Britain is home to hundreds of thousand of economic and political exiles, who follow developments in Zimbabwe with a mixture of fear and dread.
By Jennifer Koons in London
The large-scale migration of Zimbabweans to the United Kingdom in recent years has earned London the nickname “Harare North”.
The exact number varies but experts suggest that roughly one million Zimbabwean expatriates, most fleeing rising economic and political instability in their home country, now reside in the UK.
Between 2000 and 2007, there were an estimated 20,600 asylum applications and about one-third of those have received some sort of status to remain in the country, according to Soneni Baleni, an expert with the Zimbabwe Association, an organization that describes itself as a support group for Zimbabwean asylum-seekers and refugees in the UK.
“So many Zimbabweans come to the UK because of the colonial link,” said Rose Benton, the co-founder of a London-based advocacy group, the Zimbabwe Vigil. “Zimbabweans speak English and are educated under an English system. It makes perfect sense that they settle here.”
A 2006 survey of 500 Zimbabweans living in the UK found that their high skill levels and ability to speak English fluently directly contributed to economic success.
The ability to actually find work, however, depends greatly on ones legal status.
Asylum-seekers, most of whom are black Zimbabweans, not allowed to work or even volunteer unless they have been granted refugee status.
Many white Zimbabweans, in contrast, have relatives in the UK, which in many cases allows them to move here and secure employment relatively easily.
Those who await refugee status are therefore in constant fear of being sent home where their safety will be compromised if the government realises they claimed asylum in Britain, said Baleni.
“People try to keep to themselves because they feel frightened,” she said. “If the next person knows what your situation is like, you have no control over what they do with that information.”
Baleni said most Zimbabweans fleeing their country’s dire economic climate will head to neighbouring South Africa but London has become the most popular spot for those seeking political refuge.
“You’ll find that most Zimbabweans want to talk about what’s happening at home and they have strong opinions but they are very scared to say anything in public gatherings,” she said.
Even after they are settled, there remains concern about the threat posed by Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe’s secret services.
“There is a belief that members of Mugabe’s Central Intelligence Organisation are everywhere and if you say anything, you and your family will be in danger,” said Baleni.
That fear only increased during the violent lead up to a widely discredited run-off election in late June in which Mugabe ended up as the only candidate on the ballot.
Many Zimbabweans living abroad had hoped opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai would oust Mugabe from office and bring about peace and stability to the country so that they might return home.
Tsvangirai withdrew from the election shortly before the vote, however, citing concerns for the safety of his supporters.
“For a while you keep thinking that this can’t go on for any longer,” said Baleni. “There was a lot of optimism with the [Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change] party, but this is the second election that Mugabe has overtaken and now all of that optimism has just turned to despair.”
In the past, families would leave Zimbabwe together, but Baleni said that nowadays most Zimbabweans come to the UK alone so as not to arouse suspicion.
“It would be difficult to come as a family because the embassy is well aware of what is happening back home and they will start asking questions if a family suddenly says they want to go on holiday to Britain,” she said. “Unless someone is really well-off, most often one member of the family will leave and then try and send money back for everyone still back home.”
Below, five stories of Zimbabwean expatriates seeking a better life in the UK.
The Teacher
Formerly a teacher in a private school, Joseph Masunungure can only dream of taking up a similar job in the UK.
Joseph Masunungure is a teacher. His classroom is a dimly lit kitchen where he writes up lesson plans while his sister-in-law makes breakfast. He waits all day for his two pupils – his niece and nephew – to arrive home from school so he can help them with their assignments.
Four years ago, he taught mathematics to 45 primary school students at a private academy in Zimbabwe.
“We had maps on the wall and exercise books,” said Masunungure, who asked that his name be changed for his safety. “This may not seem like a lot to most people living in London today but it meant a great deal that every student had a desk. They were eager to be there and so was I.”
Then one afternoon, one of his pupils told him that he could no longer attend the class since his father believed Masunungure sympathised with the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, the main opposition to President Robert Mugabe.
That was his last day at the school near Bulawayo where he had taught for seven years. That night, he and his parents decided it would be best if he left the country. There had been rumours for several weeks that he was under surveillance. His brother had worked for the MDC and fled a few years earlier.
Soon Masunungure joined him – and his UK family – in London.
“I was lucky,” he said. “So many of my people are being forced to flee to strange lands. I had a place to go. I had someone to take care of me.”
But the move hasn’t been without its complications. Several years have passed and Masunungure hasn’t received official papers granting him refugee status, which means he can’t legally work.
“I worry about not being able to help my brother and I miss my students,” he said. “It is strange trying to occupy yourself like this all day. But my brother says that in a way I am lucky. He was a development worker in Zimbabwe, but now he is a store clerk.”
Masunungure sleeps on a pull-out couch in the family’s one-bedroom flat near Brick Lane. He spends most days at home reading or walking around the neighbourhood. While there may be no practical need to do so, he still dresses the part of an academic and – even on weekends – wears a button-up dress shirt and slacks.
Although soft-spoken, he looks you in the eye when he talks and, like a good teacher, he will repeat himself until he is sure you have understood what he is trying to say.
He said he would like to return to his home country someday if only to help the students who he feels sure have been abandoned.
“So many students can no longer go to school,” he said. “They are forced to pay for their own classroom materials – and they can’t. They do not even have food to bring with them and I have heard stories of students fainting during class. They need good teachers but all of the teachers have been pushed out like me.”
While the world’s attention is focused on Mugabe, Masunungure said others within the government are more to blame and are the reason that the unpopular ruler has remained in power.
“Things aren’t going to change – not because of Mugabe but because of the people under him,” he said. “Mugabe can find protection in any African country. But the people who hold the top security posts can’t leave because they won’t be protected for the crimes they have committed.”
Masunungure said people in Zimbabwe fear law enforcement officers and other officials. “The police are part of it,” he said. “Everyone is a part of it.”
He added that he has lost confidence in the ability of other leaders in the region to offer much assistance.
“Mugabe is a bully,” said Masunungure. “He is a freedom fighter, and because of that, the others, like [South African President] Mbeki, won’t stand up to him.”
One consolation for him is that the current regime has not interfered with the transfer of money to his family back home.
“My brother transfers money back for my parents and two sisters ever few weeks,” he said. “With everything that has happened recently, we are very worried that eventually they won’t get what we send them. So far, they are doing alright.”
It’s almost four o’clock, and it is time for Masunungure to go. His niece and nephew will be home from school soon.
“My nephew struggles with maths,” he said, smiling. “That is OK though. I am happy to help him.”
The Journalist
Award-winning reporter Sandra Nyaira says she’d be reduced to selling tomatoes on the street if she returned.
It’s the bustle of the newsroom that she misses the most.
As the political editor of the Daily News in Zimbabwe, Sandra Nyaira spent most days tackling hot-button news stories with fellow journalists in an environment that she recalls “felt alive with energy”.
Six years later, she does most of her reporting from her home in the United Kingdom. While earning a masters degree in international journalism from the City University in London in 2002, Zimbabwean authorities shuttered the Daily News along with other independent newspapers in the country.
“It’s very different working outside of Zimbabwe in that you don’t get the newsroom experience,” she said. “Now I write stories from my bedroom and I don’t speak to anyone else. When I was at the Daily News, we would all sit around and discuss story ideas or brainstorm how to tackle a particular piece.”
At 22, she took her first reporting job with a government-owned paper and then moved on to the state-run Zimbabwe Inter-Africa News Agency, where she won four national awards as well as a Reuters’ award. In 1999, the Daily News editor in chief hired her and she went on to become Zimbabwe’s first woman political editor.
Her career continued its upward trajectory when, at 27, she won the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award. But everything changed later that year when she lost her job at the Daily News and struggled to make ends meet as a foreign reporter in the UK.
Determined to succeed despite her changed circumstances, she slowly established herself as a respected freelance journalist. In the past few years alone, her work has appeared in the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the British Journalism Review and elsewhere but she spends most of her time writing for the Association of Zimbabwean Journalists, an organisation which she helped found, and working as a correspondent for Studio 7, a radio service on the US-government funded Voice of America in Washington DC.
“I prefer reporting from Zimbabwe and writing for my own people,” she said. “I guess it is good to write for an international audience, but not everyone who reads my stories is interested in Zimbabwe. When I was writing for my own people, they would want to know what is happening in their old backyards.”
She said that she, along with many other Zimbabwean journalists working abroad, would return to their home country to report if that was an option.
“Everyone I knew who is part of the Zimbabwe journalism community here wants to go back,” she said. “The main reason we’re not in Zimbabwe right now is that we have no jobs to go home to. The newspapers where we worked were closed down so it did not make any sense to go back when you were not going to have a job.”
Leaving home did not come without its personal costs.
“My whole family is back in Zimbabwe – my siblings, my mother and father,” she said. “I have two nephews who have been born since I’ve been gone – one just turned two and the other one will be two in October. It is hard. I try to get the little ones to say something on the phone because I can hear their voices in the background. I just want to be with them.”
But returning home would not only leave her without a career but would also find her without an income to help support the loved ones who she has left behind.
“I could have returned to sell tomatoes on the streets,” she noted ruefully. “If I wasn’t here working, I wouldn’t be able to buy anything for my family. It’s a catch-22.”
With no signs of the political and economic environment improving any time soon, Nyaira will head to Washington DC in the fall to do a media fellowship.
Should the situation for reporters change, she said she would eagerly return to Zimbabwe.
“If they repeal the draconian media laws that have prohibited journalists from doing their work, many newspapers would be formed,” she said. “So many people are waiting to invest in their own country. When I go back home someday, I’m going to start my own project, my own TV station.”
The Health Worker
Grace Chouriri cares for fellow exiles because she says it makes her feel that she’s doing something good for her community.
Grace Chouriri, not her real name, laughs bitterly when asked whether she will ever return to her native home.
“How can I go back and crucify myself?” she asked, shaking her head.
She will talk at length about her objections to the current regime. But she grows quiet when asked personal details about herself and her former life as a healthcare worker in Harare.
Eventually, she divulges rapid-fire details, a bullet-point list of her life so far: she is the youngest of seven children. Two brothers died of AIDS when she was younger. She left her family’s rural home for an urban life where she met and married her husband, who she said also died of AIDS a few years after they were married.
“I became angry at the lack of options for people who are sick and I started to associate with people who were also angry,” she says matter-of-factly.
The “people” she refers to were members of the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC.
She refuses to go into what kinds of activities she participated in while she was an activist in Harare, but she offers that “one morning I was told I had to leave for my safety. So I left”.
Nearly eight years have passed and she has created a life of stability for herself as a soft-spoken but committed member of the MDC community in London. Through her work with the group, she met her partner, a man who she will describe only as “kind and hard-working”.
He works two full-time jobs, she said. They had lived with friends for several years but last fall they moved into their own studio near West Ham in east London.
While she said she does not personally plan to return home, she is committed to helping those who she had to leave behind.
“I do not wish to go back,” she said. “They have ruined my country for me. I would not be safe. But I want more for my people. [Morgan] Tsvangirai would have made things better. He was our hope.”
Tsvangirai, the MDC opposition leader who beat Mugabe in a March election, pulled out of a June run-off because of escalating violence.
Chouriri said many of her friends in London’s Zimbabwe activist community have stopped speaking out in recent weeks because of concern for their own safety.
“We are definitely being watched by Mugabe’s security forces,” she said. “We are being careful. But we left our country so we wouldn’t have to hide and we do not want to hide here.”
She begins to open up when asked about her plans for the future.
“I have my refugee status. I want to get back to my health field,” she said. “AIDS does not kill people so quickly in this country like it does in mine. There is hope in this country when you are sick.”
At the moment, she is not working. She said she has tried different odd jobs over the years but ends up losing them when she takes off too much work to care for ill neighbours and friends.
“People know about my background,” she said. “They will come to me. They will want me to look after their children. And I do it. It makes me feel that I am doing something good for my community here.”
She said she is not in regular contact with her family back home but tries to send money to her parents as often as she is able.
“They have nothing,” she said. “I heard that after the March election, two of my brothers were badly beaten. They had broken bones. And we were grateful. Broken bones are not so bad.”
She said one of her parents’ neighbours had been killed in April by a mob of men belonging to the ruling Zanu-PF party.
“He was older than my father and they dragged him from his home and killed him,” she said.
When asked whether she thinks her family will flee the violence, she shakes her head.
“They were born there, and they will never leave,” she said. “They did not understand when I went to [Harare] and they did not understand when I came to London. It is there life there. This is now my life here.”
The Campaigner
Veteran human rights activist Rose Benton is resigned to more years of drawing attention to abuses in home country.
On June 27, life was supposed to get easier for Rose Benton.
On that day, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was presumed to win the presidential election in Zimbabwe, ousting President Robert Mugabe. And after that, Benton would be able to take a break.
For almost six years, she has coordinated the weekly gatherings of a London-based group called the Zimbabwe Vigil. She co-founded the organisation in October 2002 in an effort to draw public attention to human rights violations in her native country.
Every Saturday from midday to early evening, members gather outside the Zimbabwean embassy. They sing and dance in peaceful protest and encourage passers-by to sign various petitions relating to the hardships back home.
Several long-time attendees arrive early for the vigil on this bright Saturday afternoon. They greet each other warmly and share their dismay at the current state of affairs back home.
“The preparation will start when Rose arrives,” said one woman.
Eventually, a small brown car pulls to a stop along the side street and three men who had been standing around hurry over to help unload what looks to be a trunk overflowing with cardboard posters and large Zimbabwean flags.
“I need help getting out of this car,” said a woman, and one of the young men pulls her up.
Rose Benton is ready to take charge. An assembly-line forms as she starts passing out materials that others will then post along a metal fence that is to become their protest pen. She grabs some tape and starts hanging signs but keeps getting interrupted by men and women who come up to greet her.
Then the questions start. “Where should these fliers go?” “Who should handle the petition today?”
Benton is unfazed. She has been doing this for many years.
“I work two full-time jobs,” she said. “This is all voluntary. I thought the election would happen and I’d have a chance to step back. My daughter is expecting her first baby this summer.”
No one seems to know what will happen next in their native country. But while the uncertainty remains, Benton said she will continue to hold the vigils.
Benton said she left Zimbabwe in 1969 “because I didn’t like what was happening”.
She taught history and English to high school students before she met her husband, a British citizen who grew up in South Africa, and the two decided to come to London.
“We met at a university party in Cape Town and have been married ever since,” she recalled.
Finding a job in the UK at that time proved fairly easy
“I was a Rhodesian and I had dual citizenship,” she said. “I found a job in a research department very quickly.”
She said Zimbabweans coming to London today face far more difficult obstacles.
“When I came, you could get your papers sorted out very fast,” she said. “It is much more difficult nowadays, particularly for black Zimbabweans who have no ancestral help. A lot of white Zimbabweans have help from relatives. They have grandparents who are British. Black Zimbabweans don’t have that.”
She said she has two sisters still living in Zimbabwe and it was with their encouragement that she got involved in advocacy work.
“I was chatting with my sisters in 2000 and they were saying that things were going very badly and they asked me to do something from here,” she said. “It was really quite difficult to find anyone doing anything here at that time.
“There were a couple of demonstrations out in front of the embassy. They were really small – just a handful of people. And then someone said there was a regular forum on Monday night. I started going to that.”
Eventually she was asked to take a leadership role in what would become the weekly vigils.
“I never meant to get so heavily involved,” she said. “Somehow or other you can’t drop it. Once it’s started it has to continue.”
She said the number of attendees each week grew as the date for the run-off election neared, but she is not sure how people will react with the current turn of events.
“People are anxious,” she said. “We may see even more involvement. It’s just hard to predict.”
What is certain is that she will eventually need to train someone to take on a greater leadership role within the organisation.
“I have to slow down and look at what other people can do,” she said. “You never want to see that fail. The vigil has become a much bigger thing. There are far more e-mails coming in with ideas and requests. But it’s funny how few of them offer help.”
The Photographer
Neither a political refugee nor a typical white Zimbabwean, Sara Catterall struggles to find a place in the expatriate community.
Sara Catterall tosses her cigarette to the ground and shakes her head. Today was supposed to have gone differently.
She planned to spend the entire afternoon packing – packing up her life in the United Kingdom so she could return to her native Zimbabwe.
“I thought I’d be going home today,” she admitted. “We were just waiting for Mugabe to leave. And now that opportunity is gone.”
The day before, Zimbabweans went go to the polls in an election denounced around the world as a fraud.
The vote in the run-off for March’s disputed presidential election went ahead despite the withdrawal of President Robert Mugabe’s only rival, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Catterall now plans to stay put, and she acknowledges that she’s in a much more enviable position than many Zimbabweans who are struggling to find work and establish a life in the UK.
She appears almost apologetic as she quietly notes that she has a British passport – a luxury for Zimbabweans in Britain.
“I was lucky,” she said. “I am a third-generation Zimbabwean but my father is originally from London. We were privileged. When the violence began creeping up, I was able to leave.”
A freelance photographer when she left six years ago, Catterall said she decided on London because she was anxious to find work.
“My brother lives in Harare, but he is there by choice,” she said. “My father and mother are no longer alive and three of my cousins have left for America. They feel as I do that leaving Zimbabwe was always supposed to be temporary.”
When she arrived in London in 2002, she found work as a receptionist in a gallery. Eventually she began taking photographs again and met her husband, a professional photographer from France, when the two were covering the same event.
“My husband has never seen where I grew up,” said Catterall. “He has never met my brother. I have shown him many pictures but I want him to see what is there for himself.”
The two live near his sister and her children in North London.
Catterall said she has struggled to find a place within the Zimbabwean expatriate community.
“I am not like the refugees who have come seeking political asylum,” she said. “But I am not like the other white Zimbabweans who think they are British and pretend they have always lived here.”
She said she has tried to get more involved in political activities during the period leading up to the run-off election, but has spent most of her time contacting her brother and his family in Harare and planning to go home.
“My brother said there is no water or electricity,” she said. “He said things keep getting worse. But we thought this was the very bad before the good.”
She had put off plans to have children until she returned home but now she said she is no longer sure she will wait.
“I have been on a holiday for six years. I have not wanted to make roots here,” she said. “I should not keep putting it off. My husband tells me I must accept that this is my life here. I fight it.”
A week after Mugabe announced victory in the sham election, Catterall said she has begun to adapt to her changing circumstances. Instead of flying to Harare to meet up with her brother, she is taking a trip in October to visit her eldest cousin in San Francisco, California.
“Perhaps I will like America,” she mused. “I don’t know where I will end up now.”
Her brother called her the other day and said he is also thinking about leaving. She is worried that there will be no familiar faces in her country when she is finally able to return.
“My cousin in America has had a little girl,” she said. “I’m bringing one of my old photographs with me. It will hang in her room and she will grow up looking at Zimbabwe on her wall. Maybe she will be the one to go back someday.”
Jennifer Koons is an IWPR reporter in London.
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