In October the World Food Program made a major appeal for funds to help feed Zimbabwe, which only 20 years ago was feeding itself, before Robert Mugabe’s  government began to let is citizens starve. The WFP said that five million people in Zimbabwe were facing severe food shortages and the 2008 crops in this once promising African nation had failed yet again, in part because the infrastructure to keep farming alive and well is not working.

This week, 11 November, the BBC carried a sad report that the WFP is cutting back UN food supplies to Zimbabwe due to lack of funds. The public did not reply to the October WFP appeal. I think I understand why: it’s too disheartening to send money to what looks like a hopeless cause.

My first visit to Zimbabwe was in 1986, to see my new family there, shortly after I married. The country was beautiful and we visited several farms, large and small, some belonging to white families, others to blacks. Corn and tobacco seemed to grow everywhere they were planted. Yes, there was poverty and there were clearly social and political problems, but Robert Mugabe, then in power for five years, seemed to offer hope to the country, one of the few in Africa where black-white relations were often good to very good.

Five years later my mother-in-law gave me a t-shirt from a Zimbabwe women writers’ conference. I loved its message and its cautious reminder, that without girls and women getting educations and writing of their experiences, the country would continue to fight rather than achieve peace. Unfortunately, the message was not strong enough to offset political machinations, and Zimbabwe in the space of 20 years has slipped from being one of Africa’s jewels and a beacon of hope to other African countries to a poverty-stricken nation in dire straits.

Wednesday I cleaned our cupboards, part of the annual pruning of too small and too old clothing.

I did what I have done every November for at least five years: I pulled out the most worn-out t-shirt I have ever owned and decided I can’t bear to throw it out yet. It has holes, the color is faded gray rather than black, and the message is hard to read now.

I think of the women who wrote this message and put it on a t-shirt more than 20 years ago and I refuse to part with that last thread of hope for them.

Here’s what it says, and since I’m unable to reach the author, I hope she is happy for me to share it:

It is still the same -

Exactly the same.

Take up arms and wage war.

Let our spear be education

Let your shield be knowledge

Let “truth at all times” be your motto

Let your will be the determination to work hard

For sisters illiterate still abound.

Fight it to enlighten them

Fight it by solidarity of purpose

The nation cannot develop

Without your participation

Grandma fought it

Mama fought it

I still fight it

You have to fight it

Your daughter will have to fight it

Fight on!

- Barbara Makhalisa, 1990

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