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Zimbabwe: Evictees' meekness stuns world
Rangarirai Mberi, The Financial Gazette
June 09, 2005

http://www.fingaz.co.zw/fingaz/2005/June/June9/8677.shtml

A vintage portable vinyl player and a few old records provided some light amusement on Mbare’s Fourth Avenue last Tuesday, its defiant shrieking subdued by the crackle of fires, wailing infants and the roar of a loaded police truck making yet another patrol round. Residents of this street are the latest show of the great Zimbabwe mystery; police have laid waste to their homes and families have spent four nights out on the street, but yet here they are, joking and laughing amid the destruction.

A truck approaches, loaded with policemen menacingly drumming their batons against the side of the truck, obviously spoiling for a fight. But these displaced residents take no notice, showing no hostility towards the police. The police truck passes with its young occupants pointing their batons at a group of youths and ordering them to disperse. There is no resistance.

Picking through the rubble of their destroyed homes and facing yet more nights in the cold, the Mbare residents on this street confined their conversations to idle banter, even joking about their grave plight. There is no political talk. Instead, there are tall tales about one man writing to his rural kin to send a scotchcart to take him "home", jokes about confiscated marijuana and one sadistic yarn about a bed-ridden man who was too ill to get up when his wooden hovel collapsed around him.

One group is exchanging hearty tales about what it was they thought of salvaging first from their homes when the police came. "It was my gramophone," one elderly man, evidently sceptical of the questioning and identifying himself only as Josamu, told The Financial Gazette. "I thought they were going to burn it (the shack) down." "It’s just like the old days," Josamu said, referring to Rhodesian tyranny, as the police triumphantly turned into the next street.

Like typical Zimbabweans, repression has not pushed these Mbare residents to revolt - not here against the armed policemen stalking the streets and certainly not against the government. It’s a phenomenon many outside Zimbabwe fail to understand. One Botswana national, writing recently to a local weekly, chided Zimbabweans for their "cowardice". A South African writer called Zimbabweans "whiners" who were getting what they deserved. South Africans had stormed the streets to demand their freedom, he said; but Zimbabweans were instead just plain lazy.

According to Miloon Kothari of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, the evictions are "a new form of apartheid". The Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition says the operation showed up the government for its continuing failure to concentrate on the core needs of Zimbabwe’s poor. The National Association of Non-Governmental Organisations said "Operation Restore Order" would cause a "significant entrenchment of an already dire urban poverty, unemployment and human rights violations".

A coalition of Zimbabwean rights and opposition groups has called for two days of protests, beginning today, against the aggressive drive by the government and city councils to destroy thousands of illegal ghetto homes across the country. The Broad Alliance has asked workers to "stay away" from work. Middle-class political activists see an inevitable wave of massive street protests sweeping the government from office. However, there was little on that Mbare street to suggest that some political, ideological fervour has suddenly gripped ordinary Zimbabweans, and they are ready to place themselves and their homeless families in harm’s way.

While the activists and foreign observers are "talking about a revolution", politics and all its gory hazards are not on the list of priorities for these homeless families. Just one decent meal is at the top of that list for many now without an income because informal enterprise has been virtually banned. For the now jobless and homeless, work boycotts mean very little. And even though life has become unbearable, none of them is talking about giving their lives on the streets.

A series of mass action attempts over the years has not prodded the government to improve the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans, and political analysts say many are now resigned to an impoverished future. "Zimbabweans are a unique lot. Very few other nations would stand for what we are tolerating. It’s not in our nature to run down the street (in protest). "But does that make us cowards? I think, if people are fair, they would say it makes us pragmatic and sensible, given the kind of disaster that any resistance will bring," one analyst said this week.

Many of the newly homeless have run out of household properties to sell, so they can no longer feed themselves. Their former landlords charge a fat fee for a bath and they have pulled their children out of school. A family were leaving Fourth Avenue, trudging along with their wardrobe on a rickety pushcart towards the Mbare bus terminus about a 100 metres away. These are the lucky few - at least they have somewhere to go. Those left behind are left to cringe at the malice of those driving the eviction campaign. "No one in Zimbabwe comes from nowhere. Everybody belongs somewhere," Edmore Veterai, police officer commanding Harare province, told reporters last week.

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