Chiredzi

Chiredzi is a company town. Hippo Valley Estates, the sugar company on its doorstep, provides its schools and supplies every drop of its water. The hot lowveld around it was Shangaan country long before sugar, and the park everyone drives through Chiredzi to reach, Gonarezhou, was emptied of its Shangaan villages between 1957 and 1968 so that it could be a game reserve. Knowing that changes how the empty bush reads. The town itself is where you fill up, buy food and sleep before the gravel starts.

1. About 1821 to 1896

   Soshangane Manukusa, founder of the Shangaan (Gaza-Nguni) kingdom, entered southern Zimbabwe in about 1821 and conquered and absorbed the Tsonga, Hlengwe, Ndau, Ronga, Chopi and Tswa clans of the area. On the eve of colonial occupation in 1890 Gonarezhou was the land of the Shangaan, also called Tsonga or Hlengwe, and the Gaza-Nguni stayed the undisputed rulers of south-eastern Zimbabwe until their fall in 1896. source

2. 1919 to 1944

   Murray MacDougall, helped by Tom Dunuza, started a cattle enterprise at Triangle in 1919, moved into wheat in the late 1920s and had 18 hectares of cane under irrigation by 1934. On 11 September 1939 the first sugar mill in Zimbabwe opened at [Triangle](/zimbabwe/triangle/). The venture struggled for money and the government took it over in 1944. source

3. 1934 to 1968

   Gonarezhou was gazetted a game reserve in 1934. The acting secretary of commerce wrote that year that the first job was to remove the 'native population'. Up to 7,000 Shangaan were still living there, most of them around the Save (Sabi) and Runde (Lundi) junction, and tsetse fly control put their eviction off for two decades. Allan Wright, district commissioner of Nuanetsi from 1958, wrote that the lowveld was 'no good for Africans but damned good for game'. In 1957 the Chisa people were given fifteen days to leave Gotosa; the huts of those who resisted were burnt, families were trucked to sites nobody had prepared, and they were moved again in 1962. The Ngwenyeni of Marhumbini were promised in 1963 that they could stay, and were driven out by soldiers and police in August 1968 to Malipati, land Wright himself admitted was not really fit to live on. Government Notices 776 and 777 of 1968 fixed the reserve's final boundaries, and by the end of that year nobody was left inside. source

4. 1956 to 1968

   Hippo Valley Estates was set up in 1956 with £3.75 million of authorised capital by Ray Stockhill, a member of parliament, and planted 75,000 citrus trees in 1957. The first 30 acres of cane went in by 1959, a second-hand mill bought in 1960 was commissioned in 1962, and by October 1963 the company had 6,500 acres of cane and had spent £5 million on dams, canals, roads, irrigation and workers' housing. Sanctions and a collapse in world sugar prices put the estate into loss in 1966 and 1968. source

5. 1977

   During the bush war Buffalo Range, 10 km north-west of Chiredzi, was Forward Airfield 7 of the Rhodesian Air Force. On 6 January 1977 an air force Dakota returning from Malapati airfield hit steel cables strung over the Runde (Lundi) and crashed, killing the pilot, co-pilot and despatcher. Three passengers survived. source

6. Early 1980s

   During the war of the late 1970s the park had been an army base, the communities living there were forced out and poaching spread. The newly independent government asked Clive Stockil, who grew up around Gonarezhou and learned Shangaan and Ndebele from friends in the villages, to mediate between the communities and the authorities, and made him an honorary park officer. The programme that became CAMPFIRE was conceived under a tree in Mahenye village, and the model has since been taken up by rural communities in many African countries. source

7. 1991 to 2001

   A drought ended cattle ranching along the Save, and in 1991 the landholders signed the constitution of the Savé Valley Conservancy, took down the internal fences across 3,442 square kilometres and ringed it with a 350 km double fence. Land reform reached it in 2000 and 2001, when about a third of the conservancy was settled by subsistence farmers and 80 km of that fence came down. source

8. 2021

   The Gonarezhou Conservation Trust, a partnership of ZimParks and the Frankfurt Zoological Society, now runs the park. In July 2021 black rhino came back after an absence of nearly thirty years: 29 animals from Bubye Valley, Malilangwe and the Savé Valley, unloaded into a pole-walled boma (holding pen) before release. source

Who lives here

Chiredzi District is the one corner of Zimbabwe where the Tsonga are the majority and Xitsonga is the language you hear most. Over 95 percent of the district's land is Gonarezhou and conservancies such as Malilangwe, and most people outside the cane grow sorghum because it survives the dry years. source

A company town

Hippo Valley is not just the big employer, it is the town. The estate provides schools and healthcare, supplies all of Chiredzi's water, employs about 5,000 people and feeds 124 square kilometres of cane into a mill rated at 300,000 tonnes of sugar a year, with the molasses turned into ethanol. Many of its workers live in Tshovani, the only high-density suburb. Farm invasions reached the estate in 2000 and parts of it were listed for confiscation in 2004. source

Shangaan food and drink

Colonial writers called the lowveld Shangaan lazy farmers, which the record does not bear out. They grew xifake (maize), muhlate (sweet potatoes), mahuvu and mpowo millet and the sorghums xibedlani, xitishi and mutode, farmed the riverbeds, kept large herds of cattle around Malipati in the tsetse belt where officials said stock could not do well, and hunted with bows. Marula (nkanyi) and kwangwali palm fruit were made into wine, and the bark of certain trees went into medicine. source

Streets named for women the town remembers

Chiredzi's council named streets after women known in the 1960s and 1970s as the town's sex workers, among them Molly and Hilda. Molly was murdered in Tshovani township (named in honour of the local chief) in 1966; one resident says an angry boyfriend tied her to a bed and set the house alight. The men working on the sugar estates had left their wives in the rural areas, and the paper ties these women to how the town grew. Chigarapasi beerhall was built by a white businessman called Nesbit, who owned a bakery and a brewery, and later handed to the council. Sunday News called it arguably the largest beer garden in Zimbabwe. source