About 100 families have been evicted from Porta Farm, 25km south of the Zimbabwean capital Harare, and their houses have been razed in defiance of a high court order.
The farm is located in President Robert Mugabe’s constituency of Zvimba. The evictees claim they are paying the price for pressing their parliamentarian — Mugabe’s sister Sabina — to build a proper settlement with running water, boreholes and schools.
The Mail & Guardian witnessed three truckloads of families being ferried to a location 65km away, where there is no shelter or water.
Community leader Khumbulani Khumalo said he doesn’t know “what wrong they have done”, but many of the evictees believe they have been removed from Zvimba because they are unlikely to vote for Sabina Mugabe.
The settlement was established as a “transit camp” after police rounded up vagrants and squatters ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of State meeting in Harare in 1991. The city had to be “clean” for the visiting officials. During the land invasions that preceded the 2000 elections, farm workers fleeing the war veterans and youth militia also settled on Porta Farm.
Richard Banda is one of those who sought refuge here. He said hundreds of other displaced farm workers fled to rural areas while others tried to survive in Harare. “Some have become thieves, others are genuinely still seeking employment, but the majority has become squatters in Harare.”
A report released by Refugees International (RI) last month said: “Zimbabwe’s land reform programme and [its accompanying] intimidation and harassment have created an internally displaced population of more than 150 000 former farm workers and have also caused thousands to flee their country”. It added: “To further compound the issue, authorities have increasingly restricted access to farming areas … making it difficult for the displaced and other vulnerable groups to access humanitarian assistance.
“Many have no access to water, shelter, food, medical care, sanitation services and education … Authorities are actively closing down any avenues of access [to humanitarian assistance].”
The RI report found that the land reform process has also negatively impacted on the livelihood of some of the beneficiaries, formerly landless people or the so-called “new settlers”. They have been unable to fully use their land owing to a lack of essential agricultural inputs such as draught power, quality seeds and fertilizer and funds to pay for labour.
They are unable to retain the necessary working force of farm workers, the RI report said. Only a few farm workers have continued to work on a permanent basis, usually on reduced wages.
Many workers have stayed on the farms because they have no alternatives. “When the new settlers came, they threatened to evict us if we complained about conditions,” one farm worker told RI. Another said: “Our relations with the new settlers are not good.”
NGOs have been prevented from providing food assistance. “If we have food aid, they tell us we must leave the farm. They know we will not work for them if we are not starving,” an “internally trapped” worker told RI.
Female workers are at more risk. Many men left the farms in search of work, leaving their families behind. Women left without income have resorted to sex work or relationships with the new foremen and settlers to guarantee food for their children.
Many former farm workers have turned to short-term or seasonal contracts, piecework on other farms or activities such as gold panning and hunting of game for commercial sales.
Many skilled farm foremen have followed commercial farmers to their new farms in neighbouring countries.
About one-fifth of the former farm workers were descendants of migrant workers from neighbouring Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi. They have no identity documents. They have nowhere to go and to compound their situation they are denied humanitarian and food aid in Zimbabwe.
According to RI: “The government refuses to acknowledge that people are being forcibly displaced, claiming that they had a choice to leave or not.” The government defines them as “mobile vulnerable populations”.
The nature of forced displacement in Zimbabwe, according to RI, “corresponds with the internationally recognised legal definition of internal displacement”.