161.

And yet.

Another Slice of old

Rhodie Pie
Simpler, more humane times!.........or,

The lame, The halT

and the blind.

# 11.

162.
At first glance, it is not really that common for the fortunes of any
country to be altered dramatically and very quickly by an
agricultural commodity. Food production generally goes up or
down, I would imagine, in tandem with the population of a
country, or as export markets are grown slowly but surely, to
absorb excesses of production.
However, the introduction of tobacco growing in Rhodesia just
after the end of The Second World War heralded the beginning of
a brand new and really exciting era for the whole land.. (And,
the use of the word, exciting generally just spells trouble in
one form or another, I have discovered!). It is probably safe to
say that it was a defining moment every bit as important as any
of the other more easily recognizable and carefully recorded
events, such as the arrival of the Pioneer Column, The Matabele
and Mashona Rebellions, the First World War, Self Rule (I think)
in 1923, the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties, The
Second World War, Federation, U. D. I. and those long, sad
War years that still haunt many of us, in different ways, to this
day.
The main drivers of this nicotine revolution can probably be
found in the hundreds of young men who were fortunate enough
to have survived the horrors of The Second World War. They
would have left Rhodesia to fight for king and country, many of
them young farmers, clerks or unemployed and glad of the
opportunity of a grand adventure. Some of them just boys out of
school. But when they returned bringing with them the self
confidence and experience that only four or five years at the very
coal face of mans most destructiveness can produce, they
would have been game for anything.

163.
It is in any case, wise for a country to have something productive
for returning soldiers to do. Men who have been killing other men
professionally, on and off for a while, need something else to
focus on and the quicker the better, I would imagine. A country,
proud and above all, grateful to its warriors needs to reward them
for the sacrifices and deprivations it has obliged them to endure.
What better way to do this than by making farming land available
to exercise the energy and ingenuity of those men. Land was
readily available in Rhodesia and presumably it was not that
expensive to allocate a farm to a man, give him a small grant to
get going with and let him get on with it. I know that the
returning soldiers were assisted in going farming but I have to
admit to not knowing much else about the scheme, except that
the farms in the Tokwe Valley where my father and grandfather
had farmed since 1913 suddenly filled up with new faces.
Those farms had been surveyed in 1911 by an American surveyor,
strangely enough. The names he gave to the farms as he went
about his work reflected his home land, with such names as
Missouri, Havana, Nebraska and Kentucky featuring. The
outbreak of the First World War, followed not long afterwards by
the Great Depression stifled any attempts to settle the other
farms. The result of this was that my ancestors had the use of
vast tracts of land for their cattle for many years.
At first glance this looks like an excellent situation to be in but in
reality, my father told me, there was no market for cattle for
many years. The same applied to maize and if you had a good
year, so did everyone else and the price would quickly plunge to
very uneconomical levels.

164.
I suppose the population was relatively small, with many sections
of the countrys inhabitants not yet really involved in the sort of
mainstream economy which we take for granted in this day and
ageexport markets were probably almost non existent for
agricultural commodities. For many years the early farmers in
Rhodesia had been somewhat preoccupied with getting some of
the original population of the country off their newly acquired
land.
Many of the locals, in any case, shunned working on commercial
farms in the early years and my father and grandfather used to
employ Bureau Boys who came all the way from Barotseland in
Northern Rhodesia. (Now part of modern day Zambia). They were
contracted for a certain period and then went home or possibly
blended into the local population if that suited them better.
Jack was a laborer who came from Barotseland and who worked
for the Hoggs in those early farming days. At that time a train ran
from Gwelo to Fort Victoria once a week. It would wait in Fort Vic
for a couple of days and then make the return journey to Gwelo
so completing the cycle in one week. It was Jacks job to carry a
small cream can (full of cream, of course!) every week, up to Iron
Mine Hill to catch the train on its return journey from Fort Victoria
to Gwelo. He would then collect the now empty can from last
week. This was a distance of 25 miles from home to the rail
siding and my father used to tell how Jack had a special shuffle,
a bit faster than normal walking but not quite running, with the
can held up on his shoulder. He was certainly good at it because
as we all know, the souring of cream waits for no man in the
tropics but as soon as the loan taken out to buy the separator
was paid off, from the proceeds of the cream sales, Jacks

165.
shuffling was over and he presumably resumed more normal
activities.
The tale of an Ndebele man, whose name is now lost in the mists
of time, and who worked for the family in the very earliest years is
possibly also of interest. He had been one of Chief Lobengulas
hunters, by reputation anyway and was more than a little deaf as
well. He claimed that he and some other Matabele warriors had
been chased into a cave during the Matabele Rebellion and that
the Troopers who were in pursuit had dynamited the cave,
resulting in hearing problems for the rest of his life, presumably.
We will never know if his story was true but Dad said he told it
with great animation and excitement to any willing audience. To
this man fell the task of shooting one buck every Friday. He was
given just one cartridge and the shotgun and never failed to
return without an animal for the pot, either a duiker or a reed
buck. This provided meat for the following week for the family.
Eventually a Model T Ford was purchased which made access to
town easier and fridges were invented to keep meat safe for
longer and Dad refused to ever eat venison again!
Any way the scene is set whereby, up to the late nineteen forties,
not too much was happening in the world of agriculture, and then
suddenly Tobacco growing started to catch on and all sorts of
new forces started to kick in! At last a new product that the rest
of the world wanted badly, from a country with the ideal climate,
skills and initiatives needed to make the plan come together.

166.
As anyone who has lived on, or visited a tobacco farm will testify,
it is a place of hyper-activity for much of the year.
I have added the visited bit because just the other day while I
was at work at the local hardware shop in Buckingham (England)
were I now earn my crust, my peculiar accent gave rise to some
discussion about ones origins. I am afforded the luxury of
being able to proudly tell people that I am an Old
Rhodesian.not a Zimbabwean, especially as I am now denied
the citizenship, for various reasons, of the land of my birth. This
reminded the fellow with whom I was chatting, that he had at
some time in the past visited family who farmed tobacco in
Raffingora in the then Rhodesia, and he remembered above all
the happy diligence of the workers on that farm and the absolute
hive of activity that went on there!

In-spanning the oxen, ready for the days work. Always a dramatic event!

167.
The need for large amounts of labour was paramount in those
early years. Later years gave rise to a greater degree of
mechanization but at the start and in subsequent years a huge
migration of labour took place back onto the farms as rising wages
brought on by supply and demand made working on those
farms much more attractive. The locals failed to meet the demand
and many workers now came in from neighboring countries like
Mozambique and Nyasaland to fill the gaps.
Workers from across the whole spectrum of society began
offering their services to the new tobacco growers.young and
old, male and female, strong and weak both of mind and body. An
opportunity presented itself on a really big scale to earn real
money and to enjoy the new social life which was developing all
across the tobacco growing areas of the country. The work was
hard and dirty for tobacco plants have rather sticky leaves, which
left a layer of gummy stuff on you as you worked your way
through the tight rows of plants. In addition, when reaping began
for the next barn to be filled, nothing was allowed to stop that
process.not rain, no matter how heavy, nor darkness at the
end of the day when daylight ran out, before the job was finished!
The end product was much more valuable than any commodity
that had ever gone before and great care was needed at all stages
of production to achieve the best possible end results. Seed beds
were prepared and planted in winter and had to be watered daily,
then the seedlings were planted out with a cup full of water to
see each plant through the next week or two, the timing being
carefully calculated to precede the start of the rainy season.
Weed control, pest control to keep caterpillars and crickets at
bay, animal control because kudu enjoyed eating the growing

168.
points out of tobacco plants, were all required at various levels.
The suckers and flower on the top of the plant had to be
removed during the growing period. Various applications of
fertilizer along the way and eventually it was time to start reaping
the crop
Strength and manual dexterity quickly became basic
requirements and the less able bodied, no matter how optimistic
they might have been, were shunted off to one side, in a manner
of speaking. In other words, they were signed off and told to
move on! Business was business, even in those days!

Cured tobacco being moved out of the barn for further processing.

169.
And now, at last, this is where the story of simpler, more
humane times mentioned by Jennifer a little while ago begins,
for she has the honor of having shaken up the old memory
banks this time. If I was asked to describe my father in a few
words, I suppose kind and patient would pretty much do it,
although in reality there was much more to him than that. His
labor force had a fair number of able bodied men in it, for one
could not succeed without their input, but the lame, the halt and,
in fact, the blind, who couldnt cut the mustard on neighbouring
farms were also given jobs (or found refuge) according to their
capabilities on Dads farm. He would simply instruct his labourers
to build another hut for the latest victim and they would be
added to those who drew food rations every week.
A simple hut only took a few days to build, being made of posts
cut in the veld, (or forest, as it would also be known) with a simple
thatched roof to keep the weather out. Mud was daubed onto the
wooden post walls to keep rain, wind, rats and snakes out and the
whole structure was secured together using what was known as
ghonzi.
This is a natural fibre easily extracted from the branches of
certain indigenous trees which grew in abundance. Not a single
nail, screw, piece of wire, brick or cement was needed to build a
simple home, with all materials generally available within half a
mile of any building site.
Visitors to the farm would look around in wonderment or
disbelief as these unfortunate fellows went about their tasks.

170.

My father coming down a fairly

steep slope on his new Ferguson
Tractor. He never let anyone else
drive it for many years.

I doubt that there was much that any critic could have said
about my old Dad or his strange workforce that would have
disturbed him in the slightest..he just did things his way, and
didnt really give a damn otherwise. This characteristic
presented me with something of a challenge when I went to work
for him after leaving Chiredzi.
Dad had an aversion to change partly brought on I guess, by a
perpetual shortage of ready cash for expansion, and while the
newly arrived return-soldiers were busy buying Fordson and
Ferguson tractors to carry out the heaviest work, on their new
farms, he still did it with oxen and an ox-wagon. I have to admit

171.
that after his first years tobacco crop he was obliged by both the
need for greater speed and a bit of spare cash to buy a little
gray Ferguson tractor, along with a new Studebaker pick-up to
replace the old 1936 Ford which had done 16 years of hard labour
at that point.

The time of the ox-wagon was coming to an end!...1952.

.
The age of the pace of the ox was over as far as heavy work was
concerned.
As the span of oxen died out from natural causes, they were not
replaced but until the last ones grew too old to work, they still
continued to pull the hay rake when grass was being cut and
stored for winter time.

172.
I can still remember riding on the wagon when I was about five or
six. Old experienced oxen were obviously good to use since they
knew what was going on at any given time. Once they
discovered that it was time to work one in the group, who was
proficient at opening concertina gates using his horns, would
lead his team mates to the furthest corner of the farm overnight.
This naturally caused a slow start to the days work resulting in a
fair bit of cursing and shouting as the Umfaans (young
teenagers) were dispatched to find them and bring them home
again. The great lumbering wagon was pulled by sixteen oxen and
could carry thirty bags of mealies. (Maize)
There were three important workers involved in the success of a
wagon journey of any sort. At the very front of the slow, creaking
caravan, was a leader or mkokero usually chosen from the
young umfaans, teenagers who hovered around the edge of the
work force waiting for an opportunity to get employed. I seem to
remember the leader getting crapped on for anything that went
wrong with the journey as is probably the way with any
apprenticeship.
In addition to that problem he always faced the real risk of a
cantankerous ox taking a stab at him with a long sharp horn
now and then if he got a bit casual. It was the leaders job to
literally pull on a rheim tied to the horns of the two front oxen
and to guide everything around corners, between trees and
through the river crossings that punctuated any journey.
The driver of the wagon carried a long plaited whip and walking
along side the oxen and was responsible for keeping the show on
the road. The whip was cracked periodically making a noise

173.
not unlike a rifle shot going off. This cracking whip would give the
oxen a small fright and remind them of their requirements and
the whole wagon would give a temporary lurch as it briefly picked
up speed.
On the couple of rides which I can remember, the whip was
purely symbolic and I doubt was ever really applied to any of the
oxen, although it could well have been when an emergency called
for greater effort than was normal. The driver was also given a
sort of divine right to whatever poetic license took his fancy and
I suppose a good driver would keep up a running commentary
both on the progress made so far and on society in general. The
language used was certainly descriptive and occasionally crude, to
say the least, but this must have given some relief from the
tedious journey taking place at only about two miles per hour, if
you were lucky. All the oxen had names derived from their looks
or individual characteristics and they would be praised or roundly
cursed according to the whim of the driver.
The third operator was the fellow whose responsibility it was to
run to the back of the wagon and turn a big metal crank to
apply the wooden brake blocks to the back wheels as soon as a
steep descent was encountered. As is the way of Africa, forward
planning and anticipation have never been strong points and
when the wagon started to gather momentum on a downhill, a
good deal of shouting and cursing could be expected, to wind
up the individual concerned, before disaster could happen. One
can only imagine what would happen to an already heavy wagon
with a three ton load on board, careering out of control!..... no
ABS in those days!

174.

The following, then, are some thumb-nail sketches of some of

the characters that you might have encountered if you chanced to
drive into the yard at Rio, from the nineteen-fifties when I was a
small boy, to nineteen seventy nine when our family eventually
moved off the farm after enjoying its use for some sixty-six years.
Alphabetically, the first would be a man by the name of Biya.
Biya was what was rather unkindly termed deaf and dumb in
those days and I remember him helping with the milking of the so
called dairy cows and chopping the endless supply of firewood
that the old, black stove in the kitchen gobbled up in barrow
loads every day. He might not have been able to hear or speak but
when he got excited he was capable of at least a hundred
decibels. Something like finding a boom-slang in the woodpile would trigger unintelligible alarm signals of note, the likes of
which a visitor to the farm would remember for a long time!
He had a wife who was quite blind and wife is in italics
because neither of them had any known family. They therefore
literally had no worldly possessions to pay for, or relatives to carry
out negotiations, as required by custom, so it was a marriage of
convenience and survival. A handful of children followed their
blind mother when they came to collect their rations, with the
oldest one in front, leading its mother along to keep her safe.
Then there was Dzimbanete, who was known affectionately as
Njovera. If you just happen to have a chiShona Language
Dictionary handy, you will find that the nickname is the word for
that unfortunate social disease, syphilis so that one speaks for
itself. Dzimbanete wandered through the paddocks day after

175.
day, week after week, year after year, etc. etc. with his shanu or
axe over his shoulder and searched for cattle in distress of one
sort or another. He undoubtedly also checked his snares while
doing the rounds.
Kwatayi was reputedly a descendent of the royal family of
Chilimanzi, a neighbouring Tribal Trust Land. As a youngster he
had been riding on an ox and had fallen off so dislocating his hip
joint. There was no one available with the knowledge, of what I
gather is a relatively simple, if very painful procedure to put this
problem right. As a result he spent the rest of his life with a
permanently dislocated hip somehow learning to walk again in
spite of his injury.
It gave the effect of his having one short leg and one long one
and he used a knobkerrie as a stick where ever he went and sort
of dotted one and carried one as he went about his day. It is
difficult to believe that one could ever walk upright again with
this sort of disability and one cannot even begin to guess at the
incredible pain he must have suffered during his lifetime.
I do remember that he was very bad tempered all the time and
that he always had a dagga cigarette hanging from his lip. I
would imagine there was a certain amount of pain-killer
involved in his smoking habits and he had the rheumiest, red eyes
I have ever seen! Kwatayi milked those so called dairy cows as
well and looked after the chickens, where he was responsible for
beheading them all eventually, one by one, for the Sunday
roast!

176.

The so-called donkey boiler near the kitchen and bathroom which
provided hot water and devoured a wheel barrow load of firewood
every day for more than sixty years. We never had electricity except
for that supplied by a diesel powered generator in later years.

Matemera was a short, old man, probably only about five feet tall
and not too bright. He cut the tall thatching grass that grew
around the yard and all the way up the avenue of gum trees that
led one the last five hundred yards to the homestead. When he
reached the end of the avenue he worked his way down the other

177.

side, a task which took a good six months to complete, using only
a sickle.
Mabodho too was somewhat different. Nobody could remember
when he arrived on Rio and no-one including the old man himself
had any idea where he came from in the first place. He suffered
from what I believe is called in medical terms, an inguinal hernia
resulting in what certainly looked like a large portion of his
intestines being outside the place where they should have been
properly kept. The discomfit caused by this problem caused him
to hunch over terribly as he shuffled along and over the many
years I knew him he got lower and lower to the ground, but he
never complained and insisted on coming to work where he too
cut grass, sitting down, and using a sickle.
Dad once took him to the hospital in Umvuma to see if there was
anything that could be done to relieve his condition. When the
doctor discovered that he had in fact suffered that way for many
years, he suggested that those sorts of things were best left alone
and that was that.
These characters then were some of the workforce that my father
had at his command after he started growing tobacco in 1950.
At that time he would have been sixty one years old and deep in
debt, to the tune of 3000, having had to buy his deceased
fathers half share of the farm from his brother and sisters. In
this day and age 3000 represents a respectable monthly wage,
here in England, but it was easily as big as a kings ransom nearly
sixty years ago. He grew no more than about fifteen or twenty
acres of tobacco each year, preferring to concentrate on quality

178.
rather than quantity, and used to tell of the excitement and
trepidation of attending the auction sale of his first crop of
tobacco in Salisbury. Although a man who was literally frightened
of nothing he admitted that he was shaking as he collected that
first cheque shortly after the sale ended, and so profitable was
tobacco growing that within the space of a few years he had paid
off all his debts, buying back the half of the farm that he had
already spent most of his lifetime paying off in the first place.
The countrys Tobacco grew steadily into a huge industry over the
years to the point where Rhodesia was a world class player in the
field at one time. No other agricultural crop ever had the same
impact on the economy in so short a time!
In 1979, by which time the war had beaten us into submission, we
were in full retreat from our old home farm. Our useful, able
bodied labor had been driven off, I suppose by circumstances
beyond their control. My Boss-boy or foreman, Ephraim, with
whom I had grown up, approached me and explained very
apologetically .(maybe the FN that hung permanently off my
shoulder had some thing to do with his particularly good manners,
as I would imagine my sense of humor was starting to wear thin at
this point).. that they had no option but to leave as soon as they
were paid the months wages due to them. He also explained
confidentially that all our lives were in grave danger if this simple
requirement dictated by the terrorists was not met. With most
of our neighbors workforces already gone and some tragically sad
evidence of what would probably happen, there was little else to
be done but to pay them their due. Overnight the able bodied
workers disappeared like rats leaving a sinking ship!

179.

Now I was left doing damage control using my Guard Force

men and a couple of workers I had press-ganged from Que Que
to dismantle as much as possible and to save as many of our
cattle herd as I could from this disastrous situation. Stock theft
was becoming rampant and fences were being cut all over the
ranch, creating havoc.
I had an old, seven ton Bedford lorry and we began the task of
carrying away the accumulated worldly possessions of sixty six
years of farming. Roofing sheets and timber was pulled off the
sheds and houses, boreholes had piping, engines and pumps
dismantled, implements etc. all had to be carted off to a
temporary base on a farm near Iron Mine Hill, which was in a
somewhat safer locality. And every time we left either of the two
homesteads, crawling off up the road with a full load and blowing
clouds of black diesel smoke, the local robbers would be
straight in there doing their bit of dismantling too!
In the middle of this transport turmoil there appeared in the
yard, a rather tragic looking group consisting of the lame, the
halt and the blind, carrying their worldly possessions consisting
of a few blankets and cooking pots. Kwatayi, Mabodho and Biya,
along with their ancient wives asked for permission to comeaboard as well. I remember trying to persuade them that they
were under an obligation to desert me along with their more
able bodied colleagues but they assured me I was quite wrong in
this regard!
And so these pathetic old souls were helped onto the lorry and
moved along to the next staging post at Iron Mine Hill.

180.
Eventually, I bought a small farm near the old Drive-In on the
Selukwe Road just out of Gwelo which I pessimistically named
Hopeless Farm, and everyone moved there and settled down
for the time being. As things started to calm down in the Tribal
Trust Lands and the after-effects of war started to die down, most
of the refugees made a plan to return to Chilimanzi, but old
Mabodho in fact had no idea where he came from, so had
nowhere to go, anyway. One day my new foreman at Hopeless
Farm, Charis (Charles) announced that Mabhodo had passed
away in the night.
I suggested that he pick a suitable place and bury the old man. I
can remember an absolutely horrified look on his face as he shook
his head, and when I asked what the problem was he explained
that only a blood relative could carry out the formalities required
to ensure a funeral with a successful outcome, so that the old
mans soul could rest in peace. When I suggested that I was quite
happy to assume the role of surrogate relative, since there was
absolutely no-one else, and that he now had my blessing to get on
with it, he assured me that that plan simply wouldnt work either
and that the possible consequences of treating such matters
lightly were definitely not worth chancing.
At a loss as to what to do next, I contacted the local police, and
they sympathetically removed the old mans remains for a
paupers burial. With hindsight, maybe I should have dug the
grave myself, and buried our old retainer, for there is plenty of
evidence these days in the troubled land of Zimbabwe, that many
basic formalities were not followed and that the land cannot be
at peace for a while yet.

181.

To my father then, a kind and gentle man.Thomas Angus

Hogg..1889 to 1982

My father was fifty seven years old when I was born in 1946, and
he had actively farmed or worked, for that matter, on only

two farms for over seventy years by the time he passed away at
the age of nearly ninety three.
After matriculating from Marist Brothers College in Cala in the
Cape Colony, he worked for his grandmother on her farm at Bolo
Reserve in the Eastern Cape for five years. Then the whole of his
family moved to the new Rhodesia in 1913 and he farmed on
Rio Ranch until 1978/9.
It nearly broke Dads heart when we literally forced him to
move to Gwelo when it became obvious that the lives of both my
parents were in grave danger if they remained on the ranch.
Within just a couple of weeks of his moving, one of our long
standing friends and neighbours was ambushed and lost his life in
the dreadful incident! I like to think that this sad event helped him
get to grips, as best he could, with the dramatic change that hed
had to make by leaving his beloved farm.
Tom Hogg.Buckingham, England, 23/04/15