As a little girl in a small village in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Amina Kazera loved studying. She dreamt of finishing school and becoming a lawyer, in time starting a family. The world, however, had different plans for her.
War erupted in her village and when she was 14, she was kidnapped by rebels. There followed eight years of torment that strained the limits of what a human being can endure.
Rebels took her as their “wife” and, in her words, “broke my womb”. After almost a decade of trying to escape, her moment came. An opposing rebel faction attacked the camp and she fled.
“I suffered there. I didn’t know where I was because I was still young when I got there. I walked from the mountains to the city by foot. It took me about 12 hours. I was so tired, thirsty and hungry,” said Kazera.
She had one child in tow, having had to leave two others behind. They arrived at a city and sought help from taxi drivers to get them across the border to Burundi. Once across she tried to get medical help but was told that her injuries were beyond the ability of local doctors.
They told her SA was the only place that could help her. In the meantime the rebels had not forgotten about their “wife”. They pursued her into Burundi and Kazera had to flee once more. Eventually she found herself in SA, where she was able to get the medical treatment she needed.
“I am grateful because they helped me when I got to South Africa. I am not 100% better but they helped,” she said.
The next chapter of her suffering began when she had to leave SA in 2017, due to xenophobic violence, and head to Zimbabwe, where she eventually landed up at Tongogara Refugee Camp in Chipinge, about 450km southeast of Harare. It was there that she learnt about the fate of the two children she had left behind.
“I had been here for maybe four or five months when, back in February this year, I heard that someone was looking for me. They wanted to tell me that my children were suffering a lot,” said Kazera.
Apparently her 16-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son had somehow managed to make their way to Zambia and had been spotted trying to follow their mother. According to what Kazera knows, they were hungry and her daughter had been through trials that were similar to hers at that age.
“People say they are abusing the girl and the 10-year-old is still a child. I’ve been going to the Red Cross since February and they tell me that the governments of Zimbabwe and Zambia are still talking. Now I am sick. I have no hope,” said Kazera, stifling a sob.
This is arguably the point where chance should feel morally obligated to stop dealing Kazera such heartbreakingly poor hands. But it hasn’t. In total Kazera has eight kids, and malnutrition is stalking both her and the six who remain with her.
Gesturing to one of her youngest, who lies listless under a tree as the 40°C weather bakes everything into a lifeless brown husk, she says: “My son is sick and I don’t even have the energy to pick him up and take him to the clinic. I don’t even have the strength to clean our house.”
Kazera and her family get a monthly stipend from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), but unfortunately it is only enough to feed them once a day for three weeks. The last week of the month they live on hopes and prayers. Yet she is still grateful.
“I am so thankful to the UNHCR and the government of Zimbabwe for the money that they do give us because at least it is something,” she said.
Leaving the camp is out of the question. For Kazera this is the first place she has felt safe. Having spent her life fleeing from violence, she would now much rather spend her days ill and underfed, navigating skin-cracking heat in a refugee camp, than anywhere else. She’s not alone in that sentiment.
Burundian refugee Eric Manilakiza’s family made an ill-fated move to Rwanda in 1993. At the time he had two brothers and both parents. By the time he escaped to Tanzania a year later he was the last surviving member of his family. Like Kazera, Manilakiza was pursued by rebels and thought to make his way to SA for safety.
He never made it. He spent 10 years evading murderers before a truck driver promised to take him to SA — but ended up handing him over to Zimbabwean authorities in Harare. Before long he was in Tongogara, and has been there ever since.
“I don’t have any hope of leaving here. I don’t have anywhere to go. Everyone is dead. Maybe my son can leave if he studies but if we cannot find the money for school then he will probably just sit here like us. At least it is better here than in other places,” he said.
Samuel Marita Gwenzi, a Mozambican refugee who also fled his country because of rebels, only to eventually end up at Tongogara, feels the same way.
“I don’t have much hope of ever leaving here. It is better here than on the outside, especially in Zimbabwe. On the outside people are dying of hunger. At least here we get food,” said Gwenzi.
Outside the camp, Zimbabweans are a long way up a well-known creek without a paddle. At the beginning of the year a UN World Food Programme report estimated that about 62% of the population lives below the poverty line. By August the UN was trying to drum up $331m (R4.8bn) in aid to help feed the 5.5-million people affected by hunger — just over one in three Zimbabweans.
According to a Reuters report this week, the country is sitting with about 380% inflation, has increased the price of electricity by 320% and has recently seen a 27% jump in the price of fuel. The queues to get money at the bank are just as long as the queues for petrol, and ATMs are basically disused relics from the good old days.
Power cuts are known to last for up to 18 hours and in many places water is not available more often than it is. Imagine it as being like Cape Town years after Day Zero, with load-shedding that lasts more than four times as long as it does in SA, extremely limited access to cash and a thermometer that reads like you just plucked it from a frying pan.
YEARS SINCE THE LAST HARVEST
Joseph Stalin said that “the death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic”. Stalin is not someone you want to go around quoting, but the statement works in this context because statistics about just how dire the straits are in Zimbabwe do little to explain how desperate the situation is for ordinary Zimbabweans.
Take the plight of Hegen Nyabane. The area that he and his nine siblings live in is so parched that the sand wheezes as tyres roll over the dirt road that leads to his village in Zabeni, in southeastern Zimbabwe, just a few kilometres from the Chilonga bridge.
Getting to that bridge from Chiredzi, the nearest town, takes two hours on roads that look like they were transplanted from JRR Tolkien’s Mordor. The area is so hot that the windows in an air-conditioned car feel like embers when you touch them.
In March, when the floods caused by Cyclone Idai hit, the low-lying Chilonga bridge was underwater, but today you would be hard pressed to find enough water flowing by to fill a large swimming pool. Children swim and play in what little water is left and their parents do what laundry they can.
Nyabane stands at the edge of the bridge, looking north, ruminating. At 24 years old, he is at the peak of his manhood. He is at an age when most of us are being told to live our dreams, chase our goals and eat our youth.
“What fun am I supposed to have when I am always hungry? You can only enjoy yourself when you are not hungry. My only hope is that somehow I find a job and get some money so that we can eat,” says Nyabane in response to a question about how young people in the area amuse themselves.
He is in what Zimbabweans call a “001 formation”. The term refers to skipping breakfast and lunch, eating only at supper time. He said he has been in it for years.
“We mainly get food from donors. Usually we also grow drought-resistant crops but the last time we harvested something to eat was two years ago,” he said.
A few kilometres from where we leave Nyabane is a small homestead made up of a rondavel that fits four people at a stretch, a squad room with enough space for six to sleep in if they pack themselves like sardines, a chicken coop and bit of fencing to mark the perimeter. This is where Vengai Chapanga, Chiedza Maemele and their four children live.
Chapanga has lived in the area all his life, barring a brief stint in SA, where he worked in construction before leaving to rejoin his family. He met Maemele when she was visiting her grandmother, who lived a few homes down from him. They got on well and got married.
Each morning they wake up at about 6am and begin their chores. Chapanga goes out to the little plot of land they have about 3km away and farms it. Maemele starts making rice and tea.
The tea is not meant for immediate consumption but rather to supplement whatever they can get for lunch. Usually that’s nothing. More often than not, they drink tea and eat plain rice.
“Yesterday we ate pap. Sometimes we exchange some of the things we have with the neighbours. So yesterday I caught a fish and exchanged it with a gogo a few houses away for rice,” said Maemele.
“We planted sorghum and millet last year and from that harvest we got about three bags of millet. That must last us until the next harvest,” said Chapanga.
Last year the family had six goats but the harsh conditions killed off five of them. They dare not eat the remaining one or the few chickens left because that would quickly leave them with no milk or eggs to trade for longer-lasting food, like maize, rice and sorghum. The drought has left them staring down the barrel of that catch-22.
“Because of this drought there is nothing. We cannot grow enough to have food readily available or feed our livestock. It is a desperate situation,” said Chapanga.
Donor aid is patchy at best. Because of the severity of the situation in the area, donors have to pick and choose who gets aid and who doesn’t, and Chapanga and his wife do not make the cut. As their circumstances have worsened their hopes and dreams for their children have diminished.
Their oldest son, Ronald, 14, used to attend the local school but had to drop out a few years ago because they could not afford the fees. The school fees were 120 Zimbabwean dollars a month, which, depending on who you exchange money with, is about R80.
“Because we cannot take our kids to school, I would want my children to work manual jobs so that they can help out,” said Chapanga.
Ronald’s mother, however, is having none of that and still hopes that somehow they can get him back into school.
“This boy is very intelligent. He is someone I have hope in but because of our current situation we cannot send him to school right now,” says Maemele, handing us a bunch of his old school notebooks.
They’re filled with exercises and tests where Ronald got full marks and her pride in them is heart-rending. They are perhaps the only evidence she has that her family can transcend their situation. They are proof that she is not the problem — that she and her family are simply victims of circumstance, and circumstances can change.
An example of how these circumstances can be changed, even if it is not a rags-to-riches tale, lies a few hundred kilometres east, beneath a baobab tree on the road to Mutare. There a barefoot boy in clothes so dust-covered they may have once not been brown, stands next to a row of beautiful mats.
A gifted salesman with a penchant for bombastic words, 14-year-old Tatenda Nechikwira is using his surroundings to try to change his fate. Taught by his father, Tatenda uses the fibre from the trunks of the surrounding baobab trees to weave mats and baskets for passers-by.
“We get certain different colours by cooking some of the fibres so that they change colour and then mixing the different fibres together,” he said.
The money his family gets from selling their wares and the fruits of the baobab tree goes towards buying textbooks and paying school fees and for whatever else they need. It is a meagre living but Tatenda and his family are not in a 001 formation. They eat enough to have dreams of a better future.
Tatenda, whose favourite and only book is the dictionary, hopes to become a meteorologist. He is effervescent and jokes like he was born for stand-up comedy. In a strange way he is an example of what even a little bit of food in the belly and hope for the future can do for a person.
It is easy to think that, further north, in towns like Mutare and cities like Harare, everything is hunky dory — and perhaps in comparison it is. Unlike during the early part of the land invasion period, the shopping malls have food on the shelves and people in urban areas have access to a lot that their rural counterparts do not. The thing, however, is that even in its metropolitan areas Zimbabwe feels like it is kicking furiously to stay above water.
Outside the Pick n Pay and Spar stores, Mutare looks and feels in desperate need of a revamp. The buildings remind one of parts of small-town SA where no-one has bothered to spruce up the 1980s building facades.
Litter gathers on the pavements and in the gutters like it has nothing better to do than loiter. In Harare, people at taxi ranks sit with bags full of Zimbabwean dollars, eager to trade fistfuls of the local currency for a couple of US dollars.
Reuters continues to document this downward spiral, reporting that “Zimbabwe is in the grips of its worst economic crisis in a decade, with triple-digit inflation, unemployment above 90%, acute shortages of foreign exchange, fuel and medicines, and rolling power cuts that have hit mines and industry while a severe drought pummels agriculture.
“Hopes that the economy would recover have faded as President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who took over from the late Robert Mugabe after a coup in 2017, struggles to convince the population that his economic reforms will work.
“Mnangagwa is under pressure to deliver on promises he made during last year’s election campaign to revive the economy by pushing through economic reforms, attracting foreign investment to create jobs and rebuilding collapsing infrastructure.”
Whoever is at fault for whatever they did to break Zimbabwe — the historical causes are multiple and complex — it is undeniable that sanctions are affecting the poor. A place that was once called the breadbasket of Africa seems now to be holding on until the nearest life raft arrives.
In the meantime, more people struggle every day to make ends meet. Those who can travel and access funds get provisions from SA or Botswana and return home. Those who can’t live on a knife-edge.
As South Africans, there are a slew of reasons to care about the drought, famine and general state of low-level calamity existing to the north of us, but the real reason we should care is because we are fellow human beings. Yes, we are heavily burdened with our own problems, and poverty is high on that list. But it seems to me that where we are poor, they are desperate.
Where we live in a system that functions badly, the people in Zimbabwe, many of whom have been eating only once a day for years, seem to be living in a system that doesn’t work at all. If we believe at all in common decency, we need to do more to help our neighbours.
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