Pictures of ten month old babies can be cute. This one may seem that way with her over-big white bonnet and her appealing eyes but do not be fooled. She is filth.
The picture was taken in an orphanage in May this year. I know a little of her story but cannot find her name so I will just refer to her by the first name I thought of, Eve. It does not matter though what I name her. After all, she is filth.
Do not think of “saving” Eve. Save your sympathy and outrage, put away your check book, you cannot help her. She died a month after the picture was taken. Eve was filth.
Here is a picture of a filthy hovel for you to look at.
You may not think it much but the people who live in it in Bulawayo must love living there. After all their previous home must have been a lot worse. Their Government demolished it because it was so filthy.
In case you have not realised by now, I am talking about a campaign last year by the Zimbabwe (Zim) regime called “Operation Murambatsvina”. In Mugabe’s Orwellian use of language this translates as “Operation Drive out the Filth” This involved the whole-scale demolition of buildings erected using provisions from previously unused town planning legislation dating back to the colonial period he decries so much. By targeting the urban areas in which his opposition had the most support, Mugabe wanted to use the operation stay in power.
The idea was to drive people from the towns back to their tribal homelands. This would gerrymander the election system as the constituency boundaries would stay the same with obviously more seats remaining in the previously crowded towns but these would now have a majority of those supporting him. As I have remarked in comments before, a lot of African politics is tribally based. “Filth” therefore had a triple reference. The first was the cover story of slum clearance (even if much of the housing was far from that). The second and third layers of meaning were the political opposition parties’ supporters and of course the other tribe. Katrina simply decimated the black population of NOLA, Murambatsvina was intended to ethnically cleanse Zimbabwe’s cities of Ndebele and the other minority tribes supporting the Movement for Democratic Change, his opponents. 750,000 lost their homes and livelihoods.
You may wonder what this “slum” housing was like. As you must realise, the usual urhan African home is far more modest than an American MacMansion. The people’s expectations are lower. If you ever go on a game park safari you may have a room consisting of a “rondavel”, a round thatched building with enough space to make it a comfortable double bedroom of the sort of size you get in a US motel. In rural areas that would house a fairly large family. I well remember on a tourist visit to a Johannesburg gold mine about 40 years ago where we were proudly shown a hostel for their single male migrant workers. The rooms were indeed light and airy and each man had his own area. One of three concrete shelves stacked on top of each other with a locker built at the end for their possessions. Thankfully things have improved somewhat since then even if the wrench of being away from their families for most of the year still affects many of those miners (and increases the spread of AIDS if they use prostitutes to relieve the absence from their wives, something to think about the next time you catch yourself watching a jewellery hour on QVC).
A visual would be better. Here is a picture of some of the housing that the government has built to fulfil its promise to build to replace the homes it tore down. Not fancy but reasonable shelter for a family, away from the heavy rains, the summer heat and the cold of winter. Yes despite the usual mental picture it does get cold – very cold – because of the height of the land during the winter.
Characterising Zimbabwe’s political and economic picture is difficult. It is probably best described as a tribal kleptocracy. Mugabe gathers members of his clan or sub-tribe around him and I often compare this to Saddam Hussein who relied on his tribe from Tikrit to fill the top government jobs – so much so that he changed the naming system to remove the “Al-Tikriti” (“from Tikrit”). In Zim this clan allegance means that many of the parliamentary seats and the senior police and army posts and the party’s most influentian posts are filled by his loyalists. Unlike Marcos in the Phillipines it means if Mugabe is removed from the scene, there will be a replacement for him until proper democratic institutions are established. They are the ones who have gained the most from the land confiscations. Often they have been given more than one of the best siezed farms which have gone to ruin as they have no agricultural expertise. Spreading down, the wider tribe are kept loyal as their Zanu membership cards give them privileges. In Zimbabwe’s chaotic economy this might only mean they actually get their food ration but when it is drummed into you that your country is under siege because of the sanctions of the US and British neo-colonialist you are grateful. If you are not a party member or belong to the right tribe, you are “filth”.
The corrupt distribution of the land and the grand schemes like building a suitable Presidential residence for Mugabe and buying the air force jets from China (whose main purpose seems to be to “fly by” to honor Mugabe on things like the opening of Parliament) have drained the country’s coffers. International collapse has been avoided by South Africa’s Mbeke giving him the money to pay the bills from the IMF. The currency has recently been reformed and new notes issued to drop the last three 000’s. In the land of the starving millionaire champagne corks popped when the annual rate of inflation dropped below 100% – at one point that was the quarterly rate. Official unemployment is around 75% although that does not take into account the estimated 3 million who have fled the country. Electoral fraud and intimidation are organised through the youth brigades who get dubbed “war veterans” when they steal a farm and throw off the workers. Most are too young to have even been born during the struggle against the Ian Smith government. Another part of their job is to supervise the rations distribution system where they make sure that those without a party card are at the back of the line. The resulting starvation is another way of persuading people to leave the towns so that they can at least get some food from the land. Even though at the last election Mugabe got enough seats (over 66%) to change the constitution in Parliament, it was a close thing so starvation was obviously not working quickly enough. That’s when he devised “drive out the filth”.
AIDS has taken its toll and many children are orphans. It sometimes seems that you have to be incredibly lucky and careful, too old to have casual sex or too young not to be infected. Of course many children become HIV+ while being born. Babies like Eve could be infected through being raped by men who believe the story that you can cure it by having sex with a virgin. (That is more prevalent in South Africa where even the vice-President believed you protected yourself by having a shower after sex. Their health minister seems to prefer recommending beetroot, among other tradition medicines, to cure the symptoms rather than distributing the very cheap anti-retrovirals she could get.) The generational hole means that children only have their grandparents to rely on. Their responsibilities often increase as yet another of their children dies leaving more grandchildren to take care of. Some use ingenious means of supporting their growing young families. Some in the town who had a bit of spare land in front of their house built a home to rent out to others. The small income supported the family. Of course that new structure was built without the planning consent nobody bothered to get. When the people were lucky and the bulldozers were sent in to demolish their building (many were forced to take them down by hand) they not only destroyed one home, they destroyed the livelihood of another family. While those homes never approached the luxury of the palace Mugabe has built they were often as good if not better than the replacements his government has built.
Reporting from Zim has long been difficult if not impossible. Reporters are accused of being agents of hostile governments and internal media are either censored, suppressed or under the tight control of ZANU. Some have entered posing as tourists and even in 2001 when I passed through by bus from Lusaka to Johannesburg I was questioned closely at the border why I was carrying two video cameras. One group that Mugabe has problems controlling are the churches who have done amazing charitable work in the county in response to the crisis. In the traditions of the churches in southern Africa they have come together in an organisation, the Solidarity Peace Trust to organise for justice and human rights. Their relatively free movement mean that they have been able to do several reports both on the statistics of the Operation and telling a few stories of the families affected by tracing them through the churches and interviewing them.
The latest report “Meltdown” on the position to June this year was published last week (Link gives the option of download formats). It reveals that many of those forced out of the cities and dumped in the countryside have returned. Even though they are harrassed , there are more opportunities to make a living in the informal economy. It also reveals that far from building houses to replace those demolished as they promised, only a very few had been completed. Many of those has been given to ZANU minor officials or the army. You will note in the picture above the resident is wearing uniform. In addition to the documentation and photos, they also took video. Some of you may have seen this used in a report shown on CNN and Channel 4 in the UK. This link takes you to their version. If you watch it, look out for the subtitled words of the man living in an improvised shelter. It speaks much of the tragedy of Mugabe’s fall from grace that he is called “our father” who is mistreating his children.
The statistic and analysis are all very good but these abuses are being heaped on people and it is in the tracking reports of individual families that is the most powerful condemnation of the government. In these studies, tells some of the story of Eve and her extended family which included her father, his brother, their wives and children, including Eve’s brother. This is her two weeks after she was born in Ngozi Mine, an informal settlement in Killarney in Bulawayo, Zim’s second city and one week after her family’s home was demolished. She would never live with them again in a permanent home. After being forcibly removed the families were pushed from pillar to post and were found living on an open verandah at one point.
This is her aged three months.
This picture of Eve’s mother was taken in June 2005. She died in January. Her husband has suspected TB which is why Eve was taken into the orphanage.
The family was taken in by a community about 150 Km from Bulawayo. I will let the authors take up the story as I find it too harrowing to try to precis.
They were given homestead and cropping space by the local leadership, and the community were prepared to integrate them. The children were registered in the local school and the churches in Bulawayo paid their fees for two terms. The families each managed to erect one small hut before the rains.
However, on visiting in mid-June, the authors established that things had not worked out for these two families. Neither family had grown a reasonable harvest, although one had harvested three bags. Neither family had succeeded in building an additional hut since last year, which is very unusual for a rural area. Families with children do not typically live all in one hut, but will have two or three huts, one being a kitchen.
In June, no adults from either family unit were left in the area; one was deceased and the other three had all gone back to Bulawayo.
There is a surviving son from the Ngozi Mine family, who is eight. He has been taken in by a “grandmother” who is not related. He is the only one still in school in either of these families. However, the school is very far away and there is a good chance that he will drop out of school, and the possibility of him being brought back to Killarney to live with his uncle is being considered.
At the other homestead, neither husband nor wife was present. The wife was said to have left for Bulawayo some time earlier, and her husband had followed her thereafter. Their daughter, aged between twelve and fourteen, who had been enrolled in Grade Seven, was said to be now out of school and living with her boyfriend in Entumbane suburb in Bulawayo. They were said to be “married”. The parents of the girl are reported to feel this relationship is okay, although others are scandalised by what they consider to be statutory rape.
His two school-going children are still enrolled in school, but are not attending. They are living on their own in the rural areas, under supervision of neighbours. The oldest is around twelve, and is supposed to be keeping both homesteads secure.
The other younger children are all out of school as there is no longer money for fees, as the church funds have dried up.
One child was severely burnt three months ago in the rural setting. She burnt her feet in a rubbish pit that had hot coals in it. Her feet are badly burnt and infected. She was admitted to hospital for two months and was discharged before the wounds had healed. The clinic is so far from the rural home, at least 20 km, so the wounds received no medical care after discharge and were in a very bad state by mid June.
At Killarney in Bulawayo the authors located the husband and wife. They are brewing beer to make a living. The wife visits a butchery in town and cleans the sanitary lane, in exchange for condemned meat off cuts. Back in Killarney she sells these to the rest of the community, either fresh or dried.
They are basically doing any kind of piecework to survive. They seem to intend to commute from Killarney to their rural home, but are clearly establishing a substantial shack in Killarney. They have a licence of ownership on their homestead in the rural areas, which they paid Z$ 400 (thousand) for. Our perception is that they are investing most in being back in Killarney, but will keep one foot in the rural areas for a while at least.
I do not know if Eve died of AIDS, another infection she picked up or was simply too weak after her tribulations to survive. I do know her mother died but not how her father is . I do not know what killed her. I do know who killed her. Mr Mugabe, je t’accuse. Eve was not filth. You and your corrupt cronies are the filth. I long for the day that the people can organise their own Operation Murambatsvina and drive you from their beautiful land so all can share its riches.
