Mandla sleeps under a cardboard box and survives by scavenging for food from the city’s many overflowing and evil-smelling rubbish bins. He has only been on the streets for a few weeks but has learnt quickly, as needs must in this dangerous and disease-ridden environment. There is no one else to turn to for help. His few surviving relatives do not even know where he is. On the streets the law of the jungle operates - literally the survival of the fittest. Frequently it is only rapid reflexes and a swift pair of feet that keep the inhabitants of this shadowy world out of really serious trouble. Mandla Mpofu (*) is one of Bulawayo’s burgeoning number of street kids. He is just eleven years old though from his tough and wiry frame most would assume he was older. Mandla never knew his father and his mother died in 2003, aged just below the national average life expectancy of 34 years. Statistically it is likely that she died of some AIDS-related disease or malnutrition, or a combination of both, though Mandla is too young to know and it hardly seems to matter now anyway. Such a tragic loss of life in early adulthood is now so common in Zimbabwe as to occasion no surprise at all.
In practical terms for Mandla and his two younger siblings it meant that they were transferred to the care of an uncle, Themba Mpofu (*). Or more accurately, as there are no “uncles” in the local culture but only “baba omncane” (which means literally “the younger to my father”) the children were still under the care of a “parent”. But life in their adoptive family proved to be even more harsh than it had been with their widowed and destitute mother. Within a family expanded to twice its natural size through the adoption of various orphaned children there was less food for all. Moreover Mandla and his siblings found themselves discriminated against in the bigger family where preference in the food distribution was given to the biological children of Themba Mpofu. Though this practice is culturally taboo (“kuyazila”), it is becoming noticeably more common in Zimbabwean society today.
The final straw for Mandla was the strict discipline that his substitute parent imposed upon the whole household. Since discipline was an altogether alien concept to the young Mandla he soon rebelled, joining a former school friend on the streets of the city. It meant an end to his own hardly-begun primary school education as well as the measure of security enjoyed under Themba Mpofu’s roof.
Our reporter who caught up with Mandla on the pavement outside a take-away restaurant, found him naturally suspicious of all strangers and unwilling to talk. But an assuring smile helped to overcome some of the reticence, and once the lad felt confident that his interviewer had nothing to do with either the police or his unwanted relatives, he became quite talkative.
How does he survive on the streets? By prowling the rubbish bins in the city centre, Mandla replies. And, giving the term “streetwise” a new dimension, the eleven year old explains that he finds “more, better and fresh pickings” in the bins outside the small restaurants than the big takeaways, like Chicken Inn. Of the latter he says, “I can see more customers going to these places, but I don’t know where they put their leftovers. Their bins are always tidy.” Ruefully he suggests that the larger restaurants and hotels deliberately keep their rubbish bins clean and empty in order to discourage street kids like himself, some of whom harass their clients with their constant begging. Lodges in the city centre lock the bins inside their premises for the same reason.
Mandla prefers scavenging around the tourist lodges some distance out from the central business district. He scales some of their durawalls on a daily basis in search of a few scraps of food, and feels less threatened by the police who do not patrol so frequently in these areas.
“Cops accuse us of loitering and violence,” he explains, “so it safer to prowl for food at the lodges than near the banks and hotels.”
Mandla points out the difference, from his perspective, between the regular ZRP (Zimbabwe Republic Police) and the municipal police or “omakokoba”.
“Omakokoba are worse than the ZRP”, he says, “because they move in packs and do not wear uniforms. They take you by surprise and chase after you for long distances.”
It emerges that for the street kids life in the city is one continuous cat and mouse game with the police. To spot the “omakokoba” they look out for the Bulawayo City Council trucks with their easy-to-identify white and black number plates. Some plain clothes municipal details can be identified by the walkie-talkies they use with their long aerials. The street-wise youths have also learned that for them it is safer to hunt for food during the night when the ZRP are more concerned with criminals and prostitutes. For this reason they tend to venture out opportunistically by night and spend many of the daylight hours sleeping under cardboard boxes in the remoter back alleys of the urban sprawl.
Despite the huge disadvantages of his early life, Mandla is not without hope for the future. As unlikely as it might be, he has his eyes set on getting a driver’s licence and an old vehicle and setting up as an emergency taxi driver. He concedes the obstacles are formidable – first getting a birth certificate, then a national identity card, to say nothing of the cost of the driving lessons – but with all the confidence of an eleven year old who has already seen more of life than most youngsters twice his age, Mandla declares that he will achieve his ambition. Who would be so cruel as to deny him his dream?
In any event he is savvy enough to know that, if ever he is to succeed, he will also have to shed the image of a street kid altogether by replacing his ragged, stinking pair of trousers and threadbare T-shirt.
“If I can go through the first month on the job, I will spruce up, rent a room and bath more often”, he says.
Most of the other street children to whom Mandla introduced our reporter guardedly at the crowded Renkeni bus terminus, were less sanguine about the prospect of ever obtaining any legitimate, paid employment locally. These children sleep in the open air at Renkeni, their only shelter from the elements (and predatory adults) being the battered cardboard boxes strewn across the area. Would they ever be able to earn a decent living so as to move off the streets? Not one of the six interviewed held out any such hope.
Their views coincided rather with the prevailing view among a cross section of older children, still in formal education, who were randomly selected for interview first at Filabusi Secondary School in Insiza District and subsequently at Bulawayo’s Founders High School. Nine out of ten of those interviewed held out no prospect of ever finding gainful employment in Zimbabwe. Quite openly they said that on completion of their studies they would cross into South Africa, forging the Limpopo River if necessary, in order to find jobs. Their ambition was to emulate the hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans in the diaspora who are remitting real money (as compared with the valueless local currency) in order to build beautiful homes in such up-market suburbs as Bulawayo’s Selbourne Park And when might they be able to return to their home country to enjoy the fruits of their labours? Our interviewer was not so unkind – or politically naïve - as to ask the question.
Mandla’s ambition therefore had proved to be exceptional among those of his own age group, whether still attending school or not. Perhaps this resilient eleven-year old has the strength of character to persevere. Or rather, perhaps he has the survival skills and good luck to survive on the streets long enough to be able to put his dream to the test, one day. If so surely all will agree that he deserves every success that comes his way. But this in no way mitigates our harsh indictment of the callous government responsible for the desperate plight of thousands of other street kids in towns and cities across the nation. The fact is that this delinquent government bears full responsibility for producing a generation of school leavers who despair of ever obtaining either a decent further education or gainful employment within the country of their birth. It is a stark tragedy that most of our young people regard their homeland today as a prison house from which to escape at the first opportunity.
(*) All the given names are fictitious though the characters are real