Copyright 2000 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
June 25, 2000, Sunday
ELECTION IS TOUGHEST YET FOR MUGABE / POVERTY, BROKEN PROMISES LIFT OPPOSITION IN ZIMBABWE
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Nzvimbo, Zimbabwe-An old man with a few yellowed teeth ambled out of the polling booth yesterday, dropped his ballot in the wooden box, then pressed his wrinkled forehead against that of a startled foreigner and said in a loud, urgent whisper: "Chinja! Chinja!" The word means "change" in the local tongue and is a slogan of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, challenging 20 years of domination by President Robert Mugabe.
The elderly man's bold utterance in the middle of his polling station, in the middle of this long-time Mugabe stronghold, showed how drastically things have changed since the last parliament vote in 1995. From the urban areas around the capital, Harare, to destitute rural areas such as Nzvimbo, 50 miles north, people were in line at 7 a.m. and waited several hours to vote, a sharp contrast to past national elections in which there was virtually no opposition and indifference reigned.
If political pundits were to be believed, the huge turnout on the first day of voting, which ends tonight, likely signaled a shift toward the MDC by Zimbabweans fed up with poverty and what opponents see as broken promises of better lives. Mugabe yesterday scoffed as those predictions. "The prophets of doom are prophets of doom. Their prophecies are doomed."
No widespread problems were reported in voting yesterday, which was being watched by thousands of Zimbabwean monitors and about 300 foreign observers, but there were complaints by opponents of continuing intimidation and harassment.
"We want things to change. You can see how things have gone in the last 20 years," said 28-year-old Godfrey Chiriwa, who said he had voted for the MDC in his rural polling station in Amandas, 20 miles south of Nzvimbo, despite being threatened on election eve by supporters of Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party. The group of ZANU-PF men corralled Chiriwa and 19 buddies away from their friendly, Friday night soccer game, ordered them to attend a political meeting, and warned that they had ways of knowing who had voted for MDC.
One of the soccer players, Samson Magruwen, had already been beaten once before for his support of the MDC, back in May when eight men wielding wooden clubs, hose pipes and chains attacked him and two friends. "They didn't make me fear," said Magruwen, who voted yesterday for the MDC. "I want things to change. "
At stake are 120 seats in the 150-seat parliament, where Mugabe's party currently holds 147 seats. Until labor leader Morgan Tsvangirai launched his MDC last year, Mugabe's hold over the country he led to independence in 1980 was not in question. The former guerrilla leader was hailed by most Zimbabweans as the liberator of the black majority after decades of white rule. The former British colony known as Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, and Mugabe's government promised to provide land to blacks without chasing out the wealthy whites whose commercial farms formed the backbone of the country's economy.
The land reforms he promised, however, did not happen, and the economy began collapsing under the weight of high-level corruption and overspending on things like government salaries and the war in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, where Mugabe has sent more than 10,000 soldiers. Mugabe, 76, does not face a presidential election for another two years, but he was shaken in February by voters' strong rejection of a new constitution that would have given him more powers and was considered a barometer of his popularity. If his party fares poorly in this vote, it would mark an opposition momentum that could be impossible to overcome.
In an attempt to win back support, Mugabe has renewed promises of land reform and endorsed the sometimes violent takeover of more than 1,000 white farms by his backers in the wake of the February referendum defeat. More than 30 people, many of them black farm workers accused of supporting the MDC, have died in political violence since then.
The ability of ZANU-PF to hold onto the rural vote, through campaigning or intimidation, is key to its success given the urban-based MDC's overwhelming support in cities. Mugabe has tried to convince rural blacks that the MDC is a puppet of whites, primarily the white farmers whose land Mugabe has targeted for seizure.
"The MDC will never win elections in this country as long as they defend the interests of the minority, not when they are a stooge of the white man," Mugabe declared in his final campaign rally Friday.
John Katena echoed that theme as he prepared to vote for the president. " I don't see anything to change to. To be frank and fair, the white man has been oppressing the black man, so if someone who is affiliated with the white wants to be in power, what is the reason for change?"
Mugabe by law gets to name 30 members of the parliament, meaning the MDC would have to win 76 seats of the 120 up for election to score a simple majority. Such an outcome would be astounding in a country dominated by one man and his party since independence, but Tsvangirai and his supporters say there is no alternative. "This is the day we move forward as a country, or backward into an economic abyss," he said yesterday.
Stuart Lindsay, a white farmer, agreed. "I'd say if ZANU comes in again, just as I said to my workers today, there's no future for any of us," said Lindsay, who was driven from his farm by occupiers in May. "We'd have to wind down our operations and look at other things to do."
LOAD-DATE: June 25, 2000
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Newsday (New York)
May 8, 2000, Monday
POWERING THE TAKEOVERS / VETS LEADER IS SEEN AS TOOL FOR MUGABE
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Harare, Zimbabwe-Sitting in the dock of Harare's criminal court, wearing a clunky blue hearing aid, thick glasses and a calm but concerned expression on his ordinary face, Chenjerai Hunzvi looks more like a slightly nerdy, middle-aged man than a warmonger.
This is a man who proudly calls himself Hitler, however, and who has managed, through leadership of the country's war veterans, to force the hand first of the government and now of white farmers, whose land is being occupied by his followers.
"This is part of a revolution. You can call it whatever you want. This process is a revolutionary one, and there is no going back," Hunzvi said in an interview Friday after another morning in court facing charges he pilfered state funds reserved for veterans of Zimbabwe's independence war. "My goal is to liberate the land for Zimbabweans. What's wrong with that?"
What's wrong, say critics, are Hunzvi's violent tactics and the real reasons behind his actions, which they allege are motivated not by a desire for land reform but by President Robert Mugabe's political ambitions in the run- up to parliamentary elections.
Hunzvi's rise to prominence, say insiders, is a direct result of his showdown with Mugabe in 1997, when the 50,000-member War Veterans Association led by Hunzvi joined labor groups in riots over rising food prices.
Mugabe, faced with the worst public protests since taking power at independence in 1980, was forced to make one-time payouts of 50,000 Zimbabwean dollars ($ 3,100 U.S. at the '97 exchange rate; $ 1,350 at the current rate) to each veteran, and give them monthly pensions of 2,000 Zimbabwean dollars ($ 125 U.S. at '97 exchange rate, $ 52 at current rate). The alternative would have been to lose the veterans' allegiance to the burgeoning, labor-based Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition group behind the protests.
"They war veterans posed a very big threat to the government," said Robert Simba Makoni, a marketing expert who advises Hunzvi-who gives his age as 49 but who others say is 57-on his public image. "No one had ever forced the government to do what they forced Mugabe to do."
In early 1998, however, Hunzvi was charged with stealing veterans' funds by claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical benefits prosecutors say he did not deserve. They charge he claimed 117 percent disability, including hearing loss in a bombing that didn't injure him. The bright blue hearing aid appears only when he is in court and is notably absent when he addresses his fist-waving followers or conducts interviews from behind the large, leather-topped desk in his downtown Harare office.
Independent media, and Makoni, speculate the prosecution is a ploy to ensure Hunzvi's obedience and keep him from siding with the MDC again. By menacing him with the court case, they say, Mugabe can force Hunzvi to do what is needed to keep the ruling party in power, including silencing white farmers' opposition to the government by taking over their land.
"He's loved, he's hated, he's feared, and he's used," a western diplomat said of Hunzvi, dismissing Mugabe's claims Hunzvi has acted on his own since land seizures began in February. "The farm occupations are not a natural phenomenon. They are not a social phenomenon," said another diplomat. "They are sponsored, directed, and paid for by the government. There is nothing spontaneous to the farm occupations."
More than 15 people, including several black farm workers and anti-government activists, have been killed since thousands of blacks claiming to be war veterans began invading white-owned farms across the country. A third white farmer, Alan Dunn, died today after a beating by invaders on his farm.
Hunzvi, with Mugabe's blessing, refuses to call off the seizures, saying that doing so would kowtow to the demands of Britain, the former colonial ruler whose pre-independence policies put most of Zimbabwe's prime farmland in white hands. "The British are imperialists. We want to stop their imperialist tentacles spreading over the world," he said. "They're the ones who are causing a lot of problems as far as we're concerned," he told a rally yesterday. " They should know that they are foreigners...aliens if you want to call them, whatever."
As the violence and invasions-"liberations," Hunzvi calls them-continue, the mainly white Commercial Farmer's Union has quieted its combative stance and has met with Hunzvi in hopes of pacifying his backers and saving the white-owned farmland. Many farmers have hushed their once-loud support of the MDC, which has counted on white farmers to spread its message among black farm workers in rural areas.
Hunzvi bristles at the suggestion he is anyone's puppet and says that whether Mugabe is in power or not, his only desire is for every Zimbabwean to own land. That, he says, includes whites holding Zimbabwean passports.
"We're not fighting a racial war here," he said, laughing off the idea his nickname, Hitler, is an indication of support for the real Hitler's brutality and intolerance and might be harming his image. "That name means nothing to the people of Zimbabwe."
Certainly not to Nelson Sieketa, one of the dozens of Hunzvi supporters in court Friday to watch the proceedings. "He's totally innocent," said Sieketa, who had traveled from a farm outside Harare which he helped invade recently. "If they put him in jail, I don't think there's any white man who will stay in this country."
LOAD-DATE: May 8, 2000
Copyright 2000 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
May 7, 2000, Sunday
A STORM OVER 'SACRED' / LAND HIS LEADERSHIP IN CRISIS, MUGABE PLEDGES A VOLATILE FARMLAND TAKEOVER IN ZIMBABWE
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Mvurwi, Zimbabwe-The visitors arrived at sunup Monday and politely but firmly made their demands clear to the white farmers: one cow, keys to a flatbed truck, and all the black workers from the farm. As night fell, the workers still were gone, held at a compound up the highway in their umpteenth hour of political re-education being foisted upon them by backers of Zimbabwe's embattled ruling party.
"You jog, you sing revolution songs, and then you go eat to get the energy to jog again," said Samuel, who spent seven hours undergoing the military- style drills that are the newest element in President Robert Mugabe's fight for political survival. "They just tell you to vote for Mugabe."
No longer lionized by most Zimbabweans as the father of the nation and facing the first formidable opposition of his 20-year presidency, Mugabe has turned to the land and those who labor on it for salvation.
Since mid-February, an estimated 1,000 white-owned farms have been taken over-"liberated" in the words of the occupiers-by blacks with the endorsement of Mugabe, who says land reform is key to resolving Zimbabwe's economic and political problems. More than a dozen people have been killed in the occupations, including white farmers, black farm workers, and opposition activists, but Mugabe blames not the occupiers but the occupied, saying they have resisted land reform for decades and are now provoking those trying to implement it.
Land, he promises, will bring prosperity to impoverished Zimbabweans such as Samuel, who works at a rose farm hidden among fertile hills and valleys 80 miles north of the capital, Harare. "Give us the land, and we will create wealth for our people," the 76-year-old president said Wednesday in an impassioned, fist-waving speech unveiling his party's election manifesto and promising 15 million acres of farmland to black Zimbabweans. "This little world of Zimbabwe-is a Zimbabwean world, our world, little world, beautiful world for us, God-given world for us. Sacred. It is our shrine. We derive life from it."
There's just one problem: The land Mugabe has promised belongs to white farmers, most of them descendants of British settlers from the early 1900s who, by virtue of their skin color, were guaranteed prime farmland while blacks were shunted onto less desirable property.
Twenty years after a guerrilla war ended Britain's colonial rule of what was then Rhodesia, little has changed, despite Mugabe's promises of land reform. Now, with parliamentary elections due by the end of August, the economy on the skids, and many Zimbabweans frustrated by their country's downward spiral, Mugabe apparently is hoping the land topic and its racial link will see him through his worst crisis since independence and divert voters' attention from what critics say are the real issues: 70 percent inflation, high unemployment, and corruption among officials.
The result has been a bitter emphasis on race by the once tolerant Mugabe-he denounced blacks who support opposition parties as "white-blacks" in Wednesday's speech and warned of a white-backed international conspiracy against Zimbabwe-and the sinister political re-education being dished out in rural areas on white-owned farms occupied by blacks claiming to be veterans of the independence war.
"Really, at the end of the day, it's an indication of extreme desperation, " said Lupi Mushayakarara, a political commentator. "They want to get people to start thinking racially."
Rural areas traditionally have provided Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Unity-Patriotic Front party, known as ZANU-PF, its greatest support, but with most white farmers supporting the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, black farm workers are being encouraged to turn away from Mugabe.
The MDC'S leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, also heads the country's biggest labor union, and his party evolved from a series of worker strikes and protests that were called in urban areas two years ago to demand better wages and lower food prices.
The MDC'S spreading influence in rural areas became clear in February, when voters rejected a new constitution that would have enhanced Mugabe's powers and that was seen as a barometer of his popularity. Key to the referendum's failure, which was Mugabe's first polling defeat, was a campaign by the MDC, which held rallies on white-owned farms and conducted voter-education programs geared toward farm workers who had never known any party but ZANU-PF.
Rather than flocking obediently to the polls to vote whichever way ZANU- PF directed them, rural dwellers stayed away or joined urban residents in voting against the constitution. "They woke up with a fright," farmer Ian King, an opposition activist, said of ZANU-PF. "Since independence, farm workers hadn't voted. They just didn't bother. Suddenly now they've registered. This whole region has just become MDC overnight."
If the same thing that happened in February happens in the parliamentary election, and if urban voters go as expected with the opposition, Mugabe's party could for the first time lose its majority in the 150-seat parliament, said one Western diplomat. "That's a long-shot scenario, but it's not outside the realm of possibility," said the diplomat. "I'd never say ZANU-PF is dead, but they're in big trouble."
ZANU-PF clearly recognizes this, which is why unassuming, low-level farm workers such as Samuel, 26, have suddenly become so important to the party. "They tell you to support ZANU-PF," said Samuel, describing the day and night spent at the sprawling Gem Farms compound near the farm where he works. Like most farm workers, he is afraid to give his full name when discussing politics.
About 500 farm workers were rounded up from farms throughout the region, taken to the compound and overseen there by more than 100 ZANU-PF cadres who kept them dancing, hopping around, and belting out pro-Mugabe songs and slogans on a soccer field by threatening to hit them with batons if they stopped. Those who became weary and sat down were ordered to get up again, said Samuel. "Some were beaten," he said. They were mainly workers who were accused of being opposition activists.
"They say if we sell out or go against ZANU-PF we would be sorted out," said Johnphane Chisare, who endured a day of political education at another farm about 40 miles away. "They say if the whites don't look after the property we must drive them off the farm, and they tell us if the whites give us any trouble we must tell ZANU-PF and they will sort them out," implying violence.
Most workers go along with the drill and proclaim their support for ZANU- PF to avoid trouble, and those who do not attend the drills when called upon are warned they will be tracked down and beaten. "But I know in my heart how I'm going to vote," Samuel said. "It's like the old saying: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." Samuel refused to say how he would vote, but his companion, Joseph, 21, who also was taken to the political-education camp, said it had not persuaded him to support ZANU-PF. "Life is tough. Maybe a new party will come up with new ideas," he said.
White farmers say they have no choice but to obey the ZANU-PF activists who arrive, unexpectedly, in large numbers, armed with sticks, at their doors and order them to send their employees to the political rallies. They also demand vehicles to transport the workers, and cows to feed them. To hold the workers back would put them as well as the farmers in danger, said King, a well-known MDC supporter whose Dorking Dairy Farm is near several others taken over by war veterans.
To resist invaders demands would be to invite more violence, said King, who has been threatened with takeover and warned by invaders that his 250 workers will soon be called upon for political re-education."They appear to be targeting farms where they know the farmer has quite a strong bond with the workers," said King, who recently hosted a rally of about 2,000 MDC supporters at his farm. "We're just telling all the guys to go along, shout the slogans, get a T-shirt, and get some food if they can. When the election comes, you have to hope they vote with their heart."
Not everyone needs re-educating. Chisare said he will happily vote for ZANU-PF, not because he is afraid to oppose it but because it has promised 30 acres of land to him if it wins the election. "I need to be free," said Chisare, although he admitted he had no idea how, with no money or training, he could manage his own land. "I will try. If I fail, I will just abandon it."
His colleague, Noah, the black assistant manager of the farm, who also was ordered to attend an education camp, said that was the problem withMugabe's land-grab. "To be given land without money, it's nothing," he said. "Land needs money."
Whether Mugabe's methods are working won't be known until the parliamentary election, which has yet to be scheduled. Whichever way it turns out, though, the decades-old problem of land reform won't go away. "There is an historical inequity that has to be addressed," said the diplomat. "It doesn't matter how bad this government is, a new government will still have to deal with it."
GRAPHIC: 1) AP Photo - Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe chants slogans of his party. 2) AP Photo - A mother holds her child at a camp set up by squatters occupying land on a white-owned farm near Morewa, Zimbabwe. Mugabe has rallied for such actions against white farmers, whom he blames for the country s economic ills. 3) AP Photo - Zimbabwean farmer Neville Tapson examines a burned building on his son's farm April 24, a day after the farm was attacked by war veterans who burned an estimated 108 tons of a tobacco crop and the family s home. 4) Newsday Cover Photo / Tina Susman - Farm workers return from forced political "re-education."
LOAD-DATE: May 7, 2000
Copyright 2000 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
May 7, 2000, Sunday
IN THE CROSSHAIRS / WHITE FARMER LIVES UNDER THREAT
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Concession, Zimbabwe-Ian King's die-by date has come and gone. "I was supposed to be eliminated April 18," the white farmer says matter-of-factly as the scent of newly harvested onions floats up from the fields surrounding his hilltop farmhouse.
"I only heard this after the 18th, which made it a bit easier, but it doesn't mean the intention isn't still there," says King, who learned from black farm workers that his name was on a hit list of white farmers targeted because of their activism in opposition politics.
If the threat had been carried out-and King still doesn't know why it wasn't-he would have been the third white farmer killed since mid-February, when thousands of blacks began occupying white-owned farms in the name of a government-sponsored land reform scheme. Now, like thousands of other white farmers in Zimbabwe, King's once-comfortable life has been turned upside down.
The large gate at the entrance to his 1750-acre dairy farm-tiny by Zimbabwean standards-is now locked at midday to keep out potential invaders, and he is in frequent radio and phone contact with neighboring farms for updates on who has been threatened, attacked, or visited by large groups announcing their intention to seize their land. He expects his turn to come any day.
"We're just so totally helpless," said King, 52, whose grandfather bought this land in the fertile, red-earthed region north of Harare in 1951 from the colonial power of the time, Britain. "You want to take an eye for an eye, but that won't help matters."
For all the white farmers' frustrations, though, the black land occupiers, who are supported by President Robert Mugabe, say they have been frustrated far, far longer and are finally taking what is due to them and what whites refuse to share. For decades under colonial rule, when Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia, vast tracts of fertile, lucrative land were set aside for whites and sold to settlers such as King's ancestors. If blacks were on such land, they were removed and placed on so-called "communal lands" reserved for blacks, in much the same way South Africa's apartheid-era government moved blacks into urban townships or rural, tribal homelands.
Twenty years after the end of colonial rule here, just 4,500 white farmers control nearly all the country's money-making commercial farms, which, like King's, have been handed down through the generations and which would be far too expensive for most blacks to buy if they came up for sale. Attempts to introduce land reform, Mugabe says, have been blocked by farmers resistant to giving up their privileged lives.
"The farmers have never, ever changed. They are the same raw, raw Rhodesians we tried to change in 1980," he said in a speech Wednesday. "What are we supposed to do? Fold our hands and say 'Ah, you are the ordained ones by virtue of the color of your skin'? No. The end has come. The land will come to the people."
Even most white farmers agree land reform is needed, but they say punishing this generation of farmers for the misdeeds of the past is no better than what the colonialists did to blacks. Worse yet, they say, the self-proclaimed veterans of the independence war who are taking over farms know nothing about agriculture and would destroy the entire country by killing the agricultural industry that fuels its economy.
"Why don't some of these war vets get off their butts and find a job, and then they might get what they're looking for," said Jane Pretorius, who manages a white-owned farm near King's. "All they've done since independence is sit around and say, 'What can the government give me for free?' If the whole country felt like that, we wouldn't even have a country by now."
LOAD-DATE: May 7, 2000
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Newsday (New York)
February 29, 2000, Tuesday
EPIDEMIC'S DEATH GRIP / AIDS CRISIS IN ZIMBABWE FILLS MORGUES, CEMETERIES FAR BEYOND LIMIT
By Tina Susman
HARARE, Zimbabwe
IT'S A DIFFICULT time to be dead in Harare.
There's no room in the morgues, gravediggers can barely keep up with demand, and the city's most desirable cemetery is filled to capacity. It's so bad that city officials are trying to persuade people to cremate bodies, not a popular notion here but perhaps the only solution for a society saturated with AIDS.
"It's ever increasing," Sonnyboy Mudambo says of his workload at the Parirenyatwa Hospital morgue in Harare, which in June began staying open 24 hours a day to handle the growing number of corpses filtering through. "It's because there are so many bodies," he says, opening the steel door to a morgue designed to hold 21 but often stuffed with as many as 60.
AIDS is ravaging every country in southern Africa, but in few places is the epidemic as bad or as visible as in Zimbabwe, which according to medical experts has an HIV infection rate of 25 percent among adults and an AIDS-related death rate of about 1,200 people per week.
The country's economic decline in recent years has exacerbated the situation in cities like its capital, Harare, the country's largest city with 2 million to 3 million people, including those in the surrounding countryside. Not only can people not afford the medications to prolong their lives, they can't afford the traditional and costly practice of transporting their relatives' bodies to their home villages for burial, and often they can't even afford the cost of a cut-rate funeral in Harare. The result is an agricultural city burgeoning with dead and dying.
"People are dying too much," said Tarisai Ndune, who sells granite gravestones by the side of the road leading to Warren Hills cemetery in Harare. Business, she admits, is very, very good. So good that city officials declared Warren Hills full last month and said only people who had purchased plots in advance could be buried there.
Everyone else has been directed to Granville Cemetery, where the sandy soil is far less suitable than Warren Hills' rich brown earth and where the surroundings are not nearly as pretty and green as at Warren Hills. There was no alternative, said Eladinos Zimbwa, the curator of cemeteries who oversees Harare's seven burial grounds. Five are full and closed.
"You can never really predict the demand. You think you have enough graves, and you wake up the next morning and you're inundated," said Zimbwa, noting that burials have increased from a few a month in the 1970s to about 35 a day now. At times, there are four funerals going on at once in Granville, and the number of full-time gravediggers working for the city is 127.
It's not enough, said Zimbwa, who would like another 30 to 40 to lessen the workload. The inscriptions on Ndune's stones and on the newest grave markers in Granville tell the story of a nation dying young. Of every 10, perhaps three show birth dates earlier than 1950. Most are post-1960. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe has dropped from 61 to 49 in the past decade, and the United Nations estimates that the number of children under the age of 15 and orphaned as a result of AIDS is 900,000.
"The impacts have been huge," said David Wilson of the University of Zimbabwe, who heads a project that supports various AIDS-related programs across southern Africa. "It's made families poorer because not only have they lost breadwinners, they've had to pay out a lot during the illness."
That's one reason that morgues are overfilled. Many families can't afford burials, so bodies lie unclaimed up to two months, when city officials take them for burial in paupers' graves. Constance Szhakata has buried her husband and her brother and now must care for the seven children, aged 4 to 18, whom they left behind. Along with Szhakata's mother, they live together in a tiny, two-room, hut-like house in Mabvuku, one of the poorest areas of Harare, and depend on handouts from Mashambanzou Care Trust, a private aid agency that provides food, care and counseling to some of the city's most destitute AIDS victims.
Szhakata's family is one of them. On a recent Friday, breakfast consisted of a pan of roasted popcorn kernels, the only food in the house. The 40-year-old woman has no job. Sometimes she sells tomatoes on the street, but rarely does she make more than 20 Zim dollars (less than $ 1 a day), and given Zimbabwe's collapsing economy, with inflation of more than 50 percent, few people can afford to buy any nowadays.
"I didn't get anything," she said after returning home from a morning trying to sell tomatoes. "They're still hungry," she said, looking at the children. "I don't know what to do."
Worse yet, Szhakata now fears she has AIDS, but she doesn't have the money to take a taxi into the city to get tested. She also fears for her 6-year-old niece, who has been constantly sick with diarrhea.
Even with the rampaging AIDS problem, denial exists, from the poorest slums to the halls of government. Szhakata's in-laws insisted that her husband's death certificate say he died of diabetes, and her brother's stated death from tuberculosis. "AIDS is everywhere," said Giles Kuimba, a spokesman for the city. "Whatever is happening in Zimbabwe is happening in all other countries. It's not really spectacular here."
Even one of the country's biggest AIDS-education organizations didn't admit the cause of death when two of its employees died in recent months of the disease, said Wilson.
Some cut-rate coffin makers are trying to cash in on the crisis, at the expense of the bereaved. A Zimbabwean newspaper recently carried the story of a family whose funeral was disrupted when the bottom fell out of the cheap coffin they had bought.
The sole method for solving the problem of too many corpses appears to be cremation, but Zimbwa says the pro-cremation campaign that began a year ago has been a dismal failure. The practice of burning the dead, he says, is viewed as unacceptable by black Africans even though it can be far cheaper than a funeral. Out of 717 people cremated in Harare last year, only one was black. That means Granville will continue filling up.
When the cemetery opened in 1994, Zimbwa said, it was expected to stay open 30 years. "With the current burial rate," he said, "I don't know what we're looking at."
LOAD-DATE: February 29, 2000
