Zimbabwe: The Blame Game

26. Exile

175 26 Exile e are like a migrant blackbird. We are an alien traveller looking for grains, sun and the sand of rivers. Like the blackbird, we complain about the sad shadows; wind, rain, mountains, rivers, insecure nights, even of our own shouts. We are always wishing we had the power to rest from all that. Fasting for weeks on end in our journeys, fasting to purify the mind, of the ugliness we have left behind, to clean the wells of old foggy minds. We have black hair; it is a river, the Limpopo River for it reaches some places far off. The northern border of South Africa is an old scar that will not heal until there are no more deaths there. As long as there are deaths, it will always be a sore spot. There are still deaths from suffocating trailer trucks, car engines, car trunks, dying from hot boxcars with no air to breathe, from running across the freeways, dying from swimming across the Limpopo River, dying from crossing into unhospitable and inhospitable places along the border area. There are deaths from heat strokes, kidney failures, dying in the hope of finding work. We will die anyway, in Limpopo River, trying to dodge the marauding crocs. We will die in the dense forests dodging searing bullets from vigilant justice, police and army. We will die trying to dodge the marauding wild animals, perhaps writhing and smarting in a glinting coil of barbed wire, perhaps sprawling under the merciless glare of the afternoon sun. There are pregnant women dying, crossing Limpopo to join their men folk; dying in the hope of re-uniting the family. There are deaths of children accompanying these women, too. Back home, in Zimbabwe, we had to leave home afraid of dying. We fled Zimbabwe because life was too harsh and oppressive. They were no individual freedoms anymore. Our freedoms were trampled upon. We were butchered, we were killed, and we were maimed by the politicos. Some of us we couldn’t find food in the shops, tired of W 176 endless queues to secure basic commodities. Some of us were farmers whom cheap agribusiness imports drove us quickly of the lands, some of us we had our land taken forcefully by the government. Some of us our wages had been lowered due to increased presence of machinery, and the meltdown of the economy and industry, such that we had ended up specialising in skills so unexceptionally, so insignificant, and became virtually unskilled. For some time we struggled to make ends meet with all this until we couldn’t take care of our families on our own, so we asked our families to join us in those workplaces in Zimbabwe. Our children and spouses were simply compelled to join us to help us. They entered this relentless race against death. We all persevered until we couldn’t sustain ourselves anymore in our country, so we left Zimbabwe for South Africa. We had no other choice. We came into South Africa because we believed they would understand us, and that had they been the ones they would have done the same thing for their families. In South Africa we work jobs that nobody else wants, so if we leave as they are saying we should return back to Zimbabwe, who would do those jobs? There is always a war to rid us out of South Africa. This war is simply fought against those who plant and harvest crops, those who work at Burger king and MacDonald’s, clean houses and lawns and gardens, those who pack meat at the meat factories, at the foundry man, at women who man garment factories, at men polishing windshields and shoes at corner streets, at women selling treats, men bagging trash, fixing roofs, painting walls, women doing shopping, caring for children, men laying foundations to factories and new towers. The only way to go now; we should be given full rights as immigrants so that we won’t be exploited. We should have the right to dream. We should have an obligation to dream. We can’t forever pick fruit and beans and pull potatoes. After all South Africa would be nothing without our sacrifices, so we deserve to dream. What kind of a land that would say “come and work but don’t develop any ambitions, don’t dream”? But we really have no right to anything in South Africa, yet we [18.226.185.207] Project MUSE...