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The Narratives and Counter-narratives ofZimbabwean Asylum: female voicesTerence RangerPublished online: 06 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Terence Ranger (2005) The Narratives and Counter-narratives of Zimbabwean Asylum:female voices, Third World Quarterly, 26:3, 405-421, DOI: 10.1080/01436590500033636

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The Narratives and Counter-narrativesof Zimbabwean Asylum: female voices

TERENCE RANGER

ABSTRACT Social historians of Africa in general, and of Zimbabwe in particular,have learnt how to make use of colonial criminal court records by reading themboth with and against the grain. Now historians of Zimbabwe are beingpresented with another sort of court record. Many of them are on the BritainZimbabwe Society panel of ‘expert’ assessors of Zimbabwean asylum appeals.They see the narrative statements of asylum-seekers and the counter-narrativesof the Home Office refusal letters. This paper argues that read both with andagainst the grain these case records offer a revealing way into postcolonialinteractions.For the Home Office, as for the British Government in general, we live in apostcolonial world in which memories, legacies and responsibilities ofcolonialism have become redundant. Meanwhile asylum-seekers reassert theimage of imperial Britain as a country of justice and fairplay. Taking the casesof Zimbabwean women asylum-seekers the paper reveals the dialogue betweenthese two perceptions of the world and the callous injustice which it produces.

Introduction

Social historians of Zimbabwe have increasingly made use of Rhodesiancolonial court records, both criminal and civil. An abundance of preparatoryexamination files survive for each of Zimbabwe’s 50 or so districts. They havemany limitations as evidence. The examinations were often conducted bothin English and in several different vernaculars, without adequate translation.There was no shorthand record. The presiding magistrate or NativeCommissioner was often ignorant of African custom. Nevertheless, theyhave been used to great effect. Sometimes—as in Diana Jeater’s papers oneastern Zimbabwe or in my own on the Zimbabwean south-west—it ispossible to use these official records ‘with the grain’ so as to examine colonialtheory and practice. Jeater has been studying court records as evidence forthe emergence and development of white stereotypes about African society; Ihave used them to explore the boundaries between ‘legitimate’ and‘illegitimate’ violence by Rhodesian whites against blacks.1

But it is also possible to use the court records ‘against the grain’ and tohear African voices rising out of them. I have used them myself to explore the

Terence Ranger is at St Antony’s College, Oxford, OX2 6JF, UK. Email: terence.ranger@sant.ox.ac.uk.

Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp 405 – 421, 2005

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/05/030405–17 # 2005 Third World Quarterly

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ideas and practices of so-called ‘witchcraft’ and the changing patterns ofAfrican gender relations.2 Younger scholars are exploring crimes committedboth against and by African women.3 Partly because witchcraft accusations,rape and domestic violence would not have come to the Native Commis-sioner’s courts at all unless African women had taken them there, theseflawed records nevertheless reveal female agency. As Koni Benson and JoyceChadya write in their forthcoming article about violence against Africanwomen in Bulawayo during the 1940s and 1950s:

These records provide us with a rare opportunity to hear African womenspeaking about their lived experiences in a city undergoing rapid physical andsocial change. There are no other archival records for the 1940s and 1950swhere poor and working class women speak in their own voice, in their ownlanguages, for pages and pages, about their personal lives. For this reason wehave chosen to quote women’s testimonies at length.4

Above all, court testimonies are unambiguously narratives. So in one of myown papers I confess that:

I shall unashamedly tell stories and allow African voices to be heard. For this,in the end, is the main advantage of the court records. The cases deal withindividual people. . .They throw bright shafts of light into a darkness which it isdifficult to illuminate even through oral interview.

Today, in Britain, many social historians of Zimbabwe are being presentedwith another kind of quasi-judicial record—folders of material containing theapplications of Zimbabwean asylum-seekers and the judgements made uponthem byHomeOffice assessors and adjudicators. I am president of the Britain-Zimbabwe Society, which has drawn up a list of ‘expert’ asylum assessors andprovided it to the Law Society. Diana Jeater is chair of the society. Both of us,and other historians of Zimbabwe, are on this list.5 I myself have writtenassessments of some 80 Zimbabwean asylum cases. I am beginning to amassan archive which rivals my notes on the Rhodesian preparatory examinationfiles in the National Archives of Zimbabwe. Expert assessors cannot disclosethe identities either of asylum-seekers or of adjudicators. Nevertheless theasylum files are irresistible to a social historian. They offer exactly the sameopportunities as the colonial preparatory examinations to read the officialrecord ‘with the grain’ in order to explore ‘the mind of the Home Office’, andto read it ‘against the grain’ so that Zimbabwean voices can be heard. TheRhodesian files enable us to study the colonial encounter. The asylum filesallow us to study the postcolonial encounter.6

The asylum appeal files offer both narratives and counter-narratives. I amusually sent three major texts—the narrative statement of the asylum-seeker;the record of interview between the asylum-seeker and a Home Office official;and the text of the refusal letter which sets out the reasons why the claim forasylum has been refused. I rarely see the record of the proceedings of ahearing nor the texts of the final judgements made on the appeals.7

So it is the applicant’s narrative and the counter-narrative of the refusalletters and adjudicators’ determinations I shall draw on.8 Like the colonial

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Rhodesian court records these contemporary files are flawed documents. Theasylum-seekers’ narratives are rarely the spontaneous testimony of theapplicant but reflect the guidance of solicitors and the ‘street wisdom’ ofother asylum-seekers who offer advice on what they think the adjudicatorswant to hear. (In one or two cases I have been able to see these processes atwork—an applicant, badly advised by a previous solicitor—or by friends—devotes the greater part of a narrative to explaining why previous statementswere not true but this one is). The statements rarely reflect emotion;adjectives are used sparingly—much more even so than in the Rhodesiancourt records. There is an obvious effort to appear ‘objective’. Terribleexperiences are narrated with astonishing calm. The oral interviews areparticularly useless. They are structured almost entirely around a series oftest questions used by the Home Office to determine whether an applicantreally knows about opposition politics in Zimbabwe. The refusal letters areadversarial, often absurdly so.Nevertheless, these documents can be read. And when they are read they

reveal asylum-seeker narratives about two things—the political situation incontemporary Zimbabwe, and the refugee’s vision of Britain. They revealHome Office and judicial counter-narratives both about Zimbabwe andabout the limits of Britain’s commitment either to human rights or to itspostcolonial obligations.

The culture of Zimbabwean asylum

Zimbabwean asylum-seekers are very different from any others. Zimbabwe isthe most literate country in Africa and the most familiar with English. Theoverwhelming majority of Zimbabwean refugees speak and write excellentEnglish. They are Christian. They support Manchester United or Arsenal.Some of them enjoy cricket. Most are well educated. Large numbers of theircompatriots, working legally in Britain, staff the public and private careindustries—over the last three years Zimbabwean nurses have become thefourth largest nationality in the NHS; there are Zimbabwean social workersand Zimbabwean school teachers. Zimbabweans are to be found everywherecaring for ancient Britons in retirement homes. Before the British impositionof visa requirements, all Zimbabwean asylum-seekers arrived on validpassports and on flights for which they had paid. Until recently there was nomention of people-smuggling or of the provision of false documents inasylum-seeker testimonies. Zimbabweans don’t need the instruction in Britishlanguage, belief and culture which Blunkett urges. To an extent which realisesRobert Mugabe’s worst fears about dependency and globalisation they feelBritish, or at least part of the same universe of thought and culture which theBritish inhabit.In many ways, of course, they are more British than the British. They

profess belief in British justice. ‘I was advised by my party’, wrote a teacher inFebruary 2002, ‘to come to Great Britain as it was the only democraticcountry that would listen to my problems’. Asylum-seekers from othercountries joke that Zimbabweans are astonished to find people who cannot

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speak English—and also that they do not think much of the way the Englishspeak it themselves! Zimbabwean Christians are much more ferventlyChristian than almost any Briton. Reverend Noah Papasha, writing in theZimbabwean press, remarked that a small number of whites armed withChristian faith arrived in southern Africa in the nineteenth century and thatsoon they dominated it. The same would happen with Zimbabweanmissionaries to pagan Britain today. But it turns out that missionaries havean easier time in pre- rather than post-Christian societies. David Maxwell hasmade a study of the Forward in Faith Movement, a mission sent into the‘darkness’ of suburban London by the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God. Thewarmth of their worship attracted white converts in both Glasgow andLondon. But these converts were predictably marginal men and women.Soon they found Zimbabwean Christianity unbearably upbeat. ‘Zimbab-weans do not understand our depression’, complained one. ‘They are just toocheerful!’ For their part, the Zimbabwean missionaries deplored theirconverts’ lack of industry and discipline—‘Whites have too many humanrights’.9

Zimbabwean asylum-seekers and the postcolonial trap

Zimbabwean asylum-seekers do not have too many human rights, though.They are caught between the hostility of the Zimbabwean state and its pressand the repudiating coldness of their reception in Britain. IndeedZimbabwean asylum-seekers in Britain find themselves in a more clearlydefined postcolonial predicament than refugees from any other country.There are more Zimbabweans in Britain than anywhere else in the world

outside their country—estimates published in Zimbabwe itself range betweenas few as 176 400 and as many as 1.1 million10—and even for Zimbabweanswho are not seeking asylum this poses problems with a Zimbabwegovernment which now sees itself as ‘at war’ with Britain.11 The state pressin Zimbabwe views the Zimbabwe diaspora in Britain very negatively.12 As itaccurately points out, the departure of nurses and doctors for Britain hasstripped the Zimbabwean health services. Recruitment of some Zimbabweansinto the British army has been denounced as part of a British plot to raisecommandos to topple Mugabe. When a Zimbabwean bag-piper was killed bya sniper in Basra the Zimbabwean government refused to allow his family tobring the body back home for burial. Zimbabweans who chose to serve whatwas in effect an ‘enemy country’ could be buried there. Britain is exploitingZimbabweans as cheap labour. In November 2002 the Sunday Mail quotedInformation Minister, Jonathan Moyo, to the effect that ‘unskilled and semi-skilled Zimbabweans that are being recruited in their thousands. . .by Britainare actually being used as slave labour. . .They toil for long hours for littlereturn. . .Vulnerable youths [have been encouraged] to emigrate in a vainattempt to prove that there is political turmoil in Zimbabwe. They are thenmade to live in basements and work under slave conditions’. Moyo went onto single out asylum-seekers in particular:

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We know that thousands of Zimbabweans have been mobilised by the MDC[and] Amani Trust. . .and are being treated like slaves. The Zimbabweans aretold to claim that they are victims of political violence and torture. They crosswith letters from MDC officials alleging that the Government has persecutedthem. A recent case is that of an eighteen-year-old girl from Bulawayo who toldthe British media that she had fled political persecution of her family inZimbabwe by Zanu-PF. Investigations by Zimbabwean authorities, however,showed that she was actually the daughter of a Zanu-PF councillor who hadjust been re-elected in the recent local government elections.13

On its side, however, Britain was hardly welcoming Zimbabweans with openarms. The Blair government took a postcolonial line in another sense. As faras it was concerned colonialism was over and had left no obligations. Arecent Zimbabwean ‘Land Review Committee’ accurately describes whathappened:

The British Conservative Government under John Major had agreed toassist with further funding for land reform in 1996. However, with thecoming to power of Tony Blair’s Labour Government in 1997 matters cameto a head. The Labour Government refused to advance the process of landreform, in effect revoking Britain’s obligations as per the Lancaster Houseunderstanding. In a letter to the Zimbabwe Minister of Agriculture. . .thethen Secretary of State for International Development, Ms Claire Shortstated thus:

‘I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a specialresponsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a newGovernment from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonialinterests. My own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonised notcolonisers’.14

Britain’s stated development policy was now not to seek to remedy colonialunder-development but to provide assistance wherever in the world there wasthe greatest poverty. Exactly the same position has been adopted withBritain’s asylum policy. No ‘special responsibility’ is accepted for Zimbab-wean or other Commonwealth applicants—Zimbabweans may feel part ofthe same culture as Britain but this feeling is certainly not mutual.Zimbabwean applicants have claims, if at all, arising only from internationalconventions on refugees and on human rights and not from an unequallyshared colonial history.Yet there are contradictions and tensions within British policy itself. The

Foreign Office has taken the lead in stigmatising Zimbabwe within thatquintessentially postcolonial institution, the Commonwealth. Over the pastthree years the Foreign Office has depicted Zimbabwe as a uniquelydangerous and lawless place. The Home Office, on the other hand, hasconstantly sought to minimise these dangers. As Zimbabwe’s suspensionfrom the Commonwealth continues and President Mugabe has renounced itas a postcolonial illusion, the Foreign Office insists that no Zimbabweanasylum-seeker should be sent back home. But even today some ‘failed’Zimbabwean asylum-seekers are receiving letters from Home Office officials

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telling them that it is quite safe to return home and that they should prepareto do so.Nevertheless the Home Office has reluctantly come to accept some of the

realities of Zimbabwean violence. It’s Country Information and Policy Unit(CIPU) provides adjudicators with six-monthly briefings on Zimbabwe (andall other countries from which asylum-seekers come). The CIPU briefings forZimbabwe in April and October 2001 were grossly inadequate.15 Theyfocussed almost entirely on the favourite postcolonial stereotypes of race andethnicity. They contained a great deal about whites and their suffering eventhough hardly any white asylum-seekers appear before adjudicators. (Thatmost self-righteous of New Labour postcolonialists, Peter Hain, hadannounced emergency plans to receive thousands of white Zimbabweansand had asked local councils to review what housing and other facilities theycould provide. But the mass exodus of whites from Zimbabwe to Britain didnot materialise and even if it had, few incoming whites would have been dealtwith by asylum tribunals).So far as violence against Africans was concerned, the 2001 reports

focussed on ‘tribalism’—the Ndebele were in danger from the Shona. But as Iwrote in my widely publicised critique of the 2001 briefings: ‘An ethnicexplanation does not make sense today. . .The violence that is happening inMatabeleland today is in no sense a ‘‘Shona’’ attack on ‘‘the Ndebele’’. Itsmain instruments are Ndebele-speaking ex-guerrillas’. The CIPU briefingsignored the dynamics of internal African politics in Zimbabwe and theattacks by Zanu-PF youth, war veterans and youth militia on supporters ofthe MDC or those perceived to be so.16

Under criticism, however, the CIPU reports on Zimbabwe have improveda great deal. The UK Immigration Advisory Services published late in 2003an assessment of CIPU reports on a number of countries which generateasylum-seekers. This included an evaluation of the current Zimbabwecountry report. There were still criticisms to be made but by comparison tosome of the others the Zimbabwe 2003 report emerged as relatively full andwell informed. It emphasises the dangers to which MDC activists areexposed. It even recognises that people have been endangered because theybelong to certain occupational categories—like rural school teachers or civilservants—thought to be sympathetic to the MDC. It acknowledges that rapehas been used to punish male MDC activists through their wives anddaughters.17 Perhaps as a result of this improvement in reporting, there was adramatic increase in the percentages of favourable Zimbabwean asylumdecisions between 2001 and 2002. In 2002 42 per cent of Zimbabweanasylum-seekers were granted refugee status as against only 6 per cent in 2001;in 2002 38 per cent of appeals against refusals were allowed as against 23 percent in 2001.18

But there has been a British Government reaction against the increasingnumbers and success of Zimbabwean asylum applications. (There were 7655such applications in 2002 against only 2140 in 2001). The number ofZimbabwean asylum-seekers had rapidly come to rival even that of theChinese. Zimbabwean asylum had become part of the wider ‘asylum crisis’

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and of Blair’s promise to reduce applications. The means taken to do this forZimbabwe have been brutally simple and effective. At the beginning ofNovember 2002 a visa requirement was imposed on all Zimbabweanstravelling to Britain. It was no longer good enough to turn up at the airport,as nearly all the asylum-seekers had done, with a passport and a plane ticket.Now Zimbabweans could not board a flight unless they had a visa issued bythe British High Commission. Visa fees are high. No one can apply forasylum at the British High Commission in Harare. The result has been thatZimbabwean asylum-seekers either arrive in Britain having provided falseinformation to obtain their visa or travelling on bogus South Africanpassports, obtained at great expense from ‘agents’. In either case an asylumclaim is fatally damaged and in the latter case Zimbabweans have beendeported to South Africa and sent from there back to Zimbabwe.19 Underthe proposed new asylum legislation it will become a criminal offence,punishable by a fine or up to two-years imprisonment to enter Britainwithout valid documents.20 The British Government still professes that itwishes to honour its international obligations to those Zimbabweans‘genuinely’ in need of asylum. It does not say, however, how they can nowget to Britain in the first place.21

Asylum narratives in the postcolonial context

These changing dynamics can be seen at play in Zimbabwean asylumnarratives and Home Office counter-narratives. In this second section ofmy paper I will draw upon asylum testimonies as in the past I have drawnupon criminal court records. And as scholars have increasingly done withcourt records I shall focus particularly on the experience of Zimbabweanwomen. More than half of the Zimbabwean asylum cases I have beenasked to assess have involved women. This is no doubt because I am sentfew cases which involve major MDC activists, some of whom are womenbut most of whom are men. My cases involve wives and daughters;women teachers and soldiers and civil servants; women storekeepers andnurses.

The case of the Bulawayo schoolgirl

Since I quoted Zimbabwe’s Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo,mocking a bogus claim for asylum by ‘an eighteen-year-old girl fromBulawayo’ I want to begin with the narrative of another Bulawayo eighteen-year-old. Her case illustrates the way in which young women in Zimbabwecan be removed from the protection of state agencies. It exemplifies the plightof apolitical bystanders and illustrates the callous narrowness of initial HomeOffice responses to them.In her statement of late July 2002 the young woman declared openly:

I never participated in any activities of the MDC. . .It is not only MDC activistsand members who are at risk of persecution. . .The Zanu-PF agents [war

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veterans and youth militia] brutalise anyone who they think is not with Zanu-PF or has links with the MDC and are not held accountable for their actions.

This A level schoolgirl lived with her uncle in a township. The uncle was anMDC activist. In December 2001, in the aftermath of the disappearance anddeath of the Bulawayo war-veteran’s leader, Cain Nkala:

. . .a group of four Zanu-PF men came to my home. They forced their way in.They took my uncle. They called him a traitor and a slave for the white people.They said my uncle was suspected of killing a war veteran. . .They beat him withbarbed wire. He was bleeding profusely. When my mother begged them to stopand tried to intervene they turned on her and beat her with the barbed wire too.My uncle was taken away. The following day my mother and I reported theincident to the police. The police took our details and then simply said theywere not able to deal with our case. They said they would not get involved inmatters arising out of politics. My mother begged them for assistance but theywere adamant that they would not help us. . .

Deprived of her uncle’s protection the girl was an easy target:

War veterans and youth militia would constantly come to my home. . .at leasttwice a week. . .They would stay in our house and would force my mother and Ito chant Zanu-PF slogans and sing Zanu-PF songs. We would have to shoutinsults about the MDC. It was very frightening as they were often drunk andaggressive. . .

A man called M was a very senior war veteran. He was in his fifties. Sometimeat the beginning of January 2002 he came to my home and asked my mother if Icould ‘go with him’. My mother said that I was far too young for him. M wasangered by this. He pulled me to him and began to fondle my breasts in front ofmy mother. I was scared, ashamed and embarrassed. He then dragged me to hiscar and pushed me inside. . .M drove me to a farm, I was very scared during thedrive and did not speak at all. . .M took me to a room in the farmhouse. Hepushed me on to the bed. He pulled my skirt up and raped me. His handcovered my mouth. I was in a great amount of pain. He was very rough and Iwas a virgin. . .After 24 hours M came back to the room. He said he wanted a‘last one’ and them proceeded to rape me again.

M then drove her home and she and her mother went to the health clinicbecause they feared she might be infected. But ‘a nurse at the clinic said theycould not see me until I had reported the matter to the police and hadobtained a receipt confirming that a report had been lodged’. But ‘we knewthe police would not help’.A few days later M raped her again; then she was gang-raped by four

veterans. This time she did go to the police and was again sent away becausethey could not investigate ‘political matters’. Then M took her as ‘his secondwife’; ‘raped me in front of my mother’; and took her to his house where heintroduced her to many members of his family as his wife. The house wasguarded night and day. She was unable to go to school—‘this upset mebecause I was studying for my A levels. My mother tried asking the [Catholic]

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Church to help us but they were powerless to help’. Eventually a neighbourtook pity on her; gave her money and a letter of introduction to a nun inHarare; she managed to slip away from a church service in Bulawayo, travelto Harare, was provided with an air ticket and arrived at Heathrow in midJuly 2002 where she immediately claimed asylum.The truth of her story was never an issue in the subsequent asylum

process. The Home Office accepted her credibility. Instead the letter ofrefusal issued by the Home Office Integrated Casework Directorate inSeptember 2002 denied that she fell within the terms of the UnitedNations Convention relating to the status of refugees. ‘The Secretary ofState refuses to accept that Zanu-PF and its agents would accept that youhad any involvement with the MDC’; she had never attend a rally andhad shown herself in the Home Office interview ignorant of ‘who areresponsible for specific policies within the party [and] concerning basicMDC facts’. Moreover, while the Secretary of State was ‘aware that youwere subject to various sexual attacks from agents of Zanu-PF’ he ‘ingeneral takes the view that such individuals cannot be regarded as ‘‘agentsof persecution’’ within the terms of the 1951 Convention’. They were not,in other words, formal officers of the Zimbabwe state. In any case, therefusal letter added ‘the fact that you were not killed during thistime. . .causes the Secretary of State to believe that agents of Zanu-PFhave no interest in killing you’.This story has a happy ending. Assisted by a determined solicitor she took

her case to the Immigration Appellate Authority. On 20 February 2003 anadjudicator found in her favour, noting that ‘I cannot see in the long refusalletter any acknowledgement of the particular vulnerability of the appellant’.The decision was one of a number which challenged a narrowly politicaldefinition of refugee status.22

The case of the primary school teacher

In his recently published Canon Collins Memorial Lecture, Education andthe Crisis in Zimbabwe, the academic and activist, Brian Raftopolous,reminds us that rape was a threat also faced by female school teachers inrural Zimbabwean schools:

As a result of the assault by state agencies between the period 2000 – 2002, fiveteachers were killed, 119 raped and many more were maimed, kidnapped,tortured and displaced.23

However, the narrative I want to cite now is not about rape but aboutanother key issue which has often been poorly understood by Home Officeofficials—symbolic politics in Zimbabwe and its often inadvertent expression.The Zanu-PF greeting is a clenched fist, symbol of authority: the MDCgreeting, by contrast, is an open palm. Quite inadvertent references to, ordepictions of, the open hand can get people into trouble. The Amani TrustReport of 27 June 2000, for instance, records ‘political violence in Zimbabwesince 14 February 2000’. For 4 May an incident is reported from Bulawayo:

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A street vendor selling herbal products that carry a warning in Ndebele thattouching the product makes the palm of the hand hot, is accused of supportingthe MDC on the grounds that his product mentions the palm of the hand, isseverely beaten and hospitalised.

The primary school teacher’s narrative, written in March 2002, describes asimilar episode. The narrator is a woman in her late twenties, a Catholic bornin Bulawayo, and trained as a primary teacher. She obtained a job in a ruralarea north of Bulawayo and lived ‘in teachers’ accommodation within theschool grounds’:

I was not a member of the MDC and did not campaign for them or partake inany other form of activity on their behalf. . .

I did not voice any political opinions at school as I was very scared of the tacticsused by Zanu-PF supporters and war veterans to silence critics. Anyoneperceived as being a supporter of any party other than Zanu-PF faced violenceand intimidation. The school I taught in was in the countryside. Zanu-PF’ssupport is mainly from the rural areas.

My problems started in December 2001. On 4 December I set the pupils in myGrade 4 class an assignment to be completed during the Christmas vacationperiod. I asked them to draw two open hands and on the finger of each hand toplace a letter. One hand should read ‘Jesus’, the other ‘Peace’. When I set thisassignment I had no idea some parents who were war veterans and/or membersof the Zanu-PF militia would view the assignment as me promoting the MDCto the children.

Around 6.00 pm on 5 December 2001 four men came to my home in the school.They were all war veterans. They were very aggressive. They were very angry. Iwas called a traitor as I supported a party that was a slave to the white people. Iwas told that I had no right to trying to corrupt the children in my care withMDC propaganda which was evil. Initially I did not know what the men weretalking about as I had never discussed politics/the MDC with my pupils. Theythen specifically referred to the ‘Jesus gives peace’ assignment. I tried to explainthat I was not a political person and that the assignment has no politicalconnotations. The war veterans did not believe me. They said that it was wellknown that teachers. . .supported the MDC. They became very brutal. One ofthe war veterans slapped me hard across my face. Another spat at me and thenkicked me and pushed me. He then grabbed a piece of wood from the fire. Hegrabbed the end that was not in the fire [and] used the glowing part of the woodto burn my right wrist. I screamed in agony. I was terrified. I feared for my life.They warned me not to return to the school. I was told that if I came back theywould make sure I regretted it.

Next day in assembly the Head Mistress ‘simply warned us against doing orsaying anything that could be interpreted as having a political meaning’.

During the Christmas vacation the teacher went to her family in Bulawayo,attended hospital, and reported to the very uninterested police. She tried hardto find a teaching position elsewhere but failed. So when the new term beganshe returned to the school. ‘I was the breadwinner of the family. My

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grandmother and siblings do not work. They depend on my income to eatand meet the bills’. So she went back, ‘hoping that the war veterans wouldhave forgotten about the incident or would be too busy to bother withsomeone like me who is not a political activist’.But on 18 January the four men returned and ordered her to leave,

otherwise ‘they would punish me in the way they punished other MDCteachers if I did not leave. They did not want to see me in their communityagain’. Still, out of economic necessity, she stayed on. Then on 6 February anelderly Catholic man warned her to leave at once. Her name was on a list ‘tobe punished’; she was to be taken to a ‘torture base’. At last she decided toleave.When this narrative was first presented to the Home Office assessors it had

not been recognised in the Zimbabwe CIPU report that rural teachers were atrisk. Her story was dismissed as absurd. On 19 March 2002 the refusal letterfrom the Integrated Case Work Directorate informed her that:

. . .the Secretary of State does not consider that by simply getting the children todraw a similar symbol to the MDC’s logo, especially as it contained thewording ‘Jesus Gives Peace’ above the hands, would lead anyone to associate itwith the MDC. Furthermore he does not consider that Zanu-PF would believeit was a hidden political message being distributed to the children’sparents. . .these claims damage your overall credibility.

By the time her case came before an adjudicator later in the year, however, ithad been accepted that rural teachers were in danger. In a decisionpromulgated on 1 August 2002 the adjudicator refused her appeal forprecisely the opposite reason:

I accept that teachers are at risk and that [the district] was (and possibly still is)an area of particular tension. However, merely because the appellant is ateacher does not justify an automatic finding that she as or is at risk ofpersecution. . .The appellant is an educated person. I find that the she will havebeen well aware of the consequences of using the open-handed gesture and tosay that she did not realise that drawing it would have the same effect is simplydisingenuous. I therefore find that she would not have given the children thistype of assignment to do at home (or at all) in the first place.

Once again this sequence of clashes between narrative and counter-narrativewas resolved happily. Aided by the same diligent solicitor, and on a furtherappeal, the primary school teacher who had given her class the basicassignment taught in training colleges all over the world was given leave toremain.

The case of the traumatised niece

You will have noticed that in both these narratives the protagonist was notan MDC activist. The Home Office tests of knowledge about the ‘basic facts’of the MDC were irrelevant to their cases. Another situation in which thesetests were irrelevant was when somebody was put in danger not by their own

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activities in the early 2000s but by the pattern of events in the past. As onemale asylum-seeker put it: ‘it was possible for me to be hurt because of ourfamily history’. (His grandfather had been ‘burnt alive in his house by theFifth Brigade; his father had been killed in 1996.) The initial Home Officeresponse, however, was to dismiss the relevance of history:

The Secretary of State understands your claim that your father was killed in1996 (runs a refusal letter from February 2003). However, he is aware that thisincident was over six years ago following which you continued to live inZimbabwe. He therefore considers this event to be of no significance.

The Home Office concentrated entirely on the immediate present and ignoredthe pre-disposing past.Let me briefly sketch the relevant history so far as western Zimbabwe is

concerned. The guerrilla war of the 1970s was fought by two armies—JoshuaNkomo’s Zipra, which operated mainly in the west and Robert Mugabe’sZanla, which operated in the centre and east. Many deaths took place in the1970s, most as a result of Rhodesian regime violence. Rural populations inthe west supported Nkomo’s party, Zapu, from the early 1960s right throughto independence. People in the rest of the country came to support Mugabe’sparty, Zanu-PF, during the late 1970s. The elections of 1980 gave a two-thirds victory to Mugabe. There was a brief period of cooperation betweenthe two parties and of coexistence between the two guerrilla armies. Thissoon broke down, however. Zipra and Zanla fought each other; Nkomo andZapu were blamed by the government; and there followed years of terribleviolence in western Zimbabwe. Some ex-Zipra became ‘dissidents’, while inorder to break Zapu the government deployed the notorious Fifth Brigadeagainst the civilian population of Matabeleland. Again, many deaths tookplace. This violence ended in December 1987 when Zanu-PF and Zapu cameto a one-sided Unity Agreement. This was a bargain in which Mugabecontrolled the whole country and Zapu veterans were allowed to control localgovernment in Matabeleland. Veterans of both guerrilla armies cametogether in the increasingly powerful Veterans Association.24

Most ex-Zipra guerrillas and most Zapu political veterans supported—andsupport—this compromise. For some years the bulk of the old Zapu voterswent along with it. But there were always those ex-Zapu supporters whorepudiated what they thought to be a forced and unequal unification or whocould not forget the deaths of relatives and their own sufferings at the handsof the Fifth Brigade. Some of these people looked for other parties forsupport against the supposedly united Zanu-PF. In the 1990s they backed theZimbabwe Unity Movement, the Liberty Party or Zapu 2000 until the rise ofthe MDC in late 1999 finally offered them a party with both nation-widesupport and an immediate mass base in Matabeleland.The point that is most relevant to the asylum applications is that a good

deal of the current violence in Matabeleland is an internecine war betweentwo legacies of Nkomo’s Zapu. Most ex-Zipra guerrillas, some of whom havenow come to control the Veterans Association, and most old Zapu officialssupport the regime against the MDC. They have lost their mass support,

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however. And they particularly resent, and regard as traitors, conspicuousold Zapu families who now support the MDC. In this way ‘it is possible to behurt because of family history’.These complexities are clarified by asylum narratives. Here I choose

another story from a woman, this time in her forties. Once again she was notan MDC activist:

I had an MDC membership card but I got rid of it in June 2002 because I didnot want to be identifiable as an MDC supporter by the Zanu-PF. I was a low-level supporter. I was too afraid to get actively involved.

She was too afraid because of her family history. In February 1983 whenshe was sixteen she was living with her aunt in rural Matabeleland. Heraunt was ‘Chairlady for Zapu’. Soldiers of the Fifth Brigade arrived andshe and her ‘brother and cousins were forced to watch and sing songs ofpraise to Robert Mugabe while [my] aunt was literally bayoneted topieces’. Her husband:

. . .first had trouble in the 1980s. He was in the war [as a Zipra guerrilla]. AfterZapu was defeated by Zanu-PF there was a split between Zapu and Zanu soZanu-PF were killing the Zapu soldiers. My husband was in the gang that wasaccused of trying to assassinate Robert Mugabe. That is when his troublestarted.

In 1986 in South Africa her husband was ‘approached by a gang of men andthey questioned him and asked if he knew he was being looked for inZimbabwe. . .They then started hitting him and then he was shot. The lastthing he remembered was a cold thing going across his neck’. When shevisited him in hospital in Johannesburg ‘the wound was very long, from hisear to underneath his throat. The doctor said he was very lucky to be alive’.Thereafter her husband stayed in South Africa but ‘every three or fourmonths my husband would enter Zimbabwe crossing the border on footthrough the river as we had done. It was very dangerous because the riverLimpopo contains many crocodiles and there are lions on the South Africanside’.This woman clearly came from a deeply Zapu family. But her aunt’s death

and her husband’s experiences led her to refuse to accept the UnityAgreement of December 1987. She looked for parties opposed to the Zanu-PF regime. She joined the Liberty Party and after that the MDC. But, as wehave seen, she was afraid to be identified since she was well aware of thedangers presented by her family history. Having been deeply Zapu meantthat she could expect no sympathy from long-term Zanu supporters but italso meant that Zipra war veterans would regard her as a traitor forsupporting the MDC. And despite her caution it was discovered that she didsupport them. She was accosted by veterans in May 2002 and told she ‘wasselling Zanu-PF out to the whites’; in June she was assaulted and raped in herhouse by a gang; in July she received death threats over the phone. Herassailants referred back to the history, telling her that ‘she had not learnt herlessons from the 1980 atrocities’ and shouting ‘a snake’s child is a snake’. So

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she flew to Britain and applied for asylum. A doctor who examined herreported that ‘she feels intense guilt that she has survived’.But the Home Office refusal letter in October 2002 paid no notice to the

history at all. ‘By your own admission’, it said, ‘you were too afraid to beactively involved with the MDC and as such you are not known to be anactive supporter of the MDC [which] casts doubt on the credibility of yourclaims’. And the letter insisted that ‘your application has been considered inthe light of the political situation and conditions in Zimbabwe’ today.But here again a different view could be taken at the higher appellate level.

An adjudicator in the Immigration Appellate Authority promulgated adecision in April 2003 in another case in which history was determinant. Inthis case the young man concerned had applied for asylum as early as March1996, when he was seventeen, years before the emergence of the MDC. Hisfamily lived on a farm in Matabeleland and he narrated a long history ofattacks on them by the Central Intelligence Organisation, including the deathof his brother in 1987 and of his father in January 1994. He himself had beentoo young to be much involved in politics but claimed to have joined a ZapuYouth Club in 1995. By the criterion of his activity in the currentZimbabwean political situation his case had been immediately dismissed inthe initial hearing. But the adjudicator took the view that the history entitledhim to asylum:

[I] appreciate that it is now over seven years since the Appellant lived inZimbabwe and that whilst there he was not politically active to any greatextent. However, he comes from a family which was prominent in the heartlandof the opposition to the Mugabe regime and which was well known to the CIOfor such opposition. The family was broken up and driven out of Zimbabwe bythe persecution of the CIO and in those circumstances I do not think that theAppellant’s return to his own country would be overlooked. . .If the Appellantreturned it is only to be expected that in some way he would support the MDC.

Yet while this determination recognised history it was a postcolonialrecognition. The significant history accepted here is that of post-indepen-dence Zimbabwe and of the record of the Mugabe regime in dealing withopposition. The adjudicating mind does not stretch back before 1980 andinto the ambiguities and traumas of devolved colonialism.

Conclusion

I believe that the narratives I have cited—such a small proportion of the casesI have seen—tell us many things both about the situation in Zimbabwe andabout the dynamics of Home Office responses to it. They show clearly howimportant the mechanism of appeal—now under threat—can be. The firstHome Office considerations are often fatally flawed. I have seen a case inwhich the rejection letter flatly refused to accept that the applicant had been aradio journalist in Zimbabwe, though five minutes on Google showed clearlythat he had in fact been ‘a household name’ as a broadcaster. Theadjudicator’s second consideration can be equally arbitrary. In one case the

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adjudicator found that ‘there is no serious possibility that the appellant hadbeen a teacher in Zimbabwe’—whereupon the man produced a mass ofdocuments which proved conclusively that he had been.But I would like to conclude with Zimbabwean women and their agency in

this situation. Unavoidably the narratives I have presented portray women asvictims. Yet we should not have heard about them at all unless they haddecided that we must do so. The traumatised niece has regular nightmaresabout people being killed. But even some of the gang-raped have survived—the Bulawayo schoolgirl gave her evidence to the adjudicator who allowedher appeal ‘in a positive and cheerful manner’.More generally, my files are full of women in all sorts of roles. There are

district nurses and headmistresses and civil servants in local and centralgovernment; there are women police and women soldiers; there are womenresearchers and NGO administrators. Many of them have shown greatstrength of character and see themselves today as agents rather than victims.The women in the civil service, the police and the army persist in the viewwhich got them into trouble in the first place—‘I have never been a politicallyactive person’, says one, ‘I am not and never have been a member of anypolitical party. As a civil servant I have to be at all times independent andnon-partisan’. It took courage to maintain this view and to refuse to issuearms and ammunition to veterans and militia, as one female soldier did, or torefuse to join assault squads like one female police officer.Other women, of course, were active MDC supporters. Not all teachers

tried—and failed—to lie low. ‘As teachers we were privileged’, says onewoman, ‘to be able to play a pivotal role in educating those in the rural areasof the party’s aims and objectives’. Businesswomen—a famously assertivebreed—retain their self-image despite their losses.‘I am a very brave and strong-willed person’, writes one of them, as she

describes the looting and burning of her stores and guesthouse. ‘But I havenever been so scared. I have never in my life experienced such horror. Thiswas a business we had worked for. This was my life on the line. This was mycountry I was fighting for. I had a daughter to live for. They had taken myhusband’s life’.Like the colonial court case with which I began this lecture, these imperfect

asylum narratives and counter-narratives tell us a great deal about historyand gender and political violence; about commitment to non-partisanship orto a party. They tell us a great deal about postcolonial assumptions both inZimbabwe and in Britain. What worries me most in ending this lecture is thatwe are likely to have many fewer of them in the future as the visa regimebites; as appeals are cut back; and as Zimbabwean asylum-seekers aresilenced.

Notes

1 D Jeater, ‘Rethinking the ‘‘African voice’’: language interpretation in the Native Commissioner’s andMagistrate’s Courts, Melsetter District, Southern Rhodesia, 1896 – 1914’, in S McGrath et al (eds),Rethinking African History, Edinburgh: CAS, 1997; ‘Their idea of justice is so peculiar: SouthernRhodesia, 1890 – 1910’, in P Coss (ed), The Moral World of the Law, Cambridge: CUP, 2000, pp 178 –

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195; Law, Language and Science: The Invention of the Native Mind in Southern Rhodesia, forthcoming;T Ranger, ‘Tales of the wild west: gold diggers and rustlers in south-west Zimbabwe, 1898 – 1940. Anessay in the use of criminal court records for social history’, South African Historical Journal, 28, 1993,pp 40 – 62.

2 T Ranger, ‘Criminal court records and the social history of the Zimbabwean south-west: witchcraftbelief and accusation’, Oxford: 1994; ‘Murder, rape and witchcraft: criminal court data for genderrelations in colonial Matabeleland’, Oxford: unpublished manuscripts, 1995.

3 K Benson & J Chadya, ‘Ukubhinya: gender and social violence in Bulawayo, colonial Zimbabwe,1946 – 1956’ , June 2002, pp 108 – 133; T Zimudzi, ‘African Women, violent crime and the criminal lawin colonial Zimbabwe, 1900 – 1953’, Journal of Southern Africa Studies, 30(3), September 2004, pp499 – 518.

4 Koni Benson & Joyce Chadya, ‘Ukubhinya: Gender and sexual violence in Bulawayo, ColonialZimbabwe, 1946 – 1956’, Zambezia, XX, (i), 2003, p 110.

5 Very many British historians and social scientists are similarly involved as ‘experts’ on other countriesin Europe, Asia and Africa. Anthony Good in his ‘Anthropologists as experts. Asylum appeals in theBritish courts’ (Anthropology Today, 19, 2003, pp 5 – 7) reveals that he has assessed over 100 appealsinvolving Sri Lankan asylum-seekers. His article is intended as ‘ basic primer for those involved in thiskind of work’ rather than a consideration of ‘asylum processes or about [anthropologists’] roles inthem’ .

6 An interesting discussion of asylum documentation in an academic context is ML Pirouet, ‘Materialsused in making asylum decisions in the UK’, African Research and Documentation, 93, 2003, pp 29 – 38.

7 Nevertheless the asylum-seeker’s experience of the appeal hearing is very much an experience of acourt. While Anthony Good emphasises that asylum hearings ‘are not subject to normal evidentialconstraints because applicants are in no position to call witnesses or extract documents from the statewhich persecuted them’, his account of the quasi-judicial proceedings emphasises their formality.‘There are many hearing centres around the country. They are meant to be less intimidating thannormal courts, which they nonetheless resemble. The adjudicator occupies a raised desk with the royalcoat of arms on the wall behind. Adjudicators are members of the judiciary, appointed by the LordChancellor’, p 6.

8 These documents are not, of course, the only source of asylum narratives. Two striking examples ofrefugee testimonies are A Bradstock & A Trotman (eds), Asylum Voices. Experiences of People SeekingAsylum in the United Kingdom, London: CTBI, 2003; I Dumitrascu, N McClean & A Mobbs, Openingthe Doors to Freedom, Oxford: Asylum Welcome, 2003.

9 These paragraphs on Zimbabwean asylum culture are drawn from Terence Ranger, ‘Zimbabwediasporas: a report on the research day, June 14 2003’ Zimbabwe Review, Britain Zimbabwe Society,Issue 03/3, August 2003, pp 1 – 12.

10 On 17 July 2003 the independent Financial Gazette estimated that there were some 500 000Zimbabweans living abroad. Of these there were 176 400 in the UK; 165 375 in Botswana; 22 050 inSouth Africa, 33 075 in the US. But on 15 February 2004 Associated Press reported that a ZimbabweCentral bank advisory board had compiled figures which revealed that a quarter of the Zimbabweanpopulation—some 3.4 million people—were living abroad. Of these 1.1 million lived in Britain, 800 000being ‘illegal immigrants’; 1.2 million were living in South Africa.

11 For the development of a Zimbabwe ‘patriotic history’ which puts all the responsibility for the abusesof colonialism on Britain rather than on the Rhodesian settler state see T Ranger, ‘Nationalist history,patriotic history and the history of the nation: the struggle over the past in Zimbabwe’, Journal ofSouthern African Studies, June 2004, pp 215 – 234 .

12 The only exception has been the Ministry of Finance. In his 2002 budget Herbert Murerwa toldparliament that many Zimbabweans had ‘all but concluded that God has been missing for the pastthree years as the economy has halved and forced Zimbabweans into exile, mostly in Britain’. But God‘has a plan for Zimbabweans’. The hard currency remissions sent back by the Zimbabwean diasporawould rescue the economy’. P Thornycroft, ‘Send cash plea from Zimbabwe to expatriates’, Telegraph,15 November 2002 .

13 ‘Aussie slavery probed’, Sunday Mail, 3 November 2002 .14 Report of the Presidential Land Review Committee on the Implementation of the Fast Track Land

Reform Programme, 2000 – 2002, Harare: Government of Zimbabwe, 2003, p 15.15 L Pirouet in her ‘Materials used in making asylum decisions in the UK’ writes: ‘You might expect that

the country assessments would be written by people with some expert knowledge of the countriesconcerned and of the literature available but you would be wrong. The Home Office employs nocountry or area experts, and resists suggestions that such experts should be employed. You might alsothink that the Home Office would seek the expertise of the Research Department of the Foreign andCommonwealth Office but again you would be mostly wrong’. Pirouet lists all the material available

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for a proper country assessment of Kenya which is missing from the CIPU document for that countryon pages 32 – 34.

16 T Ranger, ‘Comments on the Home Office Immigration and Nationality Directorate’s ZimbabweAssessment, April 2001’, Oxford: unpublished manuscript, December 2001 .

17 N Carver (ed), Home Office Country Assessments; An Analysis, London: Research and InformationUnit, IAS, 2003. The analysis examines country information bulletins for 17 countries. In general theyfind the bulletins ‘extremely selective in [their] use of information’; ‘full of inaccuracies and out of datematerial’. IAS ‘is alarmed that such poor quality research in so influential in deciding asylum claims’and urges the creation of an ‘independent documentation centre capable of providing information thatis accurate, reliable and independent of Government asylum policy’, p 4. The critique of the ZimbabweCIPU assessment is on pages 225 – 236. Despite improvements since 2001 the assessor, JosephBrookfield, finds the CIPU report basically ‘a repetition of old material. . .rather than a thoroughrevision. . .disjointed’ and misleading on a number of points, p 226.

18 I draw these statistics from a valuable article by V Prais & P Warburton, of the Immigration AdvisoryService: ‘Zimbabwean asylum cases in focus’, Exile. The Magazine for Refugee Rights, 29, 2004.

19 The Guardian of 26 February 2004 reports the latest development. Under the heading ‘South Africanhelp sought on refugees’ the paper reported that the Home Office had opened talks with South Africa‘about cooperating on returning South Africans who may have falsely claimed to be Zimbabweanswhen they claimed asylum in Britain’. Refugee welfare organisations were convinced that agreement bySouth Africa would ‘mean rejected asylum-seekers from Zimbabwe being sent from Britain to aneighbouring third country’ .

20 ‘The definitive guide to the new Asylum and Immigration Bill’ in Exile, January 2004, p 5, comments:‘This measure is in danger of criminalising many refugees who are forced to flee on false papers. . .theextension of visa requirements to refugee-producing countries (such as Zimbabwe) has reducedrefugee’s ability to access the EU legally and safely. Many people whom the Home Office recognises asrefugees have only reached safety in the UK through smuggling networks [and] are powerless to refuseto obey ruthless smugglers or traffickers who demand that they destroy or return documents as acondition of travel’.

21 The visa requirement had its desired impact on the numbers of Zimbabwean asylum applications.Between January and September 2003 there were only 2600, back almost to 2001 levels after the boomon 2002. For an initial Zimbabwean response to the visa imposition see Zimbabwean Independent, 29November 2002. Today the visa regime arouses much discontent among ‘legitimate’ Zimbabweantravellers to the UK. The visa office is open only for a few hours a day; long queues outside aremarshalled by street youth and by police who sometimes disperse them. Zimbabwean asylum-seekersare also, of course, affected by the tightening of asylum regulations. Thus, for instance, whenZimbabweans are at the end of the process and have been denied asylum they cannot be sent back toZimbabwe. But they cease to be paid benefits or provided with accommodation and they are notallowed to work.

22 In 2002, however, there had been many similar refusal letters. In another case the young granddaughterof an African farmer who supported the MDC was gang-raped in order to punish him. Thegrandfather himself died. In June 2002 the refusal letter told her: ‘Your grandfather was the mainpolitical activist in your family. The Secretary of States sees no reason why you would be of interest tomembers of the Zanu-PF’.

23 Brian Raftopoulos, Education and the crisis in Zimbabwe. Canon Collins Memorial Lecture 2003,London: Canon Collins Educational Trust for Southern Africa, 204, pp 1 – 39. Raftopolous, London:CCESTSHA, 2003, pp 32 – 33. Raftopolous is drawing here on the report by the Progressive TeachersUnion of Zimbabwe, ‘Report on the teachers’ strike of October, 2002’, Harare, 2002 .

24 For a historical account of popular support for Zapu in northern Matabeleland, of Zipra’sinvolvement in the guerrilla war, and of the activities of the Fifth Brigade see J Alexander et al,Violence and Memory, Oxford: James Currey, 2000. For the role of the veterans between 1980 and 1987see N Kriger, Guerrilla Veterans in Post-War Zimbabwe, Symbolic and Violent Politics, Cambridge:CUP, 2003. For the classic human rights documentation of abuses in Matabeleland and the Midlandssee Breaking The Silence. Building True Peace, Harare: CCJP & LRF, 1997. J Alexander and JMcGregor have an article on guerrilla narratives forthcoming in History Workshop Journal.

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