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But Marechera could see through the deceptive characters that were at the brink of leading Zimbabwe. Most of them were his contemporaries and former classmates. Marechera’s no holds barred book, Mindblast, published in 1984 provides a searing review of the early years of Mugabe’s presidency. He writes:

…it seems to me for all the ideals our independence is supposed to represent, it’s still the same old ox-wagon of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. There’s even an attempt to make poverty a holy and acceptable condition. You say you’re hungry, and the shef peers over his three chins down at you and says Comrade, you’re the backbone of the revolution as if your life’s ambition is to be thin and lean as a mosquito’s backbone. And you try to say ‘Shef, I don’t want to be the backbone, I want to be the big belly of the struggle aginst neo-colonialism like the one you got there underneath that Castro beard.’ And before you even finish what you are saying he’s got the CIO and the police and you are being marched at gunpoint to the interrogation barracks. I’m not saying there’s such a thing as an absence of free speech. Rather there’s an excess of it to feed the numerous ears that have been unleashed ‘for security reasons.’

Mugabe who was known for being a vindictive character by political opponents probably never forgave Marechera for the embarrassment. After Marechera returned to independent Zimbabwe, he was harassed and persecuted by state security for his refusal to join the system, or his public rebukes directed towards the status quo. Marechera made it uncomfortable for politicians to be in the same room with him. He would call them out.

As a result, Marechera was effectively banished from public gatherings. The government’s solution was to periodically throw him in prison to keep him away from the media or his network of international friends who often visited him. These episodes contributed to the elevation of his reputation as a fearless critic of the establishment who spoke truth to power.

The cracks in Zimbabwe were always there, only the heat of time deepened them. After the landslide victory of Mugabe’s party in the 1980 elections, the sense of euphoria, which followed, was short-lived.

Bob Marley who was invited to play at the independence gala composed a song titled, Zimbabwe. Throughout the song Marley repeatedly warns the leadership:

Mugabe’s big man politics were entrenched in the early years. He annexed all political power to himself and mastered absolute authority by creating a one party state in 1987 to give shape to his dreams of total conquest and to hold under his sway the country, which he insensibly considered his private property. He spoke of Zimbabwe as “my country, my Zimbabwe.”

Bob Marley performed at Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations in 1980

In the new Zimbabwe, students and young radicals quickly heralded Marechera as the voice of their generation. Marechera was sublimely scathing of the slogans that surrounded the euphoria of independence. He was deeply suspicious of the black leadership led by Mugabe. Current political leaders such as Tendai Biti, Douglas Mwonzora and others who have become prominent figures in the opposition ranks embraced Marechera’s gospel. His uncompromising fight for justice and equality for the common man directly and indirectly influences a lot of the forces that merge to form the Movement of Democratic Change opposition party in 1999.

Tragic circumstances, however, brought Marechera and Mugabe together a few months before he died. This was a photo moment Mugabe would not let pass though Marechera was right to have been cynical. Marechera’s sister, Tsitsi, a 24-year old who had been a freedom fighter in the chimurenga war, was killed instantly by a booby-trapped television set which exploded in her Harare townhouse in May 1987. She was married to an ANC comrade, Vusumuzi Masondo (aka ‘Mhlophe Chiliza’).  Evidence later presented at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggested this was a joint SADF Special Forces and Military Intelligence operation initiated by the apartheid government. Marechera’s brother-in-law was not at home at the time though his two nieces, aged one and five, were in the house but survived the blast.

Though Marechera, died young of an AIDS-related pulmonary disorder at 35 in 1987, he never stopped tormenting Mugabe to the end as young Zimbabweans who lived in the “House of Hunger” he presided never stopped reminding him of his failures to fulfill the promises of liberation.

Post published in: Featured

JOHANNESBURG — Robert Mugabe had just made a furious speech against Zimbabwe’s LGBT community, calling them “worse than pigs and dogs.”

As he was about to get into his limousine, I asked, “Are you saying that gays in Zimbabwe have no legal rights?”

He glared at me and responded irately: “They have no rights whatsoever! They are an abomination and against human nature and God,” he shouted. He grabbed my arm and jostled me, causing my head to knock against a video camera behind.

That is how I remember Mugabe: an angry man who channeled his rage against colonial rule to become one of Africa’s most influential and longest-lasting leaders. He was one of the continent’s most iconic rulers, arguably more popular for a time than his rival Nelson Mandela. And he was one of Africa’s great liberators, who ruthlessly led the guerrilla force that ended white-minority rule in Rhodesia and brought about majority-rule Zimbabwe in 1980.

His 37-year reign and fist-shaking tirades against the former colonial powers of the West made him the ruler that many other African leaders emulate today.

Mugabe, who died Friday at age 95, grew up in poverty as the son of a single mother who was a subsistence farmer. Like all blacks in what was then Rhodesia, he suffered the indignities of colonial racism. He succeeded academically in a Catholic mission school and rose to become an African nationalist leader who had to fight to win basic democratic rights. When he won power in 1980, he advocated for reconciliation between whites and blacks but retained a bitterness that colored his rule.

I came to Zimbabwe as a journalist in 1980 and reported on Mugabe’s significant achievements in improving education and health for the country’s black majority, which made up more than 95% of the population. During 23 years in Zimbabwe, until my expulsion as the last foreign journalist in the country, I watched the shrewd tactics he used to retain power.

His attack on Zimbabwe’s LGBT community in August 1995 was a calculated move. He disliked that his star as Africa’s liberation hero had been eclipsed by Mandela, whose magnanimous and tolerant leadership included a constitution that specifically gave full legal rights to all citizens regardless of sexual orientation.

Mugabe defined a competing African nationalism that was exclusively for those who supported, and were accepted by, the ruling party. He was saying to the continent that Mandela’s leadership was too accepting of Western values and that his leadership of Zimbabwe was more authentically African.

His anti-gay tirades became a turning point in how Mugabe was viewed internationally. Until then, he was generally regarded as a benign leader who had dramatically improved conditions for Zimbabwe’s blacks. That positive image persisted despite the Matabeleland Massacres of the 1980s, in which his army killed 10,000 to 20,000 ethnic Ndebeles in the southern Matabeleland provinces. After his public excoriation of Zimbabwe’s small LBGT community, he was widely seen as an authoritarian leader.

Mugabe’s public posturing against gay people was not followed by punitive arrests. The country’s small, beleaguered LGBT population, primarily represented by the group Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, or GALZ, succeeded in becoming an integral part of the human rights community.

I saw Mugabe’s irritation with Mandela up close a year later, in August 1996, when he married his second wife, Grace, in a lavish wedding at his birthplace in Kutama Mission. Several African heads of state attended the ceremony, which was followed by a luncheon reception attended by thousands of his party’s leaders and local residents. There was polite applause when Mugabe and Grace took their place at the top table. Then a huge cheer rippled through the crowd as Mandela strode through the crowd to his table. I looked over to see Mugabe, his face twisted into a bitter scowl directed at the South African leader.

A few years later, Mugabe launched his seizures of white-owned farms, the controversial move that became his signature policy.

In 2000, he had been in power for 20 years and was facing his most significant challenge from a new opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, which sprang from labor unions and attracted support from Zimbabwe’s main Shona and Ndebele ethnic groups, the country’s urban and rural residents and blacks and whites.

There had been a national vote for a new constitution, which would have increased Mugabe’s executive powers. In a surprise result, the referendum was rejected, a stinging rebuke to his leadership that came just months before general elections for president and parliament.

Within two weeks, militias supporting Mugabe and his ruling party, ZANU-PF, begin violently seizing white-owned farms. Mugabe said Zimbabweans were taking back land that had been illegally confiscated by British colonialists. About a dozen white farmers were killed in the takeovers.

At the same time, his militia attacked leaders of the opposition party across the country, killing an estimated 300 and torturing many more, according to human rights groups. Police stood by, saying they would not intervene in political disputes. The opposition was denied coverage in the state media, which had a monopoly on all television and radio broadcasts. There were widespread charges of rigging, through documented discrepancies in voter registration and vote counting. Mugabe and ZANU-PF won the election.

The farm confiscations continued over several years, reducing the 4,200 white-owned farms to just a few score. Many observers agreed that land redistribution from whites to blacks was long overdue, but the way it was done damaged the country’s agricultural production and sent the economy into a downward spiral from which it has never recovered.

Many Africans regard the land grabs as Mugabe’s crowning achievement. To them, it doesn’t matter that lots of the farms went to his wife, generals, Cabinet ministers and party officials. It doesn’t matter that Zimbabwe, which was once known as the continent’s breadbasket, was reduced to a perennial recipient of international food aid.

What matters is that Mugabe eradicated white ownership of farms, the remaining vestige of white colonialism, and told the West to go to hell. That tapped into a deep-seated resentment across Africa and earned Mugabe widespread, and lasting, support.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/zimbabwevigil/48695315556/sizes/m/

It is surely right to disregard the tyrant’s petulant objections and bury him alongside other Zanu PF leaders. Perhaps one day tourists will visit Heroes’ Acre like they do the desolate field outside Budapest where statues from the Soviet era have been dumped.

You can say of most people that they had good and bad points. Not the same with Mugabe. What was not bad was evil.

Many people, including opposition leaders and British ambassadors, say he had charm. So did Hitler. What charm Mugabe had was of the reptilian kind – poisonous. And it was for his poisonous ruin of the state that he will be remembered.

Mugabe was hailed as a liberation hero but there are doubts that he ever spared a thought for anyone apart from his own family. Embittered by a decade of detention, he then waded through blood to capture the leadership of Zanu.

When he came to power in 1980 he was responsible for the Gukurahundi genocide of some 20,000 Ndebele, along with his successor President Mnangagwa. Together they launched rash foreign excursions to line their own pockets. He was a bad example to Africa, which still reveres him despite his legacy of starvation, corruption, hopelessness and fear.

First reaction from Harare to the news of his death was from dimwit minister Energy Mutodi who bizarrely described the death of a 95-year-old man as ‘untimely’. But Mutodi was correct in saying ‘This nation is what it is because of what he did’.

Mnangagwa has declared seven days of mourning but you can be sure that he will not be observing it himself.

Other points

• We marked the death of Mugabe with posters reading: ‘The goblin has gone’, ‘Now for real freedom’, ‘Mnangagwa must go too’, ‘Now out with Zanu PF’ and ‘Good riddance to Mugabe’. The press interviewed many of our activists.
• Thanks to those who helped set up the front table and put up the banners today: Patience Chimba, Marvellous Chinguwa, Josephine Jombe, Lucia Mudzimu, Esther Munyira, Hazvinei Saili, Sikhumbuzule Sibanda and Ephraim Tapa. Thanks to Hazvinei, Marvellous and Josephine for looking after the front table, to Lucia, Esther, Sikhumbuzule, Chido Makawa, Heather Makawa and Bigboy Sibanda for handing out flyers, to Hazvinei and Mary Muteyerwa for drumming and to Hazvinei, Ephraim and Tryness Ncube for photos.
• For latest Vigil pictures check: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zimb88abwevigil/. Please note: Vigil photos can only be downloaded from our Flickr website.

FOR THE RECORD: 32 signed the register.

EVENTS AND NOTICES:

• ROHR general members’ meeting. Saturday 14^th September from 11.30 am. Venue: Royal Festival Hall, South Bank Centre, Belvedere Road SE1 8XX. Contact: Ephraim Tapa 07940793090, Patricia Masamba 07708116625, Esther Munyira 07492058109.
• ROHR Reading branch outreach and general meeting. Saturday 21^st September. Community outreach from 11.30 am – 1.30 pm. Awareness campaign on deteriorating human rights in Zimbabwe. Venue: Broad Street, Reading. General meeting from 2 – 5 pm: Venue: The RISC 35-39 London Street, Reading, Berkshire RG1 4PS. Contact Nicodimus 07877386792, Josephine 07455166668, Shylette 07828929806, Josh 07877246251.
• The Restoration of Human Rights in Zimbabwe (ROHR) is the Vigil’s partner organization based in Zimbabwe. ROHR grew out of the need for the Vigil to have an organization on the ground in Zimbabwe which reflected the Vigil’s mission statement in a practical way. ROHR in the UK actively fundraises through membership subscriptions, events, sales etc to support the activities of ROHR in Zimbabwe. Please note that the official website of ROHR Zimbabwe is http://www.rohrzimbabwe.org/. Any other website claiming to be the official website of ROHR in no way represents us.
• The Vigil’s book ‘Zimbabwe Emergency’ is based on our weekly diaries. It records how events in Zimbabwe have unfolded as seen by the diaspora in the UK. It chronicles the economic disintegration, violence, growing oppression and political manoeuvring – and the tragic human cost involved. It is available at the Vigil. All proceeds go to the Vigil and our sister organisation the Restoration of Human Rights in Zimbabwe’s work in Zimbabwe. The book is also available from Amazon.

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Post published in: Featured

The streets and shops were packed, weddings and parties went ahead as planned. Most people were going about their usual business, trying to eke out living.

For while Mugabe is hailed for having led Zimbabwe to independence, for many Zimbabweans he is also the man who wrecked their economy, leaving them to live with the consequences.

Commuter mini bus driver More Kondo, 30, was busy decanting petrol from a large jerrycan into a smaller container to share with a fellow driver.

“If it were another leader, right now this country should have shut down to mourn,” he said. “But he was an autocrat.

“Had he left power early and the country in a better shape, we would be celebrating his life and would have seriously shut down the country in honour of him.”

Mugabe died on Friday aged 95 at a Singapore hospital.

Lauded by some as liberator and for his uncompromising stance against the West, Mugabe led a controversial land-grab programme nearly two decades ago — seizing commercial farmland from whites.

This policy is widely blamed for having contributed to the collapse of the once-thriving economy.

Zimbabweans struggle daily to access basic services, while inflation hovers in triple digits. Many people on Saturday said they had more pressing needs to attend to than mourning.

“We not going to the funeral,” said Kondo shaking out remaining drops of petrol in the container that previously had engine oil. “We will be busy trying to make money, we are hungry.”

Fuel in Zimbabwe is in short supply and its price has been increased more than six times since the start of the year — as have prices for several other goods.

Another man, a 35-year-old engineering graduate who would only give his first name, Tonde, was equally unimpressed.

“I have a degree, I’m unemployed and hungry and you expect me to waste my time to go to his funeral? What, after 37 wasted years?

“He stole money and today he is gone,” he said.

‘He destroyed this country’ 

Along Kaguvi street, police officers set up their usual Saturday morning public interaction desks conducting surveys on the public’s views on policing.

People drew comparisons between Mugabe’s death and that of South Africa’s first black president and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, who died in 2013.

“When Mandela died, people went onto the streets, but look at him (Mugabe) — nothing.

“It doesn’t even look like there’s a death (of a former leader),” said 25-year-old auto-spares store keeper Munya Nhamo.

Mugabe, he said, had stolen the 2008 election from opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. “If he had accepted defeat, the country would not be in such a bad shape”.

Ozias Mupeti, 55, stood over his small stall selling fresh ginger and a few packets of paprika and curry.

“He destroyed this country. Now he’s gone and we have nothing left … because of him,” he said angrily. “It’s painful.”

A few metres down the road, ice cream vendor and mother-of-three Tendai Marange, 42, expressed mixed feelings as she waited for customers.

“We are not respecting him (Mugabe) by continuing to work, but when the body arrives we will stop,” she said. “For now we have to work because life is tough these days.

“When Mugabe was there things were better…. if he wanted prices to drop, they would”.

State television carried extensive coverage of the death between the normal weekend programming, such as sports.

Patson Muparadzi was preparing to go to Mugabe’s village for the wake.

Sporting a white Zanu-PF t-shirt emblazoned with Mugabe’s portrait, he said: “We are maybe here at work, but we are grieving.

“We are working so we can raise money for fuel to go to Zvimba (Mugabe’s rural home),” said added.

Willy Salim, 39, a street forex dealer, also mourned Mugabe’s death.

“Darkness has engulfed our country. Zimbabwe will never be the same without Mugabe,” he said.

Post published in: Featured

I only met Robert Mugabe once.

It was 2012, at a school in Tsholotsho. As I shook his hand, I was struck by how soft and delicate it was. It was the hand of a fragile old man. This was the man responsible for the death, rape and torture of thousands of my fellow Zimbabweans. This was the man who had declared my father an enemy of the state, sought to have him assassinated, and disrupted my childhood and education as we were forced to go into hiding.

And yet at that moment, as I held his hand, what I saw was his humanity. An old man who would one day die and go to meet his Maker. Now that day has come. He died in a faraway land, in a hospital in Singapore at a time when Zimbabwean hospitals are crippled by a doctor’s strike, stripped of the power he lusted after and with the nation he once fought to free still yearning for freedom.

There are few figures with a more contested legacy than Robert Mugabe. Across Africa and throughout the world, he divides opinion.

The great freedom fighter who defeated the white supremacist Rhodesian regime.

The teacher who helped build an education system that was the envy of our neighbours.

The brutal dictator who used the repressive colonial state machinery he inherited to continue the subjugation of the masses and extraction of the nation’s wealth for the benefit of a privileged few.

It is tempting to see Mugabe through our chosen lens and ignore the complexity of the character that he was. Some engage in an ahistorical narrative that he was a good guy who turned bad. That ignores both the evil he perpetrated during the early years and the good that he achieved even in his twilight years. In truth, Mugabe the educator, Mugabe the freedom fighter, and Mugabe the dictator were intermingled throughout his life.

Mugabe started his career as a teacher and remained passionate about education until the end. The day I met Mugabe in Tsholostho, he delivered a speech telling the crowd that when my father had first joined the Government of National Unity as education minister he had been highly suspicious of him and how he would fit in as a white person. But that, over time, he’d seen my father’s commitment to the education of all Zimbabwean children and they’d grown to work together well. (Coltart’s father, David, is a Zimbabwean member of parliament for the MDC and a human rights activist – Editor.)

There were several occasions during the GNU that Mugabe intervened on my father’s the side against his lieutenants for the sake of the advancement of education. And yet, even his legacy on education is contested. Just a few kilometres from that school in Tsholotsho, seven teachers were killed at the very start of the Gukurahundi massacres in 1983. Teachers would remain prime targets for intimidation throughout Mugabe’s rule and that legacy continues today after he has gone. Only two weeks ago, I was assaulted and arrested by the police together with a group of teachers who had simply asked for a living wage. The decimation of the education sector in the past two decades is the result.

Mugabe played a critical role against white supremacy

There is no doubt Mugabe played a critical role in the struggle against white supremacy, colonialism and imperialism—not only during the liberation struggle, and as the leader of a frontline state against apartheid, but also throughout his career as an African statesman who spoke out against the hypocrisy of the West.

For that, he continues to be revered across Africa: the leader who told the West what everyone felt, but no one dared to say. As a Pan-Africanist, at times I found myself agreeing with what Mugabe said on global platforms! But sadly he did not practice at home what he preached abroad. While he railed against a global system that shackled Africa, he was keeping his people in chains. Even his legacy as a freedom fighter during the liberation struggle is marred by his cutthroat rise to power within ZANU-PF and the devious use of uMkhonto weSizwe arms caches in Matabeleland for the struggle against apartheid South Africa as a pretext for the crackdown against ZAPU and the massacres during Gukurahundi.

Mugabe did not suddenly become a dictator in the early 2000s as is sometimes portrayed. Two decades earlier, within three years of independence, Mugabe unleashed his North-Korean trained military unit, the Fifth Brigade, into Matabeleland who would kill, rape and torture tens of thousands of Ndebele civilians. But the West turned a blind eye and the Queen even gave Mugabe a knighthood.

It was only when white-owned farms started being violently expropriated that the West took notice. Which brings us to one of Mugabe’s most contested legacies of all: land. As the land reform debate rages in South Africa, some hold out Zimbabwe has a doomsday example of where South Africa is going and others view Mugabe as a hero who took back the land. I, for one, believe that land reform was extremely necessary for Zimbabwe, just as it is in South Africa.

But the violent and chaotic manner in which land reform took place in Zimbabwe — and the mass accumulation of land by black elites — was partly as a result of Mugabe’s own obstruction of land reform in the first two decades after independence and his wrong motivation for implementing land reform: which was never to empower the black majority but about retention of power.

But it was all about power

Retention of power was perhaps Mugabe’s greatest skill.

For decades, he played the game and remained on top. But Zimbabweans learnt the hard way that he was simply part of a system. When he became a liability to that system he was dispensed with to protect the system.

Today, Mugabe — the frail old man — is gone. But Mugabe — the system — remains entrenched.

It is that system, of repression and exploitation for the sake of power retention, that will be Mugabe’s defining legacy. And it remains the task of the Zimbabwean people to defeat it.

** Doug Coltart is a Zimbabwean lawyer and human rights activist.

Post published in: Featured

JOHANNESBURG – Zimbabwe’s former president Robert Mugabe, whose death was announced on Friday, was in power for 37 years, but is far from the only African leader to have ruled for so long.

Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema is Africa’s longest-serving president currently in power after 40 years.

Having come to power in a 1979 coup, he was re-elected in 2016 to a fifth seven-year term in his tiny, oil-rich country.

Here is a rundown of the continent’s leaders in longevity.

– Previous records –

Ethiopia’s late emperor Haile Selassie holds the record for the longest time in power on the African continent. After reigning for 44 years, he was ousted in 1974.

Libya’s Moamer Kadhafi, who ruled with an iron fist for nearly 42 years, was killed in 2011 after a protest movement turned into an armed conflict. Omar Bongo Ondimba governed oil-rich Gabon for more than 41 years until his death from cancer in 2009. Angola’s Jose Eduardo dos Santos stepped down in September 2017, having led his oil-rich country for 38 years.

– More than 30 years –

Among those still in power, Cameroon President Paul Biya is the second longest-serving leader in Africa with more than 36 years in office.

He was re-elected in October 2018 to a seventh term.

In Congo-Brazzaville President Denis Sassou Nguesso has spent 35 years in office, but not in one go.

He first served from 1979 to 1992 and returned in 1997 at the end of a civil war.

Sassou Nguesso was re-elected in March 2016.

In Uganda, Yoweri Museveni has been in power for 33 years.

He took office in January 1986 after winning the war that ousted brutal dictator Idi Amin Dada.

He was elected to a fifth term in February 2016.

In southern Africa’s tiny eSwatini, the former Swaziland, King Mswati III is the continent’s last absolute monarch.

He took the throne in April 1986, more than 33 years ago.

KADOMA, Zimbabwe 

As Zimbabwe’s 1970s liberation war veterans seized white-owned farms about two decades ago, now 71-year-old Danisa Njovo suddenly became a proud owner of a five-hectare farm in Chakari area in the country’s Mashonaland west province. But although Agness, his wife, fought alongside her husband during the war, she owns nothing, not even the couple’s urban home in Kadoma.

Kadoma is a Zimbabwean town, 140 kilometers west of Harare, the country’s capital.

For many like 67-year-old Agness, because she is a woman, even claiming her compensation as one of the fighters during the war did not give any result, she said.

Even today, Agness said, she is amongst millions of women in this Southern African nation, who despite making significant contribution to agriculture on land literally owned by their male counterparts, still have no ownership rights to the farms, the means of production.

“I work on the farm with my children, a farm in my husband’s name and he is the one who goes to the market with our products and nothing in terms of property or land is in my name”, Agness told Anadolu Agency.

Similar to Agness, many women in Zimbabwe in both urban and rural areas have continued to bemoan unfair access to land and properties as they are sidelined.

Farms are being seized from white farmers, but do not benefit the country’s majority of women although the women make greater part of the country’s population with 60%, according to women rights organizations speaking on Zimbabwe’s land question.

Yet the UN’s new sustainable development goals that guide development efforts recognize the significance of property rights for women like Agness all over the world, mainly in rural areas.

According to Zimbabwe’s constitution, everyone has the right, in any part of the country, to procure, hold and dispose of all forms of property, either individually or in association with others irrespective of their sex, gender or marital status.

Even then, the Southern African country is a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women of 1979, the Beijing Platform for Action of 1995 and the SADC Gender and Development Declaration of 1997.

Despite Zimbabwe’s laws dispelling myths around gender disparities in terms of land and property ownership, the country’s rural women still stand out as the worst affected, according to rights activists.

“Poverty is worse amongst Zimbabwean women from rural communities because they make significant contribution to agriculture and are the mainstay of farm labor yet they own nothing nor earn anything from what they produce,” Catherine Mkwapati, a Zimbabwean feminist and director of the Youth Dialogue Action Network — a local civil society organization — told Anadolu Agency.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe, whose economy is agro-based, has 39.6 million hectares land area, very little of it owned by women.

Zimbabwe has an estimated population of 14 million people. According to country’s Gender and Women Affairs Ministry, out of roughly 14 million population, an estimated nine million are women of which 70% live in poverty.

For women rights activists like Mkwapati: “Zimbabwean men in particular continue to own land, govern women’s labor and make agricultural decisions supported by masculine social systems”.

The majority of women lack property ownership, and “women’s access to land is only through their husbands, fathers, brothers or sons,” said Mkwapati.

Trapped in similar situations, many Zimbabwean women have ultimately found it hard to gain equal access to land and property even under the country’s Fast Track Land Reform Program.

But corruption has also played a role in disadvantaging Zimbabwe’s women in land and property ownership, according to women rights organizations such as the Zimbabwe Women Lawyers Association.

“Zimbabwean women always and often are discriminated against in land ownership owing to factors like lack of access to capital, failure to get credit, lack of collateral, customary restrictions, and even lack of knowledge on how they can get land and title deeds,” Marylin Chikwaka, a lawyer from the Zimbabwe Women Lawyers Association, told Anadolu Agency.