By Champion Mudavanhu
When the rains were late last season, things looked bleak in the Chikarudzo area under Chief Mugabe, Masvingo. The maize fields had turned brown and dusty. Towards Christmas Day— a period historically headlined by drenched merriment for families— the skies still looked clear and blue, and the sun still made the distance shimmer unforgivingly. Slowly and reluctantly, people acknowledged that another bad harvest season beckoned. It was going to be a long year ahead.
Radio and news reports said the rains were coming, just late. The rains finally came in early January, too late for most farmers to salvage their harvest, but the community was thankful that the wells and water sources for people and livestock would be replenished.
By mid-March, when the traditional harvest calendar began, the truth had hit home for many families: there was not much to look for from the fields this year.
Like many other fields, the maize in the Muzungu family’s field had turned brown and curled inward. The family had long given up rising early to work the maize fields, for even the weeds had been conquered and now drooped.
The matriarch, Mai Muzungu, did something she had hoped she would not have to do again. She walked to the chief’s homestead and asked for food. “I drummed up the courage to go to the Chief and appeal for food aid, because I live with my orphaned grandchildren,” she says. “I got help to buy time while my other children made a plan. The children were happy. They ate and drank happily.”
That help came from the zunde raMambo: the chief’s granary. It is a practice older than Zimbabwe’s borders, older than colonial tax registers, and older than the cash economy that now threatens to unravel it. Villagers work a community field reserved for the chief. The harvest is stored separately from the chief’s own supplies and kept for the elderly, orphans, people with disabilities, and anyone too sick or hungry to farm for themselves.
This season, an above-normal rainy season has reduced local yields across Masvingo province; young people are leaving for South Africa and Botswana; and a monetary economy that rewards individual accumulation over communal storage is testing whether this indigenous philanthropic system can still feed those it was designed to protect.
The Mechanism: Labour Today for Food Tomorrow
Chief Mugabe, who oversees the community where Mai Muzungu lives, explains the system plainly: every able-bodied person in the village is required to work the zunde field on a rotational basis. Not for their own benefit, but for neighbours who cannot work.
“We have different kinds of people in our community. Some are able-bodied, others are not,” Chief Mugabe says. “The elderly, those too ill to carry out heavy tasks, orphans, child-headed families. When there is food insecurity, that is where the zunde comes into play.”
When a household runs out of food, the affected person approaches the chief. A committee vets the claim. If approved, the applicant receives grain; not enough to last an entire season, but enough to avert immediate disaster while other solutions are found.
Mai Muzungu, who is elderly and raising her grandchildren alone, says the system is not without friction. “Human nature. People always think they are being used and abused when they are asked to work the zunde fields,” she admits. “But we only appreciate the value in times of hunger. We have fed the orphans, the elderly, and people with disabilities. No one has died of hunger in our community.”
Professor Tsitsi Nyoni of Great Zimbabwe University says the zunde ramambo (called isphala senkosi in Ndebele) is far from an outdated relic. She points to similar practices across Africa and beyond: Harambee in Kenya, Chilimba in Zambia, Litsema in South Africa, and even Milpa in Mexico.
“It is an initiative that is still alive in Zimbabwe, even though some people would want to say it is outdated,” Nyoni says. “If managed well, Zunde raMambo is a very effective intervention. An outsider cannot come into a district and point out that this family, that widow, that orphan needs help. But as a community, we know. It is easier to assist where need is the greatest.”
In Gutu and Chivi districts, in Chipinge’s Mwangu area, in Mangwe and Lupane in Matebeleland North, zunde programmes continue to operate. Some chiefs have partnered with NGOs. The Mwangu model in Chipinge works with the Forestry Commission and the Green Institute Trust to produce for their communities.
Money and Mistrust
But those partnerships are not the norm. And the pressures on the system are mounting. Nyoni identifies the core tension: “The monetary economy has come with it. People are more interested in making money than storing things for the future for other people. The individualistic tendency has crept in. People feel they cannot waste time going to the chief’s field instead of making their own money.”
Dorothy Tazvivinga, a community member who has not yet needed to draw from the zunde, confirms that the system’s effectiveness depends heavily on local leadership. She explains that the village head nominates families for relief based on his awareness of who is suffering.
“The system of referrals is prone to abuse because it hinges on the village head’s discretion,” Tazvivinga says carefully. “If the village head is not happy with you, you may suffer without referral while others benefit. Of course, these are isolated cases, but they exist.”
She adds that community meetings provide a check: witnesses report seeing children begging for food portions from neighbours are an indicator of scarcity that forces leaders to act.
A recent controversy in Gutu exposed a different vulnerability. A chief demanded US$10 from each household for zunde operations. The community balked, not necessarily because they opposed the concept, but because they were uncertain the money would be used effectively.
Nyoni says the outcry was avoidable. “If the chief had said, ‘On this day, so many people should come from each village to work in the zunde field so that we harvest and store,’ and if people saw the food being stored and then distributed to those in need, such an outcry would not have happened.”
What the Numbers Don’t Capture
There are no official statistics on how many Zimbabwean households rely on the zunde in a given year. No line item in the national budget. No minister delivering a statement on its contribution to food security.
But on the ground, in the areas where the practice survives, its absence would be felt immediately. Mai Muzungu puts it simply: “Some of us are elderly. We do what we can on our fields, but it is not enough to go the way. At some point, we need the help.”
Chief Mugabe notes that the zunde field is harvested alongside individual fields. This harvesting season, as farmers across Masvingo assess the damage from an erratic rainy season, the question is not whether the zunde will be needed. It will be. Rather, the question is whether enough able-bodied villagers will still show up to work a field that feeds someone else’s family, and whether chiefs can manage the system transparently enough to keep their communities’ trust.
When asked what would happen if the zunde stopped functioning, Chief Mugabe does not speculate. He simply describes what it has already done. “Every able-bodied person in the community is mandated to participate and do their part.”
In this harvesting season, that mandate is being tested.