The Adonis Musati Project (AMP) was named after a young Zimbabwean boy who died of starvation on the streets of Cape Town in 2007, while awaiting his asylum papers. He is just one of untold numbers of mainly Zimbabwean refugees who have become the often forgotten victims of South Africas refugee crisis, where thousands of people are left without food or shelter while trying to gain legal asylum.
Distressed that such a tragedy could occur unnoticed in the middle of one of the most vibrant and progressive cities in Africa, Gahlia Brogneri and Terry?Hodson founded the AMP to provide support and assistance to Zimbabwean refugees seeking asylum.
Over the past three years, the project has been extended to include refugees of all nationalities and also to assist as many South African homeless people in Cape Town as possible.
To date, the AMP, with a small voluntary managing team of ten people and 20 additional volunteers has assisted thousands of refugees with food, clothing, training and accommodation. It has more than 300 refugees on its books, who are being helped and guided towards independence.
The group last year also launched a youth shelter that helps put young, homeless children back into education systems, giving them a chance to succeed as adults. The children have mainly been young Zimbabwean refugees who fled their country to escape violence and economic collapse.
How we respond as a nation to the human suffering of the refugees entering?South Africa in search of help is often dependent upon our own situation, AMP founder Brogneri to SW Radio Africa last week.
Brogneri said how, in South Africa there is very little assistance given by the government to refugees, explaining that the official response to the plight of refugees is shocking.
She explained how refugees are often rounded up and arrested by police officials as part of a suspected unofficial government directive to remove the unsightly numbers of refugees living on the citys streets.
This same issue has been highlighted in a recent report on the state of the Zimbabwean refugee plight, which detailed how this clean up operation is in full swing ahead of the football world cup. The report by the Solidarity Peace Trust detailed how Zimbabweans continue to live in appalling conditions, suffering ongoing xenophobic violence and facing arrests as authorities try to move them out of sight during the tournament.
These migrants, mostly undocumented, live on the edge of survival, often in appalling circumstances, the organisation said.
Post published in: Politics