Brief History of the BaTonga People of the Zambezi River Valley - Zimbabwe
The BaTonga are "the great river people" in the North of Zimbabwe and South of Zambia that were forced to move into arid regions of their country when the construction of Kariba dam, completed in 1959, swelled their beloved Zambezi river into a lake that filled in the valley they called home. After the move, they were given bags or grain to sustain themselves, until they cleared and learned to farm the desert they were trucked into. People still depend on bags of grain to survive, yet they are often not to be found in a country experiencing 1,600 inflation.
World Commission on Dams Report Section 3.3 details human impact on Valley BaTonga
The BaTonga people's lives were bound to the river. Two harvests a year, from the alluvial flood gardens, sustained their families. Being a culture that worships their ancestors, the forced move from beloved decesed relatives gravesites was a spiritual devastation. There is a very sad song about relatives and their resting places once honored and visited now under the water of the lake.
The BaTonga built houses on stilts, while living on the Zambezi, weathering annual floods as a natural fact of life. They lived with the river, something that modern cities plagued by floods could learn from today. In haunting reminder of what was, some villages still build those same huts on stilts, more to hold grain today. Yet it is a reminder of the life giving water that once was, is now a long walk away. Today people find their water, a bucket at a time, from distant and unreliable boreholes or muddy streams that dry into cracked earth after the rainy season.
During the relocation, the concern for the people's placement into lands marked "uninhabitable" on maps at that time, came well behind "Operation Noah" a global effort to relocate displaced animals, which held world wide interest. Those animals were given the same home as the Tonga. The ancestors of those animals have thrived in their new environment, yet the BaTonga are not allowed to hunt them. The hunting is done by those with the money to pay a large fee for permission to do so.
This leaves the people farming next to hills inhabitated by one of the most concentrated habitats in world for the big 10 of Africa. Elephants trample men and women working in fields every year. Lions attack herds of precious cattle and goats. Water Buffalo gore children walking home from school. Increased populations of hippos and crocodiles pull people to their graves as they try to get a bucket of water.
No equitable economic remuneration has ever been paid to the BaTonga for all they endured and gave up. Water captured and electricty generated by the dam has failed to reached their villages in pipes or wires. (You can see the effort to address these injustices on Basiliwizi non-profit on the right.) The spirit with which the BaTonga live, worship, celebrate and mourn could not be taken from them and this makes knowing them an honor.
Read about Ruth Shaver's time with the BaTonga and other interests in service and travel at the main page link:Main Page
Read even more of her time as a guest of the BaTonga in Surprises of the Spirit, a book Ruthie (Leidorf) Shaver co authored with Reverend Bernard J. Boff. All proceeds from the book will support the Ministry of the Mission of Accompaniment to the
Ubi Caritas et Amor, Deus ibi est.
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Where Charity & Love are, God is There.
