In recent years, 48,000 people have applied for asylum in Australia. There are 2,300 asylum seekers who tried to get into Australia illegally by boat and who are now waiting on Nauru and on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island to have their claims heard. South Africa, in contrast, is host to about two million Zimbabweans, many of whom would have illegally breached the country’s electrified border fences to escape the political repression and economic disaster in their homeland.

Once in South Africa, employers often exploit their fear of being deported and pay the Zimbabweans a pittance. They send a portion of that money to their families back home.

Many South Africans view the influx of foreigners from other parts of Africa since 1994 as a drain on the economy, a threat to their jobs and to national security. In May 2008, 41 people died in a wave of xenophobic attacks.
Looking out for the Zimbabweans in South Africa and in their country is leading human rights academic and activist Brian Raftopoulos of the Solidarity Peace Trust.

Raftopoulos has written many books about the Zimbabwean situation which has led to a diaspora of about 4 million to over 90 countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Since the attacks of 2008, Zimbabweans in South Africa have faced an easier time but more needs to be done.

“There are challenges around the question of their livelihoods, getting jobs and sending money home to their families. There have been efforts made to regularise their stay in South Africa but it is still very difficult for them.

“Most of them say they would rather go home to be with their families but their livelihoods are at threat there and many are forced to stay out of the country,” says Raftopoulos.

Zimbabwe’s problems became apparent in the 1990s when the economy buckled under the strain of massive corruption and mismanagement. The country has been ruled without break by Robert Mugabe and his party, Zanu-PF, since independence from Britain in 1980. A master Machiavellian politician, Mugabe has served seven terms by manipulating the constitution, skilfully playing political opponents against each other, and by crushing popular dissent.
But his power plays have cost the country dearly. As opposition to his rule grew, he turned on the country’s white farmers in 1998 to seize their land and return it to the country’s black population as part of a violent and badly executed restitution process. At the same time, he cracked down on the newly formed Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) with breathtaking violence.

The economy began its spiral into hyperinflation, the like of which had not been seen since pre-Hitler Germany. Industry and agriculture collapsed and the exodus out of the country became a flood.

Raftopoulos grew up in the capital city, Harare – then called Salisbury. After studies in London, he returned to Zimbabwe in 1980 and worked for the Ministry of Labour. He subsequently joined the University of Zimbabwe where he was to work until 2007 when he left for South Africa.

His human rights work gathered pace as the situation grew worse in the late 1990s. He was a founder member of the National Constitutional Assembly which was created to plot a more democratic future for Zimbabwe. He also played a leading role in the fledgling MDC, a broad-based party with solid trade union support that offered the first real democratic opposition to Mugabe’s rule.

“What made me speak out was growing anger at the abuse of human rights, the attacks on trade unionists, on students. The growing authoritarianism is what pushed many people in the university and the human rights community into more formal opposition.

“Like many other Zimbabweans, I was arrested twice and was frequently harassed. But many more suffered a lot more than I did,” Raftopoulos says.
Raftopoulos is of mixed race. His grandfather, Spiros Raftopoulos, was born in Ithaca and came to Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, in the 1930s.

“Like many white immigrants then, some of them had relationships with black women, had children with them but never took responsibility for them. That was the case with my family. The Greek community often would distance themselves from people who were coloured,” says Raftopoulos.

“Spiros was initially a speculative miner, he then got involved in a lot of other ventures. He made money and lost it several times and then finally ended up impoverished, at which point he came to stay with my family. He died in our home.”

Raftopoulos did visit his grandfather’s family in Ithaca and Patras in the 1970s.

For the present, Raftopoulos splits his time between South Africa, where he is now based, and Zimbabwe. While the situation has eased in his home country, there are worrying signs of more trouble to come.

After the years of hyperinflation, the Zimbabwe dollar was abandoned in 2008 in favour of the US dollar and the South African rand. This brought some stability to the shattered economy.

In March that year, the MDC claimed victory in an election marred by extreme violence and fraud on a grand scale, yet it was Mugabe who was declared the victor. The regional grouping of neighbouring states, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), stepped in to broker a powersharing deal between the ruling Zanu-PF and MDC. Mugabe remained president and his rival, the MDC’s Morgan Tsvangirai, became the country’s prime minister. Some ministerial positions went to MDC leaders but the key posts remained in Zanu-PF’s grip.

Last year, Mugabe won outright power again in elections that, although peaceful, were tainted in the eyes of most election observers. But the result gave a measure of stability in the region and the SADC signed off on Zimbabwe.

“What the SADC countries wanted all along was a reformed Zanu-PF. They never wanted to see a change of government,” Raftopoulos says.

“There is strong solidarity among the former liberation movements in the region and they are wary of any opposition to what they consider the legacies of the liberation struggle. Many of them distrust the MDC because they feel it is too close to the West, which is a bit hypocritical because many of them have relations with the West.”

Zimbabwe’s retail industry is run by South Africa and most goods sold in the shops come from that country. South African mining houses also have important stakes in Zimbabwe minerals.

Raftopoulos says the battle to bring democracy to Zimbabwe was ongoing but of more immediate concern was the parlous state of Zimbabwe’s economy. Instead of inflation now the danger is deflation brought on by a massive decline in demand.