Zimbabwe dispatches: attacking the helpless
Updated on 22 July 2009
New evictions of farm workers and the vulnerable are forcing an estimated 150,000 out of work and the problem is going unnoticed, writes Helen.
Isaac was wearing patched, grey cotton trousers and a very thin red jersey and I could see he was cold. I greeted him and we stood on the road chatting for a few minutes, both trying to absorb a bit of warmth from the weak winter sun.
I first met Isaac four years ago in the winter of 2005 when his wooden cottage had been demolished by government bulldozers in what was called Operation Murambatsvina (clear out the rubbish).
Isaac was one of an estimated 600,000 people who were made homeless around the country in the government's cruel winter demolition and he had arrived in the neighbourhood desperately looking for somewhere to stay - a room, shed, the back of a garage, anywhere.
Isaac found the friend of a distant relation who cleared out a garden shed for him and he moved in.
That was the second time Isaac had lost everything.
Isaac was originally a farm worker. He grew up on a commercial farm where his parents lived and worked. After attending the farm school but not doing very well, Isaac started working on the farm and stayed with the same farmer on the same property for over twenty years.
A lifetime of caring for the environment and producing has been turned into destruction by necessity.
Isaac lost his job, home and security in 2004 when the farm was taken over by a senior government politician and the farmer and all the farm workers were evicted.
Isaac knows all about growing maize and tobacco and about horses and rearing cattle - but nothing about living in a Zimbabwean town where 90 per cent of people are unemployed.
For a year he pushed a wheelbarrow into the bush every day, chopped trees and sold firewood - it was all he could find to do to survive and pay the rent for the one room cottage.
Isaac said he often didn't have enough to eat but he resisted the urge to follow others who went gold panning - that was just too dangerous. Isaac came back with his loaded wheelbarrow one afternoon and his cottage was gone - demolished by the same government that had evicted him from the farm he had lived on all his life.
The ex-farm worker, twice a victim, shook his head sadly as we talked about the latest evictions of workers from commercial farms. None of us can understand why, six months after the MDC entered government, the nightmare on farms is still going on.
"They've got no power," Isaac said, referring to the MDC and the obvious stranglehold Zanu PF still has over the country.
Since February 2009 an estimated 150,000 farm workers and ex-farm workers have lost their jobs and been forced to leave their homes on commercial farms.
These are new evictions which are going virtually unnoticed by the new government and they include not only farm workers but women, the elderly, orphans and people in poor health according to a recent report by the Refugee Council. On one farm in Odzi, (north east Zimbabwe) 114 men, women and children have been camped out in the bush for three weeks since being evicted from a farm by a Zanu PF government official.
The secretary general of GAPWUZ, the farm workers union, Gertrude Hambira has described the evictions as: "a cruel attack on helpless people.' In a recent independent newspaper, Hambira said: "This so called land reform is just a political game with no genuine desire to give land to landless peasants."
Isaac and I parted company both saying nothing has changed. He doesn't hold out any hope of ever being able to do what he knows and does best: growing food and rearing livestock.
If anyone should have benefited from land seizures, it should have been the farm workers but the one million like Isaac now chop trees, dig for diamonds and pan for gold. A lifetime of caring for the environment and producing has been turned into destruction by necessity.
