The Bundu

Posted by Jew from Jersey
1 October 2025

With the exception of Bulawayo, which had been the Matabele capital, virtually all cities and towns in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe were established by white men. Just before the turn of the 20th century, Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company set aside land reserved for tribal use which came to be known as Tribal Trust Lands. For a while, the tribes farmed and raised their cattle as their ancestors had, but improved medicine led to population growth that exceeded the land’s carrying capacity given traditional farming methods. Meanwhile, the cities, mines, and white-owned farms prospered and demand for labor increased. Some black farmers were able to buy farms outside the TTLs, but most moved to the cities to look for jobs, which they usually found.

White people were not happy to have black neighbors, who were usually poor. Even in farming areas, white farmers did not like to have black farmers as neighbors. In his History of Rhodesia, Robert Blake suggests this may not have been due entirely to race prejudice, but to farming methods that led to overgrazing and soil erosion. These aversions led to the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 which designated land outside the TTLs as either for white or for black purchase. The Act and all modifications to it through to 1965 were approved by the British Government as acceptable.

The Land Apportionment Act was a major source of ire and resentment among black Rhodesians. As the black population continued to grow and possess more financial resources, the act was modified many times to apportion more land for purchase by blacks. By the 1960s, most other legal forms of racial discrimination, such as bans on interracial sex and restrictions on sales of distilled liquor, had been removed. But the Land Apportionment Act persisted and grated on race relations.

Total repeal of the Act was repeatedly discussed by the government. A government “Select Committee on the Resettlement of Natives” in 1960 recommended the immediate removal of all land restrictions, including the TTLs themselves so that “land in general whether urban or agricultural should be purchasable by anyone, anywhere, irrespective of race or colour.” Ian Smith supported continued restrictions on land ownership to prevent white money from buying up the land and leaving TTL dwellers homeless. The Land Apportionment Act was eventually replaced by the less stringent Rhodesian Land Tenure Act of 1969, but restrictions on land ownership were not completely abolished until 1978, after Smith left office.

But even then, and after years of increased investment in schools and infrastructure, most black people in Rhodesia still lived unenviable lives in the TTLs. In the late 1970s, many still lived in grass huts. In theory, residents of the TTLs had the same rights as anyone else and could qualify for the same franchise, but in practice most did not have any such prospects. It has been estimated that the average white in Rhodesia earned roughly ten times what the average black earned. But it has also been pointed out that this statistic is misleading because many blacks in the TTLs did not participate in the cash economy.

Native kraal in the Bikita Tribal Trust Land, 1975 Original photo by Colin Weyer

The TTLs were not “Bantustans,” they were part of Rhodesia. They comprised approximately half of Rhodesia’s territory and were largely contiguous. They roughly made up a sort of outer ring, with the white purchase areas mostly concentrated in the center of the country. Victoria Falls in the far west and Umtali in the far east were something akin to white salients. The white purchase areas totaled less than half the country’s territory, with the remainder being black purchase and national lands.

The white areas were owned by white people or available to them for purchase. The shaded areas were all to some extent or other “the bundu.” (Map from Kenneth Young Rhodesia and Independence)

Rhodesian words such as “bundu,” “shateen,” and “the bush” didn’t refer specifically to the TTLs, but they certainly included them. Unlike land apportioned to blacks for purchase, land in the TTLs was unsaleable and exempt from taxes. The Rhodesian government never fully established its authority there. During the colonial era, TTL land was administered by the Department of Native Affairs which reported to London. After UDI, administration of the TTLs was turned over to the tribal chiefs. While ZAPU and ZANU rhetoric was focused on violence against the government and white farmers, most of their activity focused on destabilizing the TTLs. This was because government presence there was weak and also because the guerillas competed with the Chiefs for moral authority over the black population. It was in these areas that most of the fighting of the “Rhodesian Bush War” took place. As an AP journalist embedded with the RAR put it in 1978:

It was a typical patrol. The people we met were scared, caught in the crossfire of a war they’d rather be without. Theirs is a dilemma: aid the guerillas and risk the anger of the security forces or help the army and be punished by the guerillas. Either way, they lose.

There is no question who people feared more. With the army you might be, as the AP put it: “led away for questioning.” Peter Baxter, in his book about the Selous Scouts, describes the guerilla approach:

This process typically involved an intoxicating mix of Marxist orientation and extreme violence. The lesson deployed was simple: behold the rewards of liberation versus the price of collaboration. To illustrate the latter point political meetings very often ended with the salutary torture and killing of named ‘sellouts’ and political quislings.

Early ZAPU agitation had been in the cities, where the revolutionary consciousness had originated among the more modernized and educated urban population. Emergency powers were soon put in place to deal with them and by the end of 1964 most of their leaders had been arrested or had left the country. Immediately following UDI, the army’s main concern was a British military invasion and international boycott. When it seemed that Britain was not willing to commit its own troops and that the economy was able to withstand sanctions, Rhodesia breathed a sigh of relief. At that time, Mozambique was still under Portuguese control and friendly. Any threat from across the Zambezi River in the north seemed manageable. Rhodesia’s military was second to none in Africa and was perfectly capable of tracking and killing insurgents. But, as Baxter describes it:

The preparation for this new phase of the war went on right under the noses of the Rhodesian security services. It was only as attacks began to take place in the northeast of Rhodesia with no obvious trace of the insurgents anywhere to be found that the full implication of what was taking place began to be appreciated.

Now incoming insurgents were able to simply merge with a receptive local population in the Tribal Trust Lands, the so-called native reserves, and remain effectively invisible. Intelligence sources dried up. Local people knew nothing and said nothing. No rough treatment at the hands of a white security force member had a hope of competing in severity to what the “terrs” or “gooks” dished out on an almost nightly basis.

Even though Rhodesians later stepped up their counterinsurgency efforts, developing some of the most innovative counterinsurgency tactics and fielding some of the most deadly counterinsurgency units, and even though they were victorious in every encounter, they were essentially employing a search-and-destroy strategy within their own borders.

Speaking on John van Zyl’s youtube channel in 2021, Will Keys, formerly of the BSAP, notes that while the Rhodesian government prepared well for sanctions-busting in the lead-up to UDI, the greater focus should have been setting up an intelligence network in the TTLs.

They also should have looked more to their own black population for support instead of to Portugal and South Africa. This did start to happen somewhat in the late 1970s, especially in the army and police. Black recruitment scaled up rapidly, some units became racially integrated for the first time, and some black commanders even obtained commissions. Ian Smith goes out of his way in his autobiography to say that no black soldier in the Rhodesian army was ever promoted or decorated who was not held to the same rigorous standards as white soldiers.

But however much the army may have come out ahead in military engagements, the fate of the country was not decided on the battlefield but at the ballot box. Throughout the war, the insurgents had not only asserted physical dominance over the residents of the TTLs. They also offered them a worldview, some kind of homebrew of Marxism-Leninism and Pan-Africanism, that made their lives make sense more than either the fading traditionalism of the Chiefs or gradual participation in a British-style democracy as offered by the government.

The elections of April 1980 took place under conditions most favorable to ZANU and ZAPU, but particularly to ZANU, who were more ruthless towards black civilians and whose leader by that time, Robert Mugabe, was a Shona, the majority ethnic group in the country. Prime minister Muzorewa had not fared any better than Smith in either gaining diplomatic recognition worldwide or in getting ZANU or ZAPU to lay down their arms. Increasingly brutal Rhodesian cross-border raids into Zambia and Mozambique had brought the insurgents to the negotiating table at Lancaster House, but this was under the auspices of the British and on the condition that the country be returned to Britain to be run again as a colony until new elections could be held. Smith would most certainly not have agreed to this last condition, but Smith was no longer prime minister.

The conditions of the agreement also specified that insurgents must gather in assembly points or forfeit their rights to participate in the balloting. The British, who after Lancaster House were in command of the Rhodesian security forces, made a point of doing nothing to enforce this. According to Baxter:

Electioneering began with the first signature ceasefire violation being the false representation by their political leadership of guerilla forces in the various assembly points... combatants ranging through the rural areas merely had to remind villagers what was possible, pointing to the fact that the Rhodesian security forces were now nowhere to be seen.

Rhodesian security forces had a contingency plan called Operation Quartz to assassinate their soon-to-be new prime minister and destroy his private army, who were now conveniently all within range. But now the order to execute it would have had to come from the British. Luise White quotes a member of the BSAP who writes: “All day long, we cleaned our weapons and waited for the code word ‘quartz’ to be transmitted on the radio,” but in vain.

Mugabe’s ZANU received 63% of the popular vote. Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU, now strongly associated with the Ndbele (Matabele) ethnic group, did well only in Matabeleland. Muzorewa, the incumbent, received less than 10%. Ndabaningi Sithole and James Chikerema, former insurgents who had agreed to disarm prior to 1979, got no seats. Neither did Jeremiah Chirau, a Chief heading a party comprised largely of Chiefs.

Not for nothing had ZANU refused to participate in elections that effectively excluded the people who lived in the bundu and not for nothing had they never disarmed. They had lost every engagement against Rhodesian security forces, but they won the country by becoming the authority in the bundu.