The Zambezi River runs through a valley in northern Zimbabwe well known for its animal and plant diversity. Yet climate-related pressures, exacerbated by global warming, are taking an increasing toll on the people for whom this area is home.
The latest drought came last year and was caused by the El Niño weather pattern. It wiped out half the maize crop and put 2.7 million Zimbabweans at risk of hunger. The situation prompted the country’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, to declare a national disaster in April.
El Niño is a climate pattern where the surface water of the east-central tropical Pacific Ocean warms significantly above average. This affects rainfall patterns and weather across the world, raising temperatures globally.
El Niño is part of a phenomenon called the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). El Niño events on average appear every two to seven years. The opposite and cooler phase is called La Niña.
During La Niña, cooler-than-average sea temperatures are experienced in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. Like El Niño, it affects patterns of rainfall and atmospheric pressure worldwide.
Such climate shocks are a real and growing danger, but the views of rural people at their sharp end are poorly understood. To try and redress this, in May 2023 a survey of 747 households was conducted by Utariri, a programme concerned with local community stewardship in Zimbabwe’s mid-lower Zambezi Valley. It aimed to gauge perceptions of issues related to natural resource management, including climate change.
The resulting reports, which I edited as part of my work, revealed local perspectives on ecological practices. Indigenous communities have their own ways of adapting to changing environmental and climatic conditions, resource availability and human-wildlife conflict. They may for example predict a dry or a wet year ahead by observing the height of birds’ nests on a river bank.
In October 2024, I went to northern Zimbabwe’s Hurungwe district, Mashonaland West province, to visit some of those Utariri had surveyed.
A warming, drying climate
Northern Zimbabwe has a subtropical climate of dry winters and hot summers. Traditionally, rainmaking ceremonies are held at the beginning of summer, from August to September, heralding the planting season. The first rains fall in October, causing new vegetation to sprout. But things have been changing.
Zimbabwe’s annual average surface temperature increased by about 0.9C between 1900 and 2019, according to a 2024 government report to the UN. The start and end of the rains have been shifting, annual rainfall has been shrinking, and droughts have become more frequent and more intense. All the while Zimbabwe contributes less than 0.1% of the emissions causing the global climate to change.
This unpredictability is making it very hard for farmers to plan.
I met one such, Noel Chabayanzara, sitting under the much-needed shade of a mango tree outside his humble homestead in Chitindiva village. “During the rainy season, it may be hot, which never used to happen. Climate change leads to poor harvests, which result in hunger,” he said. “It is caused mainly by human activity.”
Of the 200 people that Utariri interviewed in Hurungwe, 196 understood climate change in terms of changing rainfall patterns, water availability, increased heat and more frequent droughts. However, few highlighted the link to human activity as Chabayanzara did.
I also met Rungamirai Machesa, watering her vegetable garden amid the sweltering October heat in Alpha village, Hurungwe. She must compete with her neighbours, surrounding villages and local livestock for dwindling supplies of water.
Machesa was hesitant to answer the question, what is climate change? “I cannot talk about climate change,” she said, seemingly worried about saying the wrong thing. “What I know is that there is now less rain, and our borehole is running dry, making it difficult to water our gardens. This means we have less food and no vegetables to sell to pay school fees for the children.”
Paul Mapfumo, a roofer from another village, told me: “Climate change means the changing of seasons … it no longer rains [in October] and our rivers have lots of sand and no water, which shows that the ancestors are unhappy. This is increasing human-wildlife conflict when people look for water in the rivers. This climate change is challenging.”
In the absence of water, communities are forced to wander closer to wildlife corridors to keep hunger at bay, poaching what game they can snare. Similarly, wild animals are forced into human settlements in search of food and water. Utariri’s survey found that 72% had experienced some form of human-wildlife conflict.
The competition for resources has led to deforestation, soil erosion, illegal poaching and loss of human life.
Indigenous adaptation
Confronted with this situation, local communities are adapting through agroecological practices, such as fertilising their vegetable gardens with agricultural waste, and growing mushrooms. Many of these adaptation methods are influenced by traditional practices, which were quite common among survey respondents. For example, 72% said they engage in rainmaking ceremonies, and 52% partake in rituals to celebrate the harvest in line with local traditions and customs.
Such practices bring to the fore the personal connection of the people, and their history, to the land and the passing down of that knowledge over generations. The respondents I met came to life and brimmed with nostalgia as they explained how they used to perform rainmaking ceremonies, planting their crops at a predictable point in the year.
They also talked about how the link between the living, the dead and the environment was declining owing to the adoption of modern practices. “We have lost the ability to speak to the ancestors, because people have adopted western ways,” said Mapfumo. “Those who should intercede have lost the ability and the ancestors are angry.”
We have lost the ability to speak to the ancestors… Those who should intercede have lost the ability and the ancestors are angry.Paul Mapfumo, a roofer
They gave some examples of traditional practices being lost. One focused on observations of the level at which birds built their nests in trees along the riverbed. When they are closer to the river surface this forecasts a dry year. The higher up in the trees they are, the more likely there will be floods. Another was based on the level of production of certain non-timber forest products, such as sugar plums. More of these indicate to the community a higher likelihood of a dry season.
Who are the Shona?
The Shona people and language are native to Southern Africa, primarily Zimbabwe. They are a part of the Bantu peoples, a linguistic grouping of speakers of more than 500 Bantu languages, residing in West, Central, Southeast, Southern and some parts of Northeast Africa.
In traditional Shona culture, each clan has its own animal totem. The totem symbolises the clan’s sense of belonging and communal power, so they revere and seek to protect it. Of the survey respondents, 82% strongly believe in animal totems as a part of biodiversity and natural-resource management.
Changing livelihoods
Noel Chabayanzara, the farmer, was working at Zimbabwe’s largest copper mine, Mhangura, when it closed in 2022. As a result, he moved back to Chitindiva with his wife Shupe and their three children.
He spoke fondly of the past: “As a young boy, when the [liberation] war had just ended [in 1979], this area had plenty of trees, wild fruit and plenty of vegetation. We used to go and harvest wild fruit in the forest, vegetables of different types including climbers and spinach. Back then we had no gardens – the forest provided everything we needed.
“Now that knowledge is gone. These young people know nothing about tradition and ecological balance … Much of this [loss] is caused by people needlessly cutting down trees.”
The family had arrived in another drought year and they recalled the hunger in their village of approximately 500 people. Chabayanzara had to decide how to support his family, in a community where nearly everyone is involved in agriculture of some kind.
Disheartened by the environmental degradation wrought by tobacco farming, he enrolled for training in mushroom farming. He has dedicated one of his two thatched roundhouses to mushrooms. Inside, he alternates the bags of substrate – a combination of cotton husks, maize stalks, lime and mushrooms spores – between dark and light conditions, depending on the fungi’s growth stage.
He told me: “I never imagined that I would be a mushroom farmer. Mushrooms are good in this area because … we don’t have to burn any trees. Mushrooms also don’t require much water. They have no specific season; any time of the year you can grow mushrooms.”
In a changing climate, Chabayanzara’s pivot is just one of many adaptations taking place.
