Online ReporterPepukai Mubako-Correspondent
When he passed Standard 4 in 1948, my grandmother expected my father to go on to a teachers’ college.
She figured he would need a few beasts — for lobola (bride price) and for financial independence — as a foundation for a stable life.
So, from the little she had saved, she gifted him cattle.
It was a remarkable act under colonial restrictions on African livestock ownership, perhaps even heroic.
She obviously saw beyond the moment, guided by instincts shaped over generations — practical wisdom that science is only now catching up to.
To wit, the hardy local breed of cattle is a sound economic investment. Today the evidence confirms her common sense.
Long-term cross breeding trials at Matopos Research Station in Southern Zimbabwe found that Mashona cows consistently outperformed exotic breeds in calving rates, weaning percentages and productivity under Zimbabwean conditions.
In chronic under-nutrition trials, Mashona cows could lose 32,5 percent of body mass before breeding activity ceased — nearly double the tolerance of the next closest breed.
Resilience, it turns out, is measurable.
Long before it became a climate buzzword, one breeder was quietly proving it in the veld.
In 1963, Mrs Carmen Stubbs fell in love with the Mashona.
She bought her first animals in Masvingo and immediately saw what many dismissed: that these cattle had been shaped by the land over generations to endure its harshest conditions.
By the 1970s, she was performance-testing Mashona cattle at her Fertyline stud, proving on paper what many already suspected — that these animals could thrive on poor veld and produce lean, high-quality beef.
And this was long before lean beef was recognised as a health-conscious choice.
Her Mashona bull broke national records in 1978.
Subsequent Matopos trials confirmed what she already knew.
Mrs Stubbs spent over six decades proving that oral tradition and lived experience are not inferior to institutional knowledge.
Often, they are simply earlier.
Indigenous cattle hold firm through conditions that break exotic counterparts — producing calves year after year, maintaining condition on poor pasture and requiring minimal intervention.
Commercial exotic breeds, by contrast, depend on high-input systems that become liabilities.
When climate doesn’t play ball, costs spike or supply chains fail. The deeper problem is a habitual distrust of local knowledge.
Aid programmes frequently measure success by how much local practice gets replaced rather than refined. Farmers are told to crossbreed native herds with exotics to improve them.
Improve what? If it’s 100 percent Mashona, Tuli, or Nkone — it’s 100 percent; it’s proven.
Indigenous herds end up propping up weaker exotics that ordinarily cannot survive in these climes.
The result is a local livestock sector chasing external benchmarks — export feedlot models, high-input systems — rather than building on what already works.
The quiet genetics and hard-won knowledge that carry a herd through drought are unglamorous. They don’t make for ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
But they carry families through droughts that well-wishing projects don’t survive.
The local market is now assigning serious value to this resilience.
Last year, the Indigenous Breeders Societies of Zimbabwe held their annual sale — for the second consecutive year — at the ADMA show in Harare.
The market spoke clearly: both the Nkone and Tuli bulls topped the sale at US$4 750 each, with the Mashona following at US$3 750.
These are not novelty prices. They are the returns for farmers who have bet on genetics that work.
At the same ADMA show, a young farmer named Tich said he had planted 300 hectares of sorghum.
Fighting words. But he wasn’t wrong.
Sorghum, like indigenous cattle, is drought-resistant, low-input and adapted over centuries to local conditions.
This year his group has planted over 10 000 hectares of sorghum.
Ancient grains and indigenous cattle share the same logic: reliable when everything else is not.
This story cannot end without mentioning a segment that CNN ran on indigenous cattle in Zimbabwe.
Featured was Mr Max Makuvise, resident director of Shangani Holistic, which manages over 7 500 Nguni cattle. The operation has invested in indigenous genetics since 2012, built on, as the operation’s name declares, holistic management and soil health.
We are talking here of Zimbabwean commercial operation vindicating what the land already knew.
I look forward to the upcoming Indigenous Breeders Societies sale. If the trajectory holds, those phenomenal numbers for local breeds will only climb.
Pepukai Mubako is a rancher based in Masvingo
