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Out in the cold

Peter | 15.06.2005 10:33

The aim is to recreate a rural peasantry in which voters are brought under the control of chiefs and militias and punish them for supporting the opposition


A day in the life of Haru Mutasa

It’s 10am and Chengetayi removes the metal teapot from the fire under the winter sky. It is chilly and her two youngest boys are still lying on an old mattress, bundled under blankets. “For a week it has been like this,” says their mother. “Thank God it is not raining yet. It was very cold last night.” Ten days ago, the mother of four watched her life crumble as bull-dozers grazed on her prized possession in her family home. It may have been just a one-roomed shack loosely put together with home-made bricks and scrap metal, but it was her home. She was given 24-hours’ notice to evacuate her home in terms of Zanu PF’s Operation Marambatsvina (drive out rubbish). At first she did not believe it. Reality hit when she heard the howls of her women neighbours, as their dwellings were ripped apart by the metal-mouthed machines. She managed to haul most of her belongings outside before the bulldozer arrived at her door. Those who were out at work had their homes and everything they possessed crushed to a pulp. Some residents opted to tear down their own homes so that their precious building material was not damaged.

Until they can find somewhere else to go, Chengetayi’s family sleeps out in the open. Her eyes are bloodshot from lack of sleep. She stays awake at night, keeping an eye on her children and their belongings. Three single beds, a chest of drawers, an old TV set and an even older gramophone line the road where their house used to stand. “My husband wasn’t here last night,” she says with irritation. “He said he went to look for a place for us to stay, but he probably went off to that bar up the road. I was afraid to fall asleep by myself. People have no hearts here and would easily steal my food and the few belongings I have. They might even rape my two eldest daughters.”The once vibrant, sprawling township of Mbare is now barren and desolate. Desperate parents try to palm their children off on relatives until a solution is found. For many, the only option is to return to the rural areas and try and eke out a living from subsistence farming. But, with the country in the grip of drought and a food shortage looming, this seems optimistic.

Chengetayi has no choice but to move her family to Mutoko, the rural home of her husband’s family. She cannot afford to hire a truck to transport her belongings and her only hope is that she will find other families travelling in the same direction so they can split the cost. She knows there are no jobs where she plans to go. Her children will have to be taken out of their school and there is no guarantee they will get a place at the school in Mutoko. “We have always been poor but at least I knew my family had a house to come back to at the end of the day. I thought we were settled in Harare,” she weeps. “Now we are starting all over again. Had it been my husband and I it would not have been so bad, but it’s unfair on my children. They do not deserve this.”

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) believes the operation is a ploy by the ruling Zanu PF to punish urban residents for voting for the opposition party in the recent parliamentary elections where the ruling party was decisively trounced in the cities. “Overnight, Zimbabwe has a massive internal refugee population in its urban areas,” says MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai. The International Crisis Group (ICG), an NGO involved in conflict resolution, estimates that 30 000 people have been arrested in the current crackdown and 200 000 have been displaced. Sydney Masamvu, of the ICG, says that the operation is also about the “politics of demographics”. He says the aim is to depopulate urban constituencies ahead of the 2008 elections and recreate a rural peasantry in which voters are brought under the control of chiefs and militias. Added to the approximate one million farm workers displaced during farm invasions, Zimbabwe’s internal refugee population is now between four million and five million.



Peter

Comments

Display the following 3 comments

  1. Thanks — Pretty
  2. Yeah right... — anarchoteapot
  3. No ! — Pretty
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