Two families, two babies, and one – thinning – hope for a new Zimbabwe

Angela Simbi squinted to read the crumpled piece of paper delivered to her by the city council in early October. Part of her family’s brick home in the suburb of Mbare was an illegal structure, the letter explained, and the family must demolish the extra rooms they’d added.

If they didn’t, the notice warned, the government would come do it for them.

Dread welled in her chest. This house had been in Ms. Simbi’s family since the 1970s, when the white minority government built a settlement of three-room houses for Black workers on the southern edge of the capital, and she and her husband had moved in. 

It was the house where she’d raised her children, and where those same children had begun to raise theirs. 

In April 1980,

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