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African knowledge systems better

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By Dr Michelina  Andreucci

ONCE the hoped-for ‘Second Rand’ gold mining potential failed to materialise, agriculture became the colonising Rhodesian regime’s dominant enterprise and principal export earner.   

White settler-farmers controlled much of the key agricultural sector and enjoyed a correspondingly dominant political importance.

 As final settlement was taking shape, a plethora of other state-initiated or sponsored laws were being pursued simultaneously. The period between the 1950s-1960s was a significant time in the developmental history of the erstwhile colony’s rural areas.  

The colonial state’s pre-occupation with conservationism, the construction of roads, bridges, dams, weirs, dip tanks, the drilling of boreholes by the Irrigation Department and rest houses for visiting officials also took centre stage at the time. 

The 1950s marked a key period in the history of Southern Rhodesia.  

They were times of dramatic economic, social and political change; not least in the countryside where the colonial state embarked on a hugely ambitious programme to recast the prevailing pattern of what was termed ‘…harmful African agricultural practice.’  

The harmful agricultural policies of African governments have often erroneously been articulated on states, agricultural policy and small subsistence farmers in Africa.  

Important attention has not been given to the issue of how indigenous African farmers have contributed to the process of shaping governments and their agricultural policies.

Interpretations of African agriculture are polarised between scholars who see peasant cultivators as “… collapsing beneath accumulated weight of discriminatory practices, or surviving as a significant economic force well into the 1950s.” 

While some examined the mechanisms by which peasants were exploited; others have moved beyond this to demonstrate the rural peasant’s work by showing how they, through various forms of resistance, often frustrated the colonial settler’s efforts to introduce and institutionalise conservation measures, such as contours and destocking, among rural communities. As a social and economic class, rural peasant farmers remained unchanged. 

These circumstances reflect that indigenous African people knew much more about their environments and that such knowledge ought to have informed the design of conservation and development schemes on the part of the colonial officials; and furthermore, that Western science would do well by building on local indigenous agricultural knowledge.

Contrary to arguments that denigrate peasant agency, it can be noted that resistance to the National Land Husbandry Act (NLHA) was quite rife among the ‘new immigrants’, the majority of whom encompassed the rural elites. 

Convinced that “…good farming methods were almost impossible to enforce with lasting results under a communal system … [and that] there was great danger of further soil deterioration throughout the reserves unless the system of land tenure was rapidly changed,” the Southern Rhodesian administration resolved to speed up the implementation of the NLHA.

 Indeed, issues raised by rural farmers in the Sanyati area were responsible for defining policy and class differentiation developed more rapidly than had been anticipated despite the proscribing effects of the NLHA of 1951, the rural cornerstone on which everything revolved.

Development protocols were, however, not formalised on the basis of ‘negotiation’ with the people towards whom implementation of the laws were ostensibly targeted; but were ‘dictated from above’; and thus, resentment of the colonial state’s measures became inevitable.  

Illustrating the volatility of the situation throughout the country as a result of opposition to the NLHA, George Nyandoro was further quoted as saying: “…In October-November we [the ANC] received at our newspaper office reports from all over the country – Belingwe (Mberengwa),  Enkeldoorn (Chivhu), Matobo, Sinoia (Chinhoyi), Umtali (Mutare) – of school buildings, teachers houses, cattle-dipping tanks, beer-garden shelters being burnt down or destroyed.”

In Sanyati, developments and irrigation prospects between the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s were, in fact, still distant and undertaken mainly within the context of the NLHA.  

From a historical point of view, the area of Sanyati represents a landscape produced by many years of intervention by the settler-colonial state’s land re-allocation, population management, conservationism and development.

By 1958, only seven million acres were completed, instead of 14 million. 

This was partly due to changes in the programme, unforeseen circumstances, such as the need for recentralisation in some areas, for example, new techniques (stereoscopic photography, unit planning) and staff shortages (photographers, surveyors and agricultural officers) as well as bottle-necks in the supply of machinery. 

In post-colonial times, the area was punctuated by the appearance of newly cleared fields and clustered huts that signal the work of African farmers resettled there under the Zimbabwe Government’s schemes that began shortly after independence in 1980.  

Hitherto, these lands had been set aside for future settlement of European ranchers. 

In early 1962, implementation of the NLHA was suspended.  

Overtime, the poor planning and arrogant implementation which characterised the NLHA, which was “… by no means thorough,” have been emphasised by analysts.  Others have concluded that: “The greater error was in assessing the speed at which it was possible to implement the different stages, on 27 million acres of widely diverse native reserves, among two million people….” 

The Native Affairs Department (NAD) had, quite simply, undertaken more than they had realised.  By 1961, rural resistance had escalated to an extent where it was assuming the dimensions of “…a major revolt against the Act.”  Land allocation maps were torn up by angry villagers and Land Development Officers and their assistants assaulted. “Resistance got to the point where District Commissioners could no longer hold meetings and the administration was grinding to a halt.” 

Dr Michelina Andreucci is a Zimbabwean-Italian researcher, industrial design consultant, lecturer and specialist hospitality interior decorator.  She is a published author in her field.  For comments e-mail: linamanucci@gmail.com

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