Bvumavaranda B. Technocrat MuRozvi on Karanga/Shona Granaries
Introduction: My friend B. Technocrat has started posting factoids of the day on Facebook. And these are very informative pieces of writing on Karanga/Shona history and culture, offering the kind of information I sometimes struggle to locate or remember when working on a story or poem, forgotten practices which are in the danger of dying with time altogether. In the interest of supporting cultural and historical preservation (and all other forms of preservations of a people's indegenous way of life), I hereby join B. Technocrat MuRozvi by publishing this piece with his permission. Enjoy! In the village, grain is stored in matura, the storage bins in a hozi. These granaries, hozi or tsapi, may appear simple but that apparent simplicity is misleading. If constructed within the homestead, mumusha/mumozi/mumose, four boulders ... of roughly 1 meter in height are used as stilts to support a platform of poles. It is on this platform, gudzururu, that the hozi is constructed.