The personal stories from Zimbabwe’s ‘map of terror’

We guest blogged on The Independent’s blog section yesterday. This was the post:

Sokwanele launched a “Map of Terror” recently featuring more than 1,300 individual confirmed cases of political violence perpetrated against Zimbabwean civilians. We know that there are hundreds more cases that we haven’t received the information for yet, and that this map is still in its early stages.

I have been overwhelmed reading the case testimony: line after line after line of human experience condensed into short sentences: “They burnt my home, chased my wife out of the village and took away my goats to their base for slaughtering.” Behind each icon is a decent ordinary person who just wants to wake up in the morning and live a peaceful life. It’s so unfair.

Instead, many of these decent people have lost absolutely everything they have in the world: their homes, their clothes, their crops, their livestock, their radios, their bicycles. And then they have been viciously tortured and beaten to a pulp for good measure. The ruthlessness and cruelty of this is very hard to convey: a lifetime’s accumulation of possessions wiped out in an instant.

There is no “home insurance” or “personal insurance” in rural Mashonaland East. As I plotted each case of total devastation I wondered what would happen after the person’s physical injuries had healed. Would he or she end up begging in Harare’s streets? How can they start again from ground zero in a country where there are no jobs and food is scarce and unaffordable? Would they starve?

For most Zimbabweans, including myself, the story is close to home and spills beyond the icons on this map.

A colleague of mine recently went home to a rural area to take food for her family. The Zanu PF militia refused to let her leave lest she carry back stories. Her companion travelling with her was viciously beaten but my colleague used hard cash to bribe the youths to not follow through on their threats to beat and rape her. They accepted the money and instead settled on punishing her by turning on her family: they burned her parent’s home and then another three belonging to the neighbours. The message was clear: get out and don’t come back! My colleague is shaken (but not silenced) by the experience.

Another dear friend of mine is worried sick about her elderly mother who just doesn’t care about things like safety anymore; her anger at Mugabe (she survived the atrocities during the 1980s) is such that she still defiantly organises the neighbours to come to her village home to listen to SW Radio Africa. Her daughter is mad with worry that she will be dragged from her house by youths and stripped and whipped like others have been.

Like my work colleague, this old lady has her own way of refusing to comply with intimidation. I am in awe of both these woman who have seen and know so much more than I have. It’s a terrible thought, but I pray that neither will ever end up as an icon on our map.

This entry was posted by Hope on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 at 12:36 pm. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.