Indigenous Crop Production for Sustainable Livelihoods: a Case of uninga in the Rural Areas of South-Eastern Zimbabwe.

Abstract

South-eastern parts of Zimbabwe lie in drought-stricken agricultural region five, characterised by low and erratic rainfall patterns. To realise food security people in the region have resorted to growing drought resistant crops such as sorghum. The recent observations are that the success of sorghum as a drought resistant crop is accompanied by ambivalence as some people view the crop to be unsuitable as a staple food while others rely on it to cope with food insecurity. Some families have resorted to farming cash crops such as cotton and use the dividends to buy maize meal as the staple food. However, recently some farmers have started intensive production of uninga, an indigenous crop which had almost become extinct among the Ndau people (an ethnic grouping of Ndau-speaking) of south-eastern Zimbabwe. The production of this crop is under-researched and understudied in Zimbabwe. To fill this lacuna, we adopted a participatory case study research approach to explore the nature and scope of uninga production. An Afrocentric-postcolonial lens was employed to investigate the factors for its resurgence after decades of absence in the agricultural crop basket. We found that the crop which used to be largely cultivated by women in the past, had become a ‘must-plant’ crop for all gender owing to its high demand on the market, especially in Mozambique.