Kinship ties, sanguine ties, were very important in the life of a Shona village. These social relations at village level went up to the level of chiefs and to the national level, says Cain Mathema in his book Why the West and its MDC stooges want Zimbabwe’s Defence and Security Forces reformed that The Patriot is serialising

While the main social division of labour then among the Shona people was between men and women, Mudenge says there was yet another division of labour even though it was not that prominent as each man was a jack of all trade. Mudenge says:
“Although in theory it would seem that a pre-colonial Shona person was a sort of ‘Renaissance man’ who was supposed to know something about woodwork, iron-mongering, hunting, fishing and so many other things, in practice more often than not he did not.
“Instead there were skilled people or nyanzvi who specialised in these fields and were often thought to be possessed by beneficiary spirits which endowed them with their different expertise. In this way people in a village relied on each other by bartering for crafts, commodities and items which they could not produce individually.
“Items such as iron could not be produced in every village as it was available only in particular geographical locations.
“Perhaps equally important in bringing the village together was the dare. This was the meeting place where men of the village came together every night if their mamana (the family unit made up of a man, his wife or wives and their children, it owned and worked its own gardens and lived in its own district section or compound – Mudenge, 2011) were close by.
“There the men of the village would share their evening meal and exchange views. If there were any problems or issues to be dealt with, the dare would deal with them. Every mature man had a right to sit at the dare. It was both a village assembly and a village court but it could impose fines for only minor offences. Court fees, usually in the form of an animal, were shared by all present,” (Mudenge, 2011).
Mudenge also says kinship ties, sanguine ties, were very important in the life of a Shona village. These social relations at village level went up to the level of chiefs and to the national level. In other words, Shona society and life in general was communal, people did things together, particularly in owning the means of production.
The Shona were an Iron Age people and they were also a pottery people, like all Bantu peoples.
There was no standing army among the Shona people. “A chief did not have a standing army but was able to mobilise the peasants in his chiefdom if need arose.
“The first to be mobilised were those hundreds of men who lived in the chief’s guta followed by those who resided in the dunhu (a ward under a sub-chief known as sadunhu) where the guta was situated, the chief was in fact sadunhu.
“These men could be mobilised in hours rather than days,” (Mudenge, 2011). In other words, the Shona did not have a standing army or armies, men could be mobilised quickly if there was need to engage in war, either a civil war or war against another tribe, or an insubordinate chief or any other insubordinate leader. Let it be remembered that the Shona people never really had one ruler or king for all of them in the country, that is why the Munhumutapa Empire existed at the same time with the Torwa Empire and the Changamire Empire.
On the other hand, the Ndebele and the Shangani peoples had virtually the whole population armed, every young man belonged to one military formation, regiment, or other.
In other words, the whole population was armed at any given time, but not for internal use against one social group or class or the other for no group or population can arm itself against itself; a group or population can only arm itself in defence against a foreign force or army, that is in defence of itself, in defence of its interests.
As such, therefore, even among the Ndebele and the Shangani, there was no public institution, an institution seemingly standing above the general public, an institution whose members were not the whole population, who were specially recruited, trained and led for a particular purpose within the Ndebele and Shangani nations.
But then this really was the case with the Shona and indeed any other tribe in Zimbabwe before the country was colonised.
And the reason for this is very simple. Society at that time in Zimbabwe had no fundamental social differences that led to one group owning the means of production at the expense of another group or other groups, that led to the creation of classes one of which had to defend and promote its economic interests against the economic interests of the other group or other groups; there were no classes among these peoples then.
At that time, as Mudenge (2011) has shown, every family had access to the means of production in the country, particularly land. Beach (1984) says the following about economic activities then:
“The basic unit of society on the plateau, the household, was an agricultural one. True, there was no such thing as a completely agricultural unit.
Each household took part in hunting, the gathering of wild vegetables and fruit, the herding of cattle and/or small stock and at least some of a variety of mining, craft, industrial or specialised agricultural activities, to varying degrees. Nevertheless, agriculture was the basic, underlying activity of society. This was particularly true of the plateau itself, but it was also true of the agriculturally marginal lands around it.
On the plateau, the Njanja built up a deservedly great reputation as makers and traders of hoes over a very wide area, yet they put the greatest number of their labour hours into agriculture, as well as the herding of the stock they acquired in their iron trade.
The Shangwe of the Mafungabusi Plateau in the west had a similar reputation with their tobacco trade, but they still planted many more fields of grain for their own consumption. Even the Ndebele, once seen as primarily herdsmen, are now known to have been basically agriculturalists with a strong herding element.”