Back to Index

Shadows and lies
PBS Frontline/World (US)
June 28, 2006

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/zimbabwe504/video_index.html

In a scene filled with tension and despair, men and women sit crouched, huddling on a 17 hour-long night train ride that will send them back to Zimbabwe. "Heads down," shouts a South African guard - because crouched down like this, the deportees are less likely to jump out the window. Despite this, more than a dozen Zimbabweans jump from the train that night; they'd rather risk death than face the ruling party back home.

These men and women have been living illegally in South Africa. But the South Africans don't want them; they round up thousands of Zimbabweans each week, gather them into overcrowded detention centers, then finally, send them back across the border to Zimbabwe.

On this night, FRONTLINE/World reporter Alexis Bloom takes the journey with them. Talking to people on the train, Bloom senses that it will be the last chance for many to talk openly. One man tells her: "You can't get the truth in Zimbabwe... Even if you come to me in Zimbabwe, I can't give you the truth because there are people always watching. And once you go, they will kill me."

When Bloom and producer Cassandra Herrman traveled to Zimbabwe to report "Shadows and Lies," they entered carrying fake business cards, pretending to be tourists. It is impossible for foreign journalists to work freely in Zimbabwe these days. They arrive at the spectacular Victoria Falls, once the high point on Zimbabwe's popular tourist circuit and one of the seven natural wonders of the world. Now the hotels at the falls are eerily empty.

Ten years ago, explains Bloom, as she counts out bricks of the local currency in the hotel, Zimbabwe was one of the richest countries in Africa, but with inflation now running at more than 1,000 percent, Zimbabwean money isn't worth the ink that's used to print it. Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's long-standing president, was once a respected liberator, but after 26 years in power, he has turned this jewel of Africa into an impoverished state of fear.

From Victoria Falls, Bloom and Herrman set off for the capital, Harare. Along the way, they film through the car window, shooting long lines of cars at empty gas stations. People can wait for weeks before fuel arrives, Bloom is told. They film people scavenging in garbage dumps alongside baboons, and they pass families on the roadside who have resorted to donkey carts to get around. Signs of food and fuel shortages are everywhere.

In Harare, they meet with journalist Duminsani Muleya, who takes them to the building that used to house The Daily News, Zimbabwe's last independent daily newspaper. The newspaper's offices were bombed, under suspicious circumstances, after clashes with the government.

Muleya tells Bloom what is happening to his country, but only behind the safety of the tinted windows of Bloom's car. "Zimbabwe has, without a doubt, the weakest currency in Africa, if not even in the world," he tells Bloom. "It has now become a monumental museum of failure. The air is fraught with frustration, with anger, with despair, and some people have just given up."

It wasn't always this bleak, says Bloom. "Robert Mugabe was once a liberation hero, admired around the world. He ushered in prosperity, health care and a literacy rate of 85 percent - the highest in Africa."

But politics here has turned into thuggery, she says - holding on to power has become Mugabe's top priority. And during the last seven years, intimidation has become his chief weapon. His radical land redistribution plan set out to seize white-owned farms and turn them over to black farmworkers. Instead, Bloom reports, these farms were given to members of Mugabe's inner circle, who didn't know how to run them. A once-thriving agricultural economy has been brought to its knees, and many of Zimbabwe's most productive farms now lie fallow.

Describing Mugabe's regime today, a former ally of his, Margaret Dongo, tells Bloom: "They have no feeling for any other person, for any human beings anymore. What they want to make sure of is how can they maintain their power base." Dongo is a famous freedom fighter. She fought for Zimbabwe's independence in the 1970s and became the first member of parliament to confront her old ruling party colleagues.

"You're watching the country going down the drain," Dongo continues. "You look at the time it took to build it up, and then one can just destroy it overnight. It is something painful."

In the city of Bulawayo - long considered an opposition stronghold - things look even worse: There are long lines all over town, people waiting to buy the most basic necessities, but many supermarket shelves are simply empty. A local farmer tells Bloom that the army has launched a new policy of farm seizures that targets small family farms owned by ordinary Zimbabweans - this despite the evident lack of food. In an effort to make up the shortfall precipitated by Mugabe's disastrous land reform, the army is now ordering locals to dig up the crops that feed their families and instead grow maize that will be sent to the government mill. A woman tells Bloom that when she protested these orders, a soldier beat her.

Resistance runs deep in Bulawayo - and there is none so outspoken as Pius Ncube, Bulawayo's Catholic archbishop. Despite constant surveillance and death threats, Ncube refuses to be intimidated by Mugabe: He denounces the government and tries as best he can to look after parishioners who are increasingly short of food. "Women come and cry before me, 'We haven't eaten for all these days,'" he tells our reporter. "What I pray for is that people become so restless and angry enough ... to simply say, 'We've had enough' and get the army to their side, the police ... and rise up and bring him down."

Over the course of his rule, many say that Mugabe has brought each one of the country's democratic institutions to heel: Critics say he has muzzled the media, politicized the police force and rewritten the laws to maintain his power base. To explore the reality of justice under Mugabe, Bloom and Herrman meet with two members of the opposition movement - the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Khethani Sibanda and Sazini Mpofu describe how they became the fall guys for a much larger campaign to discredit the opposition, and they speak of the violence that the regime is willing to use in its name.

The reality of daily life in Zimbabwe comes into stark relief when one drives past the luxurious gated compounds in Harare. Among them is Mugabe's sprawling retirement palace, epitomizing the splendor of the ruling elite. But for most Zimbabweans, life is increasingly grim: tin-roof shacks, even cardboard boxes, are the homes for many of Mugabe's people.

The fate of the urban poor comes to light in footage smuggled out of Zimbabwe in 2005 that shows police burning and bulldozing many of these dwellings as part of a government campaign called Operation Murambatsvina, or "Clear Out the Filth." Though Mugabe claimed this government operation would beautify urban areas across Zimbabwe, many say his real aim was to break up these communities because they had become a breeding ground for revolt. The clearing operation left some 700,000 people homeless, and millions lost their livelihood overnight. And though Mugabe promised to build better homes for these communities, a year later Bloom is witness that nothing has been done.

Leaving a muted and beaten country behind, Bloom and Herrman travel back to South Africa. It's nighttime in downtown Johannesburg, and the police are trying to control a crowd of anxious Zimbabweans, lined up and waiting to apply for political asylum at an immigration office. The authorities here are overwhelmed. More than 2 million people have poured into South Africa from Zimbabwe since the country's economic collapse.

"For these Zimbabweans, a place in line represents survival," says Bloom. "They know only a handful will ever be allowed to stay."

But it's not only refugees and economic migrants who make their way to South Africa. Prominent Zimbabweans also find it increasingly difficult to continue to live in Zimbabwe. Visiting the offices of Zimbabwean newspaper publisher Trevor Ncube, Bloom asks him why the rest of world remains silent while Zimbabwe continues to break down.

"South Africans don't know what to do with Robert Mugabe," he tells her. "The Americans don't have a clue... How do you deal with a fallen hero like Mugabe, a man that the whole continent looked up to, who assisted the liberation of South Africa? How do you tell your father to sit down and shut up?"

The final words come from an asylum seeker, who is being loaded into a security van, to be deported back to Zimbabwe. "This is torture," he cries. "This is torture."

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP