Survival after Operation Murambatsvina

A year after Zimbabwe's controversial campaign to demolish illegal urban settlements and informal markets, thousands of people remain in limbo, fearful of renewed raids by the police, but with nowhere else to go. When President Robert Mugabe's government launched Operation Murambatsvina 'drive out trash', last winter, it said the campaign was designed to restore order and stamp out the parallel market, insisting that people displaced by the municipal bulldozers should return to their rural homes. "Everybody comes from somewhere. There is nobody who comes from nowhere, so people will have to return to their rural homes," said police assistant commissioner Edmore Veterai, who led the demolitions around the country. But people like Martha Zulu, whose grandparents came from Zambia several decades ago as migrant labourers to the then white-ruled Rhodesia, have no rural roots in Zimbabwe. She survives by doing people's laundry in exchange for food in Kuwadzana, a township in the capital, Harare, where she has built a shack on the ruins of the cooperative housing she used to live in. The shack is only a metre high, so as not to draw the attention of the authorities. Before, she had running water at the housing cooperative; now raw sewerage flows past her shack. Zulu, like tens of thousand of others, lives in Zimbabwe as part of a colonial legacy. From 1953 to 1963, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) were part of a federation of states under British rule. Migrant labourers came in their thousands to work on Rhodesia's mines and farms. When Malawi and Zambia gained independence in 1963, the federation collapsed. Many migrants remained in the then Rhodesia and stayed on in newly independent Zimbabwe, but never applied for or attained citizenship, even though they were born there. Zulu worked as labourer with her two sons on a commercial farm in Mashonaland West Province, but was forced off the farm in 2000 when the government launched its fast-track land redistribution programme, otherwise known as farm invasions. "When the new farmer took over the farm in 2000, he said he would not be able to employ us and advised us to look for new jobs." Her two sons fled during the farm invasions, and she has not seen them since. The white farmer, who was her employer for 20 years, gave her some money, which she used to buy two rooms in the now demolished housing cooperative. Zulu has lost contact with her relatives in Zambia. "I don't even know which part of Zambia my grandparents came from - I have never been to Zambia because I now consider myself a Zimbabwean, but now I have been reduced to a vagabond." Before the 2002 presidential elections, the ZANU-PF government stipulated that people with "alien" parentage had to renounce any other citizenship in order to become Zimbabwean citizens. Many were unaware of the regulations, chose to ignore them, or were unable to comply because of the prohibitive costs. Margaret Banda lives in Epworth, east of Harare. Her grandparents were from Malawi. "Our family members have generally worked as domestic workers or gardeners, and we were not aware of the effect of not renouncing our Malawian citizenship. A relative once told us that the process was cumbersome and expensive, and most of us chose to ignore the requirements." A spokesman for the Combined Harare Residents Association, Precious Shumba, told IRIN that his organisation had encountered many residents of foreign origin. "The Harare municipality is demanding title deeds from council houses but, although many people of foreign origin had some houses willed to them by their parents or grandparents, they are having problems claiming ownership because they don't have the local identity documents." Gertrude Hambira, secretary-general of the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe, said many of their members were descendants of migrant labourers. "At our peak we had 500,000 members, but out of that number only 0.2 percent of farm workers were given pieces of land by the government. The majority of our members lost their jobs and, naturally, that means they also lost their homes, and this means they are wandering and searching for homes, as most of them no longer had any links with their countries of origin." Hopley Farm outside Harare is a transit centre for those left homeless by Operation Murambatsvina. According to a field officer with the municipality, "We have vetted all the inmates here and close to 80 percent are of foreign origins - most of the locals have been sent to their rural homes." A Zambian Embassy official in Harare said their office was offering to repatriate Zambian descendents wanting to start a new life in the land of their ancestors, but did not say how many people had taken up the offer.