WHEN Fredrick C. Selous explored the land of the ‘Great Zimbabwe’ prior to colonisation, he found the land abundant with wildlife, starkly contrasting with South Africa, where white settlers and sport hunting had wiped out large mammals to clear the land for agriculture.
Hunting played an integral role in African society pre-colonialism.
Historical research reveals that annual elephant hunts were a celebrated event of local chiefs and kings of Great Zimbabwe.
The incursion of early European hunters and the introduction of firearms resulted in a devastating decline of elephant populations and eventually other wildlife such as buffalo, antelope and zebra.
Indigenous Africans were forced to move further and further away from home in search of meat, prompting concerns among traditional leaders like the Ndebele king Mzilikazi and his son Lobengula who unsuccessfully attempted to impose fines and limit the movement of European hunters.
Strict traditional hunting laws, which forbade local communities to shoot female elephants or any female wild animal for that matter or take ostrich eggs, were also applied to Europeans and in one instance the famous hunters Selous and Martin were fined for shooting a hippopotamus against the wishes of Lobengula.
The indigenous Shona people of Zimbabwe had managed wildlife through their local traditions, killing those animals that were necessary mainly to compensate for weak crop outputs.
Certain species such as the elephant were held sacred and hunted under strict conditions.
Furthermore, no hunting of females was permitted during their reproductive periods, nor was the killing of their offspring allowed.
Sacred sanctuaries or marambatemwa in which all hunting was prohibited, were created and safeguarded by the community.
With the onset of colonialism, traditional African wildlife systems were rapidly replaced by European models which acknowledged little need for existing indigenous knowledge and practictices.
Throughout this century, wildlife managers have been unable to cope with the problems dwindling wildlife populations and habitat and escalating poverty in rural areas living around protected wildlife areas.
Towards the mid 1980s researchers, academics, policy makers and conservation organisations saw the need to involve local Africans in wildlife management.
They argued that unless rural communities were able to benefit financially from neighbouring wildlife resources, poaching of wildlife would continue.
A trend emerged whereby several programmes claimed to combine both the protection of wildlife and rural development.
The BaTonga people traditionally living along the Zambezi, had intimate knowledge of over 600 local plants with over a hundred medicinal uses to treat wounds, bites, coughs, diarrhoea to name a few.
In other districts in Zimbabwe, elders recalled how during the pre-1945 period, land use was controlled through chiefs, lineage elders and spirit mediums.
Various natural sanctuaries such as water sites, termite mounds and woodlands were used sparingly and protected as symbols of respect of ancestral spirits, such that the overall vegetation density was relatively high.
The community practised rotation or fallowing over periods ranging from five-10 years.
“The recollection of one BaTonga elderly man reflecting on the pre-colonial era, is interesting.
“It was a simple life.
“At that time we could go hunting anywhere we liked.
“No one claimed possession of wild game.
“Not everyone could hunt the elephant.
“Only special people could hunt and inflict injuries on them.
“When an elephant had been killed word went around.” “
“Elephant meat is good meat.
“It is a mixture of all game and has big chunks of every type.
“Everyone was invited to come and take out the meat he wanted to carry home.
Even urbanised indigenous Zimbabweans of today have strong social links to wildlife through their belief in totems or clan identification, which uses names of wildlife such as elephant, lion, or buffalo.
Marriages are prohibited between two people of the same totem and compatibility between totems was also identified.
African wildlife and other natural resource management systems were practised in Africa long before the arrival of Europeans.
Strong remnants of this can be seen today, revealing how tightly knit these systems were with daily social, cultural, economic and political activities of indigenous inhabitants.
The dependence of many African communities on wild animal and plant resources, based upon collective access allowed for the evolution of resource management systems.
Access to resources such as wildlife and forests for food, medicine and cultural purposes were controlled by local institutions and involved complex sharing and rotation schemes, bound by tribal laws and knowledge.
It was the nature of this access to natural resources which formed the basis of unique socio economic, cultural and political structures upon which the survival and propagation of communities depended.
There is substantial evidence to show that indigenous Zimbabweans had practised wildlife and resource conservation long before they were colonised.
The colonial government established national parks and safari areas in some of the better wildlife areas in the Lowveld, at times taking these lands from the locals who were further crowded into communal lands.
Indigenous Zimbabweans in addition to losing their land and rights to hunting also lost their rights of access to forests for honey, firewood and medicinal herbs. The BaTonga whose closely knit community was split up with the creation of the Lake Kariba in the late 1950s were evicted to arid areas of the present day Nyaminyami District, losing access to the fertile region of the Zambezi where fishing and cultivation had previously ensured their household food security.
The Shangaan people who originally inhabited what is now Gonarezhou National Park and South Africa’s Kruger National Park, were evicted as recently as the 1960s to create protective reserves for wildlife, which had been wiped out through white commercial farming activity, hunting and poaching.
Now these communities who had lived in harmony with wild animals are regarded as poachers when they kill a single hare for subsistence purposes, they are often harassed when they chase the same elephants they protected prior to colonialism when they invade their fields and destroy their crops.
l To be continued