By Dr Michelina Andreucci

“Kare kare mairimwa zviyo zvizhinji kwazvo nehurudza dzevatema dzaivemo. Mairimwa zviyo zvaipedza makore mazhinji-zhinji zvichizere mumatura, zvisati zvapera. (Long ago African farmers produced abundant grain that could last for many years.” (Feso)

IN pre-colonial Africa it was an era of plenty and for Zimbabwe in particular; characterised by stability, harmony and unity.
People enjoyed a diversified and well-developed production of agriculture and livestock.
Fields from Egypt down through Africa were known to be extensive and filled with all manner of crops: leeks, onions, cucumbers, beans, peas, radishes, melons, dates, grapes and figs, barley, cassava, wheat etc., were grown in abundance.
In Zimbabwe, the land yielded abundant harvests; the forests provided the people with firewood and building material.
The economy was diverse and the people’s diet was regulated. The people were in complete control of their land and livelihood.
The mountains of Ethiopia possessed the highest diversity of plant life in the world.
Ancient indigenous people living in these mountains had accumulated and developed vast amounts of plant knowledge.
The pre-colonial golden age in Africa was an era of stability and abundance for the people.
Plagues, famine and poverty in Africa emerged much later; in part as a result of the massive economic dislocation caused by the Slave Trade and colonisation of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The knowledge of collecting wild seed for cultivation, was taken from Africa to the Middle-East; not vice-versa as is commonly claimed by Western academics.
Lightweight hoes to lightly cultivate the soil; or heavy hoes to dig deep into the ground were used by early African agriculturalists to grow their crops.
They also invented and used irrigation techniques to grow their specialised crops.
Therefore the vast African populations could not have sustained themselves simply through hunter-gatherer activities nor could the abducted African slaves have survived the arduous brutality of the long trans-Atlantic ocean crossing had they been undernourished and weak.
At MaDzimbahwe, specialised ergonomic hoes were designed and manufactured by highly-skilled blacksmiths for the cultivation of stable crops that included mhunga, finger millet and indigenous maize.
With a deep understanding of farming methods and principles, indigenous Africans have planted crops for over 1 000 years; being equally aware of the positive effects other plants and crop management had on soil fertility and the environment.
Over the centuries, several Arab writers travelling on the trans-Saharan trade route, have described the varied, abundant agriculture produced by these early agriculturalists; including plantations of date palm, fig trees, vines and henna.
They irrigated wheat, rice and cotton.
They grew sorghum, yams, kidney beans, gourds, calabashes, onion, garlic, aubergines and cabbages for centuries before colonisation.
In 1st millennium BC, Herodotus the Greek historian described the cultivation of dates, grown deliberately along the expanding trade routes, to provide a nutritional source of food for travellers en-route.
Today, these crops are consumed on a daily basis worldwide; many being available in British supermarkets since the 1950s.
As late as in the Middle-Ages, people living in Africa, including MaDzimbahwe, were better fed than most British citizens.
Rock paintings found in the Sahara Desert are among the first visual images of agricultural practices – painted between the 4th-3rd millennium BC, also show images of cattle herding and an animal being milked, giving credence to Africa’s long history of animal husbandry skills.
In pre-colonial Africa, indigenous people were engaged in hunting, gathering, agriculture, mining and some budding forms of industries, as evidenced by tools such as grinding and milling stones, cutting blades, iron tools, hide scrapers, pottery, fish traps, mortars and pestles uncovered at various sites.
Although farmers often faced a hostile environment and at times conditions were adverse for agricultural production, they were resourceful and innovative, and developed sundry systems of agricultural production to suit the varied environmental conditions.
Life for most people was generally characterised by stability, accord and communion, until through chicanery and subterfuge the law was used to suppress and steal the land of Munhumutapa from its people; but whose laws?
For most of Southern Africa, and Zimbabwe in particular, history is forever characterised by dispossession, alienation and violence, much of which can be traced back to England’s official conquest in 1890 and the imposition of intransigent British rule that marked the beginning of massive reorganisation of African indigenous life, culture, beliefs and land, through force and various pieces of legislation.
The British first entered the land of Munhumutapa through what they called the land of the Matabele (Matabeleland), in the late 1880s, under the leadership of Cecil John Rhodes, an ambitious, insatiable colonial entrepreneur.
The history of the Ndebele people, a multi-ethnic assimilation of peoples, dates back to 1820, when the people who are today known as the Ndebele, broke away from the then powerful Zulu kingdom in present-day KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
Mzilikazi (circa 1790-1868), a former warrior of Tshaka kaSenzangakhona (1787-1828), was founder and leader of the Northern Ndebele (Matabele) people who settled in MaDzimbahwe almost 100 years before the arrival of white settlers.
Mzilikazi and his group roamed northwards from Zululand into Sotho territory (present day Gauteng province of South Africa).
Mzilikazi assimilated a number of Sotho people – through persuasion or coercion, who soon outnumbered the original Khumalos who were of Nguni descent.
The Nguni comprised of Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Gaza and other peoples.
The original group that left kwaZulu was called Khumalo since Mzilikazi was from the Khumalo clan.
While fleeing north, Mzilikazi left a trail of destruction along the trail, pillaging and raiding; taking as captives stock and wives along the way.
Within a decade, Mzilikazi and his warriors came to dominate the entire northern region of South Africa, destroying local kingdoms and pushing others like the Shangaan, Venda, Pedi and Tswana off the best land.
This was a period of nation-building for Mzilikazi and the Ndebele.
They achieved this by subduing and incorporating the various groups they came into contact with.
In 1835, Mzilikazi settled along the Zambezi before moving down to the western part of the country that today is referred to as Matabeleland Province.
In Zimbabwe, Mzilikazi assimilated the largest number of people, including the Kalanga, Nyubi, Nambya and to some extent BaTonga, most of whom had previously been under the Rozvi Empire that had been established over the Karanga inhabitants of the old Mwene Mutapa Kingdom which had been overcome by invasions.
Men and women of working age who would not submit to the new order were taken as slaves.
The existence of this large constituent of (Ndebele) people not of Nguni origin was used by colonial and post-colonial historians to perpetuate myths about the Ndebele social organisation as superior to the Shona.
Many of the underlying tensions and divisions based on race, ethnicity, regionalism, class and gender were inherited from the colonial past.
The violent conflicts over land are recorded in Zimbabwe’s history as the First Matabele Uprising (1894), the Second Matabele Uprising/First Chimurenga (1896); the Second Chimurenga (circa 1965-1979) and the Third Chimurenga/Land Reform (2000).
In 1888, Rhodes, having acquired a fraudulent concession, sent a band of pioneers to and colonised the territory which was originally referred to as ‘South Zambezia’.
On September 30 1890, they established Fort Salisbury (Harare) as the capital, and the pioneers disbanded, having been promised gold concessions and land.
Rhodes formed the British South Africa Company (BSAC), obtained a Royal Charter from British Queen Victoria and began appropriating land from the indigenes and claim extensive land-holdings rights for himself and his cronies.
By 1895 this professed terra incognita was being called ‘Rhodesia’, after Rhodes.
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 views and comments, email: linamanucci@gmail.com