Drive out the rubbish!

These two aerial photos were taken less than three months apart, over the Cripps Road area in Harare. Just to the left of the picture area would be Rufaro Stadium, the site where the Zimbabwe flag was first raised at Independence on 18 April 1980.

For those who know or remember Harare, the road tranversing the picture from left to right is Cripps Road. In the top left hand corner, the road at 90 degrees to Cripps is Rememberance Drive which becomes Leopold Takawira Street in the Harare CBD. The smaller road running down the center of the photographs is a secondary road to leading to the Mbare-Msika suburbs, also sites of much violent reprisal from ZanuPF after losing elections there. The rectangular complex of buildings is the Matapi Hostels and the bigger building on the other side of Cripps Road are Mbare Hostels.

On the 18 April pic on the extreme left near Cripps Road is what they called (past tense) "Bend Down Boutique" run mostly by women who used to sell second hand clothes on bits of cardboard on the ground. You will see that in the 4 June pic it is totally gone! Not in the picture, but immediately underneath the pics was (probably still is) a council run market area.

You can clearly see the destructive result of Robert Mugabe's "Operation Murambatsvina [translation: drive out rubbish]" which has seen more than 30,000 people arrested and tens of thousands of homes, shacks, and street-side stalls destroyed. What was an area filled with informal markets where the unemployed were trying to eek out a meagre living, was bulldozed and residents bullied with brutal and discompassionate cruelty. Our beloved Robert loves to choose the cold months in which to exact his punishment and wrath upon his subjects.

The photos were first noticed here on a blog from Scotland and cross posted on The Bearded Man. Both blogs are useful places to get a more personal opinion on events unfolding in Mugabe's current reign of terror, thinly veiled as progressive democracy. Direct link to a better sized version of the photos here. As far as I can tell, these photos were sourced from the BBC, but if you know more ... please tell me.