Zimbabwean women left to die a silent death

This is the front page of The Independent (UK) today. The image of grave after grave after grave accompanies a harrowing article about life expectancy in Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans are dying like flies - Zimbabwean women, in particular, are dying at a younger age than women anywhere else in the world. I was gratified to see the article use a particular word to describe the horror - a CULL - responsibility for their early deaths set full square at the feet of Robert Mugabe and his government.

This cull is not an act of God. It is a catastrophe aggravated by the ruthless, kleptocratic reign of Robert Mugabe, in power since independence in 1980. The Mugabe regime has succeeded in turning a country once fêted as the breadbasket of Africa into a famished and demoralised land deserted by its men of working age, with its women left to die a silent death.

A world used to associating language like that with weapons of mass distruction and bloody warfare played out in the streets of war torn nations might find the use of a word like ‘cull’ misplaced in an article like this. But David Coltart, in his most recent emailed letter, reminded us of a horrifying quote from one of Robert Mugabe’s most senior ministers - Didymus Mutasa, the current Minister of State Security - who in August 2002 said:

“We would be better off with only six million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle; we don’t want all these extra people.”

You don’t need chemical weapons to kill people in their thousands, nor do you need nuclear bombs or ruthless soldiers rousting people from their homes in the dead of night in order to dispatch hundreds of people to an early grave. All you need to do is ensure people can’t eat, that they can’t access the vital medication that they need to survive, and that they don’t have shelter over their heads. Disease, starvation, and brutal environmental elements are a deadly combination in a despot’s arsenal, and are as certain to kill as the most sophisticated military weapon. They are even more certain to kill if the nation you preside over has the worst HIV/AIDs statistics in the world.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that the crumbling economy is the root cause of all these problems: Mugabe has set out to achieve all of these things DELIBERATELY. We’ve written about it all on this blog as it happened - Operation Murumbatsvina is vicious and has deprived thousands people of shelter; food has been withheld and politically manipulated to meet Mugabe’s own objectives; and ARV drugs are a low priority for Mugabe’s government, despite the fact they know they preside over a population suffering from the worst HIV/AIDs statistics in the world. Funding is calculatedly steered away from the principle of caring for Zimbabweans, and directed instead to the CIO whose primary purpose is to control, intimidate, terrify, torture and repress Zimbabweans. And who controls the CIO? None other than Didymus Mutasa, the man who would like to reduce the population to only those who supported the liberation strggle (i.e., support Zanu PF and Robert Mugabe).

I think the word cull is fair and entirely appropiate in this context.

The average Zimbabwean woman can only expect to live to the age of 34. This is an age where women in stable democracies are thinking about careers, starting families, or buying homes. While they look towards their bright futures, Zimbabwean women face a painful cruel death.

There isn’t a person in Zimbabwe who doesn’t know several people who have died of AIDs, and I am no exception. Last year two women I knew very well, both work colleagues, died. One was a women in her fifties. She was infected with the virus by her husband who had left Zimbabwe to try and earn an income in South Africa so he could do more for his children. Long absences from home turned into a string of encounters with ladies of the night. And these in turn resulted in Jessie’s death from the AIDs virus when he brought the disease back home to her. I don’t know what happened to Jessie’s husband, but I expect he’s dead too now. And that means their children, the very reason he left the country in the first place, have joined the country’s swelling AIDs orphan statistics.

The other women was Tenjiwe. Tenjiwe was a lovely person, a woman who laughed loud and often and had flaring feuds with work colleagues that lasted five minutes and then were instantly forgotten. We all liked her -we liked laughing with her and we even enjoyed the shouting matches. Whenever it was her birthday she’d say, ‘I’m one year closer to forty now… I’m going to be forty soon’. I asked her why this was such a big deal after all, forty is a much talked about age which signals an end to child-bearing years and a transitional period to the next stage of life. But to Tenjiwe it simply meant that surviving to forty meant she’d have outlived many of the other women she knew, and it meant her son would have reached an age where he was less dependent on her.

And she nearly made it too. Tenjiwe lived to 36. But we watched her fading before our eyes for several years before that - her battle with HIV extended by the support our employers gave her - vitamins, food supplements, extra food to take home. But without retrivirols, which her employers struggled to find for her, she stood no chance.

The last time I saw her she was in hospital, thin and frail, her mouth too swollen with sores to be able to eat the liquid supplements we’d clubbed together to buy for her, and her body to frail to cope with any nutrition at all. She didn’t expect to have work colleagues visit her, and when we walked into the room she turned towards us and cried silently. We said nothing the whole time we were there, we all cried, and then we said goodbye knowing we’d never see her again. Her family took her back to her rural home and she died less than a week later, leaving behind a son - another AIDS ophan.

Tenjiwe survived to 36 becase she had people who tried to do all they could to help her live as long as she possibly could. She is also one of the very few (20% of the population) who had a full time job. But even her income, higher than the lowest paid levels in Zimbabwe, was so ravaged by inflation that she couldn’t begin to meet the financial demands she faced as a single mother trying to raise a child. So Tenjiwe turned to ‘friendships’ with older men - sugar daddies - who paid the school fees and helped to keep her child clothed, fed and educated. They showered her with gifts, cell phones and cheap jewellery from the markets, and they also gave her a disease which eventually destroyed her.

Tenjiwe had a job; most in Zimbabwe do not. She had one child while most Zimbabwean women have more than one. She had a support network of people who cared for her; most Zimbabwean women have to fight to survive alone. As unlucky as Tenjiwe was, she was still, in a Zimbabwean context, far luckier than a lot of other women. And how terrible is that.

The anger and despair I felt when I saw Tenjiwe for the last time is indescribable. We cried at her bed because there was nothing more we could do - we had all tried everything. I felt as if she was on death row - an innocent victim sentenced to a cruel death overseen by dispassionate wardens - and we and her family were the helpless bystanders wracked with emotion, standing on the other side of the glass and watching her die. My anger, my frustration, my sense of helplessness left me feeling out of control and beside myself with rage at the senseless futility of her death.

My feelings are NOTHING compared to those her family must have experienced.

Mugabe and his government are those cruel wardens. They are responsible for the decisions and choices they make, and they are accountable for the effect it has on the lives of all Zimbabweans. The women who are dying before the age of 34, silently and forgotten, are all innocent victims of his ghastly policies and his ruthless deliberate attempts to keep himself and his government in power no matter the costs. His crimes are immense. As far as I am concerned, his failure to do the right thing leaves him accountable for the deaths of thousands and thousands. It is a cull.

Please read this (also here on ZWNews) and this for more about the women in Zimbabwe who are dying so young.

Technorati Tags: Mugabe, women, Didymus Mutasa, HIV/AIDs, Murumbatsvina, ARV, Zimbabwe, AIDs, orphan, HIV, Zanu PF, life expectancy

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