By Dr Michelina Andreucci

BY 1963, when the decade-long Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland ended, 113 000 people had been forcibly relocated throughout Southern Rhodesia while further migration to Sanyati faded to a trickle of relatives of those already resettled there. 

Differentiation among the ‘migrant’ groups was on the basis of affiliation to a particular kinship group. 

This was not, however, to be the end of immigration to the adjacent district of Gokwe. 

Further forced relocations of people into Gokwe continued unabated, even after independence in 1980. 

These relocations of people into Gokwe were the consequence of compulsory evictions of people from white ranches.

In fact, as knowledge of a newly opened area drifted back through networks of kin to the migrants’ district of origin, land-hungry relatives from the home ‘reserve’ or workmates from urban centres came of their own accord to request land from the local Sanyati headmen. 

Although Sanyati was small and not as fertile, numerous applications for land were lodged, nonetheless, with the District Commissioner (DC), via the applicants’ respective headmen or chiefs.  

On arrival in Sanyati, the ‘new migrant’ master farmers imparted their knowledge of agriculture to the Shangwe people they found living there. 

These new farmers were touted as having better farming skills than the locals and this gave them a sense of difference due to their exposure to the effect of the disciplinary programme devised by the colonial Native Agriculture Department in the 1920s, which emphasised conservation ideals more than anything else. 

Indeed, it is evident some of the post-war ‘new migrants’ to Sanyati originated in reserves in the Fort Victoria (now Masvingo) region where policies of centralisation and conservation were pursued earliest and with the greatest vigour.  

At the core of this programme was the replication of what was perceived to be “… an orderly way of planning settlement (homesteads) in a linear fashion.” 

A cattle kraal was always situated adjacent to the home. 

Immediately after the homesteads were arable and then grazing lands. 

Attempts to ‘centralise’ rural settlement patterns according to this plan began as early as 1929, under the direction of a former missionary, E. D. Alvord, in the Selukwe (Shurugwi) ‘reserves’ and were soon duplicated in the other ‘reserves’ of Masvingo and much later in Sanyati

Ten years later, approximately 3,6 million acres had been centralised and over 1 100 villages laid out along the colonially perceived ‘improved lines’ by community.  

According to Gatooma’s (Kadoma) Land Development Officer’s (LDO’s), monthly report for October 1950: “…Apart from a few exceptions, the old settlers (or Shangwe as they became known), in the reserve … did very little in the way of clearing or improving their lands…”

On the other hand, the ‘new migrants’ from Rhodesdale were, on the whole, seen by the colonial Rhodesian state as more industrious than the local inhabitants.  

Many of them had already adopted new identities within the hierarchy of achievement and practice laid out by Alvord.  

They became ‘Co-operators’, then ‘Plot holders’ and then, finally, ‘Master Farmers’. 

The madherukas, the majority of whom had attained ‘Master Farmer’ status, were seen as a cut above the rest in terms of the modernisation expectations of the state and the agricultural sophistication they embodied compared to the Shangwe. 

In 1947, when demonstrators were appointed to Sanyati, they insisted on strict crop and animal husbandry methods.  

The farmers were instructed to apply manure regularly (that is, 30 scotch carts per acre as instructed) and plant a five-year rotation, each year putting manure on a different field.  

After the fifth year, one qualified to be a recipient of a ‘Master Farmer’ Certificate.

Nevertheless, obtaining a certificate required not only that one adopted such techniques as crop rotation, manuring and the building of field contours; one also had to present evidence of a substantial transformation of one’s domestic environment as well and, specifically, to meet a set of stringent criteria held to be as follows:  

“They would check your house to see if you had a nice dining room, you had to get two rooms – a living room and dining room. ‘Nice room,’ they might say … but you still have to plant a tree [mango or other fruit] in your yard.”  

Prior the 1960s, the indigenous residents of Sanyati had not known Land Development Officers (LDOs) and agricultural demonstrators.  

In contrast to the south-eastern reserves, the contour-pegging of fields was undertaken only at the end of the decade when other provisions of the National Land Husbandry Act (NLHA), had long been abandoned. 

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