Unwillingly torn from your homeland

It is the custom to distinguish between economic migrants and refugees.  I, and many of my friends, fall between these rigid categories.  Money was not a motive for my leaving Zimbabwe (or Rhodesia, as it was then) but nor was my life in constant danger when I left, and I was not deported.  I love to travel but I was not seeking a new way of life; I did not sense that I was actually an Australian under the skin with the sort of conviction that affects, say, a transgender person.  Though I had read the Billabong books of Mary Grant Bruce....  However, I believed that when Zimbabwe emerged from its bitter war I would no longer be welcome there and so I started looking for suitable opportunities to depart.  Commonplace enough.

Anyway, I am naturally interested in the reasons why people take the hard road of quitting their country of birth and settling elsewhere, perhaps without having much choice in their destination, and in how they adapt.  I know many migrants from Southern Africa: some have been required to leave home; many have suffered hardships; most pine for their old country; a few have allowed their lives to be destroyed by regrets; all have tales to tell.  It is their tales that I plunder when I write about migration and assimilation. 

Actually, at certain points in any life, there are decisions to make.  In Rhodesia, where they were made against the backdrop of the guerrilla war, they gained urgency, especially at points of crisis.  These pressures could easily precipitate or worsen existing personal problems.  Over and above everything, in a way not known in stable countries, the question of emigration would hang.  Talk and speculation gave way to an imperative and the moment of departure would be chosen.  And this was a forced departure, not a lifestyle choice.  Leaving the place you love for a strange life in whatever country will accept you....  But I cannot complain.  Any true refugee knows what I mean, but with a vengeance.

I always knew the war in Rhodesia would result in an extremist, racist black government, probably a dictatorship.  Old and recent history told me that.  If I said so, outside a coterie of “liberal” friends (that is, rationalists), someone would be sure to start raging and denying the obvious.  I wonder what they really thought?  But of course it is natural enough to deceive oneself; in my own way, hoping against hope, I sometimes wondered, looking round at my relatively prosperous homeland and its ingenious, well-educated inhabitants, with its relatively good race relations and plentiful resources, if there was a future for me and mine.