#martin fletcher

[comicpolls]

Favourite Speedster: Round One Match Seventeen

Martin Fletcher (Super Sabre)

Marrina Smallwood (Leviathan)

Voting ended onMay 20, 2025

[lukegauthier]

[traderrock]

Depeche Mode - "Policy of Truth"

[literallyjustnewmutants]

The New Mutants #65 (vol. 1)

[mutantenfisch]

I am in love with him and I don’t even know him.  Nor does he exist. But who cares?

[pulitzerfieldnotes]

Martin Fletcher

Mount Carmel, Ben Freeth's farm 70 miles west of Harare, was seized by a member of Robert Mugabe's cabinet in 2009, but one recent morning we sneaked back on to his land. The fields were barren. The mango and orange orchards, once the most productive in the country, were dead or dying. The 6,000 acre farm now produces absolutely nothing.

Freeth has suffered badly, but in the ruins of his house - which the regime's war veterans burned down - we met two of his former workers, Peter Asani (left) and Sinos Bois (right) who have suffered much worse. They still live on the farm, but they have been beaten by the war vets. They have no work, no money, no electricity or running water, and survive on barely a bowl a day of a maize porridge known as sadza. They cannot even afford seeds to plant for food next year, though now is planting season. "It was a good life, but now we're starving," Asani told me.  

To read more of Martin’s reporting, visit his project at “Mugabe’s Last Days”.

[pulitzerfieldnotes]

Martin Fletcher

Drive around central Harare any weekday morning and this is what you see - long queues snaking along the pavements outside every bank - though you have to photograph them quickly and discreetly because regime informers are everywhere.

The queues form long before dawn. The people who stand in them are desperate to withdrew as many US dollars as possible while they can, though the daily limit is now $50 or less per person. That is because the regime abandoned the national currency after it was rendered worthless by hyperinflation in 2009, and is now running out of the US dollars that it adopted instead.

The regime's response to the liquidity crisis has been to introduce a surrogate currency called bond notes. No Zimbabwean has any confidence in what they regard as Monopoly money. But they fear that sooner or later they will turn up at their banks and be given bond notes in lieu of US dollars - hence the panic. 

To read more of Martin’s reporting, visit his project “Mugabe’s Last Days”.   

[pulitzerfieldnotes]

Martin Fletcher

A big protest against corruption and economic mismanagement was planned for Harare one recent weekday morning. I drive into the city centre at about 8.30am to watch, only to be told that one of the organisers, Patson Dzamara, had been abducted and severely beaten during the night. I found him lying on a gurney in the Avenues Clinic with a big lump on the back of his head and red weals across his back. After he told me the story of his abduction I returned to the streets to find large numbers of security forces backed by water cannons had taken up positions in the main squares and thoroughfares. News of Dzamara's abduction spread rapidly on social media. Fear prevailed. The protest fizzled out. Robert Mugabe's regime used a deliberate, pre-meditated act of violence to send a message, and it worked.

To read more of Martin’s reporting, visit his project “Mugabe’s Last Days”.