Starvation stalks Doma community

secluded clan of semi-nomadic people caught in the transition between a migratory hunting and gathering lifestyle on one side and modern day permanent settlement.
Here is a community without second names, only first names. Here is a community detached from the rest of Zimbabwe. A community that sees no sense in having a birth certificate, a national identity card or, worse still, a passport.

This is a primitive community, for lack of diction, where stories about urban life still remain tell-tales of oral tradition.
It is a closed community that treats everyone with suspicion and never looks anyone in the face. On first sight of a well-dressed stranger they run into the mountains or simply disappear.
The disappearing antic is a smooth and polished act that it could be propped up by juju. Being largely short in stature, they are sleek and fast and use whistles to notify each other of impending danger.
When you get to their “homes”, the only tool you see are home-made axes and spears and they are also iron smiths as such equipment is abundant.

Theirs is a story of a people with no human rights, not because they should not have them, but because they don’t even know their rights and where to articulate them.
Geography and history have condemned them to a swathe of land largely inhabitable by modern men and has become a hunting ground for professional hunters from Europe, America and elsewhere yet they are not allowed to hunt themselves.

To them, the irony of life is that they dodge and fight the wild animals everyday of their lives, they know where the elephant, gnu and kudu frolic and drink but they are deemed poachers.
They build their huts on tree-tops or on elevated single-roomed mud-and pole, grass thatched huts, to avert predators.
After a few weeks they move on and build another settlement, where there is no longer anything to hunt and gather.

Although hunting and gathering is no longer idealistic in modern day Zimbabwe, theirs is the real story of being between a rock and a hard place.
For centuries, the Doma people hunted and gathered in the Mwanzamutanda Mountains, east of Chapoto communal lands in Kanyemba at the border with Zambia but today they are battling to survive after being restricted to a swathe of land between the communal lands and Dande Safari area.

The National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority has sealed off the Dande Safari Area and Chewore National Park from hunting, making it difficult for the hunters and gatherers to survive.
Villagers from chief Chapoto’s area to the east are increasing in numbers and expanding their settlements towards the Doma people pressing them really hard against the national park.
The transition from hunting to permanent settlement has become a toll order for a community without livestock, a community without education and a community whose skills are mainly based on communalism and barter trade.

“Things have suddenly changed for us. We lived on hunting and have been reduced to destitutes. We cannot hunt these days.
“We cannot farm because we have never farmed. We have no cattle and neither do we have farming implements.
“We feel unwanted and neglected. We have heard about towns but we have never been to any town. What work can we do there? Where is town?” asked Pondaimoto.
The future of these people looks bleak and they can even go into extinction as severe hunger is forcing them to survive mainly on fishing in the Zambezi River, where they have access to a very small stretch, because of the restrictions imposed by the national park and the Chapoto villagers.

Unless and until the Government moves in to rescue the Doma people they are doomed.
Surviving on fishing and fruit gathering has become the only means of survival.

If they turn to farming, they must have the land, the equipment and the seed.
They need the training too.
Theirs is a life under serious threat. Severe hunger and starvation now stalks them. They don’t know anything about the donor community, yet they need donations for food, clothing and everything else.

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