A Zimbabwean living in Bristol
Forward
Forward, a Zimbabwean journalist, talks about the setting up of the Bristol Zimbabwe Association, and how the organisation deals with issues of politics, asylum and immigration.
Transcript
I came out to Bristol in 2004, February 2004 and there was already a Zimbabwean community in Bristol, but there was no association or grouping of Zimbabweans like other communities, and we thought “Maybe if we group together as a community we will be able to also address the challenges that we face.”
I think one of the challenges obviously is isolation, and we came together with some of the volunteers from Refugee Action, some of the Zimbabweans like Naria, Mashamba, Estachuma, Fidelis and Merembe… myseld, among others, and we started, you know, looking at the structures of how to set up a community group and mobilising people and identifying people to come. It’s not easy if you are people from Zimbabwe alone, because people they have different… views or perceptions: People who are, you know, looking for refugee status, we have people who are just students, you have people who are just sort of professional workers who are working here, so it’s a mix of people, so it is putting all those people together that is not easy. People will be viewing you with a different sort of, you know… suspicion, whether maybe they would think you are from the government or you are from the opposition.
Our stance was we want to have a non-partisan group and we had to do a lot of, you know, mobilisation to encourage people to come forward.
What we do is basically advise and moral support and also give to a referrer agencies – we refer people to other agencies that will help in terms of providing legal advice.
Where necessary we do provide, you know, a reference and writing reference letters and where necessary we also intervene – there are quite a number of cases I can give you where some of our members have been, you know, detained and was about to be deported back to Zimbabwe and we had to quickly, sort of, intervene, you know, identify solicitors and interject and stop some of the deporatations and we had actually three recent cases of three Zimbabweans who were supposed to be deported from here in Bristol but the Association managed to, you know, write letters to the Home Office, we managed to talk to the Police and they have reversed the decision.
So what we do is we try by all means – we don’t have enough resources, we don’t have, you know, full time, you know people emplyed by the Association: we work on voluntary basis. We try in a small way we can in terms of helping our members.
So it’s a question of course of trying to, you know, encourage everybody to do what they can within our community.
And what is quite, you know, unique about Zimbabwe is people are sharing the same problem, despite the fact you are coming from different political persuasion. I think it’s the economic factors – the way how our economy’s melting down is putting us – you know, whether you like Mugabe or you don’t like him – I think it effects everybody whether you are from the ruling government or not, so in that in helps to bring people together, plus, also more importantly, it’s not easy – we are all in a land of exile where there are no mothers, there are no sisters. Everybody’s and most of all the majority of our relatives are back home, so, you know, you start thinking of what is happening, so it puts you together the fact that you are not in your country and you see your countrymen, you want to be, you know, working together, you want to socialise, you want to play with them, you want to do whatever you can under the circumstances. So the bonding factor is “We are in a country that is not our mother country.”
