Jabulani Zilawe lost all 11 of his children to AIDS. Now he is the only one left to care for their orphans.
“This has become my life — with my grandchildren. All their parents died. AIDS killed them. I had 11 children, six of them were girls who had moved to South Africa to seek better life, but they all came back dead one after the other,” Zilawe told the Thompson Reuters Foundation as he surveyed his small grandchildren scrambling around him.
Zilawe lives in a dilapidated homestead outside Norton, a town 40 kilometers from Harare, the Zimbabwean capital. His bedroom is a thatched mud hut that sits near 12 mounds marking the remains of his wife and children.
“My sons, who became illegal gold miners, also suffered from AIDS before they died. You can see the graves here; the additional one belongs to my wife, who also died some two years ago, leaving me to look after our orphaned grandchildren,” said Zilawe, 76.
Nearby, some of his grandchildren wrestled over a pot of leftover porridge. None is in school; instead, like their grandfather, each child passes the day at the homestead, idling and seeking a spot to bask in the sunshine.
Some of the little ones fall ill regularly, said Zilawe, who didn’t know whether any carried the virus that had killed their parents.
“I don’t know anything about my grandchildren’s HIV status; maybe they have the disease or maybe not,” he said.