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What sick society does this to its children?

IF YOU'VE ever been assailed by this lump-in-the-throat feeling of losing your child in a packed shopping mall for long agonising seconds, then you are my audience.

Those who share my living space know that I'd kill for my children, not a sitting head of state.

Having made home in a dwelling that can easily swallow my mother's apartheid-issue yard five times - and a bit more - my young brood's favourite prank is listening to me making my voice hoarse calling after them.

Their childish chortles will almost invariably give them away, followed by my own guffaw, relieved that no extraterrestrial had snatched them to do unmentionable things to them.

In the hell that Zimbabwe has become, fathers wake up in hospital to remember that they haven't seen their three-year-olds in months. God knows I'd go crazy first before it hits me that my child is missing.

Sampson Chenerani, like any other child elsewhere in the sane world, is in a VW Beetle T-shirt and next to his bed is a picture of a dinosaur torn from a magazine.

The horror of his fate is that he's in hospital, his "one eye massively swollen, surrounded by a gory abrasion and a wound on his temple".

His mother, Margaret, a modest woman of rural Zimbabwean stock says "he is too young to understand".

When Zanu-PF goons attacked his home of MDC supporters with sticks and rocks, little Sampson was hit in the eye during the ensuing commotion.

One can't help but be moved to paraphrase Nelson Mandela and ask what sort of sick society does this to its own children?

Since one particularly toxic dalliance with fermented grapes where I pitched up at the garage with my own kids but instead of filling up got into a fight with the petrol attendant - I even cried - I have vowed that never again will I subject my offspring to such an unsightly experience.

Denias Dombo will not be able to spare his children a lot of woe. After he was beaten to a pulp by war veterans, he tried, unsuccessfully, to take his own life when the wire noose failed to do the deed.

His nine-year-old daughter Dorcas would find him in that sorry state - covered in blood and his body broken.

Shepherd, a 4-year-old boy, accompanies his mother to visit his father in hospital. He points at his father's swollen feet and begs to know: "Daddy, where are your shoes?"

This madness, unravelling across the Limpopo, is detailed in The Fear, The Last Days of Robert Mugabe, a book by Peter Godwin.

Read it and weep.

Children who should be out playing in the mud are treated like enemies of the state and beaten black and blue.

In 1994 when neighbour turned against neighbour because one happened to be Tutsi and the other Hutu, we had a perfect excuse for our inaction: we were busy with our first democratic elections.

Over a million Rwandans would perish in what would be the continent's worst round of genocide.

What will be our excuse when these tormented Zimbabwean children finally cross the border to our shores to contend for space at the robots with their blind countrymen? We were busy? Doing what?

In his senility, Mugabe doesn't care.

We, South Africans - architects of ubuntu - cannot afford not to care.

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