What, if anything, draws millions of Zimbabweans in the diaspora together? Sean Christie reports
While contemplating how I might write an article on the subject of the Zimbabwean diaspora, I recalled a poem, Conversations With a Stone, by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska and, in particular, the last lines: “I knock at the stone’s front door/ ‘it’s only me, let me come in.’/ ‘I don’t have a door’, says the stone.”
The subject of the Zimbabwean diaspora has many doors and that’s more or less the same thing — how can one possibly hope to illuminate such a universe of subjectivities?
Attempting to establish the facts proved vexing — like farm murders in South Africa, empirically reliable statistics are not available.
Margaret Ling of the Britain Zimbabwe Society (BZS) wrote to say that estimates for the numbers of Zimbabweans in the United Kingdom range from the official figures of about 50 000 up to half a million. Tara Polzer, working for the Southern African Migration Project, wrote that estimates on the number of Zimbabweans currently in South Africa range from one million to five million.
Emigration trends to the UK and South Africa make for a better kick-off as they have received the highest share of Zimbabweans from the two major migrations — the post-independence exodus of white Rhodesians and the continuing post-2000, post-economic meltdown migrations, which have included most of the remaining whites, as well as millions of other Zimbabweans from all classes, tribes, generations, races and political persuasions.
I was carried south with the first wave in 1983, aged three, and have some insight into the reasons white Zimbabweans like my parents left and how they adjusted in the early years. Perhaps the earliest clue that something had happened somewhere else that had caused us to be living in a face-brick house in Johannesburg North, was the triangular hole in my father’s back. The FN bullet, with its neat exit point above the drawstrings of his swimming costume, had passed right through him, missing his spine by centimetres, during an ambush in the Zambezi valley six years before.
Other signs of soldiery were to be found on the bookshelves: Peter Badcock’s Shadows of War, books by Peter Stiff in which the faces of some members of the SAS and Selous Scouts were Vaselined out. Sometimes we went to lunch with these blanked-out faces, one of whom was confined to a wheelchair, but these interactions became less and less frequent as the former fighters slipped deeper into the displaced aftermath of their military years.
In the conclusion to the book, Rhodesians Never Die, Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock write that a white population of 232 000 in mid-1979 had become about 80 000 in 1990. “Young and old alike,” they write, “they experienced a warm inner glow when thinking of their Rhodesia but this recent invention of few or shallow traditions could, and did, so easily fall apart.”
This might be true with regard to the social system itself, but not so with regard to the way then-Rhodesians tended to bond outside Rhodesia. Both the junior and senior schools I went to were chosen for the numbers of ex-Rhodesian Teacher’s Training College staff in residence. I remember very clearly the literal laagers of ex-Rhodesians that used to spring up on the sports fields and on charity camping nights.
As time passed these bonds weakened but never broke. But talk of Rhodesia has long since faded from conversation, which skirts nostalgia by polite consensus.
It is the writers who illuminate the diaspora and it will be only when they have produced decades more work that the rest of us will have a better idea of how it has played out.
Brian Chikwava’s Harare North, which places a former Green Bomber in Brixton, is the best novel from the diaspora so far. For me, what was most striking about it was the unrelenting selfishness of the Zimbabwean characters he describes.
I wondered aloud in an email to Chikwava, who lives in London, whether this was an acceptable generalisation to make about Zimbabweans abroad. I cited a case related to me by a Zimbabwean publisher of a young lawyer who stood up in an airline bus after a flight had been delayed by 18 hours and tried to rouse the passengers to demand double the generous compensation already given out by British Airways and signed for.
“I’d like to believe selfishness is a modern cultural phenomenon that is not specific to those living outside their countries,” Chikwava responded. “It however comes into sharp focus in the cases of many who leave their countries in search of better lives elsewhere.
“That’s because the places where we seek better lives are places where, on the surface, things seem to work ok — you can earn a living that keeps starvation at bay and maybe you can now even begin to fancy lapping up that Krug [champagne], clutching that LV [Louis Vuitton] bag or even dreaming of that Hummer.
“Admittedly this is stretching things a bit but I do not think that it diminishes the fact that the places where things seem to work well, the places where we flee to — the UK, United States etc — whether one is from Africa, Latin America or Asia, tend to have temples of consumption at the top of their social hierarchy.”
I find that my thirty-something Zimbabwean acquaintances — the “real” ones, who delight in referring to people like me as “plastic (fake) Zimbabweans” — tend to be far more motivated than my South African friends.
I think particularly of Rob Burrell, who in response to a charge of serial entrepreneurship, wrote to say: ‘I tried to start a Chess Café Coffee Shop (fail), shoot an independent movie (fail), become a famous rock star (Mann Friday — verdict pending), create an international call card to get around international call restrictions from Zimbabwe (fail) —”
Burrell now co-owns Mukuru.com, an internet remittance company that enables Zimbabweans in the diaspora to send cash back to their friends and family in Zimbabwe. The data from his business contradicts, somewhat, the selfish stereotype.
For example, the independent International Organisation for Migration report found that of a sample group of 1 000 Zimbabweans living in South Africa and the UK about three-quarters sent financial remittances to friends and family back home; 85% of these said the only reason they were abroad at all was to support family members back home.
Perhaps the report’s most striking finding was that two-thirds of respondents said they would like to return to Zimbabwe at some point.
A manifestation of this longing is the sheer number of internet forums, social network pages and news aggregation sites that the diaspora has spawned — though my own cursory research into this nostalgia explosion suggests that the activity is cooling, perhaps because the full extent of the human and economic tragedy in Zimbabwe has become clearer to middle-class expatriates, shutting doors in their minds on the idea of return.
More resilient than these sites are the many organisations that have been set up with the goal of either assisting Zimbabweans abroad or uniting people in pursuit of the goal of a better Zimbabwe. The BZS is perhaps pre-eminent among these.
Formed in 1981 by mainly British people who, in one way or another, had been supporting Zimbabwe’s struggle for majority rule and independence, the organisation has in the past 10 years experienced a surge in diaspora membership, particularly from the academic sector, according to Ling.
In South Africa organisations such as the Global Zimbabwe Forum seek to coordinate the visions and strategies of Zimbabwean civil society organisations in pursuit of a new democratic dispensation for Zimbabwe.
The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation last year sponsored events around the country at which Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, called on Zimbabweans to return home and reinvest their money there. I attended the Sea Point meeting and was impressed not only by the size and diverse nature of the crowd but also by its genuine interest in Tsvangirai’s message.
But, as one audience member said: “All of us here left either because we had nothing left, or to guard what we had left from the vultures of state. You have failed to convince us that it is either worthwhile or safe to return, whether with money or with nothing at all, so I think it’s here that we must stay for now.”
Sean Christie is a freelance writer based in Johannesburg