Racist mass-murder of isiNdebele-speakers by the regime of President Robert Mugabe and the Zanu-PF party took place in Zimbabwe between 1983 and 1987. This is the subject of a factual investigative report, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe (Hurst and Co., London, 2007), first published by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe and the Legal Resources Foundation in 1997 as Breaking the Silence: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands. We print below passages from the Introduction to the 2007 edition, written by Elinor Sisulu.f
Part of the silence was that of leaders of the African National Congress, then fighting the apartheid regime of South Africa with an army based mainly in Angola. At the same time as the Mugabe regime was carrying out its Gukurahundi (or "washing away of the chaff") in Zimbabwe, the ANC exercised a repressive regime over its own members, a large number of whom were imprisoned and brutalised at Quatro detention camp in northern Angola. This took place especially after the mutiny in Angola in February and May 1984 of over 90 percent of the ANC's trained troops. (For a first-hand report, see here).
The mutineers had been protesting against the lack of a democratic conference and the repressive character of the ANC Security Department, which they regarded as infiltrated by the security forces of the apartheid regime. Major General Andrew Masondo, who died on 20 April this year - former lecturer at the University College of Fort Hare, long-term prisoner on Robben Island, National Commissar of the ANC in exile and subsequent head of the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (Somafco) at Mazimbu in Tanzania (where he was later accused of having carried out sexual abuse of young women students) - was one of the architects of that repressive regime. Quatro in Angola found a still more terrible parallel in Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe .
The Archbishop of Cape Town, the Most Reverend Thabo Makgoba, has stated that leaders of the government of South Africa "currently appear to many beyond our borders as heartless and unmoved by the suffering of Zimbabweans." (For full statement, see here). The Archbishop is too kind, to the South African government.
The crime of Gukurahundi took place a quarter of a century ago. Based as they were in Lusaka in Zambia, immediately to the north of Zimbabwe, it is impossible that leaders of the ANC in exile at that time such as President Thabo Mbeki and Arts and Culture Minister Pallo Jordan did not know. The Zimbabwean nationalist party, Zapu, led by Joshua Nkomo, had been one of their most intimate allies. The two organisations had together fought as allies in Zimbabwe. Had a white government - in the eighties - conducted mass murder of black people in Rhodesia on even a fraction of the same scale, the ANC would have organised a tidal wave of protest across the globe.
Instead, Mbeki and Jordan (re-elected last December as a member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC) have preserved a diplomatic silence for a quarter of a century on this great crime of southern Africa: a "Sharpeville massacre" replicated many times over. This might have been excused as pragmatic while the ANC was in exile, fighting a military and diplomatic struggle against the apartheid regime in Pretoria . Since publication of the report of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in 1997, it is open and unforgivable collusion with the murderers. The discrepancy between Minister Jordan's current outrage at the writings of a white columnist in South Africa (see here) and his silence over the regime of Gukurahundi is bare-faced hypocrisy.
Elinor Sisulu is the daughter-in-law of the late Walter Sisulu and Albertina Sisulu, two of the most respected leaders of the ANC in South Africa over half a century. She is one of the first people from the ANC tradition in South Africa to break that terrible silence. As mentor and comrade to Nelson Mandela, her father-in-law served a life sentence on Robben Island, where Jacob Zuma - now president of the ANC - was a fellow prisoner. Elinor Sisulu herself has provided an inspirational lead to the ANC, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party - and not least to the aged Mandela himself - in their moral responsibility towards the terrorist regime in their neighbour to the north. All the crimes of the Mugabe regime follow from its Gukurahundi massacres of the 1980s. "Breaking the silence" must start with the government of South Africa. Ms Sisulu speaks to that government, and to former President Mandela himself.
Elinor Sisulu, Introduction to the 2007 edition, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, (Hurst and Co, London, 2007)
The Shona expression "Gukurahundi", meaning "the first rain that washes away the chaff of the last harvest before the spring rains", used to have pleasant connotations. ...In the 1980s the term Gukurahundi assumed an entirely new meaning when the North Korean-trained 5 Brigade murdered thousands of people in the Zimbabwean province of Matabeleland and parts of Midlands. Both the 5 Brigade and the period of mayhem and murder they caused were called Gukurahundi, which is why, since then, the word Gukurahundi invokes nothing but negative emotions among Zimbabweans, ranging from indifference, shame, denial, terror, bitter anger and deep trauma, depending on whether one is a victim, perpetrator or one of the millions of citizens who remained silent. ...
...Yolande Mukagasana [is] a Rwandan woman whose husband and three children were murdered in the 1994 genocide. ...The title of one of her books, Les Blessures du Silence (The Wounds of Silence), comes to mind whenever I grapple with the capacity of human societies to ignore gross human rights violations even if these happen right in their midst. Nelson Mandela commented on this tendency with reference to Rwanda: "The louder and more piercing the cries of despair - even when that despair results in half-a-million dead in Rwanda - the more these cries seem to encourage an instinctive reaction to raise our hands so as to close our eyes and ears".
...The report [by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace] points out that one of the most painful aspects of the Gukurahundi massacres was that the plight of the victims and survivors was and continues to be unacknowledged. They are still suffering from the wounds of silence. And who is responsible for inflicting these wounds? The perpetrators obviously have a vested interest in maintaining this silence. But what about the rest of us who lived through those years and continued our lives as if nothing was happening? Are we not equally responsible for the wounds of silence, both while the horrific events of Gukurahundi were unfolding, and in their aftermath? Even today many of us continue to be silent.
As I read this report I felt a deep sense of shame about my own silence. ...[Those] of us who had family in Matabeleland had no excuse. Right from the start of the 5 Brigade campaign, news filtered out through family and community networks that there was something horrendous going on. ...
...The 5 Brigade did not fall within the army chain of command but was directly answerable to the highest office in the land. With hindsight we know without a doubt that President Robert Mugabe was fully aware and part of the campaign of mass murder in the Matabeleland hinterland. At the time many of us were too enamoured of our great liberation hero to allow ourselves to confront all the evidence of his direct complicity. ...The eyes and ears of the international community were also closed. In contrast to the propaganda image of the radical Marxist leader, Robert Mugabe was moderation itself during his first few years in office. ...The cries of the Ndebele people fell on deaf ears.
...The stories of physical and psychological torture, rape and other forms of sexual abuse, starvation of the population, burning of homes and granaries, disappearances, bodies thrown down mineshafts and murders are all familiar and consistent with what I heard described by relatives. However, I was taken aback by the account of the mass shooting of 62 young men and women on the banks of the Cewale River in Lupane on 5 March 1983. The silence that greeted this massacre is in direct contrast to the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, news of which reverberated around the world.
The Gukurahundi operations came to an end with the 1987 Unity Accord between Zapu and Zanu. At the end of the Liberation War in 1980, all those guilty of violations were covered by a general amnesty. The report notes the important fact that once more in Zimbabwe's history, those responsible for the most heinous acts against unarmed civilians were not held accountable for their actions, thus strengthening the culture of impunity that prevails in Zimbabwe. The human rights violations since 2000 are a product of this culture of impunity. The same tools of intimidation, physical and psychological torture and murder have been used, albeit on a lesser scale, in the recent violations. The difference is that they are targeted not on a particular ethnic group but at opposition leaders throughout the country.
Far from being a closed chapter, Gukurahundi has left a festering wound in the psyche of the Zimbabwean nation. ...The silence needs to be broken. Hopefully, one day the leaders of this region who have not cried out as loudly as they should have against the enormous and heinous crimes against the people of Zimbabwe that were committed in the past 23 years, will see fit to apologise to the people of Zimbabwe.
Elinor Sisulu, December 2006
