Greetings fellow Zims, Rhodies & Shamwaris
I have recently finished reading John Padbury’s fascinating book titled The Battle for Hurungwe. Toward the end of the book, I was captivated by the following quote attributed to a lady called Barbara Abrahams:-
“When people can no longer call a land their own, when they are displaced from the place of their ancestors, and when they lose control of their destiny, they lose a part of their soul. Once the fragile link between people, their land and their ancestry is broken, they become a shadow roaming a land they no longer understand, beset by cultural conflicts and torn between material wealth and loyalty to tradition.”
The drama and pain in these words are compelling. While I believe the writer was referring to the trauma felt by many white Zimbabweans who chose to leave the country around the time of Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, her words are no doubt equally true, first for the many Ndebele people who were politically disempowered and displaced during Robert Mugabe’s Gukurahundi campaign from 1982 to 1986, and second for a far larger number of people of all tribes and colours who were forced to leave the country of their birth as a result of the gross mismanagement of the country’s economy and natural resources by the corrupt ZANU-PF government from the late 1980s.
Collectively, all these people are today referred to as Zimbabwe’s diaspora. We all know persons who fall into this category. Some of us no doubt also know, either directly or indirectly, of the pain and sense of loss experienced by many of these 'scatterlings'.
But that is not to say that these displaced folk no longer play an important part in Zimbabwe’s cultural and economic fabric. Nothing could be further from the truth. The economic contribution made by Zimbabwe’s diaspora is significant. According to the website of Zimbabwe’s embassy to the USA, in 2022, remittances by Zimbabwe’s diaspora amounted to US$1.66 billion, or 14% of the country’s total foreign earnings of US$11.57 billion that year.
The tragedy, of course, is how much greater that contribution could have been if conditions in Zimbabwe had not forced so many people to live outside their home country.
Promisingly, there are some small green shoots appearing in Zimbabwe which are encouraging some of the diaspora to consider returning to the country of their birth. We can only hope that these slender shoots will grow and flourish, thereby encouraging more displaced people to return to the country of their first love.
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