Dear Family and Friends,
It’s the time of year when we keep looking up for signs of those dark purple clouds that bring the rain. With the approach of a Super El Nino, we know it’s going to be bad but instead of trying to prepare for it, all eyes are on the yellow machines of destruction. The ongoing destruction of homes, shops and vendors markets by local authorities is tearing lives apart across the country. Every day it feels like a perfect storm of despair and discontent is building to boiling point.
For many the despair began months ago when their sources of survival were lost when thousands of Zimbabweans were deported from South Africa in July 2026. It is a story that is barely even mentioned anymore and yet 200,000 people have come home since July, on the run from violent anti- foreigner protestors who were not stopped by their own government. Many returnees lost their employment benefits, pensions, and unpaid wages in South Africa. Many had to leave all their possessions behind as they literally ran for their lives. They lost their ability to help their families in Zimbabwe and lost their ability to help themselves. They came back with nothing, to nothing. The government here told them to go back to the rural areas to “start their projects there” without acknowledging that Zimbabweans in South Africa had become the equivalent of a social welfare system for hundreds of thousands of people here. They sent money home for rent, to pay school fees, buy groceries and medicines for their families here. Now all those resources are gone and the 200,000 returnees and those they were supporting are all left watching in horror, alongside the rest of us, as the bulldozer destruction campaign in Zimbabwe continues.
The first numbers of the bulldozer’s demolished buildings have just been released. Local Government Minister Daniel Garwe said 16,529 “illegal structures” have been demolished. He said 35,365 “illegal businesses and activities” had been affected. He said the Operation was meant to restore order but didn’t say why there was no order in the first place. He did not explain why people who have been paying Municipal bills for years were now having their homes destroyed by that same Municipality. He did not say how many lives had been directly impacted by those 16,529 demolitions. Was it four per structure, six, ten, twenty? The numbers are terrifying and each one is a human being, a Dad unable to earn, a Mum unable to feed her family, a child unable to go to school and for all of them, nowhere to live. Minster Garwe said “Operation Chenesa is an unyielding, non-negotiable instrument of good governance.” They are words, these are lives.
Those of you who have been reading my Letters From Zimbabwe for a long time, will remember the last mass destruction of human settlements which took place in Zimbabwe in Operation Murambatsvina in mid-winter 2005. The UN sent Special Envoy Anna Tibaijuka to Zimbabwe to investigate and her report said the operation was a “disastrous venture” that left approximately 700,000 people homeless or without a livelihood, and indirectly affected an estimated 2.4 million people. 2.4 million people then, how many this time?
We may not know the number now but the human face of it is everywhere to see. A huge Durawall Market has just been demolished in my home town. Hundreds of people working there have instantly lost their ability to earn a living. This was the place you came to for hardware, pipes, tools, tyres, strapping, building materials. It was here you could buy bowls and buckets; you could bargain for a 10kg pocket of potatoes or a single handful of garlic bulbs or red hot chillies. Now it looks like a war zone, a pile of smoking litter, mounds of rubble, walls, stalls and roofing all gone. Three women sit in the rubble under black umbrellas trying to sell little bowls of tomatoes. Youngsters who once whistled and called out for you to come and look at their wares are now sitting in groups on the kerbs, looking desolate, broken, lost.
I meet a friend. “Is your house OK,” I ask. “Have the bulldozers come there?” She puts her hands over her face and then tells me: “I dread it, every day, every night. I can’t sleep, my BP is so high. All I can do is wait.”
The perfect storm in Zimbabwe seems inevitable. Please don’t forget us.
My new book, “A Hammock Under the Zimbabwean Sky. Stories from a time of innocence,” is now available from my website. Click here to order yours: https://cathybuckle.co.zw/books/
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Until next time, thanks for reading this Letter From Zimbabwe now in its 26th year, and my books about life in Zimbabwe, a country in waiting.
Ndini shamwari yenyu (I am your friend)
Love Cathy 13th November 2026. Copyright © Cathy Buckle https://cathybuckle.co.zw/
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