Cathy Buckle's Weekly Letter From Zimbabwe !

Weary Cheers Leaders!

Saturday 1st December 2007
Dear Family and Friends,

On Friday morning in small town Zimbabwe the big ten-tonne trucks were visible soon after nine in the morning and they were filled to overflowing with weary "cheer leaders." Men, women and youths who looked dusty, wind tossed and tired and theirs was certainly not a position to be envied. It was hard to know where all these people had come from but they weren't familiar faces so they must have been collected from somewhere in the surrounding rural areas. Crammed into two open topped trucks, there were perhaps 50 people in each, sitting on the floor , squashed up against each other like livestock going to slaughter: without dignity or individuality - just faces, numbers to swell the crowd.

It only took a few seconds to work out what was going on when the vehicles turned into the local ruling party offices in the town. The trucks were from a well known parastatal and had the Zimbabwe flag wrapped around and tied onto bumpers and roll bars. These vehicles aren't buses and undoubtedly don't have permits to transport people but they have become very familiar to us in the past eight years, disgorging great crowds of people at ruling party rallies and meetings. When the worst of the farm invasions were going on, the big white vehicles with the red and blue stripes on the doors bought fear, dread and a feeling of finality to farmers and their workers. They trucks came carrying masses of people who would swarm over fields, camp outside gates, barricade roads and sing, drum and shout, throwing stones at walls, windows and roofs until the occupants were beaten into submission and left.

Some of the people in the trucks on this last day of November 2007 were wearing clothes and head scarves adorned with the President's face and that gave the game away. They were here on a brief stop over but were on their way to Harare for what had been advertised as the "Million Man March" - a show of support of President Mugabe's candidature in the 2008 elections.

As I passed the loaded trucks, for a brief moment I tried to catch someone's eye to see if I could spot political fervour, a dedicated zealot, even a believer in the cause but it wasn't there. I saw weary images, lean faces, pronounced cheek bones - tired people, the same as the rest of us. Like everyone else they are also surviving with the bare minimum of food and money; their children are malnourished and many are no longer in school ; their hospitals and clinics have few staff and even fewer drugs and they are scratching out a living in hard, primitive conditions. So why then, after seven years of chronic decline would anyone willingly support a party which cannot even ensure basic food in the shops. Undoubtedly those big trucks would be empty if the ruling party had not taken such pains to ensure that as we went into the next election they had complete control over the supply, price and availability of food, seed, fertilizer, fuel, water, electricity and now even of bank notes.

Until next week, thanks for reading,
love cathy.