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It still feels like last night to Newton Mudzingwa. Seven months ago, Mudzingwa, a security guard in an affluent suburb of Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, had a much-appreciated night off-duty.

He spent the evening in one of the city's burgeoning slums, in the one-room shack he had rented—with him, his wife, and his two young children crammed into a single bed. It was to be their last night at home together.

Around midnight, the blare of loudspeakers jolted them out of sleep. Police and military officers cheered by President Robert Mugabe's political activists swooped down on the slum to demolish "illegal" structures. Operation Murambastvina (meaning "Drive Out Trash") had begun. Mudzingwa quickly threw together whatever goods he could save. His wife bundled blankets around their children. As temperatures plummeted to biting levels, they rushed outside. The family then watched as bulldozers reduced to rubble the only home the children had ever known.

"All I could ask was: 'Why, God? Why?'" recalls Mudzingwa.

The government says that only 700,000 people were relocated and that urban renewal was long overdue. Other reliable estimates put the figure at 1.7 million displaced people. Either way, the Mudzingwas were among tens of thousands of locals suddenly without shelter, proper food, and clean water.

The "Mugabe tsunami," as African news media have labeled the event, pushed Zimbabwe, a country the size of Montana with a population of 12 million, back onto front pages around the world. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan rushed top envoy Anna Kajimulo Tibaijuka to begin a fact-finding mission to the former Rhodesia.

On the ground, away from the media, churches located in the slums felt the first brunt of the government's action. Thousands sought help.

"Many were coming to churches saying, 'We are desperate,'" says Jethro Dube, a pastor on staff with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in Bulawayo, the country's second-largest city.

Churches responded by delivering food, water, and blankets, as well as by housing many of the displaced—at least until they, too, were forcibly moved. The government put many families into holding camps in remote areas.

"The government has been very harsh in dealing with poor people," observes Bulawayo-based Useni Sibanda, program manager of the Justice and Peace Commission of the Association of Evangelicals in Africa (AEA). Sibanda witnessed the suffering and death of some in these camps.

Fortunately, through the help of churches and friends, Mudzingwa managed to find safe haven in the country for his wife and children. Mudzingwa remains an "illegal" squatter in an urban building under construction.

The government eventually succumbed to local and international pressure and halted the destruction. But by February, the beginning of the rainy season in Zimbabwe, thousands were still living out in the open or under plastic sheets. The government had promised earlier to build 200,000 new homes by the year's end. But the deadline came and went without much being done. Some media reports say the few houses that were constructed crumbled under the first heavy rains.

Many church leaders told CT that restoring order in townships was not the original issue, regardless of what the Mugabe government claimed. "It is the way it was done," explains Tawona Mtshigo, then a church-based activist and now director of the International Bible Society in Zimbabwe. "Was it cleaning up places or people?" she asks.

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April 2006, Vol. 50, No. 4