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By Root 1476 0

living on the shores of the Zambesi river were being moved from their villages on the river bank. Because they most passionately did not want to leave their homes they were forced into lorries, sometimes at gun-point, and driven away to high dry grounds miles away, and there dumped to get on as best they could. Many died. This operation was not one the governments in question could be proud of. The enforced migration of the river Tonga was because of the shortly-to-be completed Kariba dam, and was a big issue with the then young national movements of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland. Countless political speeches were made to audiences who cried Shame, Shame, and groaned and even wept. There were riots. There were petitions. The white liberals of the time (or ‘Kaffir-lovers’) were eloquent. The bad treatment of the river Tonga was a symbol of everything wrong with white government.

When in 1989 I told people at the Training Centre I was about to visit the Tonga, they said, ‘You don’t want to go there.’ ‘They are primitive people.’ ‘They wear skins and sleep in the ashes of their fires.’ I said I had friends who actually knew the Tonga, and they live in huts and wear clothes, but the response was, ‘Then the clothes must be the ones collected from us for charity.’

It is true the river Tonga are as poor as any people I saw in Zimbabwe. They are thin and some are stunted. Their villages are shabby. (Not however the villages of the Chiefs, which are of fine big huts, well built.) The lives of the Tonga since they were taken from their land, their shrines, and the graves of their ancestors, have been hard, have been painful, a struggle year in, year out, and from season to season. Unable to fish, removed from the rich alluvial soil that produced two or three crops a year, they tried plants that withstand dryness, like millet, rapoka and other small grains, but flocks of quelea birds waited for these to be ripe and even when women and children stood for days and weeks banging bits of iron and saucepans, the birds descended in clouds so thick they darkened the sky, and ate up everything, as thorough as a swarm of locusts. The quelea are those multitudinous flocks that we watch swirling so attractively about on our television screens. Then the Tonga tried maize, but had to reckon with elephants, who love maize. The elephants had visited just before we did, and had devastated the fields.

These were near the villages behind Binga, which is on the other end of the Kariba lake away from the Kariba township on its hills, with its tourist hotels and tours and tour guides–quite one of the most attractive places in Zimbabwe, where you think these are shores in Greece or Sicily, wild pale rocky hills and islands and the blue water and the blue sky, and with all the attractions of elephants who appear even in the town itself, or herds of buffalo, and birds and buck…these shores and their delights are for the visitors who bring in essential foreign currency, and take photographs of the game, and on the lake itself, of crocodiles and hippos.

But crocodiles tear the frail nets of Binga’s fishermen, and hippos threaten their boats.

Binga is expanding fast. It consists of several acres of small two- and three-room houses of the kind described as medium-density housing, and here set at angles in the thick pinky-white dust where soon gardens will spring up. The air smells of donkeys and goats and cows, and roosters wake you at their appointed times through the night. It was full moon in Binga. Outside many of the little houses flickered the cooking fires found more attractive than the kitchens and stoves favoured by the whites. Binga is crowded with every kind of Aid worker. They are a dedicated lot. They would have to be. For one thing the temperature can stand at over a hundred for days at a time. To get there you drive miles on a dirt road that demands serious vehicles, like landrovers.

Electricity was soon to arrive in Binga: the great power lines were in place, ready to come to life. People will no longer have to sleep at