ZIMBABWE

The diaspora dimension is critical: Zimbabwean men in South Africa face xenophobic violence that specifically targets foreign African men. Men in the UK — many of them highly educated — work as care assistants and warehouse operatives, experiencing a professional demotion that their Shona concept of unhu (human dignity) makes particularly painful. The men who stayed in Zimbabwe under Mugabe and now Mnangagwa navigate a surveillance state where political expression is dangerous and economic initiative is constrained by party loyalty. The war veterans — men who fought the liberation war — were used as political tools during the land reform era and then discarded, receiving neither the farms they were promised nor the psychological support they needed for the trauma of a guerrilla war fought in their youth.