War vets battle dispair
2010-04-17 19:06
Wedza, Zimbabwe - A dusty road leads to the village of Wedza, where veterans of Zimbabwe's liberation war eke out a meagre living on their farm cooperative, which after a promising start now brings only despair.
Thirty years after defeating Southern Rhodesia's white racist regime, this handful of proud men, all mutilated during combat, seem about to lose their new battle.
Weeds have taken over the empty pig pen, the water pump was stolen, the flour mill's motor makes a dodgy noise, and drought is scorching their maize.
It was a long and painful path to ruin after the joyous liberation from Britain in 1980.
"When we came back from the war, we were happy to be in a free country. We had freed ourselves," said the group's president Melusi Makwelo, who lost his left leg in a bombing.
"The war was about independence so we wanted to be independent, to work for ourselves," he said. "We named our cooperative Vukuzenzele" - meaning "wake up and help yourself" in the minority Ndebele language.
At the time, the world toasted the Lancaster House Agreement signed in December 1979, which created a transition to black majority rule while protecting the white minority's interests.
"In 1980 the world was happy about the settlement. There was a lot of support for the ex-combatants," said Eckem Moyo, a 57-year-old veteran.
The co-op started with 12 square kilometres of land donated by former Rhodesian prime minister Garfield Todd, who had led a progressive government in the 1950s.
Money from Britain, New Zealand, Germany and others flowed into grants for the vets to build housing and to buy cattle and seed.
Zimbabwe's new government was less enthusiastic about Vukuzenzele. Its 50 members fought for the mainly Ndebele forces led by Joshua Nkomo.
But Nkomo lost the first elections to Robert Mugabe, who headed a movement dominated by the ethnic Shona majority.
A few years later, Mugabe launched the Gukurahundi campaign. Its name means "the wind that sweeps away the rubbish", and Mugabe's rubbish was the Ndebele minority.
Between 1984 and 1987, around 20 000 people were killed in massacres by security forces, when Nkomo agreed to a Unity Accord that folded his followers into Mugabe's party, which became the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF).
Within the cooperative, one faction joined Zanu-PF, but Makwelo still speaks cautiously about the Gukurahundi.
"There were disturbances," he said. "We were not very much affected."
The decision to back Mugabe did bring rewards: new money to build a hospital, staffed with government medics and drugs.
They prospered until 2000, when Mugabe launched a violent campaign of land reforms and his supporters staged deadly electoral attacks that turned Zimbabwe into an international pariah.
The violence was spearheaded by self-styled "war veterans", many of them far too young to have seen combat. Their actions tarred the reputation of these real war vets, and donations dried up.
Meanwhile, the farm sector collapsed and dragged the rest of the economy down with it.
The only animal feed supplier near Wedza shut down, inflation skyrocketed, and cash became scarce. In 2001, Vukuzenzele gave up the pigs. Three years later, they gave up the chickens.
"I thought that, as a free people, things would be available in the right manner," Moyo said. "I thought the government would be able to provide everything needed in the country... I thought we would prosper."
Their only income now is from rent on their housing, the flour mill, and remittances from their children who have fled overseas.
"The cooperative is broke," its secretary Rebecca Songo said. "We are broke."
- SAPA