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The learning factory zimbabwe harare4/11/2023 ![]() ![]() When Odlum came back, he had become a tobacco expert, and was duly tasked with giving white farmers knowledge in the growing and sorting of the crop. A decade later, the British South Africa Company sent one George Odlum to the United States “to study all aspects of tobacco production”. This proved to be the first commercial harvest of this kind. In the 1894-5 season, a certain Mr L Cripps harvested 25kg of flue-cured Virginia tobacco in the eastern town of Umtali (now Mutare). When rumours of a gold reef in Southern Rhodesia extensive enough to rival that of the Witwatersrand proved chimerical, the British settlers who went to present-day Zimbabwe as part of Cecil John Rhodes’ Pioneer Column turned to farming. It is a trek back home that makes business sense too, for tobacco is – and has been – a big deal in Zimbabwe and its predecessor, Southern Rhodesia. It is not merely a sentimental return, of course. It is being tired of the routine of corporate life, for example – “I had had enough of 9-5 in corporate America,” as he said – or a desire to do what his grandfather could never do: return to his native land. The story of his grandfather aside, Mafundikwa had many other motivations to return. We probably have family in South Africa that we don’t know about,” Mafundikwa said. New Books | A historian’s passage to Africa. ![]() “There has always been this discussion in the family: What happened to him? Did he make it across the Limpopo River? Did he get to the mines and just forgot and said, ‘I am not going back.’?” Related article: The patriarch left his wife, then pregnant with Mafundikwa’s father, to work in South Africa’s mines around 1927 and never returned. “Try and create something unique.”Īs Mafundikwa plotted his return from Atlanta, Georgia, where he had lived with his family since the mid-2000s, at the back of his mind might have been the mysterious fate of his paternal grandfather. “I have to go home and do something,” he told himself. When the idea of setting up Zimbabwe’s first cigar-manufacturing factory occurred to Shepherd Mafundikwa, he was working in project management at Delta Airlines in the United States of America. Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window).Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window).Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window).Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window). ![]()
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