The long read: After agitating against Robert Mugabe in Harare in the late 90s, Patson Muzuwa fled to the UK. He continued the fight from afar, and became a tireless torchbearer for those he had to leave behind
’s British South Africa Company had invaded and colonised the country. As a child, my mother was blind to the racial injustice that Rhodesia was founded on. As an adult, she protested against it. When Mugabe came to power, she was proud to join Zanu-PF, before sadness at her homeland’s descent into tyranny set in.
Muzuwa ended up sleeping in the doorway of Leicester’s old Fenwick department store, drinking himself into oblivion with cut-price booze. “I felt embarrassed, because most of the Zimbabweans in Leicester know me well,” he said later. To avoid them, he moved to Birmingham, where he continued living on the streets until a homeless organisation found him a bedsit. He started going to church and stopped drinking. By 2022, his health was failing.
After months in hospital, Muzuwa’s oldest son – who was six when I first met him in Rugare, but had now been in Britain for 18 years – took him to live with his family in a small village just outside Darlington, in the north-east. From there, Muzuwa later went to the care home where he is now staying.fter almost 22 years in the UK, the village where the care home is situated was the first place Muzuwa had lived where there were apparently no other Zimbabweans.
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