By Fanuel Viriri
Locals paid tax in Transvaal coins
The economy of Chipinge was run on the South African rand and not Rhodesian money because all the young men worked in the Johannesburg gold mines, a reality recorded in the memoirs of Llewellyn Cambria Meredith, the Native Commissioner who first established government administration in Chipinge and Melsetter, as recounted by R.H. Wood in Heritage of Zimbabwe.
When Meredith arrived in Melsetter on 1 January 1896 after trekking from Umtali via Poko Nek and Moodies Nek through the farms of the Steyn and Martin treks, he set up his station on Kenilworth, the farm of Dunbar Moodie, and immediately began a tax patrol down to Mount Selinda and into the Save Valley to Chief Musikavanhu’s kraal.
It was during that patrol that he noticed, as Wood quotes from his memoirs, that most of the tax tendered was in Portuguese or Transvaal coins. Wood himself, writing in 1997, adds a footnote that time stands still in that part of the country, recalling that his own father, who was Native Commissioner of Chipinge in the early 1950s.
It had the exact same problem because it was traditional that the young men of the Shangaan and vaNdau tribes would travel down to the gold mines in Johannesburg and earn South African wages there for a year or two, returning with their wages to the Chipinge area.
Ironically that same trek has never stopped and in modern day Zimbabwe it has only intensified, with the vast majority of Chipinge’s young men still leaving the district to cross into South Africa to look for jobs in the farms of Limpopo, the mines and construction sites of Gauteng, and the service industries of Durban and Cape Town.
And repatriating their earnings back home in rand, so that shops in Cheche, Chipinge town and the Save Valley still price and trade in rand, families wait for remittances via Mukuru or Malaicha.
The household economy still depends on the Johannesburg wage as it did when Meredith sat at Musikavanhu’s kraal taking his first census, a continuity that links his 1896 tax book directly to today’s trek to South Africa.
