By Dr Tony Monda

IN 1946 it became compulsory in Rhodesia for local authorities to finance and administer townships for their indigenous African workers.
Major building programmes in the late 1940s and 1950s created extensive multi-story brick and concrete hostel blocks for single men, each block accommodated almost 1 000 workers in shared rooms.
Additional townships were further developed outside the towns and city boundaries.
After 1974, Rhodesian government policy dictated that future townships should be industrially self-sufficient and be located on the borders of Tribal Trust Lands (TTL), and not as satellites of the towns.
This policy meant that vast low cost housing schemes were developed 20 kilometres and further, from the cities with no effective employment potential in the environs. One such conurbation Chitungwiza became the third-largest municipality after Independence (1980).
The restrictive housing policy caused extensive illegal squatters and sub-standard housing.
The increasing provision of ‘core houses’ and serviced stands for self-built projects signified the widening gap between the number of housing that were provided by the authorities and that which were required by the growing urban black worker population
Township architecture was quite alien to indigenous African concepts and constructs of the home unit or rural homestead.
Repetitive layouts of identical units with a minimum of outside space for growing food or for children’s play, contributed to a restrictive environment of social repression in dramatic contrast to the spacious gardens and houses in the colonial white suburbs.
Pre-independence housing policies were geared mainly towards serving the interest of the white population in that the focus was essentially on urban industrial development.
The denial of home ownership schemes to urban Africans and the intentional neglect of rural housing schemes were designed to undermine the indigenous rights to their own land.
The post-independence Zimbabwean Government sought to rectify this situation. Its first priority was the reconstruction of the rural infrastructure destroyed or damaged during the liberation war. By 1985, over Z$7 000 000 (seven million dollars) had been spent on building or refurbishing clinics, hospitals, houses, schools and other government buildings in Zimbabwe.
The overall responsibility for the formulation and co-ordination of national housing and construction policies lies within the Ministry of Public Construction and National Housing
Since independence there have been three prime areas of Government development: mass housing, educational and health facilities (particularly in rural areas) and high-cost prestigious projects in Harare.
The Zimbabwean Government further pursued a policy of ‘democratisation’ in housing programmes in the urban sector by introducing what was then known as ‘Home Ownership Schemes’; encouraging local authorities to provide land to the private sector so as to develop low-and-medium income accommodation.
This was done with a view to encourage private sector and parastatal organisations to provide housing for employees through the home ownership schemes. Housing units were built by local government authorities to minimum standards laid down by the Ministry of Public Construction and National Housing, for home ownership.
Units of 50 square-metres were built on stands of a minimum of 300m2.
These were stipulated to have four rooms, and constructed by building brigades comprised mainly of semi-skilled artisans.
This combined with simple design and repetition, kept the cost to a minimum.
Another area which received attention from the Government was the decentralisation of the housing programme to ensure that affordable and durable accommodation was provided in rural areas. The National Housing Fund financed rural housing schemes in communal and resettlement areas.
The Government provided funds and technical expertise for this national exercise.
In a paper Design for Living Spaces in Zimbabwe (April 2 2006), Dr Michelina R. Andreucci writes: “The reason why the density increases in our suburbs is because colonial civic planners and architects had not taken into account nor incorporated our traditional ways of life and patterns of communal co-habitation in our living spaces.
“Today, Suburbs and suburban houses are still psychologically restrictive spaces and buildings that perpetuate class and cultural divisionism.
“A kind of housing apartheid; notwithstanding the costs, and the lack of hunhu created by the wholesale adaptation of living structures,-we have inherited from the West has turned us morally and socially into a different type of people.”
The politics of space will therefore always remain an African problem which began with racist separatist architecture in most colonised countries.
The problem was, and to a certain extent is, still visible in the shanty towns and high-density suburbs (former colonial townships) in Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Namibia and Zimbabwe.
Dr Tony Monda holds a PhD. in Art Theory and Philosophy and a DBA (Doctorate in Business Administration) and Post-Colonial Heritage Studies. He is a writer, musician, art critic, practicing artist and Corporate Image Consultant. He is also a specialist Art Consultant, Post-Colonial Scholar, Zimbabwean Socio-Economic analyst and researcher. For views and comments, e-mail: tonym.MONDA@gmail.com