MATABELELAND SOUTH, ZIMBABWE — The child's name is Godknows, and his mother smiles softly when she explains the choice: Only God knows whether he will live or die.
"I'm leaving everything in God's hands because the child is always ill," she whispers.
Godknows is 2 but looks like a frail 6-month-old, wrists and ankles like twigs, dark hollows under his solemn eyes, sores on his face. He flops in his mother's arms like an exhausted old man, a victim of Zimbabwe's silent hunger crisis.
The twin miseries of crop failure and economic collapse have left Zimbabwe's villages without food. Millions survive on nothing but wild fruit, and many have died.
There are no official statistics. But ask people here in Zimbabwe's Matabeleland South province whether they know anyone who died of hunger recently, and the answer is nearly always yes. Sometimes it's four or six people in the last couple of weeks. Sometimes they just say "plenty."
"Children are dying out in the bush," one foreign doctor says, on condition of anonymity. "We are all guarded. We have to keep quiet or else we'll be kicked out" by the government.
The crisis has been exacerbated by President Robert Mugabe's decision in June to suspend humanitarian aid during the run-up to his one-man presidential runoff. The long-ruling Mugabe, stunned when he won fewer votes than opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in the first round in March, accused aid agencies of supporting the opposition and didn't lift the ban until August. Critics say the regime, which has a history of denying food to opposition areas, was using hunger as a political tool to force people to vote for Mugabe.
In past years, groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Zimbabwean rights group Solidarity Peace Trust have reported that the Grain Marketing Board, the state monopoly responsible for distribution of maize, the nation's staple, has routinely denied food to opposition supporters. But this year, there is virtually no grain from the board -- and in many areas, no humanitarian aid either.
"The food always ends up in the hands of ZANU-PF," says villager Solomon Nsinga, 66, referring to Mugabe's ruling party. "The guys in charge of distribution are ZANU-PF. This is where the problem is. ZANU-PF gets it first."
(The locations of the Matabeleland South villages have not been disclosed, to protect the identities of villagers, who fear repercussions for speaking out.)
