Daily News
12 October 2011
It was eerily coincidental that as many parts of the country were washed with early rain last week, memories of another gukurahundi saw the light of day.
New evidence of what President Mugabe called “a moment of madness†have emerged in Matabeleland in the past few days. It was “a moment of madness†which occurred nearly 30 years ago in which an estimated 20 000 thousand men, women and children were slaughtered by the Fifth Brigade in the early 1980’s.
Most Zimbabweans and human rights organisations call this mass murder the Gukarahundi, a Shona word meaning the early rain that comes after threshing; the rain that washes the chaff away from the grain.
Thousands of victims of the Gukurahundi were dumped in mine shafts, shallow pits and mass graves in Matabeleland and the Midlands and there they have stayed for the last three decades.
The discovery last week of one of these mass graves, found in a school playground, has come as extremely disturbing news. Playing football at St Paul Secondary School in Lupane, students found human bones sticking up out of the ground where the soil had subsided, in two places.
It is impossible to imagine the shock and horror of the students or what their parents and teachers then had to tell them by way of explanation at their discovery.
The MDC Minister of National Healing, Moses Mzila Ndlovu said that local villagers in the area explained that St Paul and many other schools nearby were used by the Fifth Brigade as detention points in the early 1980’s.
The Minister said:“Dozens of people were detained, interrogated and executed before their bodies were dumped in mass graves dug up by the detainees.â€
Mzila Ndlovu went on to describe the grave under the St Paul School football field as measuring 5 x 5 metres and thought to contain between thirty and sixty bodies.
The National Healing Minister talked about the need for people to be able to tell the story of what happened to their friends and relatives and decisions made about shrines, memorials and locations for reburials.
Mzila Ndlovu said forensic exhumations were essential and that counsellors and psychologists needed to be involved in order to help people deal with this terrible trauma.
Commenting on the grim discovery, Education Minister David Coltart said that there were numerous mass graves to be found in Matabeleland. He said the recent exposure at St Paul School highlighted the need for “a meaningful process of truth-telling and reconciliation.â€
Minister Coltart said that archaeologists and anthropologists should be involved in the process of recovery and reburial of bodies from mass graves. He said local communities must be involved as these are the remains of their loved ones and that local customs, traditions and rituals needed to be observed.
Contacted by the Daily News for comment, President Mugabe’s spokesman, George Charamba, had a very different viewpoint to those given by Ministers Mzila Ndlovu and Coltart.
Asked to give the government’s position on the newly discovered mass grave under a school football field, Charamba said: “You are a crazy young man. President Mugabe said it was a moment of madness, that is all I can tell you.â€
Thanks to Tel One’s vision in providing accessible broadband Internet connections, the facts and reports on the Gukurahundi can now be found with just two simple clicks on a computer keypad. Quicker than it takes to type the words “a moment of madness,†anyone can now find and read of a mass murder that remains a festering wound in the heart of our nation 30 years after it happened.