Mick Hartley

As Robert Mugabe prepares to attend the EC-Africa summit in Portugal, supported by other African leaders, here’s life back in Zimbabwe:

Of all the victims of Robert Mugabe’s regime, the children of Zimbabwe are the most vulnerable and heartrending. Their families have been destroyed by Aids, poverty and emigration. The social welfare systems that might have helped them have collapsed in the country’s economic meltdown. Millions go hungry. Many are severely malnourished.

Unicef estimates that 1.6 million Zimbabwean children, a quarter of the total, are orphans — the highest percentage in the world. The headmaster of a secondary school outside Bulawayo told The Times that a third of his 600 14 to 16-year-old students were parentless, and expected that number to rise by another 100 within a year.

In a rural primary school 30 miles (50km) from Bulawayo we found 16 orphans in a class of 32 six-year-olds. By some estimates as many as a third of Zimbabwe’s children no longer go to school.

Unicef believes that 90 per cent of those without parents are taken in by grandparents and other members of their extended families. But it also says that there are at least 100,000 “child-headed households” left …. to fend for themselves “We have an entire generation of children who are at extreme risk of abuse, of contracting HIV and a downward spiral of dropping out of school and taking their trauma into adulthood,” said James Elder, a Unicef spokesman in Zimbabwe…

In March in Mbare The Times met Tatenda Banda, a pretty 16-year-old orphan living in a rudimentary shelter. To survive she was selling herself to as many as half a dozen men a day for less than 30p a time. “I feel ashamed but there’s nothing else I can do,” she said then. “I’m afraid of Aids but there’s nothing to be done about it.” We tried to find Tatenda last week, but were told that she had died of Aids.

On the morning that The Times visited a Harare cemetery, 24 children had just been given a paupers’ burial. They now lie rotting in an unmarked mass grave.