Posted on 07/30/2005 7:12:25 PM PDT by Clive
Dear Family and Friends,
For the last three months almost every single report from Zimbabwe has been about the destruction of homes, stalls and informal structures in our cities and towns. At first, when we could actually see the bulldozers, the huge clouds of dust and the piles of rubble in our towns and neighbourhoods, it was all very real and terrifying.
Then we saw people desperately looking for shelter, carrying their belongings and lining the roads in their hundreds trying to get transport to move the remnants of their homes out of town and away from the bulldozers.
Now, two months later, there is not much left for the ordinary passer by to see on the roadsides of Marondera. There are still piles of rubble here and there but mostly there are just empty spaces in the town.
It is hard to believe that just two months ago you could buy a banana or a twist of newspaper brimming with ground nuts at the street corner. You could haggle with a vendor over a huge orange mango, an avocado or a bowl of tomatoes or even buy a hand made hammock on the side of the road. You could have your shoes re heeled, your zip fixed or your bicycle spokes tightened by skilled self employed men and women earning an honest living from the pavements and alleyways all across Marondera.
Now the town is virtually deserted, the streets are quiet, you cannot even buy a banana on the roadside and everywhere, still everywhere, the four month old ZANU PF election posters cling to our lamp posts: "We are proud to be Zimbabweans on our land", the banners say. "Our land is our sovereignty" the slogans shout at us as we walk past them. We walk because after seven weeks there is still no petrol or diesel, almost no buses or taxis are moving and very few ordinary vehicles are still on the roads.
And the question everyone is asking is what has happened to all those people whose homes and stalls were demolished. Where are they living now, how are they surviving, have they got enough to eat? There are more questions than answers.
This week I talked with a man who lives in a rural village and I am haunted by his stories, in shock at his descriptions. He told me of people arriving from the cities but of there being no empty houses where they can live. He told me of families doubling and tripling up to try and accommodate the desperate newcomers. He told me of meagre meals being shared and then watered down and shared yet again. He described how there was no space for people's possessions and so lounge suites and wardrobes were being stored on top of roofs - exposed to the wind, the dust and the dew. There are not enough houses in the villages, the wells are already running dry, all vegetable gardening has stopped due to the shortage of water and there is no land for all these new people to scratch a living on.
It was this very excuse of congested rural villages that the ZANU PF government used when they seized all the commercial farms and turned our country from a food exporter to a begging bowl. Now the rural villages are even more congested as yet more and more people arrive.
People who once fixed shoes and bicycles, wove baskets and chairs, knitted jerseys or made hammocks now they just sit in the dusty villages, homeless, unemployed, hungry and completely at the mercy of the government systems to whom they will have to turn, for every single one of their most basic human needs.
Control is complete.
Until next week, with love, cathy.
-
She needs to leave Zim.
It sounds like a Zimbabwean Cultural Revolution. Inane policies devoid of any semblance of humanity. Marxism wedded to absolutism at its most inhumane. Over 30 million innocent people perished in the Chinese Great Leap Forward (sic) and Cultural Revolution. How many in Zimbabwe will die under the hand of the same sort of madness?
It's liberal social justice. I say let them stew in their own juices, that's what they voted for.
I'm serious. I can't think of any other reason. It's not because of any objective reason that he escapes criticism or outside intervention.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
bttt
The only country regionally that could say anything and make it stick is South Africa, but their situation is not that different from Zim's 10 years ago. I'm waiting for their race war to start.
Or, as you said, someone please correct me.
Read the entire message before you flame me.
I was in Panama in Operation Just Cause. One night, a bunch of us intel folks sitting around on our shift, shooting the breeze like folks do at 3 in the morning. We were talking about who we knew in common and where we had been stationed.
There was an Army major there that had been stationed in sub-Sahara Africa as a junior military attaché to a U.S. embassy. As a result of that posting, he had traveled quite a bit in Africa, both as a military representative and a tourist.
He made two comments that were burned into my memory.
1. “Nigger run countries are sh**holes. The leaders can’t use anything more technologically advanced than knives and spears.”
2. “I get down on my knees every night and thank God my ancestors were brought to America as slaves.”
Buckle was one of the leading voices for expelling the evil white colonialists and turning Rhodesia into Zimbabwe. So let her stay there.
you are wrong....Just as soon as the chinese become their new masters ,the african leadership will critize mugabe for letting it happen...Of course,it will be too late because,the chinese will own the value of the nation...Some of the white farms that had been stolen and given to blacks have already been stolen from them and turned over to the chinese ......
I stand corrected.
"For the last three months almost every single report from Zimbabwe has been about the destruction of homes, stalls and informal structures in our cities and towns."
They're self-destructing. It cant be that bad.
http://www.morningmirror.africanherd.com/smalls/smalls129.htm
I don't get it -- the ads portray life in southern Africa as near-normal.
She's tonally liberal.....sounds like Margaret Carlson on downers, trying to imitate Emily Dickinson. But I wasn't aware she had a liberal track record as having opposed the Rhodesian government.
So she was an early supporter of Mugabe and Nkomo? Is that why they let her live, after she writes these devastating indictments of Mugabe's party?
Do you find it a little odd that Cathy Buckle,has been able to survive Zimbabwe,when other less known white farmers were murdered,raped,mutilated and destroyed...She has cost zimbabwe leadership dearly,they know who she is,because they supposedly took her farm and yet,they let her live...Am I the only one who finds this suspicious???????
One of the boutique services black Americans with serious mad money are signing up for is having their DNA matched to African samples, to see who they're related to over there. One of Tavis Smiley's guests, an actor, was talking about that a couple of weeks ago.
SA, I still have hope for. Zim is toast.
I just hope it's the Chinese who piss away their money trying to rehabilitate Zimbawe, and not US.
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