Click to view: I Will Never Forget – by Changu Moyo

The policemen and the soldiers escorting the bulldozer and its operator were heavily armed and merciless. They were destined to destroy and that was the order of the day.   I was left with no time to pull out all my personal belongings. I only managed just a few and the rest was crushed to rubbles together with the building.

I stood there, watching and sweating as all my trust, all my confidence, my wisdom and my patriotism to my own government vanished and disappeared into the atmosphere. I was so furious, but there was nothing I could do, unarmed, neglected, dejected and destroyed. I did not understand then as I still do not understand now, why a government of the people would choose to implement such an operation on its people.

I slowly collected what I had managed to secure and joined my wife Cynthia and my son Thabiso 11 years old who were already crying helplessly in the crowd. Suddenly a large ball of tears rolled down my cheeks. ‘That was the end of all I had worked for’, ‘so what next’ I asked myself, and there was no answer. ‘Oh God I was not prepared for this’, it was horrible, barbaric and inhuman.

Later I was forced to sell all I had managed to pull out of the house to raise money for  my family  to go to the rural areas and that was the only immediate solution, a desperate solution to be more precise. Thabiso’s education was interrupted.
Reduced into a street kid, I went to work in the morning and slept in the streets in the night. My friends and relatives with houses in the city were already overcrowded so they only offered me bath times, but not all the time.

This went on for weeks until one Sunday morning my work place was also crushed by Murambatsvina and I was left jobless. I left to join my family back in the rural home.

After some few weeks there were headlines in the Herald Newspaper saying Operation Garikai is coming, meaning that those who had lost their homes were going to be housed and compensated, so I waited and waited, homeless and jobless. I waited, but alas, it was  all in vain – Operation Garikai was a big flop.

I was then forced to go back to Bulawayo were my mother owns a three roomed house in Makokoba, to start life all over again.  As I speak, or as you read this piece, we are all crammed there, thus me and my family, my sister and her daughters, my brother and his family. This is a one bed roomed house, a small kitchen and a living room accommodating four families.

I will never forget this barbaric and heartless operation.

Changu is self employed and is an artist who is a victim of Murambatsvina. When asked about governance in Zimbabwe today, all he could say was ‘Those that sanctioned this operation should just not run for any public office in the coming 2008 elections. Its time our politicians learnt that they should step down from public office if they cause human suffering of this magnitude by tacking certain decisions while in office’.

Murambatsvina was a heartless and inhuman government operation in 2005 that left over a million innocent citizens homeless, some jobless but for some like Changu both homeless and jobless. Many died soon after the operation for various reasons mostly due to exposure to bad weather conditions.

- Voices For Change, Bulawayo, Tuesday, September 25, 2007

You can contact Changu through Voices For Change. He would like suggestions on what to do with his paintings of his memories.