On 18 April 1980, a new black government took power in Zimbabwe. It confronted the widest gap in the world between the very poor and the very rich. Some 6000 white farmers owned farms with an average size of 6000 acres, comprising the best half of the arable land in the country. 800,000 African farmers scratched a living out of the sand and rocks that constituted the other half. Seventy-five per cent of the children of wage workers on the white farms suffered from malnutrition: their parents had a minimum monthly wage of $20 (Rhodesian). Eighty-five per cent of those children had never received a medical examination or visited a clinic. The dismal figures roll on and on.

... explanation is no more than exact description which bears its own interpretation (Evans-Pritchard 1973b: 764).

Social anthropologists increasingly question whether or not the translation of culture is possible, at least in the most profound sense (see e.g. Beidelman 1980: 39). If we are as yet uncertain of the essential characteristics of human perception and cognition (cf. Needham 1980: 19) the task of comparison is problematic. Are we to note how ethnographic data reveal indigenous instances of a polythetic mode of classification, or construct rigid dichotomies to sort them out? A related question is whether or not an ethnographic report is valuable because it serves to verify specific theories or because it invites alternative interpretations.

Nyavingi possession has had a long and varied history among the peoples who occupy the borderlands of northern Rwanda, south-western Uganda and eastern Zaire. Jim Freedman (1974, 1979), Who has studied the cult's early history and diffusion, has suggested that Nyavingi, or Nyabingi, as it is more frequently spelled, initially emerged in association with the rule of the Bashambo clan in the ancient kingdom of Ndorwa, although its role as a religious support for Bashambo rule may only date from the collapse of Ndorwa and the establishment of Bashambo kingdoms to the west of Lake Bunyoni in Kigezi and in the Mutara district of Rwanda at the end of the eighteenth century. While it is perhaps impossible to define the exact role which Nyavingi played in the Bashambo states, Freedman suggests that, at least in the successor states, Nyavingi represented a powerful spirit of a deceased female ancestor of the Bashambo. Hopkins (1969) notes, in addition, that, as a result of its support of Bashambo rule in northern Rwanda, Nyavingi became a focus of local resistance to Tutsi political expansion into the region.

In 1930 the Land Apportionment Act created freehold areas exclusively for blacks, known as the ‘native purchase areas’. Forty-seven years later these sixty-six separate areas lost their legal identity when the Land Tenure Amendment Act consolidated them, and the formerly ‘European’ commercial farms, into the ‘general area’ distinct from the communally held ‘Tribal Trust Land’. Today, although the new Government has not yet touched Zimbabwe's land law, it has popularized new terms to describe these three categories: ‘rural farmers’ describes the peasantry in the communal lands; ‘small-scale commercial farmers’ locates freeholders in the former African purchase lands; and ‘large-scale commercial farmers’ are those whites– and handful of blacks – who work land in what used to be the ‘European area’. The small-scale commercial farmers, however, remain exclusively black. Thus we can talk of the African purchase lands as if they had not been affected by the Land Tenure Amendment Act of 1977.

In September 1980 the Government of Zimbabwe embarked upon a programme of agricultural resettlement which is modest in terms of the extent of the problems which it seeks to mitigate, but ambitious in terms of the capacity of a new administration to implement it. The target rates of resettlement designed into the original programme have subsequently been multiplied some ninefold by the addition of a second, parallel programme, which makes resettlement now and in the foreseeable future the major rural development activity in Zimbabwe; indeed, it is currently the only sustained public sector programme with the potential to affect fairly immediately and significantly the economic welfare of large numbers of rural dwellers.