In harmony with nature

17 Jul, 2016 - 00:07 0 Views

The Sunday Mail

When Chitima Mutama completed his studies, and that was some good three decades ago, he made the long trek to the capital city.

The long-held belief then was that the city had it all, what with the lure of city lights always looming large on the horizon.

The other push factor was that his home area, Nyanyadzi, falls under natural region five, where the mean annual rainfall is below 650 millimetres, such that any subsistence farming is rendered not only heart-breaking, but pointless.

Then in the middle of the last decade came the clean-up of major cities, which saw Chitima, then employed as a security guard, falling victim to the exercise.

His meagre earnings could not sustain decent lodgings, hence he was swept by the tide that sought to rid all major urban settlements of sub-human dwellings.

He found himself tracing his steps back to his roots, after all home is where the heart is always is.

The sad thing is that in the intervening three decades that he had been away, the rains had not made any decisions to improve. In fact, each passing year ever since his arrival from the capital city to start a rural-based lifestyle, the mean rainfall has been falling.

And this year, thanks to El Nino, the heavens never opened up much. Which meant, as has always been the case in most of the previous years, that Chitima and pretty much of his fellow villagers, had to turn to the environment for survival.

Their survival and sustenance found an unlikely ally in the form of the baobab tree, which happen to be in abundance in areas lying in natural region five.

For Chitima, Virgnet Gudyanga, Loveness Chenzanga and Precious Dube, and a host of other villagers that are deft with their fingers when it comes to sewing, the fibre from the baobab tree has offered them a form of reprieve a lifeline.

They draw the bark from the tree, process and dye the fibre, getting a natural mix of orange, brown, tan, black and cream, to come up with mats in all shapes and sizes.

But not everyone is born with the same skills, the villagers who are not deft with sewing turn, as well, to the baobab, this time for its fruits.

Driving along the Mutare-Birchenough Bridge highway, it is common to see the roadside lined up with buckets and buckets of the baobab fruit.

Explained Loveness, who has been making a living off the roadside: “Some people don’t know that the baobab fruit has so many uses. One can make yoghurt out of it, and even the porridge is so tasty that once you taste it, you won’t stop.”

Online sources say the baobab fruit is a 100 percent natural and organic fruit that is a rich source of vitamin C. It contains more anti-oxidants than any other whole fruit. This is over and above the fruit being rich in calcium, magnesium, potassium and B-complex vitamins.

The dietary fibres it contains have pre-biotic properties (which are half soluble, meaning they are non-digestible but beneficial). The fruit has been used medicinally for centuries to treat everything from fevers, malaria to gastro-intestinal problems.

But for Virgnet Gudyanga, now in her mid-life, the immediate concern for her are not the nutritional values of the baobab fruit, but the little that she can make out of it so that her family derives a livelihood.

Born with hearing and speaking challenges, the only form of employment that she has known, that she has used to raise her two children, especially in the aftermath of her husband’s passing away, was sewing her anxieties away.

The products have been superb mats, either door or bed-side. She displays them on the highway in the hope that on any given day she gets a willing buyer.

But according to her 18-year-old son, who doubles up as her assistant, the buyers are not that often these days.

The highway serves as a gateway into the Eastern Highlands, especially for tourists who will be entering Zimbabwe through the Beitbridge border post.

It is an open secret that tourism has been on a downward spiral, and the sales for Virgnet and her colleagues now hinge on the occasional tourist or the local driver who gets impressed by the artwork.

The situation has also not been helped by the dearth of tourism at the natural hot springs of Nyanyadzi, which used to be a major attraction. Tourists who travelled for the hot springs usually stopped over, making a purchase of the mats.

“The sales are not encouraging,” says Learnmore, Virgnet’s son, rather resignedly.

“Every day is a new day and we wake up hoping to make a sale but at times we can go for a week or even two without selling an item. Such has been life here.”

For Chitima, who spoke the English Language rather fluently for a villager, he explained that the fluency is in part as a marketing tool, as he needs to converse with the occasional foreign tourist. “At times some of them will need to know how we make the mats and you can only do the explanation if your English is good.”

Chitima said all their ingredients in the making and sewing of the mats are from natural resources.

“We get the black dye from the mujokota tree. In some areas it is known as the muunga. We get the fruits and boil them for about two hours to give us the black colour. As for the brown, we use the fruits from the mutsikiri tree, which we also boil for about an hour.”

With the dyed fibre — brown, black and the naturally occurring cream colour — the next step is imagination.

Chipped in Loveness: “Mat-making is a form of art, one chooses what to sew, the pattern, shape and size. It is very rare to get an order so the idea is to have as many patterns, shapes and sizes as possible, so that you give your buyers options.”

The impact on the environment is the least of the villagers’ worries, in fact, as far as they are concerned, they are not doing any harm to any environment.

“Every two to three years,” explained Chitima, “the trees grow their barks back. It is not like we fell down the trees to harvest the bark. Look here,” he emphasised, pointing to a nearby baobab tree, “the bark has grown back. In another year or so, this bark will be ready for harvesting again. So we don’t see where or how we kill the environment.”

He said officials from the Environmental Management Agency occasionally visit, trying to hammer home the environmental impact that the mat-making has, but the message usually falls on deaf ears, pun not intended, because the villagers have no other option for a livelihood.

Even if they had other options, they see little or no evil in what they are doing.

Now that the rain season has been harsh on them and they don’t know what the coming season holds for them, the only hope for them is the baobab tree and its fruits.

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