Nationals are fleeing in their hundreds of thousands – around 3,000 into South Africa alone every day – while those who remain face constant threat and uncertainty.

Actress and writer Jane Houston-Green returned to Scotland last August having lived in Zimbabwe for 12 years.

During that time she witnessed the forced seizure of white-owned commercial farms and, more recently, the mass demolition of urban slums in 2005. But it wasn’t always so.

“I’ll always remember arriving at the airport for the first time and having tea and sandwiches in a nearby hotel,” she says. “It was an up-and-coming country and the tourism trade was expanding. It could've become a real jewel in Africa’s crown. But things went the other way.”

Zimbabwe is in Jane’s blood. Her aunt moved there in the 1950s to teach in a primary school, her parents have lived there and her sister still does, with her family – and, after a couple of years spent teaching English in Gambia with VSO as a teenager, Jane knew it wouldn’t be long before she herself returned to the continent.

“They say Africa gets under your skin,” she explains from her home in Blainslie. “I always knew I’d go back. It had always had its appeal and, because I already had family out there, I wasn’t going out blind.”

Originally trained as an actress and dancer, Jane was invited to Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, by a former colleague from the Dundee Rep Theatre and she jumped at the chance to escape the “politics” of the British arts scene.

“He said ‘We could use your skills out here’ and that sowed the seeds in my mind,” she says. “With my range of skills – teaching dance and drama, acting, doing voice-overs – I knew I could make a living and so I moved out there two months later.

“I was involved in 25 theatre shows while I was there.

“As an artist in the UK you had to be a round peg in a round hole or a square peg in a square hole which, for a creative person, is very limiting. It’s so competitive; all about playing politics and who you know, rather than just using your arts and talents to help others,” she explained.

“I was asked to help out with a small film institute. They’d hoped I’d be able to get funding, but production companies began pulling out because of the political crisis – the fuel shortage meant they couldn’t move people around and they simply weren’t prepared to take top actors there.”

Jane had to adjust quickly to a different – and increasingly deteriorating – way of living; where plans for the day depended on whether there was any fuel available to get you to the shops, whether there was any food there to buy and whether there was any electricity to cook at home. And so it continues.