GRANDMOTHER Ndlolo Dube sits on the dusty ground outside her mud-and-pole hut
and looks out on a land that has never seemed so dry and unforgiving. The
field that was supposed to feed her and her four orphaned grandchildren is
littered with dead broken maize stalks.
“No rain,” she says, as she shows the half-full 50kg bag of maize that is all
the family has harvested this year. It is the third year running that the
harvest has failed, but this time is by far the worst. “It’s just enough to
last two or three weeks, then I don’t know what we’ll do.”
At every hut, every village, it is the same story. Plumtree and Figtree sound
as if they should be verdant places but severe drought has left the area,
like much of southern Zimbabwe, with 95% crop failure. People sit with dazed
expressions, fuddled with hunger. The United Nations World Food Programme
estimates that 4m people will need food aid.
Shortages are no longer new in this country where President Robert Mugabe’s
violent land seizures have seen the destruction of commercial farms that
provided work for millions and food for the whole region. But this year they
come amid inflation estimated to have reached 10,000-15,000%.
By the end of June prices were doubling daily. Last week the government sent
in police and militia youths to force shopkeepers to lower prices. Many
responded by locking their doors and suspending business.
Dube has no idea how she and her family will survive for the rest of the year.
“I have no cow, no goats, nothing,” she says.
When I ask how often they eat, she replies: “Morning and evening.” Surprised,
I ask what they ate that morning. “Nothing,” she says. And the previous
evening? “Nothing.” It turns out that they often go for days without eating.
Sometimes the children get so hungry they chew green fruits from a tree known
as African chewing gum, even though they know they will end up with stomach
ache.
Two of Dube’s grandchildren — 10-year-old twins Kwenza Kele and Flatter — take
me with them to collect water. They are smaller than my seven-year-old back
home. The water-hole has a fence of twisted logs to prevent cows defecating
but it is green and putrid water, topped with scum.
This year’s maize harvest is expected to be 500,000 tonnes, compared with the
1.4m tonnes needed. But Pius Ncube, the Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo,
believes the shortages will help Mugabe in the run-up to elections next
March.
“The government is very happy about the food situation as they know they can
use food to make people vote for them again,” he says. “They use every
advantage.”
At the next village, Grandmother Dedi Ndlovu is complaining about pain in her
legs. She harvested just 20kg of maize for her nine grandchildren, eight of
whom are orphans. “Not even half a bag,” she says. “In the past we would get
six or seven bags. Sometimes I think, what if I get sick and die? What will
happen to these children?”
It is a while before I notice something even more eerie than the impending
famine. These are villages of grandparents and grandchildren. There is
nobody of my age. In a whole day we meet only one person between the ages of
20 and 50.
“All the young people have either died or gone,” explains Pastor Raymond, the
local clergyman.
Many have fallen victim to the lethal combination of Aids and hunger. Others
are part of an exodus of 4m Zimbabweans forced for economic and political
reasons to leave their country.
In the towns I have noticed fewer people on the streets, but it is only in
these villages that the figures are brought home. This is a country that has
lost an entire generation.
Amid the breakdown of society — 20-hour power cuts, water shortages, collapse
of the phone system — nobody I ask, whether government official, diplomat or
aid worker, has any idea what the population of Zimbabwe is any more.
“That’s the $25m question,” says a US diplomat, suggesting the figure may be
as low as 8m, instead of the 12m usually cited.
In 15 years, life expectancy has fallen to 34 years for women and 37 for men,
by far the lowest in the world. What some call a silent genocide has left Zimbabwe
with more orphans than anywhere else in the world — 1.4m according to Unicef.
At Bulawayo’s vast West Park cemetery, it is easy to spot the recent arrivals
— a large plot freshly dug, with row after row of graves, barely a plank’s
width between them. The gravestones tell their own story. All were born in
the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
Over on the other side in the children’s section is a line of tiny earth
mounds, the graves of babies who have died in the past week.
At the edges of the graveyard are odd areas of tossed earth. “People come in
at night and bury their relatives secretly at the margins because they
cannot afford proper burials,” explains Pastor Useni Sibanda, who leads a
church in Bulawayo and speaks for the Save Zimbabwe Campaign, an umbrella
grouping of church groups and other civic organisations.
Those who can join burial clubs — macabre savings groups where people in a
street or a workplace join together to pay for each other’s dead. Others register
sick relatives under false names at hospitals, knowing they cannot afford a
funeral.
Nobody knows how many have died of hunger. But doctors in Zimbabwe say the
population’s chronic malnutrition, combined with HIV, leads to the onset of
full-blown Aids far faster than anywhere else in Africa.
Father Oskar Wermter, a German Jesuit priest working in Mbare, Harare’s oldest
township, has spent 37 years in Zimbabwe and says he has never seen things
so bad, even during the liberation war.
“How do people survive in this situation?” he asks. “The answer is many just
don’t but you don’t see them.”
He cites the case of Chipo Kurewa, a lively teacher in her forties whose home
was bulldozed during Operation Murambatsvina (Drive out the Filth) in which
700,000 people saw their houses and businesses demolished.
“After that, she was in constant trouble, struggling to find work and
accommodation and then diagnosed HIV-positive,” says Wermter.
He took Kurewa to a centre to get anti-retroviral drugs, but then she
disappeared. “One day I got a phone call from Botswana. It was her — she’d
gone to find work. About six weeks later she arrived in a terrible state. A
kind lady in Gaborone had put her on a bus. But she had meningitis. Three
days later she was dead.”
I ask after Stella, one of his parishioners, who had taken me round Mbare 18
months ago to see those who lost their homes in Murambatsvina. I remembered
her flamboyant clothes and vivacious manner, despite the horror we were
seeing and the risks we were taking.
“Dead,” he replies. “This is becoming a land of the elderly and very young,
the unqualified and under-qualified — in other words, the most vulnerable.”
There are other effects too. All the children I speak to are much older than
their size would suggest, and a recent study found that more than one in
three people in Harare suffers mental disorders. The main reasons were
inability to find food and having belongings taken away by the authorities.
Zimbabwe is not yielding photographs of children with stick limbs and flies on
their mouths, the images we usually associate with famine in Africa.
Something more sinister is under way, almost as if life were just draining
out of the country.
At a shack selling firewood in Emakhandeni township, just outside Bulawayo,
Sibanda stops to load up and says: “If the middle classes have been so
pauperised that teachers are forced to become prostitutes to feed their
family and use firewood because there’s no more power, imagine what’s
happening to the most marginalised.”
Inside the shack, a girl of 15 lies dying on a bed, her blankets soiled and
life fading away. Her lips are parched and her eyes flicker weakly at us.
The family do not even ask for help. They know it is the same in every shack
in every township. Besides, even if we got her to hospital, there would be
no drugs.
At Mpilo hospital in Bulawayo, the Japanese-funded paediatric unit was opened
in 2004 and is remarkably clean and modern. Inside there are numerous empty
beds. Few can afford the bus fare to the hospital.
The only medicines have been donated by a foreign aid agency. On the babies’
ward, none is connected to a monitor and only two have drips, even in the
malnutrition room.
By one cot sit a couple whose seven-month-old daughter desperately needs
intestinal surgery, but who have been told they must buy a drip, which they
cannot afford. “We had to borrow to pay the bus fare to get here,” says the
father as he watches his wife cradle the sick child.
There are only two young nurses to staff the ward of 45 seriously ill babies,
treating, cleaning and feeding them.
“Anyone that can go has left the country,” says one of the nurses, pointing
out that her monthly salary of Z$3.2m (£4.50) barely covers her bus fares of
Z$120,000 a day. “I eat nothing during my shift as I can’t afford it.”
The only reason she and her colleague are still here, she says, is they are
newly qualified and the government is withholding their diplomas. “They’re
doing it deliberately to stop us going.”
There is no sign of any doctors. According to a Unicef official, 50% of all
health posts in Zimbabwe are vacant and there are more Zimbabwean nurses in
Manchester than in Bulawayo.
It is not just doctors who are leaving. Over the past few years, the
University of Zimbabwe has seen its number of lecturers fall from more than
1,200 to just over 600. According to the Progressive Teachers Union of
Zimbabwe, more than 5,000 teachers left between January and April this year.
The magnitude of the exodus becomes starkly clear across the border in South
Africa, to which the majority of people flee. At the Central Methodist
Church in central Johannesburg, Zimbabwean refugees are literally spilling
out onto the road.
More than 3,000 sleep there every night, cramming the corridors and steps,
each with a zipped bag containing all they could carry.
Yet every person I talk to is a professional: accountants, bankers,
headmasters. One was the clerk of the High Court — forced to flee, he says,
because he witnessed the secret police interfering with ballot boxes during
a legal challenge by the opposition to presidential elections.
Most have left because the alternative was to starve. “We just couldn’t afford
to feed our families,” says a group of teachers recently arrived from a
school in Masvingo.
They have to leave the church by 7am every day and wander the streets hoping
to pick up work as labourers or gardeners, or just begging. One man earns
more in a day’s gardening than he did in a month of teaching science in
Zimbabwe.
Most of the refugees are men looking for money to send back to their families.
But on the ground floor is a room packed with women and children. One woman,
Joyce, sits watching her two-year-old son and four-year-old daughter scrape
leftovers from someone’s pan of sadza (grain meal).
“My husband passed away and I couldn’t get work in Bulawayo,” she says. “I
thought if we came to South Africa we might still have hope of a life.”
It was a hazardous journey, crossing the crocodile-infested Limpopo river with
the two toddlers on her back. “But I kept thinking there is nothing left for
us in Zimbabwe,” she says.
“The numbers have been going up dramatically this year,” says Bishop Paul
Verryn, who has fought off parishioners’ protests to shelter the
Zimbabweans. “We used to see five or 10 arriving a day but for the last few
months it has been 20 or more. It’s a cataclysmic collapse of a country.”
Zim's problems are because the country is bankrupt as the economy relied on only one thing agriculture. Sanctions only target gvt officials hence cross border trade of essentials. The WHOLE of zimbabwe suffers powercuts and if you are in Harare you know THIS so how dare you try and twist this issue.
Simon, London,
tachengetwa...sanctions are not affecting blacks or whites unless they are arms-buyers or top government. That's the whole point of targeted sanctions, see??. The whites I know are certainly also getting the 20-hour power cuts. And the shortages. Those are caused by Mugabe, not by sanctions.
David Ashton, Bathurst , Australia
You have failed to explain the British's grand hidden agenda in Zimbabwe so we don't believe you. Always give us reasons to balance your work. If sanctions were not working, why would the British want to tighten them now? Why are the whites in Zimbabwe not being affected by the sanctions?
tachengetwa , Harare, Zimbabwe
There are too many apologists for Africans.Lord Soames was aware when governor that ZANU was violent.He declared it and was vilified.Its happenning now and people are being killed for expressing 'one man one vote'. Black is killing black and African leaders are silent..zanu hegemony has failed.
david, kirkcaldy, fife
Only two or three years ago a white male farmer was killed on
his farm. His wife stayed on. I think her name was Suzanne, Susanne? I was much impressed by her fantastic will-power and her having the guts to continue working the farm and staying at all costs. Does anyone know her name and adress?
Ingmar Heldsdoerfer, Gothenburg, Sweden
what planet does JJC, Berkley, ostensibly from California, live...get a ticket and go there and see for yourself....but then again you are probably one of Mugabe's henchmen...The people are dying of starvation...They dont need Mugabe, they need food and water to strengthen them to fight back.....Armies, any Army fights on it's stomach.... Mugabe knows that and that is why he is taking the food out the peoples mouths
L Harrison, Lyndhurst, uk
I agree with Laura from Scotland. I lived in Zambia for three years in the late 90's and visited Zim more times than I can count, and it was a great place to be. I had some friends who lived there (born and bred Zims) who were white farmers. They also had to "flee" Zim, but because they just couldn't survive anymore.
I agree that race shouldn't have anything to do with anything, and we are all members of the human race, but in Zim race does effect things. My friends' farm was twice named in Mugabe's land reform as a farm that would be seized, and twice they managed to get it removed from the list. In the end so many of their workers were attacked by "war vets" that their farm nearly collapsed and they decided to leave.
Kevin, KIGALI, Rwanda
The British have exagerated the case of Zimbabwe. It's too much propaganda. But anyway, that is to be expected. The case of Zimbabwe as portrayed by Ms. Lamb is not correct. Of course things aren't well in Zimbabwe after more than seven solid years of fatal sanctions by Britain and it's allies; but Mugabe and Zimbabwe have remained steadfast. Leave them alone for heaven's sake!
JJC, Berkley, California
no food no water no work no help no hope
graham, lymington, uk
HAHAHAHAHA Liberate Africa, you really make me laugh. Sitting comfortably in Derby in the UK, saying we should leave Zimbabwe to sort out it's own problems. Maybe you would like to go and live in Zimbabwe and help?
Zimbabwe HASN'T sorted out it's problems, they are just getting worse by the day! At some point the world should say enough is enough, and I think that time is now well overdue.
Richard, Surrey, UK
The UN are interested in Darfur because 2mpeople have been displaced. From everything I read it sounds like Simbabwe has more like 3m people displace byt the impossible living conditions and total hopelessness of waiting for things to get better.
Betty Ashton, Wimborne Minster, Dorset, UK
I know there's a lot of people out there who share the similar feeling, I hope anyway, there are two things that need to be done to get us on the way to some kind of normality, first us zimbabweans need tyo look at ourselves and ask ourselves what are we doing to change the situation? Wether we like it or not we are in a war, but it seems as if the attack is coming from the present regime, this goes out specialy to those living out side the country: its Time for some kind of a REVOLUTION from all ordinary people. The 2nd issue is regarding he so called "econimic Sanctions" If Zimbabwe had oil, all of you would be there lending a hand, instead u ban ministers from travelling, I believe if some of these countries had it their way, we would all kill each other. Sorry to sound crude but that is what it is beggining to look like. Above all we must al Pray for our Nation, that is the very least we can all do, rich or poor.
Revolution, melbourne, Australia
Tell Peter Hain will you - that old fellow Marxist friend of "Bob" Mugabe.
Peter hatchett, coventry,
So Liberate Africa of Derby, UK has identified the answer to the horror of Zimbabwe is 'for Europeans to leave".
Notwithstanding that anybody, regardless of their ethnic origin, colour or race with the means to leave ALREADY HAS left does he have anymore insightful solutions to add?
I think the answer to much of Africa's present day problems can be seen in statements such as Liberate Africa's.
Scary.
Keith , London,
Absolutely amazing that the rest of the world does nothing about this. Politically you can call it colonial influence, the white man in Africa, bla bla bla.
This country is dying on its feet in front of the world. Mugabe may well go down in history alongside Mao and Pol Pot. And yet the politicians of the world cannot bring themselves to point the finger and say, "Mr Mugabe, please go or the troops will be coming."
Who needs weapons of mass destruction when there are people like Mugabe in the world. To say that this is a private issue to be solved by black Africans is the most non sensical thing I have ever heard.
Nick Wood, Bangkok,
I agree with Liberate Africa; the West should leave Africa to sort out its own problems. However, they are incapable of doing so, and have no intention of doing so, because come hell or high water, African leaders will NEVER act decisively as one to get rid of their dispicable peers, such as Mugabe.
In fact, the West should give Africa up as a lost cause, because that is what it is, very largely. and it will remain so until African leaders and people such as Liberate Africa stop blaming colonialism and the West for their problems, and start looking in a mirror to see the real culprits to blame for Africa's never-ending mess of conflict, corruption, human rights abuses, genocide, inefficiency, nepotism, and all the rest.
Rod Baker, Cape Town, South Africa
If my memory serves me well,was it not a labour government under Harold Wilson who accelerated this decline in Zim.
Ian Smith was vilified by the UK, and sanctions then were very stringent, and Zim wobbled economically thanks to
Mr Wilson. Was not the very well meaning Ian Smith treated like a pariah. So, now years have passed , and the glorious bread basket of Africa has been wilfully destroyed by an inept
old man, R Mugabe.
maggie snook, Wool,, Dorset UK
Zimbabweans fled to South Africa with the false prospect of an Utopia with plenty of jobs. There is a estimate 4 million Zimbabweans in South Africa (10% of SA population) and the majority don't have any work and to survive they turn to crime. The crime rate in SA have escalated out of controle. More than 3000 white farmers have been murdered during the past 10 years. In the cities our houses are fortresses to protect us from rape, murder and armed robbery. I fear that South Africa will go the same road as Zimbabwe and the blame will be put on coloniallism and apartheid. The whites is about 7% of the South African population with about 80% of the wealth in their hands which is a time bomb about to explode. Black Economic Empowerment, affirmative action, land redistribution are on the order of the day and competent farmers, government officials, managers, etc, are on a daily basis replaced by not so competent persons with the right connections and skin colour
Philip Pienaar, Pretoria, South Africa
Uh, Laura of Alloa, by the same argument you might well claim that "The concept of any country being 'black' is utterly ridiculous today ".
But that aside, black, white, or brindle, the colour of one's skin has clearly never stopped the despots of every age wreaking havoc without discrimination on those whom they perceive to stand between them and what they clearly value most: power. And untramelled power in particular. Mugabe is merely the latest in a long line for whom human life has clearly become just one more commodity for them to dispose of at their leisure in order to keep themselves in office.
Tansi of lilburn, having a "right to bear arms" in order to throw off a despot is all very well, but I would be very careful. Iraq is in its present stage of anarchy in part because too many private citizens have a cache of arms stashed away and are using them against their ethnic and religious enemies.
Zimbabwe surely has enough problems without adding a civil war to them.
Another Stephen, Sydney, Australia
I just wanted to comment on what Stephen of Oxford had to say I am white and I had to leave Zimbabwe but it had nothing to do with race - it was purely economical. I wonder why he had to 'flee'. I was born in Rhodesia and lived in Zimbabwe for the greater portion of my life and in the 90's Zim was the most fantastic place to be. Please don't teach your children and grandchildren to fear Africa and Africans but rather to stand against tyranny - whatever the source (and it exists everywhere). I consider myself and my sons as Africans - born and bred - we belong to the white tribe of Africa and we share a common heritage with the black and brown and yellow tribes of Africa. When I think about my country it breaks my heart. The concept of any country being 'white' is utterly ridiculous today and it is far more important to realise that we ALL belong to the same race - the HUMAN RACE.
Laura, Alloa, Scotland
I sit in my easy chair with enough to eat and a nice home. I can understand having to leave your country. Because there is only one answer if one is going to stay. That answer is the reason that we in the USA have the 2nd Amendment ( the right to bear arms ) and the
Constitution ( the basic rights ) and the Declaration of Independence. ( when a Despot is abusive and destructive of the basic rights of the people, it is the right and duty of the people to abolish, remove, and throw off that Despot government with what ever means available. )
Of course, I know this way of thinking is radical and not politically correct . But, it is sad to watch a Despot take a proud independent country down that same old drain.
tansi, lilburn, USA/ ga
Ian Smith come back all is forgiven.
michael campbell, londonderry, ulster
Does this article mean you are going to end sanctions now?
Albert Jordaan, Amsterdam, Holland
I remember Rhodesia, Peter, and it was nothing like this at its worst.
Mark, London, UK
The best solution is for EUROPEANS to leave Zimbabwe alone so that they can solve their problems, never listen to these missioneries, because they used the bible to colonise Zimbabwe now they can not see that the people of Zimbabwe wants Economic Independence. Leave Zimbabwe alone please help people in Iraq, Afghanstan etc.
Liberate Africa, Derby, UK
Strange that the article blames the harvest failure on drought (the official Government line) and not the fact that Zimbabwe ethnically cleansed itself of all it's White farmers who produced 90% of all the countries food.
If drought is to blame why are other countries in the region not also experiencing crop failure?
I used to live in Zimbabwe and had to flee to South Africa when Mugabe came in. I then had to leave SA as it is headed the same way. I now live in a White country, but with unlimited non-White immigration where will be left for my children and grandchildren to flee to?
Stephen, Oxford, UK
The comment from the priest was a comparison of today with the "liberation war". He was not comparing it with Rhodesia in general.
Populations increase for many reasons. Suffering, and especially oppression, do not provent people having sex and producing children.
James Dalton, Portsmouth, UK
"Father Oskar Wermter, a German Jesuit priest working in Mbare, Harare’s oldest township, has spent 37 years in Zimbabwe and says he has never seen things so bad, even during the liberation war. "
Too much propaganda is uncritically received by people,especially journalists,about the alleged hell on earth that was Rhodesia.If,and it's a big if,you can find anybody left alive from those days you might be surprised at what they tell you.Compare this one fact,that the Black population of Rhodesia doubled every nineteen years,with the present day reality.Populations experiencing real suffering and oppression
do not increase.
Peter Harley, Felixstowe, Suffolk
Mugabe and his clique are not only a disgrace to Africa, they are a disgrace to humanity. South Africa's Mbeki, who actively connives at keeping the monsters in power, is just as much to blame. And this week, the AU summit has tacitly supported the 'silent genocide'. No wonder Africa is, and will remain, the basket-case continent. You could just as easily apply that term to the people in charge there.
Richard Flynn, Huntingdon, UK/Cambs.
And still the world watches and does nothing. It's an absolute disgrace and I, as a former UN staff member, am horrified that the UN does nothing. It is utterly scandalous. I know we have activists here in the UK - I am one of them in a very small way - but it seems we are impotent to help the innocent victims in Zimbabwe.
Sue Shaw, Morpeth, UK
This report is an indication of the cataclysmic situation in Zimbabwe, but it should not be taken as accurate and objective. The language is sensetational and meant to appeal to people's emtions, than objective analysis. I am a Zimbabwean, and I get angry when people report of only negative things. Why cant reporters tell the world about the dynamic business people who have managed to sustain their businesses under such economic conditions, the brave people who are fighting the ruthless regime of Mugabe.
Such kind of reports make Zimbabwean question the agenda of Western reporters.
Frederick Guntre, Birmingham, UK