Life in Exile
Tears for a lost home

13^th December 2003

The two women sitting in an empty office of a North Shore company are close to tears just talking about their homeland of Zimbabwe. They fear for their families - parents, sisters, nieces and nephews - still living in a country notorious for its political turmoil, but where the human tragedy is rarely given a face.

With foreign journalists banned and the closure of local papers such as the independent Daily News, information about the plight of the people has been effectively shut down. Even in a week when Zimbabwe has commanded headlines for withdrawing from the Commonwealth, it is difficult to get a picture of what is going on inside that chaotic, failing state.

This is a country where inflation runs at 550 per cent, food is scarce, sudden violence not unexpected, and fear endemic. Neither woman wants to be identified because of families still there.

One of the women, let's call her Anna, says she never discusses anything political when she phones her mother who lives in the south of this country of 16 million.

"The phone, absolutely, is tapped. You can hear people listening on the other side. And you never know who is here from there, so I'd just rather not say my name."

The woman we'll call Carol says the same. Her mother fled to Malawi this week, but her sisters are still in Zimbabwe. They keep emails simple and bland, and use code when speaking on the phone.

"We'll say, 'How's the situation with food?' and she would know 'food' means 'the police'. We've got to that stage. We know she's not getting any food so it's not worth even talking about that."

She laughs, but there is no humour in it.

Six weeks ago Anna and her husband went back to visit her family and were horrified. They saw beggars in Bulawayo (some they knew) who were too weary to even ask for a handout, and streets empty of traffic because no one can afford petrol. She tells of a school friend wheeling a child's trolley stacked with packets of milk powder, his food for a week.

She talks of the lunacies of inflation. It is pointless to convert Zimbabwe dollars into New Zealand currency - prices change so rapidly it's all but impossible anyway. A loaf of bread costs Z$1600 (about NZ$3) in the morning, Z$2400 in the afternoon and Z$3000 the following week. At the small business she and her husband used to run in Bulawayo, only one of their former employees was still there. He was earning Z$20,000 a month and was painfully thin.

He wasn't eating, but Anna also suspects he might be among the 2.5 million Zimbabweans with HIV/Aids. He is in his early 30s and has children.

Their former business was barely functioning and squatters had set themselves up outside where there was protection from the wind and they could keep their fires going.

"But the people are just so tired. I was never scared. That's what I thought I was going to encounter, but there was no violence towards us - just this absolute, 'we are so tired' feeling. I was exhausted after two days. Just trying to get petrol you have to wheel and deal."

The company's manager had fled to Botswana and they gave his brother Z$40,000 to get a passport so he too could leave. He left the following day, joining the steady stream of those getting out if they can. It is believed around a million Zimbabweans are now in South Africa.

Anna tells of the crowds waiting in the Bietbridge bus station at 4am going across the border to South Africa: women with babies on their backs, people carrying possessions in a sack.

"It was also eerily silent, the people were simply too tired and too hungry to make a noise. In Johannesburg I saw many people with signs reading, 'Zimbabwean, please help'."

Anna got out of Zimbabwe six years ago, going first to Britain and then settling in New Zealand. Her husband's parents left shortly after. Her visit back was no joyful return, and a single snapshot memory encapsulated the tragedy.

"Elijah used to look after the house we lived in in Bulawayo," she says, showing a photograph of a distinguished, grey-bearded but painfully thin man in blue overalls smiling for her camera.

"He was happy to see us. My husband gave him Z$10,000 and he started to cry. I said, 'Elijah, don't be silly, that's not a lot of money.' But he said 'No, that's more than half my [monthly] salary'."

"What happened was his employers now live in South Africa so they have no idea about the inflation. Two years ago he was getting Z$18,000 and that was a lot of money. But he's still being paid that. He pays Z$10,000 rent and a loaf of bread is Z$3000. The guy can only buy 2 1/2 loaves of bread in a month.

"I have no idea how people are living. I can only assume they must steal for survival, and I don't bloody blame them. Elijah told us he hadn't eaten a piece of meat in over two years."

The stories these women tell of Robert Mugabe's dysfunctional and dangerous country are sad, scary and even absurd: a bookshop with three books; supermarkets where the stock is old and carries a dozen different price tags.

To understand what the 550 per cent inflation means, Anna offers some examples. She went to a wine shop which had four casks for sale. She bought one for Z$16,000. Her father said that was cheap, so she went back the following day for another. The remaining three were now Z$40,000 each. In a shop she saw an old man buying a meagre bottle of oil, "maybe only 250ml", and counting off a pile of Z$100 and Z$500 notes.

Money is being printed constantly to keep up with inflation - the new notes are in denominations of Z$5000, Z$10,000 and Z$50,000. And they are printed on only one side.

"It's pathetic. You see people carrying sacks of money and our car boot was full of money. We spent over Z$1,000,000 in one week out of our boot. When we left we still had some. I just threw it in a dustbin in South Africa. You can't exchange it anywhere."

Foreign currency is essential if you want to leave. "To even buy our bus tickets back to South Africa we had to pay in foreign currency. You think you are a Zimbabwean and want to get out. but you can't because you only have Zimbabwe dollars. We were repeatedly warned not to carry foreign currency because the police would body-search you at roadblocks.

"It didn't happen to us, because my husband still has his Zimbabwe licence and we spoke the lingo. And we were driving a car without foreign numberplates. We were scared because we did have foreign currency and knew they [the police] would just take it."

She shows a photo discreetly taken from their car window of people walking home from work.

"There were no other cars on the road. I was scared to take photographs because of what they had done to journalists. But this just shows people walking home. Usually they would have taken an 'emergency taxi', which are those trucks where everyone just piles on. But there were no 'emergency taxis', no buses, nothing.

"Food is available in shops, but at a price no normal person can afford. I have no idea what people are doing [to eat]."

One answer was on the road out of Bulawayo, a trip she and her husband used to make regularly. A decade ago the landscape was full of animals - goats, donkeys and the like.

"This time was saw exactly three goats and three donkeys. There was no wildlife. People are having to eat them, and I don't blame them."

The farms from which many of the white owners have been frightened off by the war veterans - often just teenage thugs with guns, they say - now stand idle. The people who originally took them over have been given no assistance so the crops were left untended. Many have just drifted back to the cities. Once-profitable farms are deserted.

People, black and white, have been fleeing steadily, often leaving with nothing. Carol, born in Hwange in the west of the country where her family owns and still works a farm, left in August last year.

"It was terrible, you were scared to go out. We had friends who would go shopping and not come back, they'd be arrested for stupid little things.

"Then one time I went to work and I got a call to say a whole lot of war veterans had broken into our house and stolen all our stuff.

"My 5-year-old son was in the house and he has a cut from a knife they gave him. They locked him in the toilet with the maid and when that happened I felt I'd had enough." Carol went to Britain with her son, then came to New Zealand. Her son's passport expires next year and she has been told Zimbabwe will not renew it "because they say he has 'abandoned' the country. He was 5!"

Yet even as their homeland continues its relentless descent, they long for it to become stable so they can return. They feel guilt at being safe here when their families are struggling and in danger.

People here don't understand, they say, and some think they are over-dramatising.

Says Carol: "I just say, go there for two weeks, just go, don't say anything, just go and come back and then you can tell me what you think."

They say Zimbabwe never had apartheid and they grew up, went to school with, and worked alongside blacks. They were sympathetic to the war veterans originally, but now they are just kids from the town parading as patriots who are given guns and food and let loose to do what they want.

Carol: "There's no colour involved in it any more. It started like that but now it's just anyone and everyone [is a target]."

Anna: "It's the government versus the ordinary people now. And people are helpless, and unless you have family out of the country you have no hope of getting out."

Carol: "Every day you think you are going to get a phone call saying something has happened. If something happens to my sister and she gets killed, I can't even go to her funeral because they won't let me back in the country.

"But I would love to go back. It's the world we need to live in, it's absolutely beautiful and I'd like to bring my son up there. I miss it so much. So much." The tears well up.

By GRAHAM REID  - New Zealand Herald