were flooded. We grew corn, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, beans, and even tobacco. These were small fields, like gardens. But they produced a great deal.”236Carlos Churo, his neighbor, told a similar story:
Before Cahora Bassa, each family had several fields. The number and size varied depending on the strength of a person and the size of his family. . . . On the ntchenga soils we planted sorghum, which does not require as much water. The mixed ntchenga-makande soils were better for maize, which needs more moisture than sorghum. Some people planted peanuts in their maize fields. We harvested these crops in June and July and then returned to our gardens. . . . The land near the river, called makande, was very fertile. When the river rose and then receded in June, the area that had been covered with water was where we farmed. There, we first planted maize. We cultivated beans in the same field as the maize. Beans needed something to rest on and the maize stalks served well. Nearby we cultivated a second small plot with sweet potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage, and more beans. We harvested our gardens in September and October, before the rains and flooding.237
As this account suggests, intercropping—growing multiple crops simultaneously in a single field—was another key element of indigenous farming systems throughout the lower Zambezi valley.238It rested on the recognition that agricultural success in a difficult environment depended on peasant families’ ability to make good use of limited resources while maximizing the returns on their labor. Intercropping offered several advantages to small-scale cultivators. Nitrogen-fixing legumes, such as beans and peanuts, were excellent companion crops for heavy nitrogen-consuming cereals, such as maize and sorghum. In exchange for functioning as a natural trellis for bean plants, maize and sorghum benefited from the restoration of nitrogen to the soil and achieved higher productivity when mixed with legumes than if planted on their own. Sowing maize or sorghum in the same mound as beans or peanuts also enabled cultivators to control pests and weeds for multiple crops at the same time—thereby reducing their labor requirements.
Just as important to local food production systems was the social organization of agricultural labor. A clearly defined gender division of labor was already in place by the early nineteenth century.239Historically, the agricultural season began in late July or August, when men felled trees in the upland areas, cleared the terrain of any major obstructions, and burned their fields, collecting the ashes for later use as fertilizer. Households with sufficient available labor might prepare a second and even a third upland plot. In October women burned whatever shrubbery remained on these plots and tilled the soil in preparation for planting. After the rains began, in November, they planted sorghum and bush millet, which were more drought resistant than maize, intermingled with smaller amounts of cowpeas, peanuts, and beans.240During the following months, women cut the surrounding grass and weeded the fields to remove parasites that threatened their crops.241With the help of their husbands and children, they harvested the grains and legumes in February and March.242Back in the village, women pounded the grains into a fine substance from which they prepared porridge, the mainstay of the local diet. This first harvest, known as tchaca, helped alleviate seasonal hunger, which occurred regularly.243
By April the water of the Zambezi was receding, and villagers with access to riverine land turned their attention to these plots. Although typically smaller then the upland fields,244riverine gardens were more productive. A wide variety of crops were cultivated on the floodplains, including several types of beans, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, okra, pumpkins, greens, and maize, along with tree crops, such as papayas.245Women gathered these foodstuffs in August and September. This harvest, known as murope, was typically a time of plenty. In most years, growers got more than one harvest from their alluvial gardens. Fatima Mbivinisa recounted how she and the other women in her village “often managed to grow crops twice a year.”246When conditions were favorable, a second harvest might occur just before the November rains arrived.
Another important dimension of this gendered labor process was reliance on mutual assistance networks. Throughout the Zambezi region, cultivators historically organized work groups and exchanges for pressing tasks or those that were tedious or daunting when performed alone, such as tree cutting, burning, weeding, and harvesting.247Women, especially, depended on such collective labor arrangements, relying on kinship networks and neighbors to alleviate production bottlenecks during times of labor stress. Maquina remembered that in Chicoa Velha “neighbors would help me in the harvest,” and then she would “brew phombi [local beer] and we would all have a party and celebrate.”248During the colonial period, labor exchanges provided critical assistance to wives of migrant workers, who would have been hard pressed to cultivate their fields alone. As Peter Phiri, a peasant from Inboque, explained, “This practice in the local language is called dhomba. Women brewed phombi and invited their neighbors to help them weed their fields. Afterward they prepared chicken or goat, which they served in the field. This was how women managed two fields [one near the river and one upland] with their husbands working in Zimbabwe.”249
Such time-honored practices as planting dispersed fields in different ecological zones, intercropping, and dhomba were important strategies for blunting the vagaries of nature, minimizing the risk of crop failure, and enabling rural households to avoid the devastating effects of subsistence crises.250Although not all interviewees shared identical memories of food security before the construction of Cahora Bassa, they agreed that the Zambezi River had been critical to the human ecology of survival and that indigenous farming systems were well adapted to local environmental conditions. Reliance on river-fed gardens and cultivation of multiple fields in different ecological zones provided a critical margin of food security to most households and dramatically reduced the risk of long-term hunger.251Francisco Manuel summed it up best: “My family survived because we had two machamba (fields). During periods of drought we relied on our gardens, and, when large floods destroyed my gardens, we got by on the reserves collected from my field in the hills.”252Other long-time residents painted a much rosier picture: “In the past there was not any real hunger. We relied on food from the first harvest, which fed us until we collected grains from the second.”253According to Maurício Alemão, “When we lived in Chicoa Velha, there was no hunger. We always had something to eat.”254Even Senteira Botão, whose more nuanced account recognized that “in those times, occasionally there was hunger,” credited long-standing local farming practices with ameliorating it: “There could be a shortage of corn, but then we had some sorghum. There could be a shortage of both, but then we would eat sweet potatoes and other products from our gardens near the river. If someone lacked food, then neighbors would provide it in exchange for labor or something else. . . . No one ever died from hunger.”255
Inácio Guta and his friends in Chetcha gave a similar account: “In the past, when there were droughts, we experienced some hunger, but because we lived near the river we did not suffer too much.”256Their neighbor Pezulani Mafalanjala mused about the decades just before the dam was built: “Even when we were forced to grow cotton, there was no hunger because, if our fields far from the river had low yields, we could always rely on our river gardens.”257This recollection does not completely reflect reality, given that the colonial state forced peasants in the Zambezi valley, as elsewhere in Mozambique, to cultivate cotton between 1938 and 1964, provoking widespread food crises and famines throughout the colony.258
Despite the nostalgia evident in some of these memories, there is no doubt that the success of the Zambezi valley’s agroecological system rested on peasants’ access to the alluvial fields enriched by the annual flood cycle of the Zambezi. In most years, households with river gardens could both feed their families and produce some grain to trade for basic amenities. “In the past,” recalled Joaquim Sacatucua, “I might have two sacks of maize or I might have five sacks of maize that I could sell to buy school books for my five children, as well as soap, medicine, and cigarettes.”259When households with alluvial plots did experience food shortages, their intensity and duration were more limited. For them, seasonal shortfalls “typically lasted about a month, whereas in the region inland from the river, famines were more severe and persisted up to five months.”260
As this recollection suggests, while recession agriculture with its double-field system offered a measure of food security, it did not provide ironclad protection
