Current displacements in Zimbabwe: heavy yoke for women to carry

Imagine waking up one day to be told that the place you have been calling home for 20 years is actually not your home and you have to take whatever you can and vacate as soon as possible to God-knows-where.

Imagine, as a single mother one day you are working in your field and a group of armed police accompanied by government officials round you up together with tens of fellow villagers to tell you that you have been arrested for illegal settlement.

You have been working tirelessly to develop this rural piece of land you have possessed since you got married for two decades, making it as much comfortable as you can for your children.

Your children come back from school on that particular day and do not find you home, only to be told by some distant neighbours that you are in police custody—night comes and goes and they have no idea if you are ever coming back.

This has been the heart-breaking fate of Nyaradzai Mugabe*, a widow from Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe, who has spent weeks of agonizing sleepless nights trying to figure out where she would go if the government-led crackdown against ‘illegal’ settlers goes on.

All she has is the two-bedroomed house and few huts her husband built before he died. She also has some chicken, a few goats and two herd of cattle she hoped would help her when tough times come, but that is far from being enough for her to relocate.

For starters, land itself, unless it is ancestral, is pretty expensive in Zimbabwe, a country whose laws stipulate that all communal land belongs to the state, which means that her husband’s kinsmen had no right to allocate that piece of land to her.

Nyaradzai’s nightmares started on January 19, 2024 when she, together with nearly 50 other villagers were rounded up by police and arrested for a crime they did not know they were committing since the year 2000—illegally occupying gazetted state land.

All those years they had been paying the requisite rates and taxes to the local authority, which never, for once told them they were supposed to leave, until now.

Tears flow down Nyaradzai’s cheeks as she narrates her ordeal, “We were rounded up like criminals and we had to sleep in police cells. The young, old, men, women and children, we all shared the same cell. Babies were wailing from mosquito bites in that cell that night, and all I could think about was how much injustice must a person be subjected to, all because they needed shelter? It was really traumatizing and I kept thinking about my children who had gone to school that morning; who was going to look after them that night?”

“We have been frequenting the courts for weeks now, and we keep being told to come back on another date, and when we go, the case gets postponed again. I am really tired and my body is now weak from all the stress,” Nyaradzai says as she wipes a tear.

Her husband, born of the Mugabe clan, are the custodians of the Mugabe chieftaincy, and have been occupying the same land they are being evicted from for nearly two centuries—they were of course briefly displaced by colonization, but they returned to their ancestral soil just before the country got independent from colonial rule; according to Chikutuva village head Henry Makusha, a Mugabe clansman.

Nyaradzayi’s children ask questions she does not have answers to; the government is asking them to go back to wherever they came from, where exactly did they come from? Where exactly are their origins? Why don’t they have rights to a home and shelter like other people?

In surrounding villages across the district, many other families have been ordered to demolish their own home, which they have painstakingly done, surrendering their lives to fate.

Single mothers have been hard hit, as the odds have worsened for them now that they do not have anywhere to call home. Their teenage daughters are now more at risk of the child marriage scourge that is rampant in Zimbabwean society. Most are likely to drop out of school due to this, adding to the number of out-of-school children, a trend that has been bedevilling Sub-Saharan Africa for long.

For Nyaradzayi, this situation is worse than the Covid-19 pandemic as she says, because then, at least the government cared; at least their welfare was cause for concern to the powers that be. Now everything has been left in the victims’ hands, and on top of that the authorities keep hounding them.

One question that keeps haunting Nyaradzayi and her children is that, how can a right be snatched so abruptly and in such a manner that you do not even have time to catch a breath? It is a hard question to answer.

So where do I, a mere community journalist come in? Well, seeing the most prominent side of the story to these evictions being just the numbers of those who are appearing at the magistrates’ court, being charged, fined and ordered, I see the most important side being largely ignored—the human side.

Government operations, programmes and projects come and go, leave a trail of statistics, and a treasure trove of data, numbers, but the emotional implications are often underplayed, if not totally forgotten.

I believe each and every story is valid, in fact telling these stories is vitally necessary, because one thing that binds us all together is humanity, and it is in that humanity that we ought to listen to each other’s voices, which will inspire the change we all so desire.

Documenting each and every individual story that I come across is giving voice to a people who have suffered an injustice, a people who have been wronged and continue to be wronged, a people whose lives have changed forever.

These stories may be a drop in the ocean, but I have seen human rights organizations reacting to such narratives, amplifying these voices, bringing about the rewards of this kind of storytelling.

I am hoping, just hoping that someone, somewhere in the high echelons of power might see Nyaradzai’s story, and may think long and hard, which may inspire policy, because indeed, that is the real and true side to the evictions story—the human side.

*Not her real name. This article is based on true, current events, and the writer got permission from the subjects before publishing.