The Sunday Mail
Innocent Chirisa
Zimbabwe is in a new dispensation.
The old dispensation seemed to have a cacophony of ideas that did not add up to a defining development ideology.
Every Zimbabwean wants the new order to deliver the desired development, and it appears we are on the right path.
Let’s consider a few issues as we march forward.
When colonial settlers took over the land between the Zambezi and Limpopo in 1890, they immediately set out to establish rules, ordinances and laws to define their imperialistic appetite.
The British South Africa Company’s rule (1890-1922) saw the establishment of an effective transport system.
Within 10 years, a well-networked spatial system of settlements had been set up.
African agriculture was relegated to a subsistence economy.
The 1930 Land Apportionment Act ensured the imperialists amassed as much land as possibly required, reserving some of it for their unborn children.
The colonial government also institutionalised the Maize Control Act (1934) to stifle the efforts of peasants, whose production competed favourably with that of whites. This meant that in the maize market, the black African farmers now could not compete with the white farmers.
Blacks always received lower grading of their produce relative to that of their white counterparts.
As far back as 1894, the first reserves had been created – Gwaai and Shangaan – in Matabeleland.
The First Chimurenga precipitated creation of more reserves.
Whites “owned” commercial farms, estates and mines while blacks were second-class citizens in their own country.
Towns and cities always received blacks as temporary citizens whose presence in the urban space was defined by their ability to prove to the authorities that they were gainfully employed.
Black women and children had no space in the city. If one visited an industrial area, say, Willowvale in Harare today, he or she would notice that there are no sanitary facilities for women there.
Mines and farms were designed to serve as enclaves in which workers could bring their families.
Primary school facilities would be provided on the farm. This design and provision of facilities was informed by the philosophy of white supremacy.
Husband, wife and children could sell their labour to the farm and the system would go on for generations like that.
Those children would be made to aspire to be good farm workers and be retained on the farm after “completing” primary schooling. Those who did very well could end up as farm foremen or managers or live in “better houses”, far from the madding crowd in the farm or mine compounds. Abundance of farm or mine work ensured workers had limited touch with the outside world. This is some form of local embeddedness.
When one is locally embedded, they are destined to be born, grow up, school, work, marry and have children, grow old, die and be buried in one place.
They are holed up in that place and their mindset is programmed never to see any life outside their current frame of exposure. It could be assumed that under such an arrangement, one can be very close to the city, but never get an opportunity to set their feet therein.
The mind is so boxed that thinking outside the box is considered rebellion.
Colonial planning created no-go areas for the black population, all in the spirit of separatist development.
We are told that black people were not allowed in First Street Mall of Salisbury (now Harare). We are told a “city centre” for blacks was created for them – “Magaba”.
The city was racially divided such that the so-called locations were planned as black African townships, the oldest being Harari (now Mbare), followed by places like Highfield, Mufakose and Kambuzuma. Successful blacks could afford to be accommodated in places like Marimba where a varied tenure system of the properties was designed for them.
There were places reserved for the coloured community – Sunningdale, Arcadia, Ardbennie and St Martins – and others like Belvedere were for the Asian community. With massive industrialisation in mind, particularly during the years of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1953-1963), three-to-four storey hostels were constructed.
They were designed to accommodate the migrant worker, a bachelor.
It didn’t matter whether you were married or not, once you came for work and had left your family at your rural home, you were a bachelor.
You were discouraged from bringing that family to town because the available facilities, including the kitchen, one bedroom and ablution were just meant for one male adult employed in a shop, factory or other similar workplaces.
From time to time, city authorities would unleash inspectors to see how residents were living and keeping the hostels and council-provided accommodation.
It made sense to have a Department of Housing and Community Services just to ensure the habitability of accommodation facilities and also to ensure illegal residents were chucked or kept out.
Having a work pass or identity card (chitupa/situpa) was a major requirement. Inspections (masipakisheni) were the order of the day. The places were highly-policed and controlled and that meant orderliness in the African residences.
The Department of Housing and Community Services also ensured community amenities, including community parks, grounds and similar facilities were well-managed. Grass had to be cut short during the rainy reason.
In 1951, the Land Husbandry Act was enacted.
It was meant to give the migrant worker in town or on a farm or mine confidence without having to have a schizophrenic worry about his assets, including land left in communal areas in trust of the wife and children. It had already been acknowledged that rural communal lands were suffering from gross environmental degradation such as overgrazing, deforestation, soil erosion and siltation of water bodies.
Revision of the 1933 and 1945 Town Planning Acts was suggested so that these issues could be embraced.
The 1976 Regional, Town and Country Planning Act was born out of this realisation. The Land Husbandry Act provided for some stringent measures to deal with environmental challenges experienced in the rural areas apportioned to black Africans. For instance, households were supposed to reduce their livestock to ensure adequacy of pasture lands.
They were also expected to prepare their arable land. To mitigate against uncontrolled overland flow and subsequent soil erosion, contours were dug in fields (makandiwa).
And to allow for easy tax collection, communal land dwellers were commanded to get into the linear settlement system, usually along a river or a defined path/road. The re-arrangement of dwelling units resulted in what came to be known as maraini (the lines).
The same pattern was also to be seen with respect to the locations (African townships) in urban areas.
Police would be seen patrolling the streets. By the late 1970s, the Smith regime was determined to see advancement of its separatist policy.
The success of the Chitungwiza dormitory town system where blacks could live about 40km away from the city, but sell their labour to whites in the city, was ripe for replication countrywide.
For every major city, a growth point town for blacks was suggested. For example, for Mutare it was Zimunya.
Their idea was to have blacks have their own sense of success and “independence” while underhand forces could keep them as suppliers of cheap labour to white cities.
One could go on and on, but the bottom line is that colonial planning was never guesswork.
We may not like its objectives, but it had a clear ideology and guiding philosophy.
The idea was to present whites as a force of dominance while putting the black person in underdog position.
This served the purpose of the colonialists to the greatest and its legacy and imprint we have even up to today.
We must ask: what is the guiding philosophy of the planning practice in independent Zimbabwe? Has this philosophy been spelt out? If spelt out, by who and to advance whose interests?
If it has not been defined, then, as a nation, we have to act on this for us to move forward.
This explains why our rural townships and growth points resemble nothing but a midhadhadha of buildings along a “highway” without any innovation in design.
Once you are at Murambinda, you get the Mupandawana experience, and this extends to Juru and Murehwa Centre. This explains why a typical house in a high-density suburb is nothing but a mere semblance of a matchbox structure.
It partly explains why the rural kitchen hut has never been remodelled to embrace the modern needs of habitable accommodation.
However, the mind of the planner and architect sometimes can only go as far as ideology and philosophy define the aspirations and direction of a nation.
Good is the enemy of best.
As long as we still think what we have is good enough for us, we will never tap into progressive and innovative thinking.
I am still wondering who schooled the Chinese.
I wonder who gave them the idea to design the more than 600km Great Wall north of Beijing.
I wonder who gave the Central Chinese Emperors the idea to craft their Terracotta warriors in Xi’an.
The seed that defines society – ideology and philosophy – in its practical way, seems to be the missing link between what we do and where we aspire to be.
Professor Innocent Chirisa is the University of Zimbabwe Department of Rural and Urban Planning Chairperson. He wrote this article for The Sunday Mail.
