months later, he would close the case. More than two dozen infants had been mysteriously abandoned in his precinct alone in recent months.
“The children are not there in the evening, then they are in the morning,” he said later. “Some are found close to roads. Others are dropped into sewers or ditches. We only find the corpses when people tell us about them. I think it is the mothers who leave them, because the fathers are gone, but it is only my theory. Who can say where they come from?”
The wave of abandoned children was unprecedented in the nine hundred years since the Shona-speaking people had built
dzimba dzimbabwe,
the magnificent stone fortress on the southern plains that formed the cornerstone of the national identity. There had always been isolated cases of abandonment, children set down in the forests for the animals to find—after colonialism, parliament adopted something called the Infanticide Act to provide for such cases—but only during the long war for independence had there been anything remotely similar.
In the mid-1970s, when the war was at its peak, Rhodesian troops would raid villages suspected of harboring rebel soldiers, guns blazing. Everyone would scatter. Parents would be killed or separated in the cross fire, losing children in the chaos. Most children had some form of extended family to care for them. For those who had no one, there was Chinyaradzo Children’s Home in Harare. Stella Mesikano had been a worker at the orphanage during the war and she later became the matron, or director. In 1980, she began keeping a bar chart on graph paper showing the number of abandoned children brought to Chinyaradzo. Each year was carefully shaded with different colored pencils. In 1980, the year independence was declared, ending fourteen years of conflict, the bar was colored in black and showed that 40 children had been admitted. The next year was pink, and the number of children dropped to 23. It held at that level, or dropped to the low teens, for a decade. Then it shot to 35 in 1991. By 1994, it was up to 56. The orphanage was set up to handle a total of 58 children but had taken in 159 in four years. Other orphanages or children’s homes began to take in the overflow. As Mesikano’s chart began to move toward the edge of the page with each new year, she began to lose the enthusiasm for keeping detailed statistics for a government that had so little interest.
By the late 1990s, the administration of Robert Mugabe was skittish about acknowledging the depth of the AIDS disaster, and unable or unwilling to administer a program that might care for the nation’s most vulnerable charges. The state was allocating only about five Zimbabwean dollars (then the equivalent of about thirty American cents, a rate that would drop by more than 60 percent in the coming months) per day to feed, clothe, educate, and care for each orphan. This was to provide about one-third of the total cost of administering the home. The government plan called for other agencies or donors to cover the other two-thirds. The agency that was to administer Chinyaradzo, and raise most of its funds, was the Child Protection Society (CPS). During what would come to be recognized as one of the largest wave of orphans in human history, the agency was almost completely moribund. “The organization currently does little research or advocacy on behalf of children,” an internal study reported. “The CPS has become somewhat stagnant . . . there has been no director for a number of years.”
As more orphans came in but more money did not, Mesikano became the de facto fund-raiser. She got help from a local Rotary club and a handful of Western aid agencies, most notably from the Canadian division of World Vision, the U.S.-based Christian charity, and the Qantas Cabin Crew Team, volunteers from the Australian airline.
The orphanage appeared modern and clean, for Mesikano and her staff worked hard. But there was only so much to be done