A friend from Zimbabwe emailed me to say the temperature there on Christmas Day was 20 degrees when he woke up to blazing sunshine at 5am. He also sent good news that at last some rain had fallen, breaking what we feared would be yet another drought. The air is clean and you can see forever, he said, making me homesick for the beauty of my motherland.
“Somehow no other place on earth has quite that same ambiance. Even our storms are beautiful - cumulus clouds like tower blocks in the sky. Black and white with shafts of light from the afternoon sun, the rain steaming down in a solid sheet,” he wrote.
While I feasted on good food in Tilburg, my thoughts were with the millions of people in Zimbabwe for whom Christmas 2003 was not fun or beautiful. The local food stocks are exhausted and the people have to rely on food aid until the next crop is harvested from about May onwards. Food aid is very short; donors are reluctant to support a regime that continues to behave like a polecat and showers insults on all those who try to help us.
A week before Christmas it was announced that the World Food Programme would cut the daily allocation of food aid to needy families to a mere 360 grams a day. And most families have at least five or six children.
During 2003 Zimbabwe was 50% short of its food staples – mainly as a result of the government’s disastrous land reform policies and corruption. This is fairly meaningless until one considers that the ‘famous’ drought famine in Ethiopia, which caught the world’s attention in the 1990s, was generated by a 20% shortfall in primary staple foods.
And the future bears little hope. All the signs of a further food crisis are there - crop plantings are very small. Seed, fertilizer, draft power and diesel are in short supply. The rains have come very late – and may not continue.
Yet the madness goes on – farmhouses continue to be burned to the ground while fertile lands lie empty and idle. 2003 will surely go down in history as Zimbabwe’s darkest time – as it experienced the lowest GDP, exports, incomes, life expectancy and employment, and the highest inflation, HIV/Aids victims, endemic diseases, mortality for both children and adults, and exodus of Zimbabweans – millions of whom have fled as economic and political refugees.
In Tilburg, I enjoyed the lights, the shopping, the abundance of warm food and bishop’s wine, the Kerst Concert by the Heuvels Gemengd Koor, the Festival Stranger than Paranoia at Paradox, the visits from friends, the Kirsteliederen at ‘t Heike and, above all, the peace and freedom of being beyond the reach of Mugabe’s thugs.
All columns by Wilf Mbanga
| Wilf Mbanga, one of the founders of the independent Zimbabwean daily newspaper "The Daily News", is currently living in Tilburg, the Netherlands. He writes about the differences between Tilburg and Harare. His column is printed weekly in "Het Brabants Dagblad". |
