by Kelvin Wilson Kasiwulaya
“The history of all hitherto societies has been the history of class struggles.” — Karl Marx
Samson Muchirahondo, a frail, broken boy from Mberengwa, had never heard of Karl Marx. Why would he? Marx’s words were foreign, they belonged to books that gathered dust in rooms where the poor never set foot. No, the words of a dead philosopher—of a long-ago time—had no place in a life shackled by the suffocating reality of survival.
The reality Samson lived in was savage, like a wild beast that clawed at his soul. From the cracks in the dust-choked streets of Mberengwa, he could feel the weight of everything he wasn’t. The village where his body was born, the place where dreams went to die before they even had a chance to breathe, was both his cradle and his tomb. No escape. No way out. There were no other stories for a boy like him, only silence, the kind that crushed his spirit even before his legs could run.
Havillah. The name hung like a dream—borrowed, impossible. She lived in Borrowdale, that place where the gods must have once rested, where the air was different and where words like “privilege” and “comfort” held weight. Her family, opulent and untouchable, had things Samson would never hold in his hands—power, land, schools, fat bank accounts bloated with a history of exploitation. And they gave her everything: the fine taste of Western education, a house built of glass and dreams. She had never seen poverty, had never knelt on the soil Samson’s bare feet knew too well.
They met. And Samson thought—foolishly, hopelessly—that love, that fevered, undying fire that burned in his chest, could bridge the gap. He thought it could burn down walls, tear down the gates of Borrowdale. That maybe, just maybe, he could shed the skin of Mberengwa and climb into a world where people like him weren’t consigned to rot, to work, to labor until they too could be turned into dust.
But love, much like the things that suffocate the soul, was a lie. Samson was a boy born of the soil—earthbound, tied to the muck. And Marx? Marx knew. Marx knew how the system worked. He knew that the rich stayed rich and the poor stayed poor, that the system twisted itself in on itself, feeding the few while grinding the many into pulp. For Samson, Marx’s words—if they had ever reached him—would have sounded like the ringing of a bell, too late, too far from his hands. For Samson, life was not about theory, it was about surviving each minute, each breath, each desperate act of rebellion against the machine that worked to erase him.
But love. Love, he thought, love could be an escape. It was a childish fantasy, of course, but when you’ve never known anything else, the only dream worth dreaming is the one you can hold in your chest. And so, he held it. But love, you see, was a luxury that the rich could afford. For Havillah’s family, he was a symbol of something they would rather have burnt than touched. He was nothing but a smudge on their name—a stain on the immaculate whiteness of their world.
Her father, her mother, their unspoken glances—they saw Samson for what he was: a peasant with skin thickened by labor, with callouses on his hands that didn’t belong to them. They sneered at the dirt under his nails, the hunger in his stomach, the way he shuffled when he entered their immaculate house. He wasn’t fit to touch their daughter, let alone love her.
It wasn’t just class. It was existence. Samson existed only as a shadow to them, a ghost that walked when the sun went down, unnoticed, unacknowledged, except when he was needed to work. They told him as much, in ways that couldn’t be denied. The dismissive glances, the cutting words, the sideways looks—they didn’t want his love, his truth, his life. They wanted the illusion of perfection, the picture of privilege. They wanted a son-in-law who spoke the right language, ate the right food, lived in the right houses. He had none of these things, and they made sure he knew it. Every breath he took in their presence was a reminder of his worthlessness.
The fight drained him. The fight to prove himself—to himself, to her, to them—was exhausting. Samson worked himself into the ground, tore at the very fabric of his body to scrape together what little he could. But the more he gave, the more he found himself starving. The more he bent, the more the world forced him to break. Marx had been right: no matter how much he worked, the fruits of his labor were never his to eat.
Day after day, the weight of the world crushed him further. He was a man without a name, without a future, without even the right to exist as something more than a tool to be used, to be discarded. The contradictions—oh, how they burned. The contradictions of his love, his struggle, his unrelenting desire to be.
And then, the crash. One final moment. One last breath of air to suffocate the smoldering hope. Samson let go. He couldn’t hold on anymore. There was nothing left. He ended it, slipping quietly from the world that never cared. Gone, as though he had never been.
It wasn’t his fault. Samson’s death wasn’t an isolated tragedy—it was just another name in the unending list of young Zimbabweans who died not of disease or violence, but of systematic despair. His story mirrors the lives of thousands, millions who stand at the crossroads of existence in Zimbabwe, young men and women born into systems that have already written their fates in invisible ink. These youth are the forgotten. They are sold into hopelessness, left to rot under the hot sun while the powerful, the rich, the corrupt keep their hands clean, keep their pockets full.
Samson’s life was stolen—not by a bullet or a disease, but by the deep, unyielding structure of a society that has no place for the working class, that has no place for its youth except to work and die. In a land where opportunity is a foreign concept, where youth unemployment runs rampant, where the future is the cruelest joke, Samson’s story is but one drop in an ocean of sorrow. His body is just another statistic, another lost soul in a country that refuses to see them.
The young people of Zimbabwe—they are not just fighting for jobs. They are fighting for their right to exist. In a system controlled by the ruling elite, the corrupt elite who hold the wealth, the power, the land, the future is nothing but a dream. The cycle of exploitation and poverty is unbroken. The story of Samson Muchirahondo is a fiction, yes—but it is a fiction that mirrors the lives of thousands of Zimbabwean youths today.
They fight for the right to break free. They fight for the right to rise. But the question remains: Will the system ever let them live? Or will the fight continue, and will they be condemned to die before they even have a chance to breathe free? This, too, is their story. The story of a youth betrayed, and a country that watches them die from the inside out.
This story is a reflection of their struggle —one that mirrors the life of too many Zimbabwean youth who cannot succeed, who cannot thrive, because they are forever caught in the web of a corrupt elite and an unrelenting system