Second thoughts on the Shona economy: suggestions for further research

Abstract

This paper has its beginnings in some interviews carried out in the upper Sabi valley in 1973. The trail between these interviews and the present paper is a long and devious one, but it is worth mentioning here. In the first half of 1973 my main interest was in the digging of a kind of historical trench across the central Shona country from east to west and back again, examining and analysing the traditions of a group of peoples whose ruling dynasties were mostly of the Shava (eland) totem. The basic purpose of the work was to determine the historical-political structure of the area, which happened to coincide to a great extent with the upper Sabi valley, but a certain amount of attention was paid to economic factors. As this paper makes clear, more attention should have been paid to economic, social and religious questions, but at the time I was mainly conscious of the problem involved in collecting as much political data as possible from a very wide area in a very short time. Nevertheless, it was possible to put together the raw economic data into a preliminary paper that was read at the Umtali History Conference in December 1973.