Thinking through the calendar: Why the climate crisis needs indigenous names, and what we can learn from western Zimbabwe's April

By Tinashe Takuva, 27 May 2026

For many peoples across the world, the naming of months has been deeply descriptive and rooted in what communities perceive, experience, or anticipate at that time of year. The same cannot always be said of the Gregorian calendar that now dominates globally, whose month names owe more to Roman gods and emperors than to lived ecological experiences.

In late nineteenth century Zimbabwe, London Missionary Society (LMS) missionaries based in the Ndebele kingdom at times struggled with the weather of the region. They often complained about fever during the rainy season. In 1860, a year after establishing the LMS station at Inyathi in the kingdom, Robert Moffat described April as “the Fever Moon, which has been thought to be severe this season.” Since then, different missionaries in the kingdom would often complain about fever, among other weather-related challenges. For instance, in 1862, Thomas Morgan Thomas, describing what caused the death of his child and wife on 7 and 10 June respectively, wrote “All my little family consisting of my dear wife, and three little children, by taking a walk on the 28th ultimo, seemed to have had cold, and in a few days later they became ill of an intermittent fever of a malignant kind, and which in Mrs Thomas’ case assumed a more serious form still, on account of the unfavourable state of her health at the time at which she was attacked.” Years later, David Carnegie observed that this high fever period was longer than just a month. In 1886, he referred to the months between February and May as ‘our fever season…’.

A map of Matabeleland in 1887 — An 1887 map showing Matabeleland, part of present-day Zimbabwe

It is important to highlight that fever during this time was not just high temperature. Victorian fever, as journalist Erin Blakemore would say, was a ‘suite of symptoms seated in the brain… one characterized by headache, flushed skin, delirium, and sensitivity to light and sound.’ In naming April a fever month, or identifying a fever season, the missionaries were not deliberately displacing indigenous knowledge or telling locals how to understand their own land. Rather, they were reaching for the only framework they had, translating an unfamiliar environment into terms their own experience and training could accommodate. The two knowledge systems were, for a time, operating side by side, each naming the same reality without awareness of the other. Considering that the missionaries had only been in that region for a few years, it is interesting to find out what the locals named these months/season. While the locals may not have had a distinct calendar month like April, the descriptive meanings of such months in indigenous languages as they are called today may help us to know their experiences, activities or understanding of the time.

In IsiNdebele, February is called Nhlolanja, March- Mbimbitho and April, Mabasa. April is a time of the onset of lower temperatures as a forerunner of winter. That time people would traditionally start making fires (ukubasa umlilo) to warm themselves. In Shona, the language spoken by people some of whom had a tributary relationship with the Ndebele kingdom, particularly the Zezuru and Karanga dialects, April is Kubvumbi (rain showers/drizzle), May is Chivabvu (likely named after the last green maize, or signalling the end of harvest) while the names for February and March are not environment related. It will be interesting to know the indigenous meaning of these months in the Kalanga language, spoken by people who settled in western Zimbabwe many centuries before the arrival of the Ndebele and were later incorporated into the broader Ndebele Kingdom by mid-19th century, although preserving their identity, customs and language. In Kalanga April is known as Tjabewombe, May Kungulu while February and March are Bheta and Ndabhatani, respectively. I made a few inquiries to understand the meaning of these terms, but nothing conclusive came up. Some speakers of the language believe the original meanings may have been lost over time, as it is a very old language.

It is interesting to observe that what was seen by missionaries as a cause of disease and suffering, a fever moon or season, the locals felt it was a cause of action: Mabasa. The missionaries mapped illness onto a landscape; the Ndebele mapped intention. This reflects a fundamentally different relationship with seasonal change, one that positions people not as victims of climate but as agents responding to it. As global conversations about climate change grow louder, they, unfortunately, remain anchored in the vocabulary of crisis, measurement, and external intervention. Yet communities across the world have long held localised, action-oriented ecological knowledge. Such knowledge was not embedded in reports or policy frameworks, but in the very names they gave to the months, among many other forms of creating and passing on the knowledge. These names carried instructions: light the fire, harvest the last maize, prepare for what comes next. The challenge for climate policy today is not simply to include indigenous knowledge as a footnote to Western science, but to genuinely consider the possibility that some communities have already been encoding environmental knowledge for centuries. How much more effective would our climate policies be if they were not just informed by Western science, but also rooted in the place specific and action-oriented wisdom found in vernacular ecological knowledge?

Thinking through the calendar: Why the climate crisis needs indigenous names, and what we can learn from western Zimbabwe's April

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