Surviving on the margins

Abstract

This article examines the history of the Tjwa (San) community of Zimbabwe from the prisms of food, marginality and Zimbabwean politics. It traces the marginal position of the Tjwa people to the Bantu migrations and the coming of the Ndebele state in the 1830s. These two migrations pushed the San people into the marginal and driest south-western parts of Zimbabwe. We examine how this affected the Tjwa people’s choice of food as they responded to capricious weather conditions. We also argue that the colonial state furthered the marginalisation of the Tjwa by setting up the Hwange National Park and removing the Tjwa from their traditional foodways and livelihood strategies. Their marginalisation in the colonial economy got worse because the colonial state did not prioritise their education or induction in the colonial economy, as it did for other ethnic groups. Resultantly, the Tjwa found themselves as ‘rural serfs’ working for their Ndebele and Kalanga neighbours who underpaid them. We show that the Ndebele and Kalanga rural cattle economies were themselves periodically plagued by recurrent droughts and that they responded to these variable weather conditions by underpaying their Tjwa workers. We also show that the government’s preference of settled agriculture also worsened the marginalisation of the Tjwa. We conclude by pointing out that the Tjwa’s marginal position in the successive epochs affected their eating habits and access to food. The paper is based on published sources produced by European literate observers, as well as data collected during multiple fieldworks between 2013 and 2023. The fieldworks aimed at documenting the language and its speech community through interviews, questionnaires and narratives.