Muzvidziwa/MASVINGO URBAN WOMEN 
Keeping a foot in the village: Masvingo 
urban women 
VICTOR NGONIDZASHE MUZVIDZIWA1 
ABSTRACT 
A complex give-and-take relationship characterizes the way female 
heads of household in Masvingo balanced their relationships in town 
and countryside. My respondents employed a double-rooted strategy 
that entailed the use of urban kin to gain a foothold in town and at the 
same time the use of rural kin to help maintain the family, children and 
the elderly in the village. The women's strategy was also characterised 
by less instrumental considerations such as supporting rural kin 
and maintaining ties of affect and culture. However, because survival 
in town is difficult, the women expected to return to the village when 
their working lives were over and they therefore made strategic moves 
that ensured easy entry into the village when the time finally arrived. 
In view of the choices made by the women heads of households in this 
study, it is imperative for policy makers to arrive at policies that take 
into account double-rooted strategies. 
Introduction 
A COMPLEX GIVE-AND-TAKE relationship between town and tjbuntry characterized 
the form of urban-rural linkages that formed an important 
ongoing survival strategy of Masvingo female heads of household. 
This article shows that, despite the women's desire to stay and source 
a living in town, they kept one foot in town and the other in the village. 
1 Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, National 
University of Lesotho 
VOL 16 NO 1 JANUARY 2001 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA 85
This article focuses on a few case histories, showing how the women 
activated and used rural-urban linkages as survival and coping mechanisms. 
A major argument in this article is that the move to town in most 
cases had not led to the total rupture with rural kin and the village. 
The results reported in this article are based on 14 months of fieldwork, 
extending from early November 1994 to the end of December 
1995, in the provincial town of Masvingo in southern Zimbabwe. The 
study focused on how female heads of households dealt with urban 
poverty. The research sample was selected using the snowball sampling 
technique. The four cases discussed in this article are a part of a 
larger sample of some 50 female heads of households. 
Urban-rural linkages constituted, for 72% of the research participants 
in the main study, an important ongoing survival strategy. Without 
a foot in the countryside most women would not have been in a position 
to stay in town. Many in the larger sample continued to utilize kin 
networks in ways that maximized their chances of survival in the city. At 
the same time there was a minority of respondents (particularly the 
upwardly mobile and those bom in town who had no rural connections) 
who opted for urban permanency. This article seeks to explore the ways 
in which the four respondents turned to rural-urban linkages as a survival 
strategy that enabled them to cope with town life. 
Migration case histories 
THIS SECTION EXAMINES the migration history of four respondents. They 
all maintained some form of link with their villages. 
Coping 
Respondent QB1, a 20-year-old, childless woman, the only child of her 
late mother, had never married and had left school at 14 due to lack of 
financial and material support (her father being a polygamist with two 
wives). QB worked as a full-time sex worker and a part-time food vendor. 
Her business boomed during the November-December festive season 
1 to maintain the anonymity of my respondents letter symbols are 
used instead of real names 
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Muzvidziwa/MASVINGO URBAN WOMEN 
and the May to August winter months. She made savings that enabled 
her to cope during the lean months when sex work did not pay much. 
QB belonged to the coping group (those able to balance the household 
budget but making no long term savings). She was also a one-room 
lodger in Mucheke's maR2 two-roomed houses. 
QB first came to settle in Masvingo in 1993. She stayed with her 
maternal uncle in Mucheke's Pangolin area for a period of four months. 
By the time she moved to Masvingo she had for two years operated 
covertly as a part-time sex worker at Ngundu Business Service Centre, 
some four kilometres from her village and approximately 100 km from 
Masvingo. After four months of residence with her uncle, she became 
a one-room lodger in the Ma7?sarea in Mucheke. A friend belonging to 
a prostitute network that she had joined assisted her in finding and 
moving into this accommodation. She had been introduced to this prostitute 
network by a female maternal cousin. After a year she moved from 
this residence to where she was residing at the time of initial interviews 
during fieldwork. QB observed that town life was difficult and she had 
no intention in view of her circumstances of taking up urban residence 
permanently. She hoped to marry an urban man within the next ten 
years, failing which she would return to the countryside. 
QB remitted money and material goods on a regular basis to her 
father in Chivi rural district. She sent her father $300 in August 1995 but 
her average monthly remittances were far below this figure. She was the 
breadwinner for her father's family of 20. She bought her father a 50 kg 
bag of standard maize seed during the 1994-1995 agricultural season. 
QB made four short visits to her village during the year preceding the 
initial interview. Her main reason for visiting her village was to see her 
father and other members of the family. 
Hanging on (1) 
Respondent YM, a 34-year-old mother of four, lived in a mapoto- an 
informal conjugal relationship. Her informal partner was a polygamist 
2 Masvingo's former rondavels area, which had been destroyed to 
make way for the iwo-roomed housing units 
VOL 16 NO 1 JANUARY 2001 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA 87
with two other wives apart from her. No lobola (bride wealth) had been 
paid for her, hence her relationship to this man had never been formalized 
as marriage (in both the traditional and legal sense of the term). She 
was a highly frequent visitor to the village and hoped to retire there in 
old age. She had built a three-roomed rural homestead for herself and 
her children. She made monthly visits to the village. The main reason 
for these visits was to see her two children aged eleven and nine who 
lived with their maternal grandparents. During most of her visits to the 
village she bought her parents groceries like sugar and cooking oil. 
Although YM was born and had grown up in Harare her parents 
maintained their rural connections and had retired to their home village 
in the Nyanyadzi area of Manicaland Province some 200 km to the east 
of Masvingo and approximately 350 km from Harare. YM was solely 
responsible for the upkeep of her children. Her informal partner, the 
father of her children, made very little contribution towards the children's 
upkeep. YM was a lodger in one-room in Rujeko high density 
suburb, where she lived with her other two children, a 15-year-old daughter 
in Form III and a 13-year-old son in Grade 7. Even though she had no 
land or other assets, she planned to acquire a plot at Nyanyadzi irrigation 
scheme in order to secure her old age. Despite YM's view that town 
life was better than a rural existence, she still felt that she could not cut 
ties with the village as she would retire there in her old age. 
In 1991 she was retrenched from her clerical job in Harare but managed, 
through the aid of friends, to get a clerical job which she was still 
doing at the time of my fieldwork in 1992 in a shop in town. She had 
moved from Harare to Masvingo leaving her mapolo husband, the father 
of both her children, behind in Harare. YM's informal marital union 
dated back to the late 1980s. Although formally employed, she belonged 
to those in the hanging on in poverty category (those who were 
finding it hard to balance their household budget). She supplemented 
her formal income by doing part-time informal sector work. She sourced 
mupedzanhamo ( second hand clothes) for resale by her mother in the 
village and she also sewed and knitted clothing for resale in town and 
countryside. 
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Muzvidziwa/MASVINGO URBAN WOMEN 
When she first came to Masvingo in April 1992 she stayed with a 
maternal aunt for at least two weeks, after which she secured her own 
accommodation as a lodger. She stayed at this residence in Rujeko until 
October 1994, when she moved to the two-roomed residence where she 
was staying in at the time of my fieldwork. Although she would have 
preferred at least two rooms for her own use, she could not afford to 
pay for more than one room. YM felt very insecure in her formal sector 
job; hence her desire to invest in a Nyanyadzi irrigation scheme and 
rural residence. 
Hanging on (2) 
Respondent Q had never married. She was 40 years old, single and a 
mother of four and had lived in Masvingo for 23 years since 1972. Her 
elder sister facilitated her initial arrival to Masvingo. For the first four 
years there she worked as a domestic worker, but had been operating as 
a full-time food vendor since the late 1970s. Her sister taught her the 
skills required to succeed as a food vendor. Q lived at her sister's residence 
from 1972 to 1980, then became a one-room lodger. Since then 
she had changed lodgings several times. Q had a split family. Her two 
eldest sons lived in the village with their maternal uncle and his wife 
and she stayed in town with two daughters. Q belonged to the hanging 
on in poverty category. 
Q used to make frequent visits to her village, but by 1995 had cut 
them down to two or three trips per year, only visiting the village on 
important occasions such as weddings, funerals and celebrations. However, 
she continued to remit to the village on a bi-monthly basis. While 
Q had no intention of moving back to the village in the immediate future, 
she saw herself retiring to the village in old age. Her desire for 
town life did not weaken her village connections. She referred to the 
rural village as "home". 
Although Q had no land in the village she bought seed, particularly 
maize, cotton and groundnuts, for her brother and sister-in-law. They in 
turn sent her groundnuts and maize after harvesting. She took the maize 
VOL 16 NO 1 JANUARY 2001 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA 89
to town hammer mills. Q had established a connection with one of the 
crew of a long-distance bus. She had this to say "I give them parcels to 
take to my people at home and in turn my sister-in-law sends me groundnuts 
on a regular basis". It seemed the transport was a favour: if ever 
she paid for it was not in monetary terms. 
Climbing out 
Respondent C, a 41 -year-old widow with a 13 -year-old son had become, 
after the death of her husband, the legal owner of a four-roomed house 
in Masvingo's Rujeko high-density suburb. C looked after and lived 
with two of her late sister's Sons, a nine-year-old and a 13-year-old. She 
first came to Masvingo in 1982 when her husband was transferred from 
Harare. They had bought the house using a loan from CABS Building 
Society and the mortgage insurance company, following the death of 
her husband, paid the outstanding mortgage debt in full. 
C had no other assets in Masvingo or anywhere else. She belonged 
to the climbing out of poverty group (those who were making investments 
and saving for the future)/ Her main source of income was derived 
from cross-border trade. She intended to stay permanently in Masvingo. 
C had no contact of significance outside Masvingo town. She did not 
remit anything to her pensidner parents. Her father used to work for 
Mashaba Mine, 40 km. from Masvingo and her parents now lived in 
Chivi communal area. However, she made her once-yearly trip to the 
village only at Christmas. She did not take part in village affairs. C relied 
on her non-kin urban network - mostly friends - for moral and economic 
support. Her late husband, a Coloured, had had no rural roots. 
For C, with her weakly developed village ties, the rural strategy was not 
an option. C represented a minority of respondents who maintained 
weak ties with the countryside, either because they were born in town 
and had no rural roots or because they had made a choice to stay in 
town permanently and were making investments towards that goal. 
Three of the four cases presented above maintained strong ruralurban 
linkages as a survival technique. Recognizing the importance of 
kin, particularly on first entry into the city, and keeping close ties with 
their rural areas were part of the strategies these urban women migrants 
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used in order to survive. For many in my sample, as the above cases 
confirm, keeping one foot in the village and the other in town enabled 
them to eke out an existence in town without necessarily abandoning 
the village. The prospect of eventual return to the village, especially in 
old age or when things went wrong in town, loomed high in the minds 
of my respondents. B, Q and YM were able to pursue an urban career 
partly because they did have a foot in the village. 
Rural-urban ties 
THE FOUR WOMEN discussed above maintained some form of contact 
with the countryside. Only respondent C had limited contacts with her 
village, having opted for urban permanency. Her investment in urban 
housing — something most people did not have — seemed critical to her 
decision to stay in town permanently. However, respondents QB, Q and 
YM retained strong country links. The three women also participated in 
village activities like funerals, weddings and ceremonial activities, 
though they invested little materially in these activities. At the same 
time they advanced those relationships they prized most in town, especially 
friendship. Most of QB's friends were of her prostitute network. 
Q's friends were fellow food vendors and for YM friends were drawn 
from her workmates and church. Respondents had met most of their 
friends in the course of pursuing their livelihoods. Only one had friends 
from her local church, outside her work-related activities. All four women 
had parents or children residing in the village. They all referred to their 
villages as "home" even though in C's case she had no intention of 
ever going to settle in the village. 
B, Q and YM had activated kin ties at the point of entry into Masvingo. 
Their case confirmed Vaa's (1990) point on the relationship between 
gender and migration in the context of Bamako, with regard to the importance 
of kin networks for new town arrivals. This tallies with the 
point made by Winter (1991) that reciprocal kin networks are important 
in aiding new town migrants in finding accommodation on arrival. Logan 
(1981) also observes, and this is confirmed in the cases above, that 
once people decide to go and live in town they usually live with urban 
kin until they find a job or their own home. It is clear that, even under 
VOL 16 NO 1 JANUARY 2001 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA 91
rapidly changing economic circumstances, kin social networks have 
not been completely undermined. What could change may be the length 
of time that it is possible to stay with kin on arrival in town. B, Q and YM 
showed that new town arrivals were still allowed to lay claim to the 
urban resources of their kinsmen. 
New migrants to the city stayed more often with maternal relations 
than paternal relations. It could be that in a patriarchal society you are 
more likely to compete for status, economic advantage and group leadership 
with your paternal relations than your maternal relations. Family 
jealousies and competition over access to resources are likely to generate 
hostilities that undermine the possibility of co-residential options 
with paternal relatives. This could explain why it is usually one's maternal 
relatives who are supportive in a non-antagonistic manner. Another 
possible explanation for the women's behaviour is the likelihood that 
women feel closer to their mothers than their fathers, hence the resulting 
close maternal kin links. 
Interestingly, all the four respondents, irrespective of housing status, 
had sheltered rural kin during their overnight visits to town. Rural 
kin often came to town to conduct business as well as shopping for 
their household requirements. While these visits were of short duration, 
it is clear that both urban migrants and rural kin benefited from 
rural-urban linkages. At the same time it was these demands by rural kin 
on urban dwellers' scarce resources that made the upwardly mobile 
women like C resent and minimize rural-urban kin connections. 
For my respondents B, Q and YM, migration ensured that rural connections 
were maintained through remittances and other forms of 
exchanges of goods and services. However, for C, these exchanges 
were weakly articulated. All my respondents showed that, despite maintaining 
rural connections, they were not prepared to elaborate their 
instrumental goals in order to support kin beyond the immediate nuclear 
family household. Such linkages as ties of affect and cultural ties 
were not accompanied by investments in terms of material resources. 
This could be part of the respondents' strategic attempts not to dissipate 
their meagre resources, despite efforts at maintaining and servicing 
92 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA VOL 16 NO 1 JANUARY 20O1
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rural connections. Investments in rural relationships, as my respondents 
showed, were weak. They appeared more inclined to invest more 
time and energy in servicing their urban friendship networks or immediate 
family needs. 
The frequency of remittances reflected the degree of respondents' 
commitment to the village. B, Q and YM remitted money or material 
goods to their villages. They also took part or full responsibility for 
parents as dependents. Although there were no data to indicate what 
percentage of urban income was remitted, it was clear that remittances 
constituted a significant proportion of these respondents' total income. 
The importance of remittances in the articulation of rural-urban ties is 
stressed by Bigstein and Kayizzi-Mugerwa (1992) who found that, in 
Kampala and Nairobi, remittances constituted between 9% and 20% of 
people's total income. However investments in the village targeted 
members of the immediate family and not many other rural relatives. The 
weak investments in rural relatives could be due to increasing poverty 
and people's inability to generate a surplus that could be shared. 
Female migrants to town continued to maintain and nurture ties with 
the village. B, Q and YM made several trips to the village each year. 
These trips were opportunities to activate and maintain old social alliances 
as well as to continue and establish important economic linkages. 
Respondents B, Q and YM were double-rooted. This finding is contrary 
to Schlyter's (1990) argument that female migrants were more urban 
than their male counterparts. Only a minority like C had opted for urban 
permanency. The above cases show that urban female heads of households 
had just as strong rural attachments as their male counterparts, 
as was observed in the 1970s by researchers like Stopforth (1973) and 
Bourdillon(1977). 
As double-rooted individuals, these women took advantage of the 
relative freedom of town life. As Little (1973:20) stresses, if you are an 
independent woman in town "you are free to do as you please. There 
are no homestead people watching you". Most likely, persons like YM 
would not have been able to enter a mapoto relationship with a man 
who had not paid lobola (bride wealth) if they had been residing in the 
VOL 16 NO 1 JANUARY 2001 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA 93
village. At least in town, money could be earned, lodgings hired and 
property acquired regardless of sex, seniority or marital status, though 
gender disadvantages still affected women's life chances. 
Accessing resources 
THE UTILIZATION OF rural resources allowed urban residents to improve 
or maintain their standard of living outside the formal economic sector 
of salaried jobs or informal earnings. Generally my respondents drew 
on the resources of their rural communities. My examples confirmed 
Logan's (1981:238) observation that migration was "not a one-step, 
final process which forever separates them from their rural homeland, 
but rather a continual exchange between city and country". 
I found that, just as in Holm's (1992) study, my Masvingo respondents 
at times used their rural networks to source food for their own 
consumption and their households in town. For instance, B depended 
on maize and groundnuts sourced directly from the village. The flow of 
food resources from rural households to urban ones is contrary to the 
common assumption that rural kin act only as recipients of goods and 
services originating from towns. Even for those respondents who did 
not receive food from their villages, rural networks functioned in ways 
that enabled them to continue to stay in town. 
The four women, even the double-rooted ones discussed in this 
article, had no land rights in rural areas. This is different from the situation 
noted by Kemper (1981) where migrants had little or no land in 
town but had a claim to some land in the village. Masvingo female 
heads of household were landless. Under customary law, in force during 
my fieldwork and still in force today, land rights were vested in men 
andwomen accessed land through their men folk. 
My respondents felt that it was essential to maintain rural links as a 
form of economic security for the eventualities of old age and unemployment 
when urban expenses could no longer be met. B, Q and YM 
realized that they could not survive permanently in town. For 
Mutambirwa and Potts (1990:695), "perhaps the most significant evidence 
of migrants' perceptions of their insecurity in the urban milieu is 
the fact that the majority of respondents reported that they expected to 
94 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA VOL 16 NO 1 JANUARY 2001
Muzvidziwa/MASVINGO URBAN WOMEN 
return to the rural areas at some time in the future". For B, Q and YM 
continued residence in town depended on maintaining rural ties and 
splitting the household into urban and rural components. Household 
splitting lowers the costs of reproduction for the urban household. , 
B, Q and YM were lodgers: only C was a house-owner. House-ownership 
status influenced household patterns for my respondents. 
Split-household residential affected two of my respondents. One or 
more children resided in the village with their maternal grandparents, 
grandmother or some other maternal relation. Children lived in the village 
as a cost-cutting measure for the urban household. It was also 
convenient to practice split-household residential patterns as a form of 
mobilizing both rural and urban resources. 
Attitude toward urban permanency 
MY STUDY SHOWED that, for my women respondents, their livelihood in 
the town was the main source of their survival. The four women regarded 
the urban context as offering better opportunities than the rural 
one for earning an income. For B, Q and YM the successful pursuit of 
urban opportunities depended on the 'strategy of split-residence and 
being double-rooted. While they preferred to work in town, however, 
this did not result in a complete break witii th.e village. The four women 
maintained both real and symbolic links with their villages of origin. 
Even in situations where they did not-visit'their villages frequently, 
they still continued to call their village their "home". 
There was a general tendency to look at urban opportunities in favourable 
terms. The town offered marjy opportunities to enterprising 
individuals. Yet my respondents realized that their future did not lie in 
the town but in activating and maintaining rural connections. But they 
also took advantage of their §tay in town to expand mostly their urban 
networks and to a limited extent rural networks thereby enabling them 
to stay in town on an extended basis, i 
Masvingo research participants at times used their rural networks to 
provide food for their own consumption and their households in town, 
as noted above. At times rural-urban, interactions were mutually beneficial. 
Through kin networks in urban areas, some villagers managed to 
VOL 16 NO 1 JANUARY 2001 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA 95
gain access to urban resources, like housing or an urban job. At the 
point of entry into the city urban kin had accommodated many of my 
study respondents until they found a job or their own home. However, 
those respondents who opted for urban permanency, like C, viewed kin 
negatively, seeing them as potential claimants to their resources. 
Policy recommendations 
IT IS MY ARGUMENT that a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy should 
reject the popular notions advanced by people like Gilbert and Gugler 
(1992) that a more rural-based and focused policy is needed to successfully 
tackle poverty in Africa. Policies thatseek to distinguish rural from 
urban poverty may distort rather than clarify the issue of poverty. With 
72% of respondents in my sample in the double-rooted category, policies 
targeted at both are more likely to be effective in reducing poverty. 
An area that needs urgent attention is the need to make land and 
housing accessible to women heads of household both in town and 
rural areas. Access to urban land, for instance, is critical to a person's 
decision to stay in town and being able to fend for the household. 
There is a need, therefore, for local authorities to formulate genderneutral 
policies in such areas as housing and employment and to 
abandon gender-selective ones that continue to assume that heads of 
households are male. An anti-poverty strategy means women must 
have independent access to both rural and urban land. Gender discrimination 
in terms of access to land, whether urban or rural, should be 
outlawed. 
Although it is still worth referring to some of the recommendations 
made by the Rukuni Commission of Inquiry into Appropriate Agricultural 
Land Tenure Systems (1994) it should be borne in mind that 
Zimbabwe's experiences in the run-up to the June 2000 elections and 
immediately thereafter, characterized by a breakdown in the rule of law, 
together with a government-orchestrated land grab policy, have meant 
the sidelining of the Commission's recommendations. The Rukuni Commission 
simply noted that the communal tenure system in Zimbabwe 
needed to be maintained and strengthened and that surviving widows 
should retain land rights held while their husbands were alive. Inad- 
96 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA VOL 16 NO 1 JANUARY 2001
Muzvidziwa/MASVINGO URBAN WOMEN 
vertently, the Commission appears to have argued for the strengthening 
of patriarchal relations regarding property rights, relations that have 
proved to be an obstacle to women's access to property including land 
,and housing. The Commission's recommendations are likely to result in 
women's exclusion as far as access to land and housing access is concerned. 
The Commission's recommendations are indicative of certain 
official ways of thinking which if pursued, can only lead to problems as 
far as access to land and housing is concerned. 
Conclusion 
UNLIKE MOST PRE-1990 studies of the flight of women to town that stressed 
escape from kinship ties, the cases reviewed in this article point to a 
different picture. These women interacted with the village and town in 
ways that enhanced their survival chances. Kin provided the first port 
of call upon a women's arrival as a migrant in town. Although most 
women further entrenched themselves in town through deliberately 
cultivating links with friends and, to a lesser extent, with neighbours, 
they generally sustained double-rootedness. The women did their best 
to foster and invest in their rural relationships while advancing those 
relations they prize most in town. While I concede that this observation 
is not in itself new in labour migration studies, my work provides fresh 
evidence that, in the 1980s after independence in Zimbabwe, and even 
more so in the 1990s after structural adjustment policies, doublerootedness 
has come to be even more important in women's struggles 
and strategies to deal with conditions of impoverishment. Even though 
survival in town is difficult and requires a solid financial resource base, 
the village, in some instance, provides a necessary backup that enabled 
many in my sample to cope or hang on in town for as long as possible 
before eventually retiring to the village. 
Through the use of case examples I have tried to show that the lived 
experiences of female heads of household show a deliberate effort to 
make adjustments to their lives in such a way as to allow them to continue 
to utilize the village as part of survival strategies open to them. 
The women had learnt how to cope and survive against odds such the 
very high costs of housing, low incomes, childcare demands and re- 
VOL 16 NO 1 JANUARY 2001 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA 97
sponsibilities towards their children, parents and kin. Very often the 
adjustments took the form of maintaining rural-urban ties. It would appear, 
however, that some, especially the economically better off, opted 
for urban permanency rather than double-rootedness. The doublerooted 
strategy pursued by my respondents involved the exchange of 
goods and services and reciprocal flow of resources from both rural 
and urban directions. Double-rootedness was a poverty-coping strategy 
adopted by many female heads of households in my sample. 
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