We've moved 'This is Zimbabwe' to a WordPress based system in the pursuit of improved flexibility and manageability. Our new blog url is at http://www.sokwanele.com/thisiszimbabwe. Please visit us there for recent posts, and please update your blogroll links to our front page. This site will remain live until we're able to add re-direct links to individual archived posts. This is to ensure that

I discovered yesterday that, despite being raised in Zimbabwe, schooled in Zimbabwe, and employed in Zimbabwe, my right to vote in my country has been revoked. I might add that this has happened without any consideration of the fact that my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents etc are all Zimbabwean born and bred. Why does this apply to me? Because my parents, bless them, just happened to be

Reading the blog posted by "Dad" last week made me think about my own growing-up experiences around about the time when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. My parents did not have much money, but that's not what I remember the most. I remember that Wednesday was the only day that the Eskimo Hut served coffee flavoured ice cream. If each of us could find 50c for a cone we would stop, argue about who was

I recently spoke to a friend of mine who lives at Nkulumane and she's very amused by what is happening there. Nkulumane has not had water now for some months. The only place residents can get water is in a dirty hole they call a watering point. Fortunately for my friend her house is not too far from this place. She is very amused though that the police compound is not getting any water either,

We apologise to readers for the disturbing picture which accompanies this short news piece. The fact is that this is the ugly reality that Mugabe has created in our beautiful Zimbabwe, once a land of peace and harmony in which innocent citizens like the one in the picture were protected from violent and lawless thugs. Now the thugs roam our streets freely, inflicting terrible suffering on a

It is nearly two weeks since robert mugabe controversially addressed the United Nations in Rome, and the state-controlled press here at home are still trying to milk as much political mileage out of it as possible. An article appearing today in The Horrid (state-controlled Herald newspaper) (link), chortles away at how mugabe and hugo chavez, the president of Venezuela "emerged as the most

We had a bit of a cool, windy day yesterday in Bulawayo - quite a relief from the normal stinking hot October weather! It warmed up by lunchtime, but started cooling off quite rapidly from there . By the time I got home it was pretty chilly. As I sat down at my PC, I rummaged back in my mind over memories of this year's winter. Those thoughts were quite miserable really - a series of events and

I haven't put pen to paper (figuratively speaking) in a while. I guess the depression has been getting the better of me. For some months now, my mental picture of Zim's future has been a blank, literally non-existent. Curiously enough, other people have come out with very similar thoughts as myself - that we can't see anything beyond the end of the year. It's really weird - as if Zim doesn't