Finding Mercy trailer. This is the 16 mb Flash version.
http://www.spacific.co.nz/indev/Finding_Mercy.flv
At the age of nine, I stood on the runway of a Zimbabwean airforce base with my best friend, Mercy Shumba. Our excitement was palpable. Today, we were to meet our hero – Comrade Robert Mugabe – in person.
Me as pale skinned as Mercy was dark, we were poster children for the new Zimbabwe.
Nervously we curtsied, smiled for the news cameras, and placed garlands of flowers around his neck. We were a symbol that all was well in post-independence Zimbabwe.
But it was not. Less than two hours’ drive away, Mercy’s Ndbele tribespeople were being massacred by Mugabe’s 5 Brigade.
Today, we are thirty years old. President Robert Mugabe has reigned over Zimbabwe for twenty-nine years; almost all of our lives. We know no Zimbabwe without him. I watch news footage now of a decimated country from my privileged new home in New Zealand, and wonder what became of Mercy.
I am desperate to find her. I do not know if she is alive or dead. Her family came to oppose Mugabe, and when I last saw them they had been moved to a shanty town on the city’s outskirts. I feel guilty that my whiteness allowed me to leave without suffering what she has suffered.
Ironically, Mugabe’s leadership has in many ways only served to strengthen the racial inequity in Zimbabwe – and Mercy & I are a testament to that.
In this documentary I will search for Mercy, tracking back through our lives which year for year span Mugabe’s reign. From the room where my friends were shot one night, to the refugee camps in neighbouring nations – this documentary is not only a very personal search, but a guided tour through the Mugabe era.
This is a story about the lost promise two little girls once represented, the lost promise of a nation.
