Remaking Mutirikwi by Joost Fontein

Author:Joost Fontein [Fontein, Joost]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847011121
Google: ZVHoCQAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 30031121
Publisher: James Currey
Published: 2015-01-15T03:06:31+00:00

Photo 9 Jairos Haruzvivishe (Sabhuku Manunure), with his family on Mzero farm

(Source: author, 2006)

Photo 10 Chief Mugabe, with Baba Lisa

(Source: author, 2006)

Many, if not most, of the graves and ruins cited by Haruzvivishe people to legitimise their re-occupation of Mzero farm in 2000, were of their grandfathers’ and fathers’ generations, who they remember being buried or even themselves buried, before their evictions in the 1940s. But the graves and ruined homesteads of their earlier re-occupations immediately after the war too animated how they re-occupied the game park/Mzero farm in the 2000s. People returned to the places where they had returned to before. The material remnants of the seven years they re-occupied Mzero (up until 1987 when it officially became a ‘game park’) further imbricated their relatedness to the substance of the land, re-forging active landscapes of belonging. Like the dangerous landscapes of resettled farms that war veterans and new farmers sought to make safe in the 2000s, this had tangible effects. During an early visit in the late 1990s – only a decade after the Haruzvivishe squatters had been removed – I walked through the game park looking for firewood with people from Nemanwa. When we encountered the scattered bricks, rusty pots and other remnants of a ruined homestead from the 1980s, I was told firmly to leave it all well alone. It belonged to someone and was dangerous. Although short-lived, the re-occupations of the 1980s re-invigorated the genealogical geographies of Haruzvivishe people, and through the makuva [graves] and matongo [ruins] left behind, reconstituted active landscapes of belonging, defying their second eviction and the imposition of a game park to which ‘no animals ever came’.71

Mai Makasva’s return to Mzero as sabhuku in the 2000s is a final story worth citing here, because it reveals how genealogical geographies can incorporate outsiders and non-kin into active landscapes of autochthonous belonging, further illustrating how the politics of people and territory entangle. Her husband and father-in-law only came onto the land she now occupies in 1959, after they were evicted from ancestral lands on Beza.72 This was after most Haruzvivishe people had already been evicted. Three years later they were removed again:

I first came here in 1980. We were looking for new fields to farm. But this area is of the Makasva people. My husband and his father came here in 1959, but then went to live in Chikarudzo in 1962, because this land was taken by Morgenster mission, who wanted it to graze their cattle. Before 1959 they lived at Beza, but many farms were put at Beza, and they were removed and came here. That was a long time ago. My husband was born at Beza in the 1920s or 1930s. At that time Beza was under Bvungudzire. Bvungudzire and Mugabe are of the same ukama [blood or patrilineal kin group]. Bvungidzire is our madzitateguru [ancestor]. The graves of Bvungudzire and the oldest Makasva are here, that is the father of the father of my husband, very nearby. The father of my husband died in 1980 just after we came to live here.

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