Hunger stalks San community

Confronted by chronic poverty, soaring commodity prices and shortages of basics such as maize-meal, the elders of Zimbabwe's aboriginal San group have raised the alarm and are appealing for assistance to avert a humanitarian disaster. "For the past years our situation has remained bad, but the hunger that we are facing at the moment is just too much. Life has never been easy for us ... In fact, what makes matters even worse is that we are not receiving any kind of support [humanitarian aid] from anyone," Levule Maphosa, a community elder in Mgodimasili village, told IRIN. Mgodimasili is a sprawling settlement where about 200 San people live in dilapidated thatch and mud huts in western Zimbabwe's Matabeleland North province. Zimbabwe is home to an estimated 1,200 San, most of whom live in abject poverty. Maphosa noted that although some of his subjects had managed to plough tiny patches of land for subsistence farming, out of desperation many of them had started harvesting the maize cobs before they were ripe. "Some are now surviving by eating maize cobs and amakhomane [melons] from their fields. But the crops are not yet mature and this means that when harvest time comes, some of us will have nothing to store for future consumption. So I believe [the] government and other well-wishers should help us with food because we are in difficult times. After all, we are also Zimbabweans who deserve care," he pointed out. Although the San have abandoned their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle and embraced modern farming methods, most don't have enough land or resources to sustain themselves, even when harvests are good, for longer than three months, according to social workers. Apart from food shortages, the San are faced with grinding poverty. Melina Ndlovu, a resident of Makhulela San village about 20 km from Mgodimasili, told IRIN the community lacked farming inputs, which condemned them to the status of permanent beggars. "At one point Christian Care [a humanitarian NGO] gave us cattle ... but they died due to drought, otherwise we could be farming large pieces of land, like our neighbours from the Kalanga and the Ndebele tribal groups," Ndlovu commented. Over the last few years her village had relied on the goodwill of the two neighbouring ethnic groups, but recurrent droughts have rendered them nearly as vulnerable as the San. "They [the Kalanga and Ndebele] may be better off than we are, but they are also facing shortages because there is no maize-meal in shops. Maize is also not available at the Grain Marketing Board [outlets]," Ndlovu said. Social Welfare Minister Nicholas Goche told IRIN that "no community is being neglected" by the government, but refused to elaborate. Zimbabwe faces a 1.1 million mt grain deficit, which has resulted in widespread shortages of maize-meal. The country lacks the foreign exchange to import sufficient grain, while rising inflation, now at almost 800 percent, has continued to undermine people's spending power.