“When I was in high school, I remember our teachers just leaving,” says Chipo Dendere, assistant professor of Africana studies at Wellesley, who was born and raised in Zimbabwe. “One day you would have a new geography teacher, and the next week, oh, they’ve gone to England!”
Dendere got used to people moving away. Many of her family members, including her mother and sister, went to the United States or the United Kingdom to study or work.
“As a kid, I never thought I would leave,” says Dendere. She used to talk to her parents about “when” she would finish law school at the University of Zimbabwe, not “if.” But even she decided to go after high school: “It felt like everybody was leaving.”
Dendere emigrated from Zimbabwe to attend Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore., where she double majored in political science and psychology. She graduated in 2008 and earned her Ph.D. in political science in 2015 from Georgia State University.
She found the political structure of the United States fascinating. “Here’s a country that has had, at the time [I moved to the U.S.], 43 presidents, and I’m coming from a country that had only had one president up until that point,” she says. “Granted, Zimbabwe is much, much younger, gaining independence in 1980. But I was seeing the same pattern in all of southern Africa, where the political parties that came to power during independence were the same political parties that were still in power.”
“So what does it mean [for the politics and government] when a quarter of the population has left, and who are the ones leaving?”
She began to research the power dynamics in the region for her Ph.D., taking buses from South Africa to Zambia to Tanzania to talk to citizens and understand local politics, but she eventually decided to focus on her home country. “When I thought about why [President Robert] Mugabe had been in power for so long, I got all these standard explanations: violence, cheating, election manipulation, fudging the numbers. All of that stuff is really true. But I also knew a lot of people had been leaving the country,” Dendere says. “At the time, no one was really making this connection between people leaving the country and what happens to the politics of the countries where people have left.”
“Economists have done a lot of work on brain drain,” she continues. “We know that these people leaving is bad for the economy. But 2 million to 4 million Zimbabweans have left—it is a very small country of just 16 million people. So what does it mean [for the politics and government] when a quarter of the population has left, and who are the ones leaving?”
Dendere interviewed Zimbabwean immigrants in England, Scotland, Texas, Indiana, and Oregon. She learned that the majority of people who had left were between the ages of 30 and 45—the “workhorses” of the economy, as Dendere puts it. “People would wake up and the entire nursing unit of a hospital would have left the country,” she says. These young, educated professionals might have changed the outcome of elections with their votes—but in Zimbabwe, they were absent.
After Dendere came to Wellesley, she started researching another type of “exit” made by potential voters in southern Africa: death by AIDS. “We talk a lot about HIV,” she says, “but we haven’t [connected] what it means for democratic development in young countries.” In particular, the majority of people dying of AIDS in the region were young, educated, and urban, part of the “post-independence, sexual liberation euphoria,” she says. Running the numbers for hypothetical scenarios in which these two groups—people who had died of AIDS and people who had migrated—might have voted for the opposing party in Zimbabwe, Dendere found the candidates trying to topple the existing leaders would have gained significant percentages in tallied votes.
“The really groundbreaking number for me is that in 2008, [the opposing party] would have had an extra 10% [of votes]. And this matters because the 2008 election in Zimbabwe is the one that was the most disputed; the government said that the opposition only gained 49%. And they needed to have 52% to avoid a runoff,” says Dendere.
Dendere has now adapted her Ph.D. dissertation into a book about voter exit in Zimbabwe, titled Death, Diversion, and Departure: Voter Exit and the Persistence of Autocracy in Zimbabwe, which is currently under final review at Cambridge University Press.
She notes that this issue has global implications. “Think about the impact of COVID deaths on democracy,” she says. “New York City had the highest number of COVID deaths and COVID illnesses, right at the height of the [2020] election. … Close to a million people died of COVID in the U.S. What does it mean that all those people were unable to participate in the election?”
Dendere has also been thinking about the impact of the emigration of millions of people from Russia and Ukraine since the start of the war in February 2022. Those people are likely to oppose Putin, explains Dendere, which reduces the democratic resistance to his regime. Sudan is seeing a similar type of exodus: The people who left as the situation there deteriorated, she says, “are the ones who can afford to pay that $1,000 or so you need to get moved outside of the country.” And she says it’s happening in Latin America too: “What does it mean that so many people who worked really hard, who are progressive, have left Mexico? What does that mean for the prospects of democracy?”
“We’re going to continue having these conversations,” says Dendere, “because people leave their home countries all the time.”