Fleeing SA as a documented migrant
At least 74 Zimbabweans fled Mossel Bay in early June following the killing of foreign nationals. One of them told us his story. By May, Langton Gumira liked his life – but it hadn’t always been that way. He and his wife were two of an estimated one million Zimbabweans who had fled to South […] The post Fleeing SA as a documented migrant appeared first on The Namibian .
At least 74 Zimbabweans fled Mossel Bay in early June following the killing of foreign nationals. One of them told us his story.
By May, Langton Gumira liked his life – but it hadn’t always been that way.
He and his wife were two of an estimated one million Zimbabweans who had fled to South Africa in the mid-2000s.
When Gumira and his wife arrived in 2006, the situation in Zimbabwe had become desperate.
Inflation had passed 1 000%, the shops were empty of food, fuel and electricity were only sporadically available, and hundreds of thousands were still living with the consequences of the previous year’s operation Murambatsvina – the Mugabe government’s campaign of forced evictions.
“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark,” the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire famously wrote.
Gumira says something similar, if less poetic.
“I loved my country. I loved Zimbabwe. But it was not a place we could survive.”
