In the sweltering heat I sat under the huge tree as birds sang dirges of a drought foreseen.

It’s December, supposedly the wettest month of the year in Zimbabwe, we have had a little rain, but the sun has been relentless, wilting the saplings and the tendrils.

I watched a woman with a hoe and a dejected posture looking at her drying crops and I felt sorry for my country women and men who are victims of climate change. But to these rural people climate change is an unknown concept, they do not understand that what is just happening in Zimbabwe is the same throughout the world.

In Seke communal lands, where the communal farmers rely on rainfall, the effects of the blistering sun have been devastating.

The woman with a hoe told me that it has been long since she managed to coax a meaningful harvest. Now she relies on donations in order to eat and feed her family. The remaining fields are now barren with the rest having been swallowed by urban sprawl while the rains are unpredictable. (more…)

The decision to more or less permanently leave home is a gut wrenching one. For months on end, families are torn apart as they debate whether to uproot everything and leave or stay with an uncertain future. This was the case for millions of Zimbabweans between 2000 and 2008. Granted, young people had been leaving Matebeleland steadily for years since Ghukurahundi in the early 1980’s, but that was because they did not identify themselves with a future Zimbabwe that had literally ignored genocide. They felt they did not belong and their parents encouraged them to go down to the city of gold where they could easily integrate because of the similarities in language between the Ndebele spoken in the Matebeleland region and Zulu, the most widely spoken national language in South Africa.

From 2000, however, every Zimbabwean had been affected by human rights violations of one form or another. Either they were directly affected or they certainly knew of people that had been. From the violence arising out of land reform, arrests of business people for flouting draconian price control laws, the invasion of factories by war veterans to extort money and the widespread need for the man in the street to move around with a Zanu PF flag or scarf to avoid possible violence all coupled with all the wrong global records for economic disintegration, the reasons for leaving the country far outweighed the reasons to stay. Families were suddenly split up. For the first time, literally every Zimbabwean had a relative in far flung countries like New Zealand, Canada and Australia. Grandparents raised children while their own children tried to set up new homes overseas. For those who could not afford the airfare to go overseas, South Africa proved to be a cheap and affordable destination. Or so they thought. (more…)