Abstract
This article explores the Zimbabwean Tonga`s daily experiences after their displacement from the well-watered and ecologically rich Zambezi River plains due to the construction of the hydroelectric power generating Kariba Dam in the late 1950s. The Southern Rhodesian government displaced the Tonga to the adjoining infertile, arid, wildlife infested, and tsetse fly ridden uplands of Binga District where some of their new villages and fields were nestled adjacent to national game sanctuaries. These unplanned dislocations exposed the Tonga to poor harvests, crop marauding animals and the tsetse induced livestock disease, trypanosomiasis or nagana. The Department of Wildlife and National Parks’ game wardens enforced a stringent wildlife conservation system within these game sanctuaries and even outside. Such regulations foreclosed the Tonga`s rights to harvest firewood, herbs, and vegetables from these ecologically diverse conservation zones. Some of the uplands` well watered and fertile areas with rich dark soils, chidhaka, were found within the game sanctuaries. Therefore, I argue, the Tonga`s displacement to this untamed landscape coupled with exposure to an unfamiliar regime of state centered ownership and control of wildlife compromised their livelihoods and undermined their access to natural resources. What they understood to be ordinary gathering and hunting while living under the colonial state`s minimal gaze in the pre-displacement era by the Zambezi River became poaching punishable by state violence and fines in the uplands. This study is informed by archival records, newspaper reports, policy documents and oral sources with diversely situated Tonga men and women.
