Mabel Ann Pike

Cry with Me: Part 1: the True Story About a Woman from Africa Seeking Asylum in Britain Mabel Ann Pike

Cry With Me is a moving and heartrending, personal account by the author about how she grew up and suffered untold hardships and injustices in a war-torn and corrupt African country-Zimbabwe-and how she finally took the courageous step to seek asylum in Britain. Mabel, who writes from the heart, recreates the loving relationship she had as a child with her Shona grandmother, a practical woman who, though married to a white British man, lived simply, preferring to sleep on the floor by the stove and eat her bush meals than live by western standards. The warm loving relationship with her family, her parents and her children, shine through the various tragedies and hardships. She is ruthlessly honest in describing the inhuman cruelties of the guerrillas ('freedom fighters' or 'war veterans') who murdered and raped her cousin, and the Zimbabwean police who 'arrested' and abused her, throwing her into a stinking prison when she was nine months pregnant. The ultimate poignancy comes from the anguish with which she recreates her sweet daughter Aida's plight, dying from a kidney infection in the unhygienic and unbelievably filthy conditions of hospitals in Zimbabwe. Though Mabel proved herself to be an enterprising and resourceful businesswoman, the persistent harassment of government officials, the unrelenting havoc of crime and plunder, eventually drove her to seek a new life in Britain, the home of her forefathers. However, the five-year long and ongoing delay in granting her asylum, with the prospect of her appeal being refused and her being returned to the Zimbabwe hell-hole at the age of 53, has been a sword of Damocles over her life, resulting in stress and ill-health.