclusively towards mining.  The Europeans were virtually given a free hand to peg out their own farms, and were allowed to parcel out the lands of the conquered among themselves.  The Europeans were each promised farms of 1,500 morgen. 

     When the Europeans moved northwawrds, the inexhaustible supply of land began to run out, and wars were waged on African societies specifically for land. 

     The late nineteenth century, there was a mineral revolution, which dramatically increased the demand for African labour and offered substantial incentives to Europeans commercial farmers. 
 

                          European land in the 'Maize Belt'.
        (An Agricultural Survey of Southern Rhodesia, 1961)