US Zim benefit concert sold out

r a three-year break to highlight to the world the government-perpetrated violence and economic chaos that is destroying people’s lives in Zimbabwe.
Through their newly formed Dispatch Foundation, band members Urmston, Heimbold and Corrigan are committed to supporting charity causes. Their carefully balanced weekend concert programme therefore ensured that Zimbabwe was the main focus.
To achieve this, devastating footage of a country in crisis was used as transitions between the sets. It portrayed the suffering caused by the Mugabe regime’s destruction of the agricultural sector, campaign of terror, economic mismanagement and corruption on a massive scale.
When the specially invited Zimbabwean children’s choir, a tribal dance group and a band called Bongo Love took to the stage, they received thunderous applause.
“If Zimbabwe was a business, they’d be closing their doors,” Corrigan told the packed crowds who were clearly appalled by the first-hand accounts of peril, pain, abject poverty and mass-scale starvation in a country once described as the breadbasket of Africa.
Support for Zimbabweans in need also came from Crocs/Rocks, who donated 10 000 pairs of shoes through their SolesUnited programme for distribution by non-governmental organisations in Zimbabwe. – Glyn Hunter