CPW Virtual Summer Week in Review | Day 5 - A Report on A Talk on Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe and the #ZimbabweanLivesMatter Movement
By Cathy Scott
Our first two speakers on the August Online CPW (Diamuid O’Murchu, Derek Reeve), offered a critique of the contemporary Institutional church, naming the dangers of clericalism, sexism and the disempowerment of the laity, and encouraging us to both form and join local groups engaged in social action and faith-life sharing as a way of authentically living out the Gospel and being church in the 21st Century. “Don’t ask permission”, they said, “just do it!”
Christine Cusack, a CPW member from the Leicester area is well networked with such groups locally. She invited along a speaker to speak at the virtual week, who had joined one of her groups and was concerned to help her fellow Zimbabweans in the wake of the Corona virus pandemic.
She told us that were many families locally who were struggling to survive – refugees and asylum seekers who had fled the regime of Emmerson Mnangagwa, who took over as President of Zimbabwe three years ago.
The group in Leicester has befriended this community, helping them to navigate the benefits system, access food points and ensure they are obtaining the assistance to which they are entitled.
The speaker told us that their group is also anxious to raise the ongoing crippling economic crisis which grips Zimbabwe (the situation was dire even before Covid 19 complicated matters still further) as well as growing concerns over human rights abuses by the regime and the repression of opposition movements such as the Movement for Democratic Change.
They told the group that Zimbabwe’s infrastructure, health, education, economy, and food production are deteriorating and there seems no end in sight, no hope of light at the end of the tunnel anytime soon.
They feel that it’s important, in addition to helping our isolated communities of refugees in our cities, to raise with our MPs here locally and our government ministers the instances of human rights violations committed in Zimbabwe, and for foreign governments to try to assist in whatever way they can – although even neighbouring African countries which try to intervene, such as South Africa, are often rebuffed in the process.
The Catholic Church, long a beacon of light in terms of naming the injustices rife in Zimbabwe continues its fraught mission, and deserves our support. The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace has highlighted human rights violations there for decades, and monitors the heavily state controlled elections. It’s assessment of those in 2018 were that although they were less violent than previous ones, intimidation, isolation, denial of food and land, were all routinely levelled at opposition parties and their activists, particularly in the provinces where party infrastructure had taken over from collapsed state institutions.
The speaker continues to interact with fellow Catholics in the Leicester area as well as the Zimbabwean Catholic Community in the UK which is well organised and active in its advocacy and fundraising.
#ZimbabweanLivesMatter is a movement which has been started to raise awareness globally and anyone interested can follow the hashtag to keep updated with events as they happen in Zimbabwe.