BY MICHELINA ANDREUCCI
August is the month we commemorate our heroes who fell during our hard-won struggle and celebrate the gallantry of our defence forces. In the local seasons, August was the time that many people contemplated the next seasons’ growing agricultural period, especially after the cold spells of June and July.
Zimbabwe is known as an agrarian country, which traditionally took into account the natural weather patterns. August has customarily been the time to prepare the land and seeds to sow for the coming season’s agricultural period.
Growing up in Mashonaland West amongst the Korekore people of Kariba, we learnt the rhythms of agricultural practices in indigenous African communities. It was a time we help our mothers and grandmothers shell the peanuts – kumenya nzungu. It was a time we threshed the dry maize cops in a sack to reap the kernels – kupura chibage; and gather the seeds from dry pumpkins in preparation to sow in the coming rainy season.
All these agrarian practices were accompanied with song, storytelling, folklore with moral lessons in life and agricultural self-sustenance.
The occasional cool winds of “nyamavhuvhu” made the work bearable under the hazy-blue, winter heat in Kariba.
This sophisticated knowledge of groundwork of food and land preparation illustrates how indigenous African people lived in harmony with the rhythm of the land and practiced organic farming and sustainable agriculture as part of a bigger cycle of culture and heritage.
Later, I was to learn that these traditional practices we took for granted is what is termed “land husbandry and sustainable geo-agrarian practice, and all other European jargon that simply describe an age-old African traditional practice of land management, seed selection – kusarudze mbeu, and the futuristic sustainable planning, continuity and re-generation; The African philosophy and practice of kuchengetedza nhaka.
Through the observances of Shona meteorology, traditional African-centred agronomists were well informed about how the land breathed or dispersed and swallowed seeds before the on-coming rainy season.
I still recall in my childhood the bright saucepan of light as the moon reflected over the nether waters of Lake Kariba. The moon for us was more accurate than the meteorological service’s weather men with sophisticated modern equipment. In fact, how many of us can remember our grandmothers telling us it would not rain because there was a red moon up in the sky?
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