Abstract
This chapter explores the challenges associated with diaspora, culture and development with specific reference to Zimbabwe during the period 2001–2011. Its main argument, contrary to the generally held belief, is that for Zimbabwe, the political violence induced emigration of over 3 million citizens in recent years to different corners of the globe has resulted in a cultural schizophrenia and hybridity that in varying degrees manifests itself in the individual, the family and the nation at large. The chapter critically examines causes of emigration and the economic and cultural consequences that have been brought to bear upon Zimbabweans, both abroad and at home. The central concepts of the chapter are anchored about the phenomena of brain drain, remittances, marriage as well as children and the youths. Zimbabwe diaspora is relatively new and is still facing critical teething and adjustment challenges whose net result for Zimbabwe is far from enthusing.
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Notes
- 1.
Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Diaspora. Accessed 19 October 2012.
- 2.
The emphasis in italics is the present writer’s and it is meant to underscore development as it relates to the individual.
- 3.
GDP refers to gross domestic product. HD refers to human development.
- 4.
The very fact that some Zimbabweans found themselves in Malawi is indicative of how desperate the situation had become at home, given the fact that Malawi is considered one of the least developed countries and that only a few decades Malawians came to what is now Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) to work on mines and farms. Mwakasungula (2008, p. 51), citing a study done by the Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation (CHRR), indicates that ‘…Malawians felt that Zimbabweans and other foreign nationals … compete for … scarce resources including healthcare, food, jobs, education, opportunities and services.’
- 5.
In May 2009, African foreigners in general, including Zimbabweans, were subjected to the worst xenophobic attacks in which immigrants from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia and elsewhere were attacked violently and during which some were killed and maimed, apart from having their properties either looted or altogether destroyed.
- 6.
Makwerekwere is a derogatory term for blacks who speak Southern African languages with a perceived preponderance of kwerekwere sounds ‘not found’ in the Sotho/Tswana and Nguni stock of languages.
- 7.
This may in some cases be just a psychological strategy designed to come to terms with the painful fact that one may in reality never come back to really settle owing to the changes in lifestyle and the human attachments that one would naturally make having stayed in the diaspora for many years. While some people will come back, there is no question that there are some who will never do so as a consequence of human nature.
- 8.
At the height of Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown, the current writer and his family could perhaps have starved or struggled much harder than we did had it not been for the financial assistance that we got from friends in the diaspora. At the time, there were severe shortages of cash, commodities and other essentials of life. The market was virtually empty of goods but the black market was thriving while subsisting on foreign currency with which business was transacted. The acute shortage of cash forced people to sleep over outside banks in order to be first in the long queues early the following day to withdraw quotas of cash allowed for each account holder per day which many times was insufficient neither to pay for one’s fare back home nor to buy a loaf of bread, that is, if both the cash and the bread were available. So bad and threatening was the situation that one is, out of sheer emotion, tempted to recount the situation, pointlessly ad nauseam.
- 9.
IOM working paper, Migration and Trade: Sect. 2.4.
- 10.
We place emphasis on their fields of training because it is also very common for Zimbabweans who outmigrated to have, in desperation, opted to do menial jobs, completely outside their professional training at home. Zimbabweans were forced into this survival mode during the terrible economic bite when people were willing to take up any job provided they earned foreign currency with which they could guarantee their own survival as well as the survival of those that they had left back home through the remittance of both money and goods. Jocularly, in diasporic parlance, such people were said to be doing RR jobs, which abbreviates a Shona phrase basa rose rose ‘any kind of job’. Included in this category of RR jobs were caring for the elderly, domestic work, driving, caring for the handicapped and working in all manner of asylums in countries such as Britain, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, among others.
- 11.
It is interesting to note that unhu/ubuntu ‘good behaviour’ is a Bantu word derived from the noun munhu/umuntu ‘a human’. Thus inferentially then, one is regarded as fully human if and only if they give evidence of good and moral behaviour in their day to day living.
- 12.
This view, from a Zimbabwe culture standpoint, is evidenced by such phenomena as the provision of nude beaches, the legalisation of same-sex marriages, production and consumption of pornography, legalisation of abortion, and an attitude of indifference to religion, among other Western cultural practices.
- 13.
Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian writer, critic, commentator and intellectual of international renown. The publication cited above, Things Fall Apart (1958), is the most widely read book on African literature, and in it, he explores the clash between the Igbo traditional way of life and the nascent encroachments of Western colonisation in Nigeria. His prognosis of the fierce clash of cultures between Africa and the west can widely be extrapolated for other African communities with very little need for local modifications.
- 14.
This point must never however be misconstrued to mean that there are no abusive parents in Zimbabwe as making such a generalised claim would amount to peddling a transparent lie. All we are saying is that given the extended family set-up which due to modernity has itself also come under strain, there are sociological mechanisms of dealing with the problem without having to resort to ‘extreme’ state-intervention methods such as sending a child into foster care. Doing so in our cultural set-up would amount to summoning strangers to arbitrate in private, family disagreements, something which is totally repugnant.
- 15.
A local newspaper, Newsday, of Thursday, 26 May 2011,carried the story of an 18-year-old young woman, Lorraine Mbulawa, who ‘repeatedly stabbed her mother as she slept’ and who was tried and ‘walked free from court after a UK judge [Justice Keith] accepted she believed she was acting on instructions of evil spirits’. At the point of trial, she had been separated from her mother for 2 years. Such are some of the sociocultural hazards of diaspora to both parents and children alike.
- 16.
If indeed the beating that the journalists describe is true, whereby the boy was being beaten with electric cords while hanging in the basement then, even by Zimbabwean standards, no matter how the boy had misbehaved, he must not have been disciplined in such a cruel and inhuman way. The family-clan support system would have promptly stepped in to strongly reprimand the father without however leaving him dispossessed of his errant son.
- 17.
Refer to the footnote above that captures the story of Lorraine Mbulawa who stabbed her mother several times while she was in bed in the United Kingdom and who the judge allowed to go scot-free.
- 18.
The suitable role models that are being referred to here are people that have been able to transform and ameliorate their lot from squalor and abject poverty to become professionals: accountants, engineers, linguists, doctors, lawyers, etc., through the midwifery of discipline and personal exertion in education and study.
- 19.
It is indeed true that people referred to fuel in general and to petrol in particular as liquid gold due to its severe scarcity on the open market. Often it was ever available on the black market but at extortionate prices.
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Matambirofa, F. (2014). Diaspora, Cultural Disintegration and Underdevelopment: The Case of Zimbabwe, 2001–2011. In: Sahoo, S., Pattanaik, B. (eds) Global Diasporas and Development. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1047-4_15
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