First Fruits of Immigration, 1907–19

Although the immigration policies of the Chartered Company were not as productive as the Directors had hoped, the white population of Marandellas did increase threefold between 1907 and 1911 and the imbalance between the sexes was markedly reduced. This encouraged significant developments in a number of areas important for the satisfaction of family needs, in educational and health facilities, in the improvement of communications, above all in the establishment of a more permanent agricultural industry. Marandellas’s importance, such as it was, had depended upon its geographical position at the junction of the roads leading to Fort Charter and the south, Umtali and the east, and the capital Salisbury. When the railway line from Bulawayo to Salisbury was completed in 1902, the village’s importance diminished as a communications centre. From that moment it was agriculture which provided the mainspring for the developments in the district; the first school, for instance, was opened not in the village, but in the farming area to the north of the railway line. The village merely catered to farmers’ needs, providing a hotel for entertainments and refreshment, a store from which machinery and exotic provisions might be obtained, a station and a Post Office to maintain links with the more populous centres and the outside world, and the embodiments of law and order, the Native Commissioner and British South Africa Company Police.