No going back to Mugabe

          After his final appeal for asylum was rejected in 2004, Thomas lived rough in Manchester; on friends’ floors and in a disused factory with other failed asylum seekers. One night, five white youths attacked him and left him with bruised ribs and a swollen eye. But he wouldn’t go to the police. “I was terrified that they would send me back to Zimbabwe.”

Shaken by the attack, he went to Glasgow to stay with friends, but an old illness forced him to go to hospital. He was afraid to give his real name, so he didn’t attend his check-up, went back to Manchester and slept in the bus station. The following day he contacted Refugee Action – the charity that had helped him with his asylum case. But hostels in Manchester can’t take people like Thomas who can’t receive state funding, so they had to send him to a homeless hostel in Liverpool. “It was full of drug addicts,” says Thomas. “There was a massive room with lots of beds. Five o’clock, they gave me dinner, and six o’clock you had to be in bed. I was scared of the other residents. They made racist jokes. I couldn’t sleep all night. The next morning I took the first bus back to Manchester.” He spent his second night in the bus station before another friend let him stay.

At this time, the asylum and immigration tribunal judged that failed asylum seekers deported to Zimbabwe would be in danger. This gave Zimbabweans refugee status, and Thomas reapplied for asylum. But his claim was rejected. His case worker at Refugee Action appealed, and Thomas was invited to attend an appeal hearing in London.

He won the appeal, and returned to Manchester ready to move into a hostel and receive government food vouchers, instead of having to rely on handouts from friends and charity, but it was another two months before anything arrived. Three days before Christmas, he was finally given a room in a National Asylum Support Service [Nass] hostel. But it was a disgusting place to live. “My bedroom floor was covered in water, the kitchen ceiling leaked, there was mould growing everywhere.” And the first food vouchers didn’t arrive until Christmas Eve, when the only supermarkets that accepted them were closed. “I spent Christmas Day ill with hunger,” he says.

The new year, however, looked more promising: Thomas was transferred to a better- maintained Nass hostel, and then he heard that his sister, who he hadn’t seen for three years since escaping from Zimbabwe, was living in the Midlands. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “She had left the same night as myself, after the Green Bombers had beaten me up in front of my family. None of us had heard from her.”

He remembered Sonia as a big woman. Now 43, also a failed asylum seeker, she was tiny. “We hated each other when I was growing up,” Thomas laughs. “But now I just wanted to be with her. She is the only family I have here.”

He has one brother still in Zimbabwe and another who died last year. Another brother and two other sisters are in South Africa, where his mother now lives, too. Her house in Zimbabwe was destroyed by Mugabe’s so-called slum clearance programme.

Thomas met Tanya through a mutual friend while he was staying with Sonia, and they clicked immediately. She invited Thomas to move in with her and her four young children. With Tanya at work all day, Thomas be­came a house husband. “It’s the happiest I have ever been,” he beams, clutching Tanya’s hand. They plan to marry, but say they don’t want to tie the knot until Thomas has his refugee status. “I don’t want anyone to think we are getting married so I can stay,” he insists. “She’s been there for me, more than anyone else in my life. She took me in when I had nothing.”

Thomas is desperate to find work to support his new family, but asylum seekers are prohibited from working. Five months on, the Home Office has told him nothing about his case. The uncertainty is making him nervous. “It’s the not knowing what is going on that is stressful,” he says. In April the government obtained permission to send failed asylum seekers back to Zimbabwe, and later this legislation was confirmed, allowing it to forcibly remove up to 7,000 people.

What will he do if the Home Office does start deporting failed asylum seekers to Zimbabwe? Thomas says: “It’s harder now. I have a family here, but I’ll have to go underground again. No way am I going back.” And Tanya? Without hesitation, she replies: “I’ll go wherever he is.”

Names have been changed. Thomas’s article, and more on asylum seekers, can be found at SocietyGuardian. co. uk/asylumseekers