“Zimbabwe” has become the newest international shorthand for disaster. A cyber-search will reveal the country name used in news stories wherever people are warning each other about bad politics and finances, as in, “We’ll go Zimbabwe if we do that.”

I would like to write about some of the human faces of this disaster.

Almost a year ago, I sat in my living room in Cape Town, South Africa, looking at a young family watching my television. They were not real. They had no identity papers, the government of their country
of birth had disavowed them, and the country where we were all living at the time was airily dismissing their claims for refugee status. In this world obsessed by identity and identification, Arthur and Tawana and their little year-old baby

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe was named the "World's Worst Dictator" by Parade Magazine in 2009. The ranking, based on reports from groups such as Amnesty International, is due to his refusal to hold fair elections and his ignorance of catastrophic economic and sanitary conditions in Zimbabwe.

Nyasha were not real. They had no claim on any government service or rights in any nation. Yet there they sat, smiling, laughing, eating lunch and watching TV – invisible on the world radar screen.

At the time, I was on the verge of finishing up a 25-year experience of living, working and learning in southern Africa. Cape Town was some 1400 miles away from Harare, Zimbabwe, where Arthur and Tawana had been born and raised; where they had met and married. But when the deterioration of the Zimbabwean economy began to seriously accelerate about five years ago, Arthur decided to follow in the footsteps of his mother and one of his brothers, and start making the trip south to sell Zimbabwe-made trinkets in order to buy South African goods to carry back to Zimbabwe. In the 1990s, his mother had blazed the family trail to Johannesburg. A decade later, her sons and daughter had to come even farther south, to Cape Town, to try to emulate her trading prowess. In this decade it was proving much more difficult.

First, the family lugged crocheted tablecloths and doilies to South Africa. Then they brought down wooden statuettes and spoons. Then they brought framed animal carvings. At the beginning, black South Africans in the townships bought these things, as decorations, as little artifacts of respectability for their chairs and walls. Each Zimbabwean foot trader sold things to South Africans on credit and would return for payment on their next trip. But as time went on, the homes of black South Africans became saturated with Zimbabwean niceties. The tourist market in the centers of South African cities were much more difficult to break into as the big companies generally had a lock on where the tourists went to spend their carefree euros, dollars and pounds.

Travelling back and forth from Cape Town to Harare required patience, luck and a lot of endurance. The boys got lifts from truck drivers, took the bus part way, or the long-distance taxis. Arthur told me he regularly slept under the trucks when they parked overnight. Whichever way he would be going, he would have more freight in big plastic satchels than one person could conceivably carry. He was a sitting duck for thieves. He always felt safer once he crossed the border into Zimbabwe. In South Africa it was if he was marked for robbery by the color of his skin, his faded and unfashionable clothes, worn-down shoes, his smile and his foreign accent.

When they were in Cape Town, they slept in the townships, in shacks with other foot trading countrymen, in the back yards of South Africans who charged them exorbitant rent.

About three years ago, Arthur again followed in his brother’s footsteps when he decided to stop the arduous traveling, and try to find a job in Cape Town. Like his brother, he was well-spoken in English and well-educated with a good Harare high school diploma. His brother had found work as a waiter in a popular pizza restaurant where employees worked only for tips. Arthur found work with a company laying roofs on the tiny new township houses that were sporadically built for South Africans in the wind-swept Cape Peninsula tundra far from the tourist routes. Arthur’s company paid him the equivalent of $10 for the work of laying an entire roof of tiles. Some weeks they did two or three houses; some weeks they didn’t do any. But it was work so he did it. Over the next months he was joined by his wife and child; by his sister, whose nimble fingers were employed to braid hair extensions; by a cousin who joined him in the roofing company; and by another brother who found construction work digging ditches. Cape Town’s employers gleefully tapped into this subset of desperate, skilled, new workers who could never be unionized. So, all the members of Arthur’s family in Cape Town were working,  sending money and goods home via networks to their mother and father and remaining siblings in Harare. None had permanent clearance to work; all were in a never-ending line of economic asylum seekers at the South African Department of Home Affairs, where everyone knew you only made progress towards legality if you could slip someone a few hundred rand if you got towards the front of the line.

Then in May last year everything became a lot worse. A steady trickle of murder and harassment of non-South Africans turned swiftly into a nightmare of fear and violence. Across the country, some 60 people were beaten, shot or burned to death by local mobs and individuals incensed by the presence of people like Arthur and his extended family, who were labeled “foreigners.” The formal end of the apartheid system had come nowhere near ending a burning contempt, slowly and deeply ingrained over the centuries of racial segregation of outsiders. They were seen automatically as threats of one kind or another; and outsiders with dark skin were even worse. Overnight, Arthur and his extended family found that the people amongst whom they had lived might be ready to slash and burn them and their possessions, ready to push them off moving trains. All over Cape Town, street corners near police stations became makeshift camps and shelters as people fled their homes, unable to trust their neighbors and unable to find other places to stay.

Three members of Arthur’s family stayed with me for a week. Other friends took in other people. Some drove through the townships looking for desperate foreigners that they could pick up and assist. Non-governmental organizations and churches scrambled to organize food and shelter. The South African government promptly took the opportunity to lose itself in a hideous squabble between municipal and national government over whose responsibility it was to help the displaced, traumatized foreigners. Eventually thousands in Cape Town were taken to windy, rainy campsites and given tents to live in for a few months. Arthur’s family moved in and out of all kinds of accommodation, treading warily, still sending whatever money they could, whenever they could, home to Harare.

The eyes of the world are somewhat focused, for the moment, on the disaster that continues in Zimbabwe as its president, Robert Mugabe, calmly performs insane pirouettes on the body of his mangled and bleeding country. The recent governmental agreement between his political party and the party which won but was not allowed to collect the spoils of last year’s elections is about a month old as of this writing. This ugly conglomeration of enemies, which is known everywhere as a “unity government” but should be called a fraud, is cast in the mold of every pseudo-settlement that has come before it in post-independence Africa. This newest face of fraud boasts no less than 71 ministers and deputy ministers. Clearly the decision has been made to simply split the old pie of damage and corruption 71 ways, rather than finding a new concept of governing. 

Arthur’s family’s supply chain is long, supple and strong. But it is probably not long enough to pay the school fees for their youngest brother, who is unluckiest of them all: in the face of local inflation that is more than 200 million percent, his fees in a public high school in Harare must now be paid in foreign currency. The supply chain also may not be long enough to continue to send blood pressure medication and water purification pills to their mother. Arthur’s parents and siblings in Harare just happen to live in the very suburb that is the epicenter of the cholera epidemic. Raw sewage is running in the streets where Nyasha would be playing if she were at home. Foreign exchange and pills can only be sent by the family in South Africa; but they are struggling themselves to keep many wolves from the door. When middle class South Africans cut back on family pizza nights things will get even worse.

So the human faces of the Zimbabwean disaster are resilient and persistent; but all the odds of the wide world are stacked against Arthur and his family. If you look in their invisible eyes you will see that things are hard and bleak.