Douglas Schorr

How Zimbabwe’s people lost their legendary physical perfection to chronic illness in just three generations.

I sat with Granddad Wilson on his Umtali veranda one lazy afternoon in the early 1960s. At fifteen, I’d just told him I thought our housemaid, Magdalene, was beautiful. His response startled me.

“Lad, you have a good eye, but oh boy, you should have been around in the early days. Miss Universe, the lot of them! When we were building the place (he meant Southern Rhodesia), I called the Bulawayo-Salisbury-Umtali zone the Venus’ triangle!”

That triangle referred to the highland ‘backbone’ of the tiny country – something of a geographical tribute to Zimbabwe’s legendary beauty. It wasn’t just the women. Uncle Charlie, who I’d often visited under the gnarled Marula tree during my Bulawayo school days, spoke of the men.

“Don’t forget the warriors,” he’d say. “Physically they matched descriptions of mythical Adonis perfectly and by temperament they wanted to work, to learn.”

Muhle, our elderly school gardener featured in my “Smelly Zimbabweans” tale, would add his confirmation: “We were lean and mean machines. Super-fit, in love with life …”

“Really?” I asked when he paused. 

“There was a before and an after the 1893 war life. I loved what we had, being a boy in a tightly knit family and learning to be a man, a hunter. But I grew with the new ways and learnt of things that simply amazed my father and uncles.”

I looked at his simple government uniform and wondered, and asked, “But what?”

“The food. It is not …” but the bell had rung. “Next time,” he said ambling over to the wheel barrow as I headed off for an hour of history about him, Uncle Charlie and Granddad Wilson.

The early settler period revealed fascinating dynamics. As Uncle Charlie explained, the predominantly male settlers building Bulawayo from the late 1890s on, quickly found willing partners among the local beauties. This triggered a response back in Britain, with women’s groups urging British girls to “think entrepreneurially” and seize the opportunity to “pick a future rich man.”

My father’s boss, one of the country’s first electrical engineers, would chuckle. “In the 1890s and 1900s it wasn’t uncommon to hear a senior whitie had contracted to pay lobola (marriage settlement) for the daughter of a chief!” The mixed-race population boomed, becoming the largest officially acknowledged Coloured group outside the Cape Province in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Then began the sharp decline. By the 1960s, newcomers noticed what residents had missed. The Joshua Nkomo and Rev. Sithole -the two famous black politicians of the day- body types became common. Women, especially in the Trust Lands, struggled with their weight. You could still see traces of their former beauty as they demonstrated remarkable flexibility despite their size – at meetings out in the bush, they’d sit straight on blankets, twisting to touch and massage their toes but when we needed to move to follow the shade they’d struggle to get up. They were billowing shadows of the active gatherers and predator-like beings their mums had been.

The transformation began earlier than many realize. In the 1870s, I think it was the American missionary Sykes, working with Robert Moffat at Inyati, who documented Zimbabweans experimenting with maize. By 1910, as Uncle Charlie noted, farmers were clearing quality grasslands and wooded areas to plant it. Fifty years later, the farmer Jacob, a national rugby player who farmed adjacent to Paramount Chief Mabigwa’s lands, lamented he couldn’t find any of the magnificent Matabele warriors his grandfather had described to teach and train.

The change was simple yet drastic. Settler arrival flipped life in the territory on its head. For the first time since the Bushman People and the Batonga had learned to co-exist there were no tribal raids. That marked the end of tribute payments and opened doors to inter-tribal cooperation that extended beyond international borders. Individual independence began. A letter from the headman allowed men like Muhle and women like Magdalene to travel to specified places for specified reasons, marking the beginnings of the freedom of choice. Better health practices were implemented and used, survival rates of mothers and babies soared, education expanded. There was an immediate explosion in both population numbers and longevity. Logically, there was a massive lobby that argued maize and other grains, fruit, vegetables and sugar were absolutely necessary -how else to feed them all? The infant -formed in 1923- government responded with gusto. Its supermen, with my father-in-law leading, went into overdrive to teach the production of the “magic” – food that in 3 or 4 months was harvested and available to be stuffed into mouths. Zimbabwe was to earn the title, “Bread Basket of Africa”. So it was that, perhaps for the first time in Sub-Saharan Africa, from birth, most citizens feasted on carbohydrates, sugars, vegetables, and fruits as their first choice food three times a day.

Ironically, this fundamental shift in diet met with tribal leadership sanction. Black Zimbabweans, counted their livestock as their bank. It is not that they avoided eating meat but rather that they didn’t look for it in their herds. So it was that health-wise the rural areas took the massive hit first. Those who had permission to work on the farms and in the fast growing urban areas fared much better. The farmers fed their workers. And because in those days there were few general provisioning shops outside the main centres, most employers provided ration packs and those packs included, predictably, a “week’s ration-meat”. This was especially true of the domestic servant and small shops and offices sector which employed by far the greatest number of women.

Why do I single them out? The post is about them and they are the beauties who alone carry our lineage forward! At least the urban lady was being fed well, but as the bush-war gained momentum in the second half of the 70s, employment crashed and they too succumbed to dietary decline. During pregnancy a mother’s body will draw from the food she takes in the best. But, as described in “Fiery Stomachs”, what if the best isn’t the best for our gut?

By 1980, I was noticing teenage acne rivalling mine on black faces – a sure indicator the population was moving beyond the basics of malnutrition. The first decade of one-person-one-vote independence saw the collapse of rural development initiatives and the pressure added to the unemployment situation, cascaded into food quality affordability and what had been a world-class healthcare system buckled under a flood of both the usual and new chronic illnesses. Depression, dementia, respiratory problems – all nearly unknown in my youth – emerged alongside obesity and diabetes. More disturbing are the questions about autism (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and celiac disease. Researchers suspect higher numbers than reported, with parents often unable to afford even the travel and associated costs of diagnosis or treatment.

Years after our first conversation about food, Muhle shared more of his story: he told of all the jobs he’d had since starting out in 1899 as “baggage boy” on the newly opened Bulawayo to Livingston line, the range of things he’d learnt and had been able to teach his children. “But they were always sick. I think … well, I’m not sure,” and he ripped a hunk from his “half brown” and took a swig of Coca-Cola. My neat corned beef sandwich and orange-flavoured drink weren’t much better.

Today’s Zimbabwean babies still carry that ancient promise. In the womb and through nursing, they match any child worldwide in health and beauty. Nature’s perfect design continues through mother’s milk. Then we introduce them to our modern nutritional wasteland.

The Venus triangle that once marked the realm of tall, dark beauties – Matabele in Bulawayo, Mashona in Salisbury, Manica in Umtali – now charts a map of chronic illness that pays no attention to language differences. While global attention fixates on maize shortages in Africa and HIV-AIDS, a deeper question lurks: how different would HIV’s impact be if black Africans still possessed their ancestors’ robust health?

Those ancestors – whose beauty and vitality struck every early witness – stand as silent accusers of our “progress.” Their transformation from physical perfection to chronic unwellness marks not just Zimbabwe’s crisis, but humanity’s warning. The evidence isn’t hidden anymore. The question remains: are we ready to see it?