Chinhoyi

The town was established as Sinoia in 1906, as a group settlement scheme organised by a wealthy Italian, Lieutenant Margherito Guidotti, who brought ten Italian families to farm here; the name derives from Tjinoyi, a Rozwi chief. The caves outside the town carry a much older story: their pool is called Chirorodziva, the pool of the fallen, after an attack in 1830 in which raiders threw their victims into it. The district's early economy came from farming and from copper and gold workings further north.

The white farming settlement grew through the middle of the century on tobacco and maize, and the town became the administrative centre for Mashonaland West. On 28 April 1966 seven ZANLA guerrillas were intercepted by the British South Africa Police near Sinoia and killed; the clash is commemorated in Zimbabwe as the opening engagement of the Second Chimurenga, the liberation war, and Chimurenga Day is marked on its anniversary. During the war the surrounding district saw further fighting, and farms were attacked and defended.

Sinoia was renamed Chinhoyi after independence. From 2000 the fast-track land reform hit this district hard: commercial farms around the town were taken over, and the service centres that depended on them lost much of their trade. Tobacco production later recovered in a different form, with many thousands of small growers replacing the earlier estates. The founding of a technical university in the town in the early 2000s changed its character again, adding several thousand students to a provincial farming centre.

Chinhoyi is a Shona town, Zezuru-speaking for the most part, with the ordinary rhythms of a provincial centre: church on Sunday, funerals that fill a street, extended families spread between the town and the farms around it. Greetings are formal and unhurried, elders are addressed first, and it is normal to ask after health and family before getting to the point of a conversation.

The caves give the town its one widely known story. In Shona tradition the pool is associated with events remembered in its name, and the site has long been treated with a degree of respect rather than as simple scenery, which is why local guides are particular about where visitors go. The liberation-war commemoration is the other strand of the town's public identity: the 1966 clash is commemorated nationally and is marked here each April, alongside Independence Day and Heroes' Day.

The university has given the town a student culture — minibuses full of students, cheap takeaways, bars and hair salons around the campus edge, music and football at weekends. Sungura, Zimdancehall and gospel are what play from shops and kombis, as across the country. Farming sets the calendar for everyone else: the tobacco selling season from about February, planting with the first rains, and the long dry months when work in the fields eases and building and travel happen instead.

About 90,000 people live in Chinhoyi, the provincial capital of Mashonaland West and the headquarters of Makonde District, with provincial offices, a referral hospital, schools and two universities. Most residents live in the high-density suburbs rather than the older low-density streets near the centre, and the population rises in term time with students.

The town itself lives largely by services — shops, banks, provincial government offices, the universities and construction — while farming underpins the district around it. Tobacco is the district's cash crop, grown now by large numbers of smallholders as well as bigger operations, with maize, soya, groundnuts and cattle beside it, and the town supplies seed, fertiliser, fuel, spares and banking to the farms around it. Mining continues in the wider district, and the highway to the Zambian border brings a steady trade in lorries, fuel stops and roadside vending. Many households also rely on money sent from relatives working in South Africa or the United Kingdom.

Everyday life carries the same strains as the rest of the country: power cuts that businesses meet with generators and solar panels, water supply that is intermittent in parts of the town, prices quoted in two currencies, and a large informal sector of vendors and small traders. The day starts early, the market and bus rank are busiest in the morning, and by dusk the centre empties as people return to the suburbs. Sunday belongs to the churches, whose congregations are large and visible across the town.

The everyday food of Chinhoyi is the food of the Mashonaland farming districts: sadza, thick maize-meal porridge, eaten by hand with a relish beside it. That relish is most often muriwo — covo, rape or pumpkin leaves cooked with tomato and onion, sometimes finished with peanut butter — or beans, or a stew of beef, goat or chicken. Free-range village chicken, known as road runner, is the preferred bird for a proper meal and is sold live in the market.

Groundnuts are important here, ground into peanut butter that goes into vegetables, into rice cooked as a dish in its own right, and into bota, the thinner maize porridge eaten at breakfast. Dried fish carried up from Lake Kariba — kapenta and matemba — is a cheap and common relish, and mopane worms appear in the markets in season, dried and then fried with onion and tomato.

Street and roadside food is what the highway is known for: roasted or boiled maize cobs, maputi, puffed maize sold in bags, boiled groundnuts, sugarcane and seasonal mangoes and bananas from the district's farms. Meat grilled over coals is the food of weekends and gatherings. Chibuku, the opaque sorghum-and-maize beer sold in cartons, and home-brewed sorghum beer are the traditional drinks, with maheu, a non-alcoholic fermented maize drink, bottled lagers and Mazoe orange cordial alongside them.