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The Narratives and Counter-Narratives of Zimbabwean Asylum: Female voices
Terence Ranger, St Antony's College, Oxford
April 2004

Paper presented at Connecting Cultures conference, Kent University, April 2004.

Introduction
Social historians of Zimbabwe have increasingly made use of Rhodesian colonial court records, both criminal and civil. An abundance of preparatory examination files survive for each of Zimbabwe's fifty or so districts. They have many limitations as evidence. The examinations were often conducted both in English and in several different vernaculars, without adequate translation. There was no short-hand record. The presiding magistrate or Native Commissioner was often ignorant of African custom. Nevertheless, they have been used to great effect. Sometimes – as in Diana Jeater's papers on eastern Zimbabwe or in my own on the Zimbabwean south-west – it is possible to use these official records 'with the grain' so as to examine colonial theory and practice. Jeater has been studying court records as evidence for the emergence and development of white stereotypes about African society; I have used them to explore the boundaries between 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' violence by Rhodesian whites against blacks.¹

But it is also possible to use the court records 'against the grain' and to hear African voices rising out of them. I have used them myself to explore the ideas and practices of so-called 'witchcraft' and the changing patterns of African gender relations.² Younger scholars are exploring crimes committed both against and by African women.³ Partly because witchcraft accusations, rape and domestic violence would not have come to the Native Commissioner's courts at all unless African women had taken them there, these flawed records nevertheless reveal female agency. As Koni Benson and Joyce Chadya write in their forthcoming article about violence against African women in Bulawayo during the 1940s and 1950s:

These records provide us with a rare opportunity to hear African women speaking about their lived experiences in a city undergoing rapid physical and social change. There are no other archival records for the 1940s and 1950s where poor and working-class women speak in their own voice, in their own languages, for pages and pages, about their personal lives. For this reason we have chosen to quote women's testimonies at length.

Above all, court testimonies are unambiguously narratives. So in one of my own papers I confess that:

I shall unashamedly tell stories and allow African voices to be heard. For this, in the end, is the main advantage of the court records. The cases deal with individual people ... They throw bright shafts of light into a darkness which it is difficult to illuminate even through oral interview.

Today, in Britain, many social historians of Zimbabwe are being presented with another kind of quasi-judicial record – folders of material containing the applications of Zimbabwean asylum seekers and the judgements made upon them by Home Office assessors and adjudicators. I am president of the Britain-Zimbabwe Society which has drawn up a list of 'expert' asylum assessors and provided it to the Law Society. Diana Jeater is chair of the society. Both of us, and other historians of Zimbabwe, are on this list.⁴ I myself have written assessments of some 80 Zimbabwean asylum cases. I am beginning to amass an archive which rivals my notes on the Rhodesian preparatory examination files in the National Archives of Zimbabwe. Expert assessors cannot disclose the identities either of asylum seekers or of adjudicators. Nevertheless the asylum files are irresistible to a social historian. They offer exactly the same opportunities as the colonial preparatory examinations to read the official record 'with the grain' in order to explore 'the mind of the Home Office', and to read it 'against the grain' so that Zimbabwean voices can be heard. The Rhodesian files enable us to study the colonial encounter. The asylum files allow us to study the post-colonial encounter. ⁵

The asylum appeal files offer both narratives and counter-narratives. I am usually sent three major texts – the narrative statement of the asylum seeker; the record of interview between the asylum-seeker and a Home Office official; and the text of the refusal letter which sets out the reasons why the claim for asylum has been refused. I rarely see the record of the proceedings of a hearing nor the texts of the final judgements made on the appeals.⁶

So it is the applicant's narrative and the counter-narrative of the refusal letters and adjudicators' determinations I shall draw on.⁷ Like the colonial Rhodesian court records these contemporary files are flawed documents. The asylum seekers' narratives are rarely the spontaneous testimony of the applicant but reflect the guidance of solicitors and the 'street wisdom' of other asylum seekers who offer advice on what they think the adjudicators want to hear. (In one or two cases I have been able to see these processes at work – an applicant, badly advised by a previous solicitor – or by friends – devotes the greater part of a narrative to explaining why previous statements were not true but this one is). The statements rarely reflect emotion; adjectives are used sparingly – much more even so than in the Rhodesian court records. There is an obvious effort to appear 'objective'. Terrible experiences are narrated with astonishing calm. The oral interviews are particularly useless. They are structured almost entirely around a series of test questions used by the Home Office to determine whether an applicant really knows about opposition politics in Zimbabwe. The refusal letters are adversarial, often absurdly so.

Nevertheless, these documents can be read. And when they are read they reveal asylum-seeker narratives about two things – the political situation in contemporary Zimbabwe, and the refugee's vision of Britain. They reveal Home Office and judicial counter-narratives both about Zimbabwe and about the limits of Britain's commitment either to human rights or to its post-colonial obligations.

The Culture of Zimbabwean Asylum
Zimbabwean asylum seekers are very different from any others. Zimbabwe is the most literate country in Africa and the most familiar with English. The overwhelming majority of Zimbabwean refugees speak and write excellent English. They are Christian. They support Manchester United or Arsenal. Some of them enjoy cricket. Most are well educated. Large numbers of their compatriots, working legally in Britain, staff the public and private care industries – over the last three years Zimbabwean nurses have become the fourth largest nationality in the NHS; there are Zimbabwean social workers and Zimbabwean school-teachers. Zimbabweans are to be found everywhere caring for ancient Britons in retirement homes. Before the British imposition of visa requirements, all Zimbabwean asylum seekers arrived on valid passports and on flights for which they had paid. Until recently there was no mention of people-smuggling or of the provision of false documents in asylum-seeker testimonies. Zimbabweans don't need the instruction in British language, belief and culture which Blunkett urges. To an extent which realises Robert Mugabe's worst fears about dependency and globalisation they feel British, or at least part of the same universe of thought and culture which the British inhabit.

In many ways, of course, they are more British than the British. They profess belief in British justice. 'I was advised by my party', wrote a teacher in February 2002, 'to come to Great Britain as it was the only democratic country that would listen to my problems'. asylum seekers from other countries joke that Zimbabweans are astonished to find people who cannot speak English – and also that they do not think much of the way the English speak it themselves! Zimbabwean Christians are much more fervently Christian than almost any Briton. Reverend Noah Papasha, writing in the Zimbabwean press, remarked that a small number of whites armed with Christian faith arrived in southern Africa in the nineteenth century and that soon they dominated it. The same would happen with Zimbabwean missionaries to pagan Britain today. But it turns out that missionaries have an easier time in pre rather than post-Christian societies. David Maxwell has made a study of the Forward in Faith Movement, a mission sent into the 'darkness' of suburban London by the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God. The warmth of their worship attracted white converts in both Glasgow and London. But these converts were predictably marginal men and women. Soon they found Zimbabwean Christianity unbearably upbeat. 'Zimbabweans do not understand our depression' , complained one. 'They are just too cheerful!' For their part, the Zimbabwean missionaries deplored their converts' lack of industry and discipline - 'Whites have too many human rights'.⁸

Zimbabwean asylum seekers and the Post Colonial Trap
Zimbabwean asylum seekers do not have too many human rights, though. They are caught between the hostility of the Zimbabwean state and its press and the repudiating coldness of their reception in Britain. Indeed Zimbabwean asylum seekers in Britain find themselves in a more clearly defined post-colonial predicament than refugees from any other country.

There are more Zimbabweans in Britain than anywhere else in the world outside their country – estimates published in Zimbabwe itself range between as few as 176,400 and as many as 1.1 million ⁹ – and even for Zimbabweans who are not seeking asylum this poses problems with a Zimbabwe government which now sees itself as 'at war' with Britain.¹⁰ The state press in Zimbabwe views the Zimbabwe diaspora in Britain very negatively.¹¹ As it accurately points out, the departure of nurses and doctors for Britain has stripped the Zimbabwean health services. Recruitment of some Zimbabweans into the British army has been denounced as part of a British plot to raise commandos to topple Mugabe. When a Zimbabwean bag-piper was killed by a sniper in Basra the Zimbabwean government refused to allow his family to bring the body back home for burial. Zimbabweans who chose to serve what was in effect an 'enemy country' could be buried there. Britain is exploiting Zimbabweans as cheap labour. In November 2002 the Sunday Mail quoted Information Minister, Jonathan Moyo, to the effect that 'unskilled and semi-skilled Zimbabweans that are being recruited in their thousands ... by Britain are actually being used as slave labour ... They toil for long hours for little return ... Vulnerable youths [have been encouraged] to emigrate in a vain attempt to prove that there is political turmoil in Zimbabwe. They are then made to live in basements and work under slave conditions.' Moyo went on to single out aslyum seekers in particular:

We know that thousands of Zimbabweans have been mobilised by the MDC [and] Amani Trust ... and are being treated like slaves. The Zimbabweans are told to claim that they are victims of political violence and torture. They cross with letters from MDC officials alleging that the Government has persecuted them. A recent case is that of an 18 year old girl from Bulawayo who told the British media that she had fled political persecution of her family in Zimbabwe by Zanu-PF. Investigations by Zimbabwean authorities, however, showed that she was actually the daughter of a Zanu-PF councillor who had just been re-elected in the recent local government elections.¹²

On its side, however, Britain was hardly welcoming Zimbabweans with open arms. The Blair government took a post-colonial line in another sense. As far as it was concerned colonialism was over and had left no obligations. A recent Zimbabwean 'Land Review Committee' accurately describes what happened:

The British Conservative Government under John Major had agreed to assist with further funding for land reform in 1996. However, with the coming to power of Tony Blair's Labour Government in 1997 matters came to a head. The Labour Government refused to advance the process of land reform, in effect revoking Britain's obligations as per the Lancaster House understanding. In a letter to the Zimbabwe Minister of Agriculture ... the then Secretary of State for International Development, Ms Claire Short stated thus:

'I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new Government from diverse back- grounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonised not colonisers'. ¹³

Britain's stated development policy was now not to seek to remedy colonial under-development but to provide assistance wherever in the world there was the greatest poverty. Exactly the same position has been adopted with Britain's asylum policy. No 'special responsibility' is accepted for Zimbabwean or other Commonwealth applicants – Zimbabweans may feel part of the same culture as Britain but this feeling is certainly not mutual. Zimbabwean applicants have claims, if at all, arising only from international conventions on Refugees and on Human Rights and not from an unequally shared colonial history.

Yet there are contradictions and tensions within British policy itself. The Foreign Office has taken the lead in stigmatising Zimbabwe within that quintessentially post-colonial institution, the Commonwealth. Over the past three years the Foreign Office has depicted Zimbabwe as a uniquely dangerous and lawless place. The Home Office, on the other hand, has constantly sought to minimise these dangers. As Zimbabwe's suspension from the Commonwealth continues and President Mugabe has renounced it as a post-colonial illusion, the Foreign Office insists that no Zimbabwean asylum-seeker should be sent back home. But even today some 'failed' Zimbabwean asylum seekers are receiving letters from Home Office officials telling them that it is quite safe to return home and that they should prepare to do so.

Nevertheless the Home Office has reluctantly come to accept some of the realities of Zimbabwean violence. Its Country Information and Policy Unit (CIPU) provides adjudicators with six-monthly briefings on Zimbabwe (and all other countries from which asylum seekers come). The CIPU briefings for Zimbabwe in April and October 2001 were grossly inadequate.¹⁴ They focussed almost entirely on the favourite post-colonial stereotypes of race and ethnicity. They contained a great deal about whites and their suffering even though hardly any white asylum seekers appear before adjudicators. (That most self-righteous of New Labour post-colonialists, Peter Hain, had announced emergency plans to receive thousands of white Zimbabweans and had asked local councils to review what housing and other facilities they could provide. But the mass exodus of whites from Zimbabwe to Britain did not materialise and even if it had, few incoming whites would have been dealt with by asylum tribunals).

So far as violence against Africans was concerned, the 2001 reports focussed on 'tribalism' – the Ndebele were in danger from the Shona. But as I wrote in my widely publicised critique of the 2001 briefings: 'An ethnic explanation does not make sense today ... The violence that is happening in Matabeleland today is in no sense a "Shona" attack on "the Ndebele". Its main instruments are Ndebele-speaking ex-guerrillas.' The CIPU briefings ignored the dynamics of internal African politics in Zimbabwe and the attacks by Zanu PF youth, war veterans and youth militia on supporters of the MDC or those perceived to be so. ¹⁵

Under criticism, however, the CIPU reports on Zimbabwe have improved a great deal. The UK Immigration Advisory Services published late in 2003 an assessment of CIPU reports on a number of countries which generate asylum seekers. This included an evaluation of the current Zimbabwe country report. There were still criticisms to be made but by comparison to some of the others the Zimbabwe 2003 report emerged as relatively full and well informed. It emphasises the dangers to which MDC activists are exposed. It even recognises that people have been endangered because they belong to certain occupational categories – like rural school teachers or civil servants – thought to be sympathetic to the MDC. It acknowledges that rape has been used to punish male MDC activists through their wives and daughters.¹⁶ Perhaps as a result of this improvement in reporting, there was a dramatic increase in the percentages of favourable Zimbabwean asylum decisions between 2001 and 2002. In 2002 42 per cent of Zimbabwean asylum seekers were granted refugee status as against only 6 per cent in 2001; in 2002 38 per cent of appeals against refusals were allowed as against 23 per cent in 2001.¹⁷

But there has been a British Government reaction against the increasing numbers and success of Zimbabwean asylum applications. (There were 7,655 such applications in 2002 against only 2,140 in 2001). The number of Zimbabwean asylum seekers had rapidly come to rival even that of the Chinese. Zimbabwean asylum had become part of the wider 'asylum crisis' and of Blair's promise to reduce applications. The means taken to do this for Zimbabwe have been brutally simple and effective. At the beginning of November 2002 a visa requirement was imposed on all Zimbabweans travelling to Britain. It was no longer good enough to turn up at the airport, as nearly all the asylum seekers had done, with a passport and a plane ticket. Now Zimbabweans could not board a flight unless they had a visa issued by the British High Commission. Visa fees are high. No one can apply for asylum at the British High Commission in Harare. The result has been that Zimbabwean asylum seekers either arrive in Britain having provided false information to obtain their visa or travelling on bogus South African passports, obtained at great expense from 'agents'. In either case an asylum claim is fatally damaged and in the latter case Zimbabweans have been deported to South Africa and sent from there back to Zimbabwe. ¹⁸ Under the proposed new asylum legislation it will become a criminal offence, punishable by a fine or up to two-years imprisonment to enter Britain without valid documents.¹⁹ The British Government still professes that it wishes to honour its international obligations to those Zimbabweans 'genuinely' in need of asylum. It does not say, however, how they can now get to Britain in the first place.²⁰

Asylum Narratives in the Post-Colonial Context
These changing dynamics can be seen at play in Zimbabwean asylum narratives and Home Office counter-narratives. In this second section of my paper I will draw upon asylum testimonies as in the past I have drawn upon criminal court records. And as scholars have increasingly done with court records I shall focus particularly on the experience of Zimbabwean women. More than half of the Zimbabwean asylum cases I have been asked to assess have involved women. This is no doubt because I am sent few cases which involve major MDC activists, some of whom are women but most of whom are men. My cases involve wives and daughters; women teachers and soldiers and civil servants; women store keepers and nurses.

The Case of the Bulawayo Schoolgirl
Since I quoted Zimbabwe's Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo, mocking a bogus claim for asylum by 'an 18-year-old girl from Bulawayo' I want to begin with the narrative of another Bulawayo 18 year old. Her case illustrates the way in which young women in Zimbabwe can be removed from the protection of state agencies. It exemplifies the plight of apolitical bystanders and illustrates the callous narrowness of initial Home Office responses to them.

In her statement of late July 2002 the young woman declared openly:

I never participated in any activities of the MDC ... It is not only MDC activists and members who are at risk of persecution ... The ZANU PF agents [war veterans and youth militia] brutalise anyone who they think is not with ZANU PF or has links with the MDC and are not held accountable for their actions.

This A-level schoolgirl lived with her uncle in a township. The uncle was an MDC activist. In December 2001, in the aftermath of the disappearance and death of the Bulawayo war-veteran's leader, Cain Nkala:

a group of four ZANU PF men came to my home. They forced their way in. They took my uncle. They called him a traitor and a slave for the white people. They said my uncle was suspected of killing a war veteran ... They beat him with barbed wire. He was bleeding profusely. When my mother begged them to stop and tried to intervene they turned on her and beat her with the barbed wire too. My uncle was taken away. The following day my mother and I reported the incident to the police. The police took our details and then simply said they were not able to deal with our case. They said they would not get involved in matters arising out of politics. My mother begged them for assistance but they were adamant that they would not help us ...

Deprived of her uncle's protection the girl was an easy target:

War veterans and youth militia would constantly come to my home ... at least twice a week ... They would stay in our house and would force my mother and I to chant ZANU PF slogans and sing ZANU PF songs. We would have to shout insults about the MDC. It was very frightening as they were often drunk and aggressive ...

A man called M was a very senior war veteran. He was in his fities. Sometime at the beginning of January 2002 he came to my home and asked my mother if I could 'go with him'. My mother said that I was far too young for him. M was angered by this. He pulled me to him and began to fondle my breats in front of my mother. I was scared, ashamed and embarrassed. He then dragged me to his car and pushed me inside ... M drove me to a farm, I was very scared during the drive and did not speak at all ... M took me to a room in the farm house. He pushed me on to the bed. He pulled my skirt up and raped me. His hand covered my mouth. I was in a great amount of pain. He was very rough and I was a virgin ... After twenty four hours M came back to the room. He said he wanted a 'last one' and them proceeded to rape me again.

M then drove her home and she and her mother went to the health clinic because they feared she might be infected. But 'a nurse at the clinic said they could not see me until I had reported the matter to the police and had obtained a receipt confirming that a report had been lodged'. But 'we knew the police would not help'.

A few days later M raped her again; then she was gang-raped by four veterans. This time she did go to the police and was again sent away because they could not investigate 'political matters'. Then M took her as 'his second wife'; 'raped me in front of my mother'; and took her to his house where he introduced her to many members of his family as his wife. The house was guarded night and day. She was unable to go to school – 'this upset me because I was studying for my A-levels. My mother tried asking the [Catholic] Church to help us but they were powerless to help'. Eventually a neighbour took pity on her; gave her money and a letter of introduction to a nun in Harare; she managed to slip away from a church service in Bulawayo, travel to Harare, was provided with an air ticket and arrived at Heathrow in mid July 2002 where she immediately claimed asylum.

The truth of her story was never an issue in the subsequent asylum process. The Home Office accepted her credibility. Instead the letter of refusal issued by the Home Office Integrated Casework Directorate in September 2002 denied that she fell within the terms of the United Nations Convention relating to the status of refugees. 'The Secretary of State refuses to accept that Zanu PF and its agents would accept that you had any involvement with the MDC'; she had never attend a rally and had shown herself in the Home Office interview ignorant of 'who are responsible for specific policies within the party [and] concerning basic MDC facts'. Moreover, while the Secretary of State was 'aware that you were subject to various sexual attacks from agents of Zanu PF' he 'in general takes the view that such individuals cannot be regarded as "agents of persecution" within the terms of the 1951 Convention'. They were not, in other words, formal officers of the Zimbabwe state. In any case, the refusal letter added 'the fact that you were not killed during this time ... causes the Secretary of State to believe that agents of Zanu PF have no interest in killing you'.

This story has a happy ending. Assisted by a determined solicitor she took her case to the Immigration Appellate Authority. On 20 February 2003 an adjudicator found in her favour, noting that 'I cannot see in the long refusal letter any acknowledgement of the particular vulnerability of the appellant'. The decision was one of a number which challenged a narrowly political definition of refugee status. ²¹

The Case of the Primary School Teacher
In his recently published Canon Collins Memorial Lecture, Education and the Crisis in Zimbabwe, the academic and activist, Brian Raftopolous, reminds us that rape was a threat also faced by female school teachers in rural Zimbabwean schools:

As a result of the assault by state agencies between the period 2000-2002, five teachers were killed, 119 raped and many more were maimed, kidnapped, tortured and displaced. ²²

However, the narrative I want to cite now is not about rape but about another key issue which has often been poorly understood by Home Office officials – symbolic politics in Zimbabwe and its often inadvertent expression. The Zanu-PF greeting is a clenched fist, symbol of authority: the MDC greeting, by contrast, is an open palm. Quite inadvertent references to, or depictions of, the open hand can get people into trouble. The Amani Trust Report of 27 June 2000, for instance, records 'political violence in Zimbabwe since 14 February 2000'. For 4 May an incident is reported from Bulawayo:

A street vendor selling herbal products that carry a warning in Ndebele that touching the product makes the palm of the hand hot, is accused of supporting the MDC on the grounds that his product mentions the palm of the hand, is severely beaten and hospitalised.

The primary school teacher's narrative, written in March 2002, describes a similar episode. The narrator is a woman in her late 20s, a Catholic born in Bulawayo, and trained as a primary teacher. She obtained a job in a rural area north of Bulawayo and lived 'in teachers' accommodation within the school grounds':

I was not a member of the MDC and did not campaign for them or partake in any other form of activity on their behalf ...

I did not voice any political opinions at school as I was very scared of the tactics used by ZANU-PF supporters and war veterans to silence critics. Anyone perceived as being a supporter of any party other than ZANU-PF faced violence and intimidation. The school I taught in was in the countryside. ZANU-PF's support is mainly from the rural areas.

My problems started in December 2001. On 4 December I set the pupils in my grade 4 class an assignment to be completed during the Christmas vacation period. I asked them to draw two open hands and on the finger of each hand to place a letter. One hand should read 'Jesus', the other 'Peace'. When I set this assignment I had no idea some parents who were war veterans and/or members of the ZANU-PF militia would view the assignment as me promoting the MDC to the children.

Around 6.00 pm on 5 December 2001 four men came to my home in the school. They were all war veterans. They were very aggressive. They were very angry. I was called a traitor as I supported a party that was a slave to the white people. I was told that I had no right to trying to corrupt the children in my care with MDC propaganda which was evil. Initially I did not know what the men were talking about as I had never discussed politics/the MDC with my pupils. They then specifically referred to the 'Jesus gives peace' assignment. I tried to explain that I was not a political person and that the assignment has no political connotations. The war veterans did not believe me. They said that it was well known that teachers ... supported the MDC. They became very brutal. One of the war veterans slapped me hard across my face. Another spat at me and then kicked me and pushed me. He then grabbed a piece of wood from the fire. He grabbed the end that was not in the fire [and] used the glowing part of the wood to burn my right wrist. I screamed in agony. I was terrified. I feared for my life. They warned me not to return to the school. I was told that if I came back they would make sure I regretted it.

Next day in assembly the Head Mistress 'simply warned us against doing or saying anything that could be interpreted as having a political meaning'. During the Christmas vacation the teacher went to her family in Bulawayo; attended hospital; and reported to the very uninterested police. She tried hard to find a teaching position elsewhere but failed. So when the new term began she returned to the school. 'I was the bread-winner of the family. My grandmother and siblings do not work. They depend on my income to eat and meet the bills'. So she went back, 'hoping that the war veterans would have forgotten about the incident or would be too busy to bother with someone like me who is not a political activist'.

But on 18 January the four men returned and ordered her to leave, otherwise 'they would punish me in the way they punished other MDC teachers if I did not leave. They did not want to see me in their community again'. Still, out of economic necessity, she stayed on. Then on 6 February an elderly Catholic man warned her to leave at once. Her name was on a list 'to be punished'; she was to be taken to a 'torture base'. At last she decided to leave.

When this narrative was first presented to the Home Office assessors it had not been recognised in the Zimbabwe CIPU report that rural teachers were at risk. Her story was dismissed as absurd. On 19 March 2002 the refusal letter from the Integrated Case Work Directorate informed her that:

the Secretary of State does not consider that by simply getting the children to draw a similar symbol to the MDC's logo, especially as it contained the wording 'Jesus Gives Peace' above the hands, would lead anyone to associate it with the MDC. Furthermore he does not consider that ZANU-PF would believe it was a hidden political message being distributed to the children's parents ... these claims damage your overall credibility.

By the time her case came before an adjudicator later in the year, however, it had been accepted that rural teachers were in danger. In a decision promulgated on 1 August 2002 the adjudicator refused her appeal for precisely the opposite reason:

I accept that teachers are at risk and that [the district] was (and possibly still is) an area of particular tension. However, merely because the appellant is a teacher does not justify an automatic finding that she as or is at risk of persecution ... The appellant is an educated person. I find that the she will have been well aware of the consequences of using the open-handed gesture and to say that she did not realise that drawing it would have the same effect is simply disingenuous. I therefore find that she would not have given the children this type of assignment to do at home (or at all) in the first place.

Once again this sequence of clashes between narrative and counter-narrative was resolved happily. Aided by the same diligent solicitor, and on a further appeal, the primary school teacher who had given her class the basic assignment taught in training colleges all over the world was given leave to remain.

The Case of the Traumatised Niece.
You will have noticed that in both these narratives the protagonist was not an MDC activist. The Home Office tests of knowledge about the 'basic facts' of the MDC were irrelevant to their cases. Another situation in which these tests were irrelevant was when somebody was put in danger not by their own activities in the early 2000s but by the pattern of events in the past. As one male asylum seeker put it: 'it was possible for me to be hurt because of our family history'. (His grandfather had been 'burnt alive in his house by the 5th Brigade; his father had been killed in 1996). The initial Home Office response, however, was to dismiss the relevance of history:

The Secretary of State understands your claim that your father was killed in 1996 (runs a refusal letter from February 2003). However, he is aware that this incident was over six years ago following which you continued to live in Zimbabwe. He therefore considers this event to be of no significance.

The Home Office concentrated entirely on the immediate present and ignored the pre-disposing past.

Let me briefly sketch the relevant history so far as western Zimbabwe is concerned. The guerrilla war of the 1970s was fought by two armies – Joshua Nkomo's Zipra, which operated mainly in the west and Robert Mugabe's Zanla, which operated in the centre and east. Many deaths took place in the 1970s, most as a result of Rhodesian regime violence. Rural populations in the west supported Nkomo's party, Zapu, from the early 1960s right through to independence. People in the rest of the country came to support Mugabe's party, Zanu-PF, during the late 1970s. The elections of 1980 gave a two-thirds victory to Mugabe. There was a brief period of co-operation between the two parties and of co-existence between the two guerrilla armies. This soon broke down, however. Zipra and Zanla fought each other; Nkomo and Zapu were blamed by the government; and there followed years of terrible violence in western Zimbabwe. Some ex-Zipra became 'dissidents', while in order to break Zapu the government deployed the notorious 5th Brigade against the civilian population of Matabeleland. Again, many deaths took place. This violence ended in December 1987 when Zanu-PF and Zapu came to a one-sided Unity Agreement. This was a bargain in which Mugabe controlled the whole country and Zapu veterans were allowed to control local government in Matabeleland. Veterans of both guerrilla armies came together in the increasingly powerful Veterans Association. ²³

Most ex-Zipra guerrillas and most Zapu political veterans supported – and support – this compromise. For some years the bulk of the old Zapu voters went along with it. But there were always those ex-Zapu supporters who repudiated what they thought to be a forced and unequal unification or who could not forget the deaths of relatives and their own sufferings at the hands of the 5th Brigade. Some of these people looked for other parties for support against the supposedly united Zanu-PF. In the 1990s they backed the Zimbabwe Unity Movement, the Liberty Party or Zapu 2000 until the rise of the MDC in late 1999 finally offered them a party with both nation-wide support and an immediate mass base in Matabeleland.

The point that is most relevant to the asylum applications is that a good deal of the current violence in Matabeleland is an internecine war between two legacies of Nkomo's Zapu. Most ex-Zipra guerrillas, some of whom have now come to control the Veterans Association, and most old Zapu officials support the regime against the MDC. They have lost their mass support, however. And they particularly resent, and regard as traitors, conspicuous old Zapu families who now support the MDC. In this way 'it is possible to be hurt because of family history'.

These complexities are clarified by asylum narratives. Here I choose another story from a woman, this time in her forties. Once again she was not an MDC activist:

I had an MDC membership card but I got rid of it in June 2002 because I did not want to be identifiable as an MDC supporter by the Zanu-PF. I was a low-level supporter. I was too afraid to get actively involved.

She was too afraid because of her family history.

In February 1983 when she was sixteen she was living with her aunt in rural Matabeleland. Her aunt was 'Chairlady for Zapu'. Soldiers of the 5th Brigade arrived and she and her 'brother and cousins were forced to watch and sing songs of praise to Robert Mugabe while [my] aunt was literally bayoneted to pieces'. Her husband:

first had trouble in the 1980s. He was in the war [as a Zipra guerrilla]. After Zapu was defeated by Zanu-PF there was a split between Zapu and Zanu so Zanu-PF were killing the Zapu soldiers. My husband was in the gang that was accused of trying to assassinate Robert Mugabe. That is when his trouble started.

In 1986 in South Africa her husband was 'approached by a gang of men and they questioned him and asked if he knew he was being looked for in Zimbabwe ... They then started hitting him and then he was shot. The last thing he remembered was a cold thing going across his neck'. When she visited him in hospital in Johannesburg 'the wound was very long, from his ear to underneath his throat. The doctor said he was very lucky to be alive'. Thereafter her husband stayed in South Africa but 'every three or four months my husband would enter Zimbabwe crossing the border on foot through the river as we had done. It was very dangerous because the river Limpopo contains many crocodiles and there are lions on the South African side'.

This woman clearly came from a deeply Zapu family. But her aunt's death and her husband's experiences led her to refuse to accept the Unity Agreement of December 1987. She looked for parties opposed to the Zanu-PF regime. She joined the Liberty Party and after that the MDC. But, as we have seen, she was afraid to be identified since she was well aware of the dangers presented by her family history. Having been deeply Zapu meant that she could expect no sympathy from long-term Zanu supporters but it also meant that Zipra war veterans would regard her as a traitor for supporting the MDC. And despite her caution it was discovered that she did support them. She was accosted by veterans in May 2002 and told she 'was selling Zanu-PF out to the whites'; in June she was assaulted and raped in her house by a gang; in July she received death threats over the phone. Her assailants referred back to the history, telling her that 'she had not learnt her lessons from the 1980 atrocities' and shouting 'a snake's child is a snake'. So she flew to Britain and applied for asylum. A doctor who examined her reported that 'she feels intense guilt that she has survived'.

But the Home Office refusal letter in October 2002 paid no notice to the history at all. 'By your own admission', it said, 'you were too afraid to be actively involved with the MDC and as such you are not known to be an active supporter of the MDC [which] casts doubt on the credibility of your claims.' And the letter insisted that 'your application has been considered in the light of the political situation and conditions in Zimbabwe' today.

But here again a different view could be taken at the higher appellate level. An adjudicator in the Immigration Appellate Authority promulgated a decision in April 2003 in another case in which history was determinant. In this case the young man concerned had applied for asylum as early as March 1996, when he was seventeen, years before the emergence of the MDC. His family lived on a farm in Matabeleland and he narrated a long history of attacks on them by the Central Intelligence Organisation, including the death of his brother in 1987 and of his father in January 1994. He himself had been too young to be much involved in politics but claimed to have joined a Zapu Youth Club in 1995. By the criterion of his activity in the current Zimbabwean political situation his case had been immediately dismissed in the initial hearing. But the adjudicator took the view that the history entitled him to asylum:

I appreciate that it is now over seven years since the Appellant lived in Zimbabwe and that whilst there he was not politically active to any great extent. However, he comes from a family which was prominent in the heartland of the opposition to the Mugabe regime and which was well known to the CIO for such opposition. The family was broken up and driven out of Zimbabwe by the persecution of the CIO and in those circumstances I do not think that the Appellant's return to his own country would be overlooked ... If the Appellant returned it is only to be expected that in some way he would support the MDC.

Yet while this determination recognised history it was a post-colonial recognition. The significant history accepted here is that of post-independence Zimbabwe and of the record of the Mugabe regime in dealing with opposition. The adjudicating mind does not stretch back before 1980 and into the ambiguities and traumas of devolved colonialism.

Conclusion
I believe that the narratives I have cited – such a small proportion of the cases I have seen – tell us many things both about the situation in Zimbabwe and about the dynamics of Home Office responses to it. They show clearly how important the mechanism of appeal – now under threat – can be. The first Home Office considerations are often fatally flawed. I have seen a case in which the rejection letter flatly refused to accept that the applicant had been a radio journalist in Zimbabwe, though five minutes on Google showed clearly that he had in fact been 'a household name' as a broadcaster. The adjudicator's second consideration can be equally arbitrary. In one case the adjudicator found that 'there is no serious possibility that the appellant had been a teacher in Zimbabwe' – whereupon the man produced a mass of documents which proved conclusively that he had been.

But I would like to conclude with Zimbabwean women and their agency in this situation. Unavoidably the narratives I have presented portray women as victims. Yet we should not have heard about them at all unless they had decided that we must do so. The traumatised niece has regular nightmares about people being killed. But even some of the gang-raped have survived – the Bulawayo schoolgirl gave her evidence to the adjudicator who allowed her appeal 'in a positive and cheerful manner'.

More generally, my files are full of women in all sorts of roles. There are district nurses and headmistresses and civil servants in local and central government; there are women police and women soldiers; there are women researchers and NGO administrators. Many of them have shown great strength of character and see themselves today as agents rather than victims. The women in the civil service, the police and the army persist in the view which got them into trouble in the first place – 'I have never been a politically active person', says one, 'I am not and never have been a member of any political party. As a civil servant I have to be at all times independent and non-partisan'. It took courage to maintain this view and to refuse to issue arms and ammunition to veterans and militia, as one female soldier did, or to refuse to join assault squads like one female police officer.

Other women, of course, were active MDC supporters. Not all teachers tried – and failed – to lie low. 'As teachers we were privileged', says one woman, 'to be able to play a pivotal role in educating those in the rural areas of the party's aims and objectives'. Businesswomen – a famously assertive breed – retain their self-image despite their losses.

'I am a very brave and strong-willed person', writes one of them, as she describes the looting and burning of her stores and guesthouse. 'But I have never been so scared. I have never in my life experienced such horror. This was a business we had worked for. This was my life on the line. This was my country I was fighting for. I had a daughter to live for. They had taken my husband's life.'

Like the colonial court case with which I began this lecture, these imperfect asylum narratives and counter-narratives tell us a great deal about history and gender and political violence; about commitment to non-partisanship or to a party. They tell us a great deal about post colonial assumptions both in Zimbabwe and in Britain. What worries me most in ending this lecture is that we are likely to have many fewer of them in the future as the visa regime bites; as appeals are cut back; and as Zimbabwean asylum seekers are silenced.

1. Diana Jeater 'Rethinking the "African Voice": Language Interpretation in the Native Commissioner's and Magistrate's Courts, Melsetter District, Southern Rhodesia, 1896-1914' in Simon McGrath et al, eds., Rethinking African History, Edinburgh:CAS, 1997; 'Their idea of justice is so peculiar: Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1910', in Peter Coss, ed., The Moral World of the Law, Cambridge: CUP, 2000, pp. 178-195; Law, Language and Science: The Invention of the Native Mind in Southern Rhodesia, forthcoming; Terence Ranger 'Tales of the Wild West: Gold Diggers and Rustlers in South-West Zimbabwe, 1898-1940. An Essay in the Use of Criminal Court Records for Social History', South African Historical Journal, 28, 1993, pp.40-62.
2. Terence Ranger 'Criminal Court Records and the Social History of the Zimbabwean South-West: Witchcraft Belief and Accusation', Oxford, 1994; 'Murder, Rape and Witchcraft: Criminal Court data for gender relations in Colonial Matabeleland', Oxford, 1995.
3. Koni Benson and Joyce Chadya 'Ukubhinya: Gender and Social Violence in Bulawayo, Colonial Abingdon, 1946-1956', June 2002; Tapiwa Zimudzi, 'African Women, Violent Crime and the Criminal Law in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1900 - 1952', 2003.
4. Very many British historians and social scientists are similarly involved as 'experts' on other countries in Europe, Asia and Africa. Anthony Good in his 'Anthropologists as Experts. Asylum Appeals in the British Courts'', Anthropology Today, 19, October 2003 reveals that he has assessed over 100 appeals involving Sri Lankan asylum seekers. His article is intended as ' basic primer for those involved in this kind of work' rather than a consideration of 'asylum processes or about [anthropologists'] roles in them'
5. An interesting discussion of asylum documentation in an academic context is M.Louise Pirouet, 'Materials Used in Making Asylum Decisions in the U.K.', African Research and Documentation, 93, 2003.
6. Nevertheless the asylum seeker's experience of the appeal hearing is very much an experience of a court. While Anthony Good emphasises that asylum hearings 'are not subject to normal evidential constraints because applicants are in no position to call witnesses or extract documents from the state which persecuted them', his account of the quasi-judicial proceedings emphasises their formality.' 'There are many hearing centres around the country. They are meant to be less intimidating than normal courts, which they nonetheless resemble. The adjudicator occupies a raised desk with the royal coat of arms on the wall behind. Adjudicators are members of the judiciary, appointed by the Lord Chancellor'.
7. These documents are not, of course, the only source of asylum narratives. Two striking examples of refugee testimonies are Andrew Bradstock and Arlington Trotman, eds., Asylum Voices. Experiences of People Seeking Asylum in the United Kingdom, London: CTBI, 2003; I.Dumitrascu, Niamh McClean and Anne Mobbs, Opening the Doors to Freedom, Oxford: Asylum Welcome, 2003.
8. These paragraphs on Zimbabwean asylum culture are drawn from 'Zimbabwe Diasporas: A Report on the Britain Zimbabwe Society Research Day, June 14 2003'.
9. On 17 July 2003 the independent Financial Gazette estimated that there were some 500,000 Zimbabweans living abroad. Of these there were 176,400 in the United Kingdom; 165,375 in Botswana; 22,050 in South Africa, 33,075 in the United States. But on 15 February 2004 Associated Press reported that a Zimbabwe Central bank advisory board had compiled figures which revealed that a quarter of the Zimbabwean population - some 3.4 million people - were living abroad. Of these 1.1 million lived in Britain, 800,000 being 'illegal immigrants'; 1.2 million were living in South Africa.
10. For the development of a Zimbabwe 'patriotic history' which puts all the responsibility for the abuses of colonialism on Britain rather than on the Rhodesian settler state see Terence Ranger, 'Nationalist History, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: the struggle over the past in Zimbabwe', Journal of Southern African Studies, June 2004.
11. The only exception has been the Ministry of Finance. In his 2002 budget Herbert Murerwa told parliament that many Zimbabweans had 'all but concluded that God has been missing for the past three years as the economy has halved and forced Zimbabweans into exile, mostly in Britain'. But God 'has a plan for Zimbabweans'. The hard currency remissions sent back by the Zimbabwean diaspora would rescue the economy'. Peta Thornycroft, 'Send Cash plea from Zimbabwe to Expatriates', Telegraph. 15 November 2002.
12. 'Aussie Slavery Probed', Sunday Mail, 3 November 2002.
13. Report of the Presidential Land Review Committee on the Implementation of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme, 200-2002, Harare, 2003, p.15.
14. Louis Pirouet in her 'Materials used in making asylum decisions in the UK' writes: 'You might expect that the country assessments would be written by people with some expert knowledge of the countries concerned and of the literature available but you would be wrong. The Home Office employs no country or area experts, and resists suggestions that such experts should be employed. You might also think that the Home Office would seek the expertise of the Research Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office but again you would be mostly wrong.' Pirouet lists all the material available for a proper country assessment of Kenya which is missing from the CIPU document for that country, pp.32-34..
15. Terence Ranger, 'Comments on the Home Office Immigration and Nationality Directorate's Zimbabwe Assessment, April 2001', Oxford, December 2001.
16. Natasha Carver, ed., Home Office Country Assessments; An Analysis, Research and Information Unit, IAS, 2003. The analysis examines country information bulletins for 17 countries. In general they find the bulletins 'extremely selective in [their] use of information'; 'full of inaccuracies and out of date material'. IAS 'is alarmed that such poor quality research in so influential in deciding asylum claims' and urges the creation of an 'independent documentation centre capable of providing information that is accurate, reliable and independent of Government asylum policy'. p.4 The critique of the Zimbabwe CIPU assessment is on pages 225-236. Despite improvements since 2001 the assessor, Joseph Brookfield, finds the CIPU report basically 'a repetition of old material ... rather than a thorough revision ... disjointed' and misleading on a number of points.
17. I draw these statistics from a valuable article by Victoria Prais and Paul Warburton, of the Immigration Advisory Service, 'Zimbabwean asylum cases in focus', In Exile. The Magazine for Refugee Rights, Issue 29, January 2004. .
18. The Guardian of 26 February 2004 reports the latest development, Under the heading 'South African help sought on refugees' the paper reported that the Home Office had opened talks with South Africa 'about co-operating on returning South Africans who may have falsely claimed to be Zimbabweans when they claimed asylum in Britain'. Refugee welfare organisations were convinced that agreement by South Africa would 'mean rejected asylum-seekers from Zimbabwe being sent from Britain to a neighbouring third country'.
19. 'The definitive guide to the new Asylum and Immigration Bill' in Exile, January 2004, comments: 'This measure is in danger of criminalising many refugees who are forced to flee on false papers .... the extension of visa requirements to refugee-producing countries (such as Zimbabwe) has reduced refugee's ability to access the EU legally and safely. Many people whom the Home Office recognises as refugees have only reached safety in the UK through smuggling networks [and] are powerless to refuse to obey ruthless smugglers or traffickers who demand that they destroy or return documents as a condition of travel.' p.5.
20. The visa requirement had its desired impact on the numbers of Zimbabwean asylum applications. Between January and September 2003 there were only 2,600, back almost to 2001 levels after the boom on 2002. For an initial Zimbabwean response to the visa imposition see Zimbabwean Independent, 29 November 2002. Today the visa regime arouses much discontent among 'legitimate' Zimbabwean travellers to the United Kingdom. The visa office is open only for a few hours a day; long queues outside are marshalled by street youth and by police who sometimes disperse them. Zimbabwean asylum seekers are also, of course, affected by the tightening of asylum regulations. Thus, for instance, when Zimbabweans are at the end of the process and have been denied asylum they cannot be sent back to Zimbabwe. But they cease to be paid benefits or provided with accommodation and they are not allowed to work.
21. In 2002, however, there had been many similar refusal letters. In another case the young grand-daughter of an African farmer who supported the MDC was gang raped in order to punish him. The grandfather himself died. In June 2002 the refusal letter told her: 'Your grandfather was the main political activist in your family. The Secretary of States sees no reason why you would be of interest to members of the Zanu-PF'.
22. Raftopolous, London:CCESTSHA, 2003, pp.32-33. Raftopolous is drawing here on the report by the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe, 'Report on the Teachers' Strike of October, 2002', Harare, 2002.
23. For a historical account of popular support for Zapu in northern Matabeleland , of Zipra's involvement in the guerrilla war, and of the activities of the 5 Brigade see Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor and Terence Ranger, Violence and Memory, Oxford: James Currey, 2000. For the role of the veterans between 1980 and 1987 see Norma Kriger, Guerrilla Veterans in Post-War Zimbabwe, Symbolic and Violent Politics, Cambridge: CUP, 2003. For the classic human rights documentation of abuses in Matabeleland and the Midlands see Breaking The Silence. Building True Peace, Harare: CCJP and LRF, 1997. Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor have an article on Guerrilla Narrratives forthcoming in History Workshop Journal.

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