Death in the Diaspora
Two funerals in the neighbourhood brought back the pain not just about lives being lost before the individuals reached their prime, but the whole thing about people leaving the country only to return in their caskets.
A young man who had barely made it into his twenties was buried last week after falling terribly ill in South Africa, and I’m told he had actually made it as far as the States or UK in his journey in search of a better life for himself and his family much like millions who have left over the decade.
One just has to imagine the parents’ pain. Every parent who has a child abroad or just across our borders has a sense that they will live a life better off than the average person/granny in the neighbourhood, so one really has to empathise with these folks. Being the Africans that we are, when a death occurs, graveside whispers are inevitable about how these young people take on lives that have no semblance of how their mothers raised them only to succeed in accelerating their departure from what is already a wretched earth.
But folks will always moralise even if they have no clue about the circumstances that led to that premature loss of life, yet the constant thing that one hears at these funerals is why people have to leave their motherland in the first place. You hear it all the time: “If he/she hadn’t left, perhaps he/she would still be alive today.” Yet it points to the desperation of the common man to find answers not just about life and death, but why families have to endure all this simply because a country that had so much promise for all its people could turn out so badly.
The other death was one that for many boggles the mind about the trek to South Africa that has lured “older” folks we thought would be content having a job and never dream of joining young bloods in the cruel universe of job hunting. This is a “young grandmother” who worked many years as a primary school teacher and toiled reading for a psychology degree with the Zimbabwe Open University. As soon as she took her degree about four or so years ago, she did not wait for that piece of paper to gather dust: she immediately left in search of a teaching post in South Africa. I recall having a chat with the son back then. The son said he found it hard to live with the “humiliating fact” that it was his mother not him who had left the country to look for a job in SA.
Yet this has become the story of so many people’s lives you ask yourself how and why so many families have been destroyed by this quest for a better life. What use is it then when so many people in the process die “before their time,” as some say here? Sounds like the Biblical “what does it profit a man…” Of course it’s a truism that death will always be part of us, but one has to listen to families whose relations die outside the country as they try to understand the death of one of their own. These stories have become too common in virtually every neighbourhood, and it points to Zimbabweans being virtually powerless abut what to do about their circumstances, be it economic or political despite the claim to being a democracy.
The bitterness of families and the people in general about the bad turn the nationalists took finds justification because while these families continue losing loved ones outside the country, the men and women who authored the country’s economic demise still hold their heads high and claim relevance to the country’s political space. It is no surprise then that these men and women will never countenance giving the millions who left their suffrage as the authors of bad politics know only too well what this would mean.
For all the departed who left the country of their birth to fend for their families, may their souls rest in peace.