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Zimbabwe

Society

The HIV-Positive Pastor Breaking Down AIDS Stigma In Zimbabwe

In the long fight against HIV/AIDS, advancements in medicine mean that today, shame and stigma is often more deadly than the disease itself. One Zimbabwean pastor has been preaching a gospel of hope in one of the countries worst affected by the virus.

HARARE — Looking back on the life journey he has traveled since 2002, when medical tests delivered a bombshell that he was HIV-positive, the Rev. Maxwell Kapachawo is satisfied he has been faithful to the assignment that God commissioned him to do … to preach the gospel of hope to the hopeless.

“I have run the race to strengthen others … that even in death from HIV, there is still God in heaven,” Kapachawo, 49, told ReligionUnplugged.com in an interview as he reflected on his life. “Because he is so faithful, here I am today, still believing and spreading the gospel of life and hope.”

Chronic illness caused doctors to urge him to take an HIV test, and when the results came back positive, the world crashed around him. This was a virus associated with people of loose morals. So for a pastor to be HIV-positive, it was unheard of. This was a time when the pandemic peaked in Zimbabwe — one of the countries worst affected by HIV/AIDS — with one in every four adults having the virus and about 4,000 HIV-related deaths recorded weekly.

Anti-retroviral drugs were not yet available, and knowledge of the disease was at most patchy, with getting the virus then equated to a death sentence. As if to remove any vestiges of hope in Kapachawo, his brother and sister soon succumbed to HIV-related illnesses while his other brother opted to take his own life after testing positive to the same deadly virus. It felt like a truly hopeless situation.

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How Censorship Could Shake Up Zimbabwe’s Election


Free speech advocates are concerned that the government has been using the Criminal Law Codification and Reform Act to keep citizens and journalists from expressing political opinions.

HARARE — Robert Zakeyo never imagined that when he forwarded a video clip to a community WhatsApp group, it would result in a lengthy court battle.

In May 2020, Zakeyo posted a clip of Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa saying that the country’s currency was stronger than other currencies in the region.

The video was spliced with footage of the mother of the late opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai dismissing the president’s claims in foul language.

The next morning, police showed up on Zakeyo’s doorstep and arrested him for undermining the president.

For close to two years, Zakeyo fought his case in court. He attended more than 25 court sessions. Each time, the court postponed his case to a later date. Zakeyo lost hope every time.

“I was deeply troubled and affected by what happened. I felt belittled because I just went around in circles without a trial or a sentence,” he says. “I thought it would never end.”

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Orwell On Mugabe: A New 'Animal Farm' Translation Resonates In Zimbabwe

Writers and translators in Shona, the most widely spoken language of Zimbabwe, have dedicated the past five years to bringing the George Orwell classic to a country that has known the cruel formula of human despotism first-hand.

Since independence in 1980, Zimbabwe has in some ways become like Animal Farm. Like the pigs in the classic 1945 novel by English writer George Orwell, the country’s post-liberation leaders have hijacked a revolution that was once rooted in righteous outrage. In Zimbabwe, the revolution was against colonialism and its practices of extraction and exploitation.

The lead characters in Animal Farm have the propensity for evil and the greed for power found in despots throughout history, including former Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe. Zimbabwe’s leaders have also acted for personal gain. They remain in power with no accountability to the suffering of the people they claim to represent.

Animal Farm’s relevance is echoed in celebrated young Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo’s recent novel Glory. Her satirical take on Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup and the fall of Mugabe is also narrated through animals. And visual artist Admire Kamudzengerere founded Animal Farm Artist Residency in Chitungwiza as a space for creative experimentation.

It’s within this context that a group of Zimbabwean writers, led by novelist and lawyer Petina Gappah and poet Tinashe Muchuri, have translated Animal Farm into Shona, the country’s most widely spoken language. A dozen writers contributed to the translation of Chimurenga Chemhuka (Animal Revolution) over five years.

It’s clear to me, as a scholar of Zimbabwean literature, that too few great books are available in the country’s indigenous languages. This matters particularly because there are few bookshops and libraries where young people can access good writing. But Zimbabwe’s writers are taking matters into their own hands.

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Zimbabwe Has A Serious Sex Ed Problem

Teachers and others say Zimbabwe’s current curriculum falls short and should be redesigned. But some question whether the subject should be taught in schools at all.

BIKITA — When Delight Ziwacha was 16, she didn’t know one could get pregnant after having unprotected sex only once. A friend told her that it had to happen multiple times. So, after experimenting with alcohol during a high school soccer tournament, she had unprotected sex with her 17-year-old boyfriend. A month and a half later, she found out she was pregnant.

“It only happened that one time,” she says.

Ziwacha, now 19, doesn’t remember ever receiving any sex education in school in Bikita, a district in southern Zimbabwe . The little she knew was from conversations with friends.

But Zimbabwe does have a Comprehensive Sexuality Education program, meant to equip young people like Ziwacha with knowledge about sex and help reduce teenage pregnancies, which have been soaring in the country, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic. Government data shows that in January and February 2021, nearly 5,000 girls age 17 and under got pregnant.

The trend has called the current sex education offered in schools into question. Some say it falls short and are asking the government to redesign it, while others want the curriculum scrapped altogether, saying that it only encourages young people to engage in early sex.

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Geopolitics
Paolo Valenti

NGO Crackdowns Are Spreading, In Both Dictatorships And Democracies

NGOs around the world are facing difficulties as governments criminalize them. The crackdown leaves states less accountable, while the biggest victims are the most vulnerable.

“It just so happens that people who value freedom the most are often deprived of it.”

These words from Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski upon being awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize strike an extra bitter chord now: last Friday a Minsk court sentenced him to 10 years in prison.

Founder and chair of Viasna, a Minsk-based non-governmental organization (NGO), Bialiatski had been arrested in July 2021 alongside two of his colleagues for “financing of group actions grossly violating the public order.” The charges were denounced as politically motivated by U.N. human rights experts.

Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko has earned a reputation for its hostility towards human rights organizations and opposition groups. But crackdowns and criminalization of NGOs are not unique to Belarus — indeed, they’re not even limited just to authoritarian regimes.

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Economy
Linda Mujuru

Why Are Zimbabwe’s Gold Miners Risking Deadly Mercury Exposure

Mercury exposure can be deadly. So why are gold miners in Zimbabwe using the dangerous chemical — and risking their lives and the health of their communities in the process?

The young men brace for the first shock of cold water as they enter the river, easing their way into another day of illegal gold mining.

David Mauta and Wisdom Nyakurima, both 18, stand knee-deep in the Odzi River near the eastern Zimbabwe mining city of Mutare and shovel gravel onto a woven mat. They hinge their hopes on finding flakes of shiny gold. But it’s another metal whose dangers they don’t recognize that may have a more lasting impact.

Every day, they touch and breathe mercury, a silverly chemical element that carries deadly implications. The toxic liquid metal is key to their gold-mining efforts, as is the government, which purchases their gold even as officials vow to eliminate mercury’s use. The young men are unregistered artisanal miners, freelance workers who don’t have a license to operate. They sift through rocks in the river and dump beads of mercury over the sediment, which clings to gold. Then they light a match, using the flame to separate the mercury from the gold, a process that shoots toxic vapors into the air.

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Migrant Lives
Linda Mujuru*

When Migrants Vanish: Families Quietly Endure Uncertainty

Zimbabweans cling to hope even after years of silence from loved ones who have disappeared across borders.

HARARE, ZIMBABWE — Blessing Tichagwa can barely remember her mother. Like hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans, Noma Muyambo emigrated to South Africa in search of work, leaving baby Blessing, now 15, behind with her grandmother.

The last time they saw her was nine years ago, when Blessing was 6. Muyambo returned for one week, then left again — and has not sent any messages or money since.

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Geopolitics
Evidence Chenjerai

Nelson Chamisa, The Outsider Shaking Up Zimbabwe’s Presidential Race

Backers of the opposition's presidential candidate see hope in upstart victories in Malawi and Zambia. But in Zimbabwe, a single party has been in power for more than four decades.

MUTARE — Precious Dinha elbows her way into a packed soccer stadium. Despite thunderclouds looming above, thousands of yellow-clad Zimbabweans are singing, dancing and thrusting their index fingers skyward. They wave placards in Shona and English saying, “We need democracy in Zimbabwe” and “Police stop brutality against citizens.” Dinha unfurls her own large white banner: “We want free and fair elections.”

Soon Zimbabwe’s leading opposition presidential candidate, 44-year-old Nelson Chamisa, bounds onto a stage. “Do you embrace the new?” he asks. “Yes!” the crowd shouts. Dinha traveled close to four hours from Harare, the capital, to hear Chamisa speak. She attends every Chamisa rally she can, wearing yellow, the color of his movement, and reveling in the festive atmosphere. This event marks the formal introduction of his new political party, Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC), in eastern Zimbabwe ahead of next year’s presidential election.

Dinha, 32, believes Chamisa’s relative youth and outsider perspective can help resuscitate Zimbabwe’s listless economy, with high levels of unemployment, inflation and food insecurity. “I have never been employed despite having professional qualifications. I do not even know what a pay slip looks like,” Dinha says. She was trained as a human resources manager but raises chickens and sells secondhand clothes to get by. “He understands us as youths, and there are promises of reviving the economy so that we can also have jobs.”

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Society
Fortune Moyo*

The Women In Zimbabwe Building Gender Equality, Brick By Brick

The pandemic has accelerated generational shifts as more women in Zimbabwe join the once male-dominated construction industry.

VICTORIA FALLS - Last year, Charity Nyoni walked by a group of men who were painting a house and asked if she could help.

They laughed.

When she insisted, the team’s leader agreed to let her join them the next time.victoria

“When I arrived at the said place, the men were shocked,” Nyoni says. “I held a paintbrush for the first time in my life, I enjoyed it, and I have never looked back.”

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Society
Gamuchirai Masiyiwa

A Paternity Reality Show Is All The Rage In Zimbabwe

A new program that settles paternity disputes has become the most popular television show in Zimbabwe. Not everyone is happy.

HARARE, ZIMBABWE — After Yvonne Damster gave birth to her baby boy last year, she was distraught when the father refused to acknowledge the child as his own. Damster says members of her community used her trade — sex work — to convince the man to deny responsibility.

“I was pained that he took me for a fool when I told him that the child was his,” Damster says.

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Sources
Elsa Dorey iQ and Klervi Le Cozic iQ

In Zimbabwe, Where Grandma Steps In For Missing Shrinks

In the absence of qualified staff, grandmothers from the Friendship Benches program offer free listening and advice to patients suffering from depression.

HARARE — In Shona, there is no word for depression. So, to talk about it, "we say "kufungisisa," which means ‘thinking too much,"" says Esilida, 73, while waiting for her next patient on a wooden bench in the clinic of Glen Norah, an impoverished suburb in Zimbabwe"s capital Harare. "I explain to them how to take care of themselves," she says in a rocky and breathless voice, examining visitors that come and go.

All sorts of miseries are unloaded onto her bench: Domestic violence, lack of money, fear of being rejected because of AIDS, unemployment. "If my patient has several problems, we approach them together, one by one, until we've solved them all." Esilida is among the first grandmothers in her neighborhood to get involved in the Friendship Bench program. These old women, present in most of Harare's clinics, offer free listening and advice in a country with only 14 psychiatrists.

I didn't set up the project to look good. I did it because it was necessary

Dixon Chibanda is one of them. He is behind the project that has been present in most of the capital's suburbs since 2006. At that time, Zimbabwe's few psychiatrists left the country in the middle of an economic crisis. While he was carrying out his a masters degree in public health, Chibanda realized there was a high level of mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety, in working-class neighborhoods. He decided to act and enlisted the help of Harare's public health department. Symbolic help, that is to say, because no funding, doctors, nurses or buildings were granted. "I was offered to work with 14 volunteer grandmothers who were already health advisers in the Mbare neighborhood. I didn't set up the project to look good. I did it because it was necessary."

Mental health guards

This morning, it is Jane's third appointment with Esilida. She discovered the Friendship Bench initiative when she was picking up her AIDS medication at the clinic. After the death of her husband, she found herself penniless and Esilida suggested they sit down. "I cried again and again. The counselor told me: ‘You will die, I will die too. You have to think about your children, take your medication every day, and eat the right food.""

Even if the language they use may be a bit too direct sometimes, the grandmothers know what they're doing. Themselves neighborhood's residents, the grannies know very well the living conditions of their patients — because they live in the same conditions. True guards for mental health, these social workers help ward off depression before it settles in and causes severe mental health problems.

In 2016, more than 85,000 people sat down on a friendship bench. This approach, more social than psychiatric, can be summarized in three concepts. "‘Kusimudzira," to lift your spirit, ‘kusimbisa," to strengthen your mind, and ‘kusimbisisa" to strengthen it even more," said Esilida, pointing to the words on the yellow loincloth that she has around her body.

Every Wednesday, former Friendship Bench patients gather in a speaking circle that combines moral support and financial help. As they sing and listen to each other, participants also learn to crochet bags they can later sell.

"Here, we hold hands rather than the mind," Esilida says with a smile. Jane uses the money to buy wholesale products at the market, and then resells them on the roadside. This way she can send her son to college.

Talking to someone who empathizes is very powerful.

Little by little, the project has spread across the country, all the way to the rural zones, where it has represented a wake-up call on the issue of mental health. In Ngomahuru, the second biggest psychiatric hospital in Zimbabwe does not have a single psychiatrist. This former leprosarium is not suitable for patients suffering from mental health disorders. "We have to improvise," says Parirenyatwa Maramba, the hospital director, pointing to the isolation cell, an empty room closed by bars: "The walls are supposed to be padded, the furniture fixed to the floor or to the wall, the room near the nurses' office ... Here, it is quite the opposite." A few days ago, a patient suffering from depression committed suicide.

Dr Maramba saw the Friendship Bench project as an opportunity to overcome the shortcomings of this place that can accommodate "180 patients instead of 300 because of a lack of staff." "Only 16 of us, out of 53 doctors, have been introduced to psychiatry, but none of us is a psychiatrist, psychologist, or occupational therapist," says the doctor, who dreams of being able to detect and treat mental diseases before they become more acute.

To optimize skills, the medical team has kept the essential parts of Chibanda's project: Caring and watching out for peers. Based on the domino effect, the psychiatrist trained the caregivers to detect mental disorders, so that in turn they transmit their new know-how to about 20 non-specialized nurses in remote clinics. "We administer these pills against headaches or to sleep without looking to understand the origins of the disorder," explains the chief nurse in the hospital. "If their disorders were detected earlier, some patients would not have to be hospitalized."

Once trained, the rural nurses will pass the baton to community workers dispersed in each village, so they can get closer to even to those who live in the most remote areas. This chain includes teachers who "deal with teenagers, whose suicides are increasing," says Dr. Maramba: "Young people have so many challenges, at school, at home, with undesired pregnancies, with strained relationships... It's a very fragile age group, that needs the help of the Friendship Bench."

In Ngomahuru, the Friendship Bench project is expanding and is gradually changing. Soon, wooden benches, a school room, the steps of a dispensary, or the shade of a mango tree will become places of listening. The idea remains the same. "They provide a space for the sick," explains Chibanda. Talking to someone who listens and empathizes with you is very powerful. Everyone needs it."

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Sources
Rumbi Chakamba

A Bank In Zimbabwe Aims To Tap Into Female Entrepreneurship

Catering specifically to women – particularly in rural areas – is not only good for gender equality, it is good for business.

HARARE – When Divine Ndhlukula first launched her security business in 1998, she found it difficult to get funding and a struggle to gain access to the markets that would allow her enterprise to thrive. "I was a woman entering the male-dominated security sector with no experience or expertise," she says. "So already, being taken seriously was a challenge. No one believes you can do it, and no one is willing to listen to you."

Twenty years later, Ndhlukula, 57, has proved her critics wrong. Harare-based SECURICO has grown into one of the biggest security companies in Zimbabwe. But Ndhlukula says things haven't changed much for women entrepreneurs in the two decades since she started her company. "The problems still exist. Role models such as myself are trying to change mind-sets, but the prejudice still exists," she says.

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