WATCH “The Pain of Losing My Home and My Country, Zimbabwe”
A former Zimbabwean resident, Barbara Anne Langridge, now living in Cape Town, South Africa, has posted a heartfelt and heartbreaking account of losing her home and her country. It’s a video that is touching not only Zimbabweans, but South Africans too… Watch below. Barbara wrote on Facebook yesterday: “Robert Mugabe has resigned, so today, 21st November […]
A former Zimbabwean resident, Barbara Anne Langridge, now living in Cape Town, South Africa, has posted a heartfelt and heartbreaking account of losing her home and her country. It’s a video that is touching not only Zimbabweans, but South Africans too… Watch below.
Barbara wrote on Facebook yesterday: “Robert Mugabe has resigned, so today, 21st November 2017, 17 years after the land reform evictions started, I feel it’s the right time to publish and share this account…”
Barbara started a Facebook page, Justice Denied, a couple of years ago “as a repository of information on both my experiences of the political upheaval in Zimbabwe and to keep the human rights abuses of Mugabe and his ZanuPF government in a safe place. I asked so many to contribute privately, but none would. If you have a story to tell, you should tell it too, because maybe collectively we may be acknowledged as an actual people, because up till now, we have been ignored by the world.
“I hope one day this sense of longing for something that no longer exists will be forgotten, but as the years go on, I too will be foreigner in a country I once called home, because the years changed me.”
In her video post, Barbara talks of Zimbabwe’s troubled history where its people were subjected to the “oppression and violence of colonialism” followed by the “oppression of the Mugabe regime”.
She says: “We had our own journey, and also came to a place of un-belonging and the realisation that being white and thinking you are “african” can never be said in the same sentence. Who are we? This lost band of the left overs of colonialism, the unwanted and unaddressed who suffered the ignorance of our own kith and kin.
“My healing of disconnect has been a slow ache to fix, the call of the morning dove still elicits a wave of deep grief, but time has deadened the pain of loss of my home and country.
https://www.facebook.com/justicedeniedzimbabwe/videos/1820364651326342/
Barbara says the video was put together by Vic Sarin and Sepia Films, after they travelled together to Zimbabwe in 2016 and revisited the places of their past – “The greatest pain is the loss of your community.”
This week Barbara said: “Losing my home, country and community and sense of belonging has been the greatest influence on my life. No matter how successful we are, without community we will experience a deep emptiness and dislocation from the world around us.”
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