I Cannot Forgive Gukurahundi Perpetrators, Says 77-Year-Old Survivor
Julia Mlilo, a 77-year-old woman from Silonkwe Village in Tsholotsho District, has yet to find forgiveness for the immense pain inflicted upon her during the Gukurahundi atrocities.
Despite her advanced age and diminished mobility, Mlilo’s memories of that fateful day remain vivid.
Speaking to the BBC, she recounted how, at the sound of gunfire on 24 February 1983, she had hastily abandoned her work in the field and fled into the bush with her husband and children, desperate to escape the violence.
When they emerged her father and more than 20 of her husband’s relatives had been badly assaulted and burnt, many beyond recognition.
She said only the heads were identifiable and they gathered up the remains into a tin basin that had been used for bathing and buried them in a nearby pit.
Mlilo said the place where they were slaughtered and the area of their burial, adjacent to a field of crops, is now marked by reflective white and red crosses. She said:
I haven’t forgiven them, I don’t know what would make me forgive. Whenever I see soldiers I feel the pain and I start trembling.
I don’t trust the process because it’s being done by the government, but I will take part in it.
In the village of the neighbouring village of Salankomo, mass graves surround Thabani Dhlamini’s home.
One of the mass graves lies near the toilet block at a primary school where teachers were killed and dumped there in the 1980s.
In another, steps away from Dhlamini’s house, 22 relatives and neighbours are buried in two graves.
Speaking to BBC, Dhlamini who was just 10 at the time, is still haunted by the memories. The 51-year-old said:
We were not able [to talk about it] and we were in fear to speak about it. I want to free myself from what I witnessed, I need to vent out what I felt.
Dhlamini, along with a group of boys from his village in 1983, saw how soldiers frog-marched 22 women, including his mother, into a hut which they then set on fire.
It is alleged that when the women broke down the door to flee the flames, the soldiers mowed them down with their guns before they could escape.
Dhlamini’s mother was the only survivor as she managed to hide along the side of a nearby grain hut.
The soldiers then ordered the older boys in the group watching nearby to carry the bullet-ridden bodies of the women into the smoking hut and another alongside it.
Dhlamini’s 14-year-old friend Lotshe Moyo was one of them. He was wearing a pin supporting Joshua Nkomo, nd because of that, afterwards, he too was ordered inside, shot and both huts burnt to ashes.
The remains of the victims are still in the ruins – an overgrown area surrounded by a chain-link fence and lots of crosses. On a whitewashed brick wall, the names of the dead are written. Said Dhlamini:
When we started talking about it my memory returned and it seems as if it had happened today. It makes me feel as if I can cry.
On Sunday, 14 July, President Emmerson Mnangagwa launched the Gukurahundi Community Engagement Outreach Programme in Bulawayo.
He said the Programme is a transformative step towards national cohesion and healing and will be led by chiefs.
Mnangagwa, however, accused Zimbabwe’s former colonial powers of instigating divisions in the country, which he claims ultimately led to the Gukurahundi massacres.
In an interview with the BBC, Mbuso Fuzwayo, a 48-year-old member of the local advocacy group Ibhetshu LikaZulu, said the government must take responsibility for the Gukurahundi atrocities.
Fuzwayo’s own grandfather was allegedly abducted during that period and never seen or heard from again. Said Fuzwayo:
They must not try to say this was a Mugabe thing. It was a collective thing. The chief perpetrator might be dead, that is Mugabe – but Emerson Mnangagwa remains in the absence of Mugabe.
Up to today, we don’t know why the people were killed – the motive.
And they don’t want to talk about it and I still believe that they have got a lot that they are hiding.
Chief Khulumani Mathema, a prominent traditional leader from Gwanda North, has denounced the government’s efforts to address the Gukurahundi atrocities as fundamentally flawed and inadequate. He told BBC:
It needs to be a national issue that focuses on international best practices, which is how genocides are addressed in the whole world.
We’ve got countries that went through genocide. We’ve got Rwanda, we’ve got Germany, but we want to create and reinvent the wheel, which I think is not feasible.
There’s no single genocide that has ever been completely solved when the perpetrators are still in charge of the levers of power.
Gukurahundi refers to a series of massacres of Ndebele people carried out by the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) in the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces of Zimbabwe between 1983 and 1987.
It was a violent suppression of perceived “dissidents” and “insurgents” by the government of Robert Mugabe against the Ndebele ethnic minority in the early years of independent Zimbabwe.
Estimates suggest that between 10,000 and 20,000 civilians were killed during the Gukurahundi massacres.
The massacres were carried out by the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade of the ZNA.
The government at the time labelled the victims as “dissidents” and justified the killings as necessary to restore order and unity in the country.
Gukurahundi is widely considered one of the worst episodes of mass violence and human rights abuses in Zimbabwe’s history.
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