William and me

Malawi is a tiny land in South Central Africa, locked country wedged between Zambia, Tanzania and Mozambique. Its residents are 98% subsistence farmers, and it has no natural resources except fertile farmland where tobacco, tea, coffee, maize can be grown, and trees (Mango, Avocado, Baobab, Acacia and Neem). Tobacco is the main cash crop and accounts for the largest income in exports in Malawi. With a global decline on the use of tobacco, more and more families are finding themselves without a market for their crop.

It is the third poorest country in the world by Gross Domestic Product per capita (2019), after Burundi and The Central African Republic. Recent climatic shocks (extreme flooding and drought) due to global warming and climate change, have brought the economy to its knees in the latter half of last decade. Unpredictable and extreme weather led to failed harvests and rampant deforestation to feed the people’s need for charcoal as a cooking and heating fuel has caused much of the once fertile topsoil to be blown away on the wind or washed away in the increased intensity floods. Harvests are lower and now two-thirds of the population of 19 million are now in extreme poverty and are hungry or starving to death. This coupled with rampant corruption by successive Governments (including the current one who have only recently been voted in) means that It is virtually impossible for the ordinary person living there to make a living. This was the driving force for my campaign over the last 10 years to help my friend William and his family to and survive achieve the most basic needs of food, clothes, shelter and education.

The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 has made everything a lot worse for the people of Malawi. Most urban dwellers hustle to live through each day or are street and market traders. What they make that day in cash is what they eat in the evening. They just could not afford to stay at home in quarantine, so they revolted against the lockdowns and were the only country in the world to successfully reverse government policy on this matter. The street traders knew that they would die of hunger at home during a lockdown. Starvation is 100% fatal whereas Covid-19 is less than 1% fatal amongst the young demographic of the country. They burnt tyres and cars around the main markets in Blantrye, Limbe, Lilongwe and Mzuzu. People power over-ruled the Government and rescued the traders day to day, hand to mouth existence.

Born in Malawi but raised and living in Zimbabwe. William had to escape the worsening political violence in Zimbabwe and take his family to safety, but an unknown future, in Malawi in 2005. He then travelled to the UK in search of work so that he could send money back to them,

From early 2000, many people within and beyond borders of Zimbabwe were displaced by a contracting economy and political violence. The state intrusion of urban and rural economies of Zimbabwe through politics and rampant hyperinflation were among the woes of the country. It saw a disintegration of public services and the destruction of assets had further effects. The crisis in Zimbabwe was no longer just domestic but was now a political issue for leaders of the ruling party. This saw many Zimbabwe citizens move to neighbouring states in search of better economies beyond the borders of Zimbabwe, seeking protection from state violence and find a new livelihood for their families.

William went back to re-join his wife and family in 2014. He had sold all his possessions before sending his wife and children to live in Blantyre, Malawi with relatives. Nine years is a long time to be away and he had no idea what awaited him back home. The projects that I put in place with him since 2010 shields the family from the grinding poverty and uncertainty of survival. I have no idea what might have happened to them otherwise.

It was July 2008 when I first met William. He was playing at Larmer Tree Festival in the West Country of England with a Zimbabwean band called Chimanimani (named after a range of hills, that are sacred in the Zimbabwean Shona culture). They were the only African band in the whole weekend. I remember it like it was yesterday. They played in the Big Top tent early on the Friday evening, just after we had pitched up and wandered into the festival grounds to grab a pint of Cranborne Chase cider and a Vegetarian Thali from one of the Indian food stalls. The band blew me away with their incredibly danceable rhythms, chiming melodic guitarwork and pumping bass. I danced like no-one was watching for an hour and did not want it to end. After the show I approached the band to know more about them and was welcomed with a big smile from the lead guitarist. An older guy with greying short afro and a statesmanlike white short goatee beard, we hit it off instantly and started to chat about the style (Sunguru), the chords and riffs that he used and any future shows that were planned that year. It was a fateful meeting and the start of a life-long friendship.

After talking about music and guitar playing, I found out quite a bit about the man. For starters, his life was in a sorry state that belied his smile and charisma, with no job to sustain him, except the occasional £20 or £30 from these live shows. He lived in Rotherham, which is over 200 miles away from the Festival, in a small, rented room that he was now unable to pay for. He had a large family back home in Malawi but could not send the cash that was needed to pay for their rent arrears, bills, school and college fees and food. They were all starving and just about to be thrown out onto the street. Hearing him speak about his woes struck a chord, and I realized I could not let him out of my mind. How had he landed in England? I was curious to know.

Back in 2005, the man arrived in Heathrow on a one-way ticket with no entry visa and a Zimbabwean passport. I have got no idea, to this day, how he got through immigration, I think that he mentioned something about being a musician with a church). Clutching a holdall and a hard case containing his beloved Gibson Les Paul electric guitar there was an arrangement, made hastily by a friend before he left for the Harare International Airport, for someone to meet him at Heathrow Terminal 2 and take him to the Zimbabwean community in Luton. No-one showed up and he slept rough outside the airport that day with no money and no plans except to find a job and send money back to his family. Not a nice welcome to a cold, wet and grey England in winter.

At that point listening to his story, I could not help but wonder how he pulled through after that. Imagine landing on foreign ground and with no one to hold your hand, to welcome you. William let off a sad smile when I inquired about it, then went ahead to explain. ``I found my way to Luton somehow.” “I got a job in a music shop with a Pakistani guy who made me drive 12 hours a day collecting and delivering equipment”, “He paid me £3 an hour”: Not enough to even rent a decent room despite the long and illegal hours, I thought. He was being exploited and poorly paid. In Luton he mixed with the other political and economic exiles, most of whom were in a similar state. After a while he started to go to live music shows which were held in Gospel Churches and Community Centres. One night a friend took him to a show in Reading in a Community Centre and It was there that he met Tomson Chaulke and Shadrick Mugede; Zimbabwean musicians who had already been in the UK for 4 years when he arrived.

Stimulated by the music and like-minded company of his countrymates he teamed up with them and, after showing his lead guitar skills, he did many gigs with them. These supplemented his meagre wages and allowed him to live (although frugally) in a rented single room in a rat-infested house and send a little money back to his family. He was then offered a job in Rotherham (don’t ask me how or why as he had no visa, no National Insurance Number and a Zimbabwean driving license). He told me that the job in Rotherham turned out to be another £3 an hour van driving job, which ended when the work dried up (the owner fled when the HMRC and Immigration started looking into his affairs). He told me that he was stuck in his room again “sleeping all of the day” “thinking too much”. But this time 200 miles away from his bandmates in Reading, who he continued to gig with, whenever they had a big gig where they needed him. They bought him a National Express coach ticket and he packed his guitar, effect pedal and stage suit and hat and dutifully travelled down.

I was touched by the man’s story and determination to survive. The fact that he had managed to find footing in a foreign land, connect other musicians from his homeland and join a band which played prestigious summer festivals like Larmer Tree, Shambala and Glastonbury was commendable. After the show at Larmer Tree Festival I decided to book the band for a fundraising gig in a barn near my house. We arranged it for September 2008, two months after. At the time I lived in the small village of Compton, near Winchester in affluent rural Hampshire. My house was at the end of the houses in the village at the beginning of the farm track that led up to two farms. It was the dairy farm at the top of the hill where I “borrowed” the barn.

This farm was run at the time by my wife Jude and I’s good friends Keith and Susannah. Keith is a stocky no nonsense Hampshire Farmer who listens to Radio Two, hates the labour party, vegetarians and vegans, do-gooder lefties and social media: “Facetube” as he calls it, “because it ruins the surprise of my news when I meet people and they already know what I am going to say”. He drinks an ice cold can of coca cola before 5am milking “to waken him up with just the right amount of caffeine, sugar and bubbles”. Susannah, although every inch the farmer’s wife who shares the milking, mucking out and living in dung, was an arty, eccentric lady. She loved throwing parties in the main barn in the summer, when the cows were not using it because they were out in the fields. Party because she was a party animal, beatnik and exhibitionist at heart and partly to dilute Keith’s main-steam conservative attitudes and get him out-there socialising and mixing with different people with different attitudes and politics.

Jude and I had our joint 40th Birthday party there which had 1970s fancy dress and disco. She walked into the barn in a gold Lycra catsuit and gold body paint on her face and gold thigh-length boots. She turned all the heads in the barn that night. Almost upstaging Jude in her Abba clingy catsuit and definitely upstaging me in my vintage, early 1970s leopard skin platform boots, hired flared trousers and wide lapel shirt. I regretted the choice of footwear on the uneven concrete cow shed floor after a few hours. It was hard enough to totter across the dance floor to get a drink, let alone dance. I nearly broke my ankle a few times. I also soon regretted the fancy dress nylon chest-wig under my nylon shirt, complete with mock gold medallion necklace, as it was a balmy September evening and I was getting itchy and sweaty.

Another time she hosted a Medieval “12th Night” meal where 22 hand-picked friends were invited for a meal at long trestle table in the barn. The dress code was strictly Dark Ages and roles were given out to some people. There was a” Lord of Misrule” (a jester who played practical jokers on everyone all evening) minstrels (players upon stringed instruments), Prince Charming, The Beautiful Princess and Keith and Susanna were the King and Queen sitting at the head of the table in full regalia. The table was laden with meats and fruits as it would have been in Tudor England. There was even a roasted pig’s head with an apple in its mouth (they kept some pigs for meat as well as dairy cows). The other event that I can recall them telling me about is when the Hampshire Swingers held their Annual General Meeting and Summer Camp in the barn and the fields. Keith said that he was going around afterwards picking up litter and tidying up ready for the cows to go back in the field, when he found discarded lingerie, a pair of jeans, a burst blow up sex doll and a rubber inflatable bed covered in baby oil. My mind boggled!

In the top field of the farm there is a prehistoric Tumulus thought to be a burial mound, which Keith had to carefully plough around every year. From this Tumulus there is a direct view to St Catherine’s Hill in St Cross, Winchester, where there was an Iron Age hill fort. There is a ley line (if you believe in such things) between St Catherine’s hill and the Tumulus, just behind the barn where we held the gig, adding to the timeless atmosphere and positive, mystical energy of the location and the evening. The gig was a roaring success. For some unknown reason the villagers and people from neighbouring villages were up for it. I had emailed and phoned all my friends and acquaintances. Altogether the direct reach was about 250 people. This sounds lame in these days of advertising events to thousands of friends and friends of friends on Facebook but about a quarter of the invited people turned up plus a few of their friends. Most arriving by car but others tottering up the quarter mile gravel farm track in high heels and party dress (and that was just the guys!). The band played their heart out and we raised enough to able to pay the barn hire and band fee and give William as substantial amount to send back home. He was emotional. He thanked us profusely. It was my pleasure to be able to offer this substantial helping hand.

The second booking was a pre-Christmas gig in the back room of a pub in my hometown of Winchester, England. The famous Railway Inn, in the heyday of Oliver Gray putting on Americana bands selected from his annual visit to the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. At the time, these shows were under the name SXSC (South by South Central) but as his name as a promotor got out there and reached the ears of the lawyers for the organisers of his beloved South by South West Festival (after which it was named) there was a threat of a lawsuit and Oliver changed it to SC4M (south central for music). This is all recorded in his highly recommended book “Banjo on my knee” and is another story entirely.

The Railway gig was not a success. In fact, I lost money on it. I had procured the hire of the 100-capacity back room including wizard soundman and a bar man. Only 25 people turned up even though I had pitched the entry price deliberately low. The band still needed paying and as they had come from Reading, Bristol, Plymouth and Rotherham there were substantial fuel costs and transport costs. Why so few people? I still do not know. Maybe it was too far removed from the Americana/Alt Country bands, that the older crowd went to see, and the club nights and techno bands favoured by the younger crowd. Maybe it was too close to Christmas and people were saving themselves for the booze fest. Maybe people were on early work Christmas meals that stretched into the evening or maybe it was the final of the “X-Factor” or “Britain’s got Talent” on TV. It was a Saturday night so the latter two are most probable. The music was great though and those lucky souls who were there danced their hearts out in the low, dark, three quarters empty room.

All through this time I was curious to find out what had driven him and his family out of Zimbabwe. After the Railway gig I asked him as the band were packing the drum kit and instruments into their old cars for their long night drives home. What followed was a recount of the most painful I had ever heard: His home country Zimbabwe was a violence zone back in 2005. Under the reign of Dictator Robert Mugabe, it was war for anyone who did not support the ruling party Zanu PF. They were drumming up support in the upcoming elections and could not stand any opposition. A famous saying to explain the situation back then; ``If you vote for MDC in the presidential runoff election, you have seen the bullets, we have enough for each of you so beware”: Soldiers addressing villagers at meetings in Karoi Mashonaland West. That was only a small taste of the way things were back in his homeland at that time (and still are).

In the run up to the 2005 elections the Zanu PF Youth Wing thugs were on the loose all over in Zimbabwe, but particularly in Harare where William lived with his large family. They made his teenage boys go on Political rallies and stand in a field with no food or water for hours, under the scorching sun. One day they could take no more and said that they would not go on another rally. This was the time when things got really ugly for William and his family, The thugs came to the house one day but this time the boys refused to put on the T-Shirts and go with them. They threatened to take them by force in the morning or kill them all if they did not join them, but still, they refused. The MDC and non Zanu PF loyal households were now being burned down in his neighbourhood and the firebombing and beatings were moving ever closer to William’s street. The night before the thugs were due to come back William and his wife Junior has no choice but to pack everything that they could into his pickup truck and flee from their home in middle-class Harare with his children. They left at 1am, leaving the house like the Marie Celeste, with half-finished plates of food still on the table and bedsheets thrown back. Everything was left behind except for the few possessions they could put into his pickup truck. These were also the days of hyper-inflation, when a wheelbarrow load Zimbabwean Dollar notes were needed to buy a loaf of bread so their possessions and the pickup truck were worth next to nothing.

William had relatives in neighbouring Malawi that he had not seen since he was a child. They lived in a village in the south of the country, near Blantrye, the second largest city in Malawi and commercial centre, which is about 8 to 10 hours by bus through the Tete Corridor in Mozambique. He drove to Harare bus station and put his wife and six teenage and young adult children on the morning bus to Blantyre bus, gave her 500 US dollars and then drove to the airport and sold his pickup for enough dollars to supplement what money he had left and buy a one-way ticket to London, Heathrow.

William painted a vivid picture of the worsening political situation in Zimbabwe in the five years before he decided that enough was enough and they went into exile. The beatings by the army and the police and the Zanu PF youth wing of anyone thought to oppose Mugabe. The forced repatriation of land from white farmers to the so-called “War Veterans” and the subsequent running down of those farms to zero yield. In the run-up to the 2005 elections, Mugabe upped the ante to win by stating that if you are not Zanu PF you are assumed to be MDC and therefore a target for political violence.

Shocking violence has been a constant feature of Zimbabwean politics since independence but it got worse since the turn of the new millennia. Parliamentary elections in June 2000 were marred by localised violence, government intimidation of opposition parties and electoral irregularities. That was when the movement of those that could afford to leave the country, or had connections, abroad began. People started leaving Zimbabwe for South Africa, Botswana, Malawi and Mozambique. The lucky few were able to go to the UK or Germany.

In January 2002, the Youth Brigade of the Zanu-PF assaulted residents of Ruwa and Mabvuku, sealing off the towns of Bindura, Chinhoyi and Karoi. This was part of a recruiting drive and to weed out members of the MDC before the upcoming elections. The offices of The Daily News (Zimbabwe’s main independent daily newspaper) were petrol bombed in February 2002 and Mugabe’s government sent soldiers to Matebeleland, giving 2900 white farmers 45 days to wind up operations and another 45 days to leave the land and make way for black settlers. 2600 complied but 300 refused to vacate their land and in mid-August 2002 they were all arrested.

Presidential elections were held in March 2002 and in the months leading up to this the Zanu PF set about wholesale intimidation and suppression of the MDC. This ensured an election victory for Mugabe but strong international criticism.

In February 2003, a high treason trial of Morgan Tsvangeri, the MDC leader, was held, intending to shut him up permanently and suppress all opposition. On the 7th December 2004 Mugabe announced that Zimbabwe was officially and permanently withdrawing from the commonwealth in protest of that organisation’s criticisms of the Zanu PF and government policies.

The education system, which was once Africa’s best, and all of William’s children benefitted from, went into crisis because of the economic meltdown. Anyone who could left the country or gated themselves into rich enclaves. The rest just hustled, stole or grew what they could to survive. Starvation and death due to lack of medical attention was commonplace in this broken country with no currency and a shattered economy. This high standard of education, following the Oxford and Cambridge syllabuses, is now a distant memory which has left many Zimbabweans of that age group well educated but frustrated due to the total lack of job opportunities in the country and neighbouring countries.

Mugabe’s Operation Murambatsvina (move the rubbish) in 2005 targeted properties belonging mostly to urban opposition supporters. March 2005 was a particularly terrible month in Zimbabwe’s history. This was a government campaign of large scale forced slum clearance that directly affected over 700,000 people through loss of their homes and livelihoods. There were many instances of assaults, beatings, murders, victimisation and discrimination.

This was the time when William decided that enough was is enough and he fled. The Zanu PF thug’s promise to return the following morning and take the boys or kill all of them and the reports of Molotov cocktails being put through the letterboxes of houses in their area was too much. Their lives were all in acute danger, so they had no choice.

The years that followed his arrival in London turned out to be very difficult for him until our paths met three years later. Despite playing in bands on the UK festival scene between 2005 and 2008 he was grossly exploited and in poverty. His great musical talent never faded. It shone through and kept him going. His positive attitude, strength of character and determination to survive and to keep his family alive meant that he never gave up.

A nationally recognised guitarist, guitar teacher and musician at stadium concert level, William had a nice house in a Harare suburb paid for from his gigs with Leonard Dembo and other greats of the golden age of the Zimbabwean popular music scene in the 1980s and early 1990s. He had a comfortable life with his family until Mugabe started throwing white farmers off the land, giving the farms to the "war veterans" and suppressing political opposition and those suspected of it. William was of the same generation as the "War Veterans" and he got an offer of a farm from Mugabe's government. He never fought in the bush war against Ian Smith's colonial Rhodesian government, but he was assumed to have. This struggle for independence from Britain was led by Robert Mugabe, then a teacher who had been imprisoned for 11 years under Ian Smith’s Government for politcal dissent. The Chimerenga (struggle) lasted from 1965 to 1979 and Zimbabwe finally gained independence after Commonwealth supervised elections in April 1980.

William refused the offer saying he was no farmer, but a musician and this made him a marked man from then on. "The farms went to ruin, all the machinery got sold" he explained. It was the beginning of the end of the economy in Zimbabwe and the country went from Africa's breadbasket to hardly producing any food, 95% unemployment and starvation among the people.

After the Railway Inn gig in Winchester, William went back to Reading and was at a crossroads in his life, with no job and no income to sustain him or send back to his family in Malawi, who's rent was now in arrears and they had no money for food. He was staying for the weekend with Shadreck and his wife Tracy in Reading. They were Gospel musicians and leaders in a local Zimbabwean Evangelical Church. Shady worked at a tyre fitting place and his brother Samson, who also lived with them and was a mean guitarist in his own right, worked shifts as a security at Reading FC Madjeski stadium. The Chimanimani line up of 2008 was classic: Tomson Chaulke on drums, Shadrick Mugede on bass, Simwinji Zeko (from Bristol but originally from Zambia) on rhythm and twin lead guitar and Chander (a Zimbabwean living in Plymouth) on lead vocals.

William went back to Rotherham on the coach as that was where his rented room was. He struggled. We kept in touch by text and phone (he did not, and still does not, have a smartphone or access to any modern free messaging apps). After a week or so I decided to step in and offered him a National Express coach ticket from Rotherham to Winchester and a bed in my spare room in exchange for him to teach me his guitar style and jam with me in the evenings. He was, after-all, the man who taught Rise Kagona from The Bhundu Boys guitar, when he was a kid living in his neighbourhood. The Bhundu Boys were and still are the only Zimbabwean band who had any breakthrough success in Europe and UK. They did it by mixing western pop, country and Zimbabwean guitar styles, even doing a recording with a UK Country and Western artist Hank Wangford.

William ended up staying with us for four months in the spare room. My wife Jude and I provided him with a family environment, meals and a bed. He was happy. He got on well with our daughter Emma who was 12 at the time and our son Charlie who was 7. He calmed Emma down whenever she flew into one of her hormonal pre-teenage rages and used make Charlie giggle by jumping up and down and chanting “Ice Cream, Ice Cream, Ice Cream”. He also used to love pulling up his tee-shirt sleeve in front of them exposing a muscular right arm and make his bicep bulge, before making another sign below like a reverse bicep saying: “inside out, outside in”. Sometimes he would put his finger to his nose like a bone through it, then turn it the other way, I have no idea what this was all about, but Charlie loved it. This was a man who had brought up children and knew how to calm them down and make them laugh.

We had some well-off friends in the village. Jude and I started looking for unofficial gardening work for him. We started with our closest freinds in the village. I used to drive him and my lawnmower and petrol hedge trimmer up the road to their houses and he would spend a few hours cutting their large lawns and hedges for cash. He always had a ready smile and greeted absolutely everyone that he met. He was also the only black guy in any of the four villages that made up the area: Compton and Shawford, Hursley and Otterbourne. His charm and un-fatigable friendliness got him more and more customers. Mostly retired people or people who were commuting to London every day on the train from Shawford to Waterloo. He ended up with about 30 cash customers who asked no questions and he worked seven days a week during all daylight hours. After four months he had enough cash to rent a room in nearby Eastleigh, and then a bigger one on St Marys Road in Southampton, near the football stadium, where all the Indian, Pakistani and Polish food shops are and rented rooms are cheap.

He used to come up to the village by bus from Southampton. He had chained up an old mountain bike that one of his customers had given him, cycling to his place of work that day and borrowing the home-owners gardening equipment. Those were happy times; he loved the villages and his customers, and they loved him. This lasted for six years and he managed to pay his room rent, bus season ticket and send his family cash to pay their rent, provisions and college fees.

William has been married to his wife Junior, a Shona woman who he met in Harare since 1962. By now it was early 2014 and he was missing her and his family badly. He had not been there through the teenage years of his youngest sons or whilst his young daughters were growing into teenagers and young lady. Junior was left with that burden of care, along with two of his grandchildren who his two eldest daughters had left with Junior whilst they worked in South Africa. He had made enough money, he decided, and it was now time to go back. One of his wealthy customers in the village kindly bought him a one way ticket to Blanytre from Heathrow and William started making plans to leave England, knowing that he would never be able to come back.

Part 2 tomorrow......