How it began
The Bemba developed chitemene, also spelled citemene, in the miombo woodlands of what is now northern Zambia. The word comes from Bemba and means a place where branches have been cut for a garden. Researchers from Kyoto University, who studied Bemba villages in Mpika District from 1983, call it a unique shifting cultivation system. Their account cites a description published in 1939 as the earliest study in a long line. The sources give no date for when the practice began.
Before it existed
Soils under the miombo woodland are highly weathered, easily leached and acidic, with a pH of about 4.0 to 4.5. That is too acidic for most of the cereals and root crops grown in Zambia. Concentrating ash from a wide area on a small plot raises the pH of the soil. The heat of the fire also kills weed seeds and leaves a fine seedbed that needs little further work.
How it works
At the start of the dry season men climb trees and cut off the branches over a large area, leaving the trunks alive. Once the branches have dried, women carry them to a smaller plot, where they are piled and burned. In the first year finger millet and cassava are planted in the ash, followed over the next years by crops such as groundnuts and beans, and the field is then left fallow. Because the trees are lopped and not uprooted, they sprout again, and fertility returns in about 20 to 25 years.
How it spread
Three main forms are practiced in different areas. Large-circle chitemene is found across the northeast, mainly among Bemba speakers in Northern and Luapula provinces. A second form is used by the Lala and Swaka peoples from southern Mpika District westward toward Kapiri Mposhi. A third is practiced by the Lamba and Kaonde in Central, Copperbelt and Northwestern provinces.
Where it stands today
From the mid-1980s government policy spread fertilized maize farming in semi-permanent fields through Bemba villages. When market liberalization in the mid-1990s cut maize production, villagers came to depend more on chitemene again. Around 2000 a resettlement project removed villagers and chitemene from parts of the woodland. The system is sound where land is plentiful, but shorter fallows and maize grown in chitemene plots now exhaust soils faster.
