“We had nothing then and we still have nothing”: the fourth anniversary of Murambatsvina

It was this time, Africa Day 25 May 2005, that Operation Murambatsvina was orchestrated by the Mugabe Government.

It was as cold then as it is today, with temperatures getting to well nigh freezing at night, when over 300,000 already impoverished Zimbabweans were thrown forcibly from their homes and forced to spend many nights out in the open.

Their homes had been razed to the ground by fire or bulldozers, their scanty property scattered in the dirt and Operation “Drive out the filth” took shape in Zimbabwe.

No one was safe from the cruel blitz: in just one week twenty thousand vendors were arrested countrywide. Their vending sites were destroyed by ruthless uniformed men, their wares, their very livelihoods were smashed, burnt or confiscated .

Riot police working under strict orders took millions of dollars worth of goods, which were then sold or auctioned for a song, to friends and cohorts.

Even totally legal vending sites were razed to the ground and the goods seized or destroyed.

The informal housing sector took an especially bad beating, thousands of dwellings, shacks and shanties were torched or bulldozed, property was tossed out into the mud, and the occupants were left to freeze in the open winter until Church groups and NGO’s took pity on them and offered them shelter

It was not only informal shelters that were destroyed: in Victoria Falls alone over 3000 properly constructed houses were destroyed – houses made of concrete blocks with corrugated iron roofs. In that same tourist city, six kilometers of vending stands that had been used to sell carvings to tourists for thirty years were torched, displacing over twenty thousand people in a town of less than one hundred thousand residents.

Almost every town and city in Zimbabwe was affected in Operation “Drive out the filth”. Thousands of families including children and the elderly, were sleeping under trees, on pavements, in churches, in bus shelters and train stations with no sanitation and in freezing cold winter conditions.

Efforts have been made to trace survivors of Murambatsvina, many of them were sent to their rural homes, many have slowly drifted back to their original squatter camps and shantytowns.

This brutal shifting of the population from the MDC urban strongholds to the rural areas where ZANU PF still had a stranglehold. was punishment indeed for cities where few votes were cast for the ruling party.

During a recent visit to the Killarney squatter camp we met several friends who had been thrown out of their “homes” four years ago. They well remember the day four years ago when they had all fled to the bush, carrying their pathetic goods and chattels with them, at least those goods that had not been torched by the police and army who had descended on their sad little homes in pre-dawn madness.

Some of the families had been taken to the Government ARDA camps, some had been taken and dumped in their rural areas, inhospitable places like Lupane and Tsholotjo where there is barely a living to be scratched together.

But many have silently crept back and rebuilt their homes – homes made of scraps of metal, cardboard and pieces of tin. They survive on vegetables thrown out at the local markets, on begging and digging in trash bins and alleyways.

Christian Care, World Vision and several local church groups bring them food on a monthly basis, but their lives are desperately impoverished.

Their children are strewn with flies, dressed scantily in the cold winter breeze, their pathetic ragged blankets are hung on bushes to air, water is gleaned from a nearby disused mining shaft, where hundreds of metres of rope carrying a miniscule bucket, leads down to some very unsanitary drinking water in the bowels of the earth.

Joseph*, a survivor of Murambatsvina of four years ago, tells us of hardships like no other, but his toothy grin is engaging, and he is delighted with the garments we took for him and his extended shantytown family.

There were numerous young children about, carrying buckets to and from the well, and numerous old men and women dealing with their pathetic day in a squatter camp. But there were no young adults to be seen anywhere. Most have ‘jumped the border’ between Zimbabwe and South Africa, never to be heard from again. There is no postal address in Killarney where mail or money can be sent.

Further down the track, at another tin shack, the sound of hammering broke through the crisp morning dew. An old man sat huddled over an old wardrobe, carefully prising the wooden panels apart. I wondered curiously why he was dismantling what was probably his only piece of furniture, only to be told that he was making a coffin for his wife who had died that night from exposure.

“Thirty years after independence” Joseph* said in his wise old way, “we had nothing then and we still have nothing; nothing has changed.”

He nods slowly in the sun reminiscing on that fateful Africa Day four years ago, when the wrath of God descended on him and his family as the Government tried in vain to gain control of the urban areas.

Operation “Restore Order” is what the Government called it, although the literal translation of Murambatsvina is “Drive out the filth”.

*Name changed

This entry was posted by Sokwanele2 on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 11:54 am. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.