“People died. The fear of being asked whether you wanted a short or long sleeve cut (cutting your hand or your arm) by soldiers made people vote in fear, not with their heads. We were voting with our lives on the line”.

This is what my maternal aunt told me following the July 2013 elections, as we sat in the back of my dad’s infamous bakkie making our way back to Botswana from Zimbabwe where she lives. Like the majority of my family, we are all refugees living in exile, in foreign lands we have been forced to make our homes.

This was the last time I had visited Zimbabwe. I had taken a road trip from Namibia (where I grew up and some of my family still lived), visiting and picking up other family members along the way. I was heartbroken at what I had returned to.

The country was sparse, and the sociopolitical and economic turmoil was reflected back in the country’s crumbling physical structures and in the faces of its people. Even though the 2013 elections had evaded the levels of state ordered violence that plagued the 2008 general elections, including intimidation tactics, killings, media bias and censorship, forced exile for opposition members, torture camps, and gender based violence, the outcome was effectively the same. Robert Mugabe was still in power and the people of Zimbabwe were still living under his oppressive regime.

”It is so easy to blame Zimbabweans for not fighting back, especially as sheltered members of the diaspora who are at a distances from the state’s violence. Instead, our role should be to organise around the resistance of the people on the ground.”

Short-lived hope

My family are South African, but our ties to Zimbabwe can be traced back to our displacement, pre and post South Africa’s apartheid as refugees. Our presence was marked by the colonial conquests of the British in Zimbabwe, namely Cecil Rhodes and his need to control the uprising against him, but we were always hopeful for a better future in a free democratic, afrofuturistic Zimbabwe. We survived and thrived in Zimbabwe in our small community of Xhosa people and made a home for ourselves.