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BY MAGUGU NYATHI

JOHANNESBURG – It’s Saturday afternoon, it’s blazing hot, but most of the Zimbabwean sons and daughters in South Africa are braving the sun to shop. Christmas is just 10 days away and the parents and children are waiting for the goodies.

At the taxi rank affectionately known as Esibayeni, groceries worth thousands of rands are scattered all over, to be transported to a land once the breadbasket of Africa.

I feel a pang of pain as I see the Zimbabweans, with their truckloads of groceries, leaving for home despite their daily ordeals in a land of gold. Besides working very hard to pay for their upkeep and to bribe the South African Police, they never forget to take care of their families back home. The love for their home country is so amazing.

They have been tortured, imprisoned, starved, persecuted by the Mugabe government yet the love for their country is steadfast. Just the way they buy goodies for the people back home and the way they risk life and limb crossing the crocodile-infested river to work here for their families tells one here is a nation that, if given a chance, can rebuild Zimbabwe.

“I always wondered if my mother knows how hard I work to afford to go home for Christmas. This is the only time of the year that I get a break at my work place, where I work as chef, and all I want is to go home where no one asks me for an ID or where I come from. Like a slave I work to provide for my family. I think I’m one of the people that keeps Zimbabwe intact after the government destroyed our economy,” said a bitter Themba Dube as he boarded a taxi to Bulawayo.

Dube is not the only one complaining about the treatment Zimbabweans get from SA authorities. Marble Moyo concurred, saying that if it wasn’t for the situation back home, she would have long ago gone back for good.