A Bleak Ride Home for Zimbabwe Deportees
This from the New York Times September 23, 2003 by MICHAEL WINES
ON ROUTE TO ZIMBABWE, in South Africa, Sept. 18 — Every time this clanking 14-car train slows to a crawl — which is often — the policeman in Car 6 barks an order and 50 men bend over in their seats, heads between knees, until the pace picks up again. Back in Car 10, the luggage racks are festooned with the occupants' belts, dangling above them like snakes. "Their trousers are too big," one officer said. "They won't try to escape without their belts."
The police say they have any number of ways to keep the 952 passengers on the train to Zimbabwe in their seats. But as the engine lumbers out of one station at 9:15 p.m., two shadows tumble from a window near the center of the train, then sprint into the inky bush.
A half-hour later, at another stop, 10 more plunge onto the rocky railbed, then another 5, then 4 or 5 more. A few cars away, a policeman cranes his neck out the window and guffaws. "They'd rather die than go home," he said.
Indeed, one of the train's coughing passengers did just that, not an hour before.
This is the overnight train from Johannesburg to Messina, which twice a month hauls about 1,000 illegal migrants from South Africa's Lindela detention camp back to the Zimbabwe border — or tries to. What the policeman says is very nearly true: life in Zimbabwe these days is so hard, and sometimes so terrifying, that the passengers say death is almost preferable to returning to hunger, oppression, disease and hopelessness. "It's like to die," a despairing Xolani Masuko, 18, being deported for the second time in less than a year, said of his homeland. "I don't have money. I don't have food. I don't have everything. The whole family died of H.I.V."
South African officials say that the country deports at least 2,500 Zimbabweans each month, on the train and in trucks.
But the true number of illegal immigrants is far higher, experts say. They work in menial jobs, as street vendors, in tenement-style sewing factories and elsewhere, sending their paychecks back to destitute relatives.
Zimbabwe has been plummeting into economic and political purgatory for at least three years, since its president, Robert Mugabe, now 79, started a nationalistic, race-driven campaign to purge the country of white influence and black political opposition. Both targets have been gravely wounded.
But in a night of conversations with Zimbabweans loaded onto the train back home, the recurring theme was that ordinary people have been hit hardest.
Mr. Masuko said he vastly preferred sharing a plastic-and-mud shack in the Diepsloot squatter's camp north of Johannesburg to subsisting in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city and once a major economic center.
In Johannesburg, he earned about $30 a week working as a security guard in a well-heeled suburb. Life in Bulawayo consisted of cleaning auto windshields, collecting less than a dollar a day in the country's wildly inflated currency. Some days, he said, there was not enough even to buy mealie-meal, the ground-up corn that, boiled into a paste, feeds much of that malnourished country.
The first time he was deported, Mr. Masuko was back inside South Africa within a day, so determined to return that he missed his mother's funeral. This time, he said, he will return too. Everyone interviewed during the train's 15-hour trek to the border had the same intention.
"Tomorrow, we are in Zimbabwe," Bitwe Sikhola, 24, a delivery boy until Johannesburg police caught him, said as he slouched late Wednesday on the train's bench seat. "Friday, we are back here."
Mr. Mugabe won global fame 20 years ago by freeing Zimbabwe from oppressive white-minority rule. Since 2000, his government has seized and redistributed to landless peasants — sometimes violently — most of the remaining white-owned farms.
But the fallout has been grievous. By United Nations estimates, production on large-scale commercial farms has shriveled to 10 percent of its 1990's level, and as many as 900,000 of the nation's 15 million people have lost their jobs or homes. Unemployment now exceeds 70 percent. Production of tobacco, the major cash crop, has collapsed.
Foreign investment has dried up. Shortages of food and imported goods like medicine have fed hyperinflation, now 500 to 700 percent a year. In the capital, Harare, residents say, a liter of gasoline costs 2,000 Zimbabwe dollars — 40 cents on the black market — and is so scarce that some people literally play dead to get the fuel allowance granted funeral processions.
Human rights groups accuse Mr. Mugabe's government of condoning torture, killings and rape to drive out white farmers and subdue rivals, mostly in the rival Movement for Democratic Change. The groups say the army and a youth militia terrorize political opponents and that the government has withheld food aid from critics of the governing party, known as ZANU-PF.
Predictably, Zimbabweans are fleeing, and South Africa, the continent's economic magnet, attracts many of them.
On this week's journey, there were 885 men and 67 women, 14 carloads of disheveled and filthy refugees wracked by a respiratory virus that pervaded the overcrowded camp and its 4,000-plus prisoners. Most had spent at least two weeks there.
The trip to the border, five hours by car, takes three times as long by rail, with stops to give way to more important trains. This time, there was an extra delay: not far out of Johannesburg, the train stopped. Doctors were summoned to administer oxygen to three men who were having trouble breathing.
A fourth, thought to be sleeping, was dead. Doctors are supposed to examine deportees before they board the train, but "he didn't show any signs of sickness," Lindela's chief immigration officer, Solly Semona, said in a telephone interview.
Among the living, there was Joy Watch, 27, who says she fled her hometown of Masvingo with her husband after paramilitaries broke into her home and beat her to force her to join a government youth militia. "You can't say no," she said. "I pretended to join, and then I left."
Wilfred Phiri, a muscular 22-year-old from outside Bulawayo, had been a youth organizer for the opposition party. "If you aren't ZANU, you don't have access to anything," he said. "There's no food."
He quit the opposition in 2000, fearing for his life, after government supporters beat a fellow worker. Since fleeing to Johannesburg in 2001, he said, he had worked odd jobs, sending about $45 back to his jobless family in a good month.
"Obviously, I have to come back to South Africa again," he said. "There's nothing I can do in Zimbabwe. Nobody is working."
Hilda, 21, another Bulawayo expatriate, left an infant daughter and her dreams of a real career with her parents 31 months ago to sneak into Johannesburg and work as a maid. Her husband, 27, drives a truck in Botswana. They see each other, and their daughter, perhaps once a year.
She is bitter, speaking of her high school grades and hopes, now ended. "We were suffering" in Zimbabwe, she said. "I didn't come to South Africa from Zimbabwe to play. I work hard."
The threadbare young woman, sitting on a hard bench, said that if Zimbabwe changed, "I would go back in a rush." As matters stand, she plans to see her husband and child, then head back to South Africa.
"Better to go there than to sit here," said Ms. Watch, sitting a few seats away with a clutch of women friends. "I will come back again."
Her friends took up a chant: "Come back again, and again, and again and again!"
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company