Sunday Telegraph
23 September 2007
By Graham Boynton
I spoke to old friends in Zimbabwe this weekend. They sounded pleased with themselves, mainly because they’d managed to scavenge 25 chickens and a bottle of Teacher’s whisky from some unnamed connection.They’d shared the chickens among friends and, having had a few shots of Scotch, were barbecuing their catch and feeling relatively contented.Last week they’d killed a cow and set up an informal butcher’s shop for the neighbourhood in their back garden.
This is life under Robert Mugabe for people who were once entrepreneurs, teachers and traders. And they say they’re the lucky ones, because their connections and foreign exchange mean they can get hold of food and smuggle in alcohol from South Africa. Most of their fellow citizens are not so lucky – they are, quite literally, starving to death.
I grew up in Bulawayo, then a beautiful colonial town with avenues so wide you could turn an ox wagon in them and streets lined with majestic gum trees, kigelia trees and hedges of bougainvillea.
At the time it was run by a white colonial minority, who had carved a modern infrastructure out of raw African bushveld and created a thriving economy, benefiting both themselves and the black majority.
Of course, minority white rule could not last and when Ian Smith’s Rhodesia became Mugabe’s Zimbabwe it was a self-sufficient, prosperous economic success – a rare beacon of hope in Africa’s bleak 20th-century landscape.Today, the trees and the flowers remain but the city is in ruins. In less than a decade Robert Mugabe has torn the heart out of this lovely country and reduced it to the fastest-declining economy in the world.
Statistics offer a stark outline of the catastrophe, but do not adequately describe the sadness that this despot has visited on his people, the very Africans he was supposed to have liberated.
An estimated 3,500 people are dying in Zimbabwe each week which, says David Coltart, the opposition MP who was in London last week, makes it “a humanitarian disaster more serious than Darfur”.
Most of my old friends have gone, scattering to the four corners of the earth. Those who have stayed are the African optimists, an ever-diminishing tribe who hold on to the belief that Mugabe will be overthrown.
This weekend my stoical friends are saying that it can’t go on like this for much longer, but admit they’ve been saying that for years.
Meanwhile, the former middle-classes – black and white – will continue to spend their days scavenging for food and drink, but the poor and dispossessed, the huddled masses for whom Mugabe was supposed to be a saviour, face disease and starvation on an unprecedented scale.
The dream of a free and prosperous Zimbabwe has truly turned sour.