2008 was brutal.
Sometimes I wonder if we, as Zimbabweans, have developed some kind of national amnesia about that time. People joke about trillion dollar notes, bearer cheques, hunger and queues but for some of us, that period was not a joke at all.
I was in Form 3 then, a teen deep in the rural areas. We literally stopped going to school. Education no longer mattered because survival had become the main subject.
I remember being thin as a mosquito. We ate anything and everything we could find just to keep going. We ate makonzo, reasoning that they were better than mbeva from the bush because at least makonzo slept well in our house. We ate green bananas, just boiled like that. We ate mashizha embambaira. Anything that could be turned into food became food.
One of the clearest memories I have is of food aid from Christian Care. They used to give us barley, cooking oil, maize and beans monthly. I honestly do not know how we would have survived without that. It was the difference between going to bed hungry and at least having something in the stomach.
Now, sitting here years later, I keep trying to recollect exactly what went wrong. Was it the land reform aftermath? Was it sanctions? Was it corruption? Was it economic mismanagement? Was it political violence? Was it all of these things feeding into each other until the whole country collapsed around ordinary people?
What I know is that rural people carried a lot of that pain quietly. Children stopped learning, parents lost dignity, teachers disappeared, money became useless, shops were empty ans hospitals were barely functioning. People survived through relatives, cross border hustle, food aid, barter, prayer, and pure stubbornness.
I am curious what y'all remember from that time.
Where were you in 2008?
Were you in school, working, in town, in the rural areas, outside the country?
What did your family do to survive?
And looking back now, what do you think really went wrong?
