‘Gukurahundi Continues’: Violence, Memory, and Mthwakazi Activism in Zimbabwe
Lena Reim Author Notes: African Affairs, Volume 122, Issue 486, January 2023, Pages 95–117, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adac043
Published: 09 February 2023 Article history: Permissions Icon Permissions
Abstract
One effect of Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup was to unleash a new wave of public engagement with the unresolved state repression of the 1980s, known as Gukurahundi. This wave was led by the ‘post-Gukurahundi generation’ and particularly by activists whose narratives of Gukurahundi were entwined with calls for a separate ‘Mthwakazi nation’. This article explores these activists’ stories of Gukurahundi and asks why they broke through into the public realm after decades of relative silence. It argues that Mthwakazi activists’ engagement relied on an interpretation of Gukurahundi not simply as a discrete historical event, but as the clearest expression of an ongoing ‘Grand Plan’ of ethnic marginalization. This narrative was foundational to the construction of a moral order that divided the country along ethnic and regional fault lines, ultimately legitimizing Mthwakazi nationalism. The paper roots this narrative’s emergence in two interrelated processes. Speaking to the role of silencing in keeping conflicts alive across generations, it examines how the ‘noisy silence’ that has surrounded Gukurahundi in both public and private has meant that Gukurahundi lingered as a readily available interpretative lens. This lens became meaningful when the second generation, faced with political and economic marginalization, was grappling for meaning and political belonging.
Issue Section:
SHORTLY AFTER ZIMBABWE’S INDEPENDENCE IN 1980, a state-led military operation known as Gukurahundi killed an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland and Midlands provinces.1 More than 30 years later, no meaningful transitional justice measures have taken place, leaving deep scars within Zimbabwe’s social fabric that have begun to reveal themselves in new forms in a second generation of survivors.
After decades of relative silence, the late 2010s saw the rekindling of Gukurahundi activism by those who grew up in its aftermath. At the forefront of ensuing protests was the Mthwakazi Republic Party (MRP), whose narratives of Gukurahundi were entwined with calls for the ‘restoration’ of the Ndebele state, i.e. Mthwakazi, as it had existed in Matabeleland and part of the Midlands region in the pre-colonial era.
Founded in 2014 and headed largely by young, unemployed men in Bulawayo, MRP claimed about 20,000 card-carrying members in 2018 and was part of a larger wave of Ndebele organizations that had formed to support this ‘restoration agenda’ in political or cultural terms. Many of their active members were children during or were born after Gukurahundi, yet their political rationale and imagination drew heavily on a particular reconstruction of this history that highlighted the conflict’s ethnic over its political dimensions, ultimately dividing the country into Ndebele-speaking victims and Shona-speaking perpetrators and beneficiaries. Positing that ‘Gukurahundi continues’, these narratives were not merely historical and they were also a condemnation of the present that challenged the very idea of Zimbabwean nationhood.
This article explores these narratives of Gukurahundi and asks why they broke through into the public realm after decades of relative silence. By drawing out how they related to the Mthwakazis’ wider nationalist project, the paper provides a point of comparison to other cases2 in which unresolved conflicts threaten established conceptions of nationhood and political community across generations. Questions of intergenerational memory, trauma, and healing, which dominate literature on (second generation) victim storytelling, are important here, but so is an explicitly political reimagining that is related to processes of nationalist history-making.
The paper begins with a history of Gukurahundi and a discussion of its public afterlife. This is followed by a brief introduction of Gukurahundi activism in Zimbabwe’s post-coup era and by a discussion of my fieldwork, which took place in its wake. From there, I turn to my empirical material in three parts. A first section discusses how Mthwakazi activists understand Gukurahundi not simply as a discrete historical event, but as the clearest expression of an ongoing ‘Grand Plan’ to systematically oppress the Ndebele people and to achieve the full ‘Shonalization’ of Zimbabwe. A second section explores how this narrative is foundational to the construction of a moral order that divides the country along ethnic and regional fault lines, ultimately legitimizing Mthwakazi nationalism. A final section suggests two factors that may explain why Gukurahundi re-emerged in this particular form in the late 2010s. Building on Richard Werbner’s discussion of ‘unfinished narratives’3 and Jocelyn Alexander’s concept of ‘noisy silence’,4 I argue that the Mthwakazis’ Gukurahundi activism emerged not despite but because of its silencing. State repression did not lead to the fading away of Gukurahundi from collective memory. Rather, it meant that the second generation inherited Gukurahundi in highly emotive and fragmented forms and with a sense of ‘unfinishedness’ that has allowed the conflict to linger as readily available interpretative lens. This lens became meaningful in a context of perpetual economic crisis, disillusionment with Zimbabwean party politics, and experiences of ethnic marginalization that motivated the second generation’s search for meaning and political belonging. In this context, they drew on Gukurahundi not merely in a struggle for justice and healing but also to make sense of their own grievances and to reimagine political and national orders.
A brief History of Gukurahundi
Gukurahundi emerged from tensions among Zimbabwe’s liberation movements: the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), now Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZANU-PF). Though national, multi-ethnic organizations, their armies’ recruitment patterns and operational areas created geographical and ethnic divisions: ZAPU and its Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) concentrated mainly on the Ndebele-speaking West, while ZANU and its Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) concentrated mainly on the Shona-speaking East.5
The liberation struggle saw multiple violent clashes among these guerrilla armies, which ‘left a legacy of distrust’.6 These tensions intensified after independence when the movements transformed into competing parties and as operational areas translated into voting blocs.7 After winning Zimbabwe’s first democratic elections with support from the more populous Mashonaland regions, ZANU-PF increasingly revealed its intolerance towards political competition and began depicting ZAPU as a national threat.8
Tensions among the parties surfaced around demobilization and the establishment of an integrated Zimbabwean National Army (ZNA). After independence, both ZIPRA and ZANLA guerrillas were called to gather at Assembly Points (APs) from where they were to either be demobilized or integrated into the new ZNA.9 However, a small number of guerrillas from both armies resisted these orders; some never entered the APs, and others made excursions outside it.10 Their reasons were diverse; some feared renewed attacks from the Rhodesian army or preferred to win the war through battle rather than negotiation; others wanted to campaign for their respective parties during the run-up to the elections or sought to ‘enjoy what they saw as the spoils of war’.11 Though an issue concerning both armies, ZANU-PF increasingly focused on ex-ZIPRAs only.12 Calling them ‘dissidents’, it eventually accused ZAPU’s leadership of masterminding their activities to undermine ZANU-PF.13 Ethnic tensions surfaced as ZANU-PF began to associate all Ndebele speakers with ZAPU supporters and ZIPRA dissidents, thereby discrediting ZAPU as a ‘tribal’ party.14
Amidst such rhetoric, tensions ran high among the liberation armies and led to several violent clashes between ZIPRA and ZANLA guerrillas.15 Meanwhile, the relationship between ZANU-PF and ZAPU deteriorated as the former began to blame the latter’s leadership for orchestrating the violence that had ensued.16 Eventually, ZAPU ministers were dismissed from government and several ZIPRA commanders were arrested on the charge of treason.17 Meanwhile, conditions for ex-ZIPRA guerrillas in the APs and ZNA deteriorated and led to mass desertions that created a second wave of dissidents.18 Amidst severe persecution within and outside the army, many former ZIPRA guerrillas decided to flee the country.19 Others, however, returned to the bush and joined the dissidents.20 In interviews with Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor, and Terence Ranger, they would later explain that their actions were guided by self-defence rather than politics.21 What is more, they explained that they felt abandoned by both their leadership and the local population, for—contrary to ZANU-PF’s accusations—neither provided them with the support they had enjoyed as guerrillas during the liberation struggle.22 In fact, during treason trials in 1982 and 1986, the High Court found no evidence that ZIPRA leaders had guided or even supported dissident action in any way.23
Nonetheless, ZANU-PF eventually authorized a military intervention that conflated ‘the dissidents’ with both ZAPU and the Ndebele-speaking population. While some units searched for dissidents, others targeted former ZIPRA soldiers, ZAPU members, and unarmed civilians, irrespective of their involvement with ‘dissidents’.24
Between 1982 and 1987, people in Matabeleland and part of the Midlands were killed, raped, and tortured in the thousands.25 In addition, they suffered from the widespread destruction of property, the closure of schools, and the imposition of strict curfews that combined with years of drought to cause severe food shortages.26 By far, the worst violence was committed between 1983 and 1984 by the Fifth Brigade, a North Korean–trained military unit, made up almost exclusively of Shona-speaking, ex-ZANLA guerrillas.27
The Fifth Brigade was also known as Gukurahundi and gave this violent period its name. Literally translating to ‘rain after threshing’ or ‘early spring rains’, the term was associated with ‘moral renewal’ during the liberation struggle, but its meaning changed irrevocably in the 1980s.28 After Gukurahundi, some survivors understood it as ‘the sweeping away of rubbish’ and explained that they had themselves been declared as ‘rubbish’ by the state.29
When deployed in Matabeleland North in 1983, the Fifth Brigade’s violence was highly public and performative, with executions, mass beatings, and other forms of torture often taking place at public gatherings.30 In 1984, the Brigade moved to Matabeleland South and shifted its strategy amidst increasing (international) attention.31 Then, thousands were brought to detention camps where they underwent brutal torture, often never to return.32 The most notorious detention centre, Bhalagwe Camp, remains scattered with unmarked mass graves and has become symbolic for Gukurahundi and its unfinished legacy.33
The Fifth Brigade became less active after 1984, but violence continued.34 In the run-up to Zimbabwe’s 1985 elections, ZANU-PF’s Youth League was implicated in the widespread harassment and killing of ZAPU supporters.35 Possibly thousands more were disappeared, detained, or tortured by the Central Intelligence Office and the Police Internal Security Intelligence Unit.36
By the time the conflict had ended, almost all ZAPU officials, across ranks, had been harassed, killed, or forced into exile.37 This evidenced the conflict’s political motivations and led the affected communities to believe that they had been targeted for their political affiliation.38 Concurrently, however, they also felt targeted as Ndebele speakers.39 For while ZAPU and ZIPRA members were often the first to be killed, other attacks, especially by the Fifth Brigade, targeted Ndebele speakers as such.40 Ethnic undertones thus emerged as predominantly Shona-speaking soldiers attacked Ndebele-speaking civilians, at times using overtly tribalist language to explain their actions.41 According to Richard Werbner, it was the very experience of being attacked as an ethnic group that solidified the Ndebele identity among people that had previously been united more by their shared support for ZAPU.42 As we shall see, these ethnic legacies played out with unprecedented force in 2018.
The Public Afterlife of Gukurahundi
The Unity Accord ended physical violence in 1987 but entailed no transitional justice measures. It subsumed ZAPU into ZANU-PF under the latter’s name and leadership, foreclosing accountability by providing blanket amnesty. Nonetheless, the subsequent decade saw vehement public engagement that tried to hold ZANU-PF to account, among other things for Gukurahundi.43 What began with union and student protests eventually culminated in 1999 with the creation of the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).44
Throughout this period, Gukurahundi was discussed publicly amid wider claims over ‘nationhood, citizenship, and personal identity’.45 Authoritative human rights reports and academic works, cited above, were published during this period.46 While emphasizing the conflict’s political rationale, they revealed that those affected felt targeted on political and ethnic grounds. Public discourse focused predominantly on Gukurahundi’s political dimensions. According to Jocelyn Alexander, ethnic dimensions were sometimes consciously minimised by former ZAPU and ZIPRA leaders who likely experienced discomfort to engage with an ethnically charged discourse owing to their nationalist credentials.47 Those leading public engagement had just fought the nationalist struggle for Zimbabwe alongside Shona-speaking comrades. Moreover, they were speaking in a hopeful period in which their nationalist project found meaning in the MDC’s new multi-ethnic opposition.48
The late 1990s also saw the rise of regional pressure groups and cultural organizations, prominently ‘Vukani Mahlabezulu’49 and ‘Imbovane Yamahlabezulu’,50 which frequently raised the issue of Gukurahundi. Some members of ‘Imbovane’ eventually created their own political party, ZAPU-2000. Yet, the overwhelming majority of people in Matabeleland rejected both ZANU-PF and ZAPU-2000 in favour of the MDC in the 2000 parliamentary elections and articulated their antagonism towards the ruling party as much as their continued belief in an alternative national (rather than regional) solution to their political grievances. According to Daniel Compagnon, it was ‘the very existence of the MDC [that] contributed to the containment of separatist ambitions in Matabeleland…’.51 This was a moment of great optimism for a different, united Zimbabwe, one in which the region and its violent past would find recognition.
ZANU-PF sought to repress engagement with Gukurahundi from the beginning. During the 1990s, even small, local commemoration efforts were met with state intimidation.52 However, the first wave of Gukurahundi activism quieted down only in the face of ZANU-PF’s wider brutal crackdown on civil society and the political opposition in the early 2000s. It was in this context that many of my informants would explain that under Mugabe’s rule, speaking about Gukurahundi had been illegal, not in law, but in practice.
In 1998, Werbner foreshadowed the explosive potential of such silencing when he argued that ‘[b]uried memory produces … unfinished narratives…: popular history in which the past is perceived to be unfinished, festering in the present…’.53 Such narratives, he warned, ‘motivate people to call again and again for a public resolution to their predicament’ and may eventually compel them ‘to unbury the memory and reject their past submission’.54 This explosive potential has time and again motivated brave acts of challenging public silences. Indeed, the suppression of Gukurahundi from the public sphere has always been incomplete, manifesting in what Alexander has termed a ‘noisy silence’—the coexistence of a pervasive culture of silence, on the one hand, and processes of storytelling from the margins of society, on the other hand.55 In this environment, counter narratives continued to be produced, but their lack of public recognition allowed an overarching sense of silence to prevail. This, Alexander argues, was not, however, ‘an end point’ but ‘a place of political productivity’, for it motivated demands for action and belonging.56 The result was ‘a complex process of collectively telling and retelling stories in bad conditions’.57
Over the past decades, artists, novelists, and poets have found creative ways to ‘represent the unrepresentable’ and demand space for Gukurahundi in the nation’s memory.58 At times, they have faced harsh consequences for doing so.59 Concurrently, a number of civic organizations have worked tirelessly to provide local support to victim communities, often breaking silences at family and community levels in the process.60 The engagement with Gukurahundi by political activists and movements has pursued various ends. Among others, an earlier Ndebele movement, the Mthwakazi Liberation Front (MLF), drew on Gukurahundi to legitimate their claims for a separate state.61 Founded in 2010, the MLF was an early indication of growing regionalist sentiments. Yet, it found only ‘limited support’62 and soon faltered in the face of state persecution.
When a new wave of Mthwakazi activists began to speak out against Gukurahundi in 2018, they still framed their activism as one of ‘breaking the silence’ and ‘unburying memories’. This confirmed Alexander’s argument that a lack of recognition from the state had maintained a sense of silence and spoke to how such silence provokes action and political claims. More specifically, still, this wave of activism provided insights into the role that members of the post-Gukurahundi generation had taken up within this struggle over memory. As clinical psychologist and forensic anthropologist Shari Eppel63 argued, the 2018 occurrences made evident that members of this younger generation ‘had picked up the burden of the past in ways that their parents could not and were carrying it into the future’.64 Such efforts by the second generation, Eppel argues, confirmed Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm’s argument that ‘remembering is oriented not to the past, but to coming to terms with the past in a present continuously troubled by it’.65
When speaking to Mthwakazi activists during my fieldwork, they often stressed how their activism was linked to parental silences and a duty to speak out on their behalf. As one MRP member explained:
The new generation … has never been intimidated … most of us, we have heard of Gukurahundi, but we have never seen it…. [O]ur elders … were instilled [with] fear. They saw Gukurahundi and they are afraid to say anything against it. So, that’s why we, as the young generation, have decided to take this path to free our people.66
Among Mthwakazi activists, their parents’ perceived silence sparked the opposite reaction, confirming Werbner’s warning that buried memories carry explosive potential. Rather than simply ‘unburying’ the first generation’s memories, however, Mthwakazi activists promulgated their own narrative. This narrative spoke to the present as much as to the past and revealed a level of politicization that is not easily contained in the idea of ‘coming to terms with the past’ or broader notions of healing. While the relationship between storytelling and healing is well established67 and essential for understanding Mthwakazi activists’ engagement with Gukurahundi, their narratives spoke more directly to what happens when repressive institutions prevent such processes from taking place. Under such conditions, conflicts may linger in ‘noisy silence’ and may gain new attention and new political meanings in shifting contexts. This paper deals with one such version of the Gukurahundi narrative, exploring the larger political project within which it is embedded and the conditions under which it emerged. First, however, I will provide some details on the context in which my interviews took place.
A new wave of Gukurahundi Activism in the Post-Coup Era
The year 2018 brought a new wave of activism that took a thus-far unseen vocal, radical, and confrontational approach to the discussion of Gukurahundi. These new forms of public engagement were facilitated by a reconfiguration of Zimbabwe’s broader political landscape that saw the removal of long-term president, Robert Mugabe, in a coup in November 2017.
Mugabe’s successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, was himself part of ZANU-PF’s old guard and implicated in Gukurahundi. Yet, his ‘eager[ness] to portray a more democratic leadership’ meant that he allowed for a limited opening up of the public realm.68 Importantly, he finally signed into law the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC), which was tasked to deal with decades of political violence, including Gukurahundi. It was in this context of political transition and continuity—Mugabe’s removal and ZANU-PF’s continued hold on power—that Mthwakazi activists asserted themselves into the public debate.
In December 2017, Mnangagwa’s first official visit to Matabeleland was met by activists who confronted him with his involvement in Gukurahundi as the Minister of State Security. Two months later, in February 2017, NPRC meetings in Bulawayo and Lupane were disrupted by young protestors who rejected the government’s efforts as illegitimate.69 During these events, they made public a new narrative about Gukurahundi that had developed under the surface, in relative silence, which was driven by both a desire to seek justice for past atrocities and the central role that Gukurahundi played in their conception of present-day political realities.
My fieldwork began five months after the NPRC protests and predominantly consisted of conducting in-depth, semi-structured interviews and observing public events. Interviews were mainly conducted in Bulawayo, Matabeleland’s capital city, and its centre of political activity. As a place of urban migration, Bulawayo provided access to informants from rural areas across the region. Yet, their narratives were nonetheless urbanized and rooted within Bulawayo’s Mthwakazi activist community.
Informants included MRP activists and a smaller number of members from other regional organizations, including the influential Matabeleland pressure group, ‘Ibhetshu LikaZulu’.70 Though stopping short of advocating for secession, some ‘Ibhetshu’ members collaborated closely with MRP in 2018 and shared many of their wider narratives, thus providing insights into the broader activism from which Mthwakazi politics emerged. Most activists from these organizations belonged to the second generation.
Predominantly between 20 and 40 years old, some of my informants had been young children during Gukurahundi; others were born in the subsequent decade. During interviews, informants often readily identified themselves as part of the second generation and drew generational distinctions to explain how their approach differed from that of the first generation. Access to activists was established through their organizations’ leadership. Though partially limiting diverging perspectives, this approach made evident who was deemed representative for the organizations. On this note, I should highlight that I was provided with significantly fewer female than male contacts, a sign, if nothing else, that their role within the organizations is more marginal. To reflect upon and contextualize Mthwakazi narratives, I interviewed other public figures and civic members working on Gukurahundi as well as youth members of other opposition parties. In total, I conducted interviews with more than 60 informants. Findings pertaining to the wider ‘post-Gukurahundi generation’ draw on additional fieldwork in Bulawayo in 2020 and 2022.
Concerning myself with stories of Gukurahundi, my aim was not to derive some ‘objective’ history, but to gain insights into subjective interpretations and the political imagination and activism to which these gave rise. In doing so, I draw on a rich scholarship in memory studies and oral history that has explored the bidirectional process by which people’s conceptions of past and present inform each other. What and how one remembers is always selective and shaped by the contemporary context that mediates reflection of it.71 In listening to people’s stories, we thus learn about which versions of the past are ‘socially conceivable’ within the present72 and how these are put to work to order the social and moral worlds of those who invoke them.73 Concurrently, we must not treat such accounts as mere ‘backward reconstructions after the fact’.74 Instead, we must acknowledge how the past asserts itself, not only through our historical narratives but also by ‘haunting’ our wider political imagination.75
The Mthwakazi activists’ Gukurahundi narratives
During my interviews with members from MRP and ‘Ibhetshu’, one of my interests was to understand their organizations’ motivation to protest at the NPRC meetings. During such conversations, many voiced complaints about the Commission’s credibility, in particular because of a lack of independence from ZANU-PF. Another crucial concern was the Commission’s ethnic composition, given that every commissioner but one was Shona-speaking in 2018. As one MRP executive member explained to me, seeing the commissioners seated in front of him made him think of the continuation of Gukurahundi. People would not ‘be free enough to air their views’ given ‘that they are talking to … the beneficiaries of the 1983-1987 arrangement of Gukurahundi’.76 As he and others made clear, the NPRC represented the very system they sought to challenge. As another informant put it,
We are not looking … [for] just the truth. … [W]e believe that Gukurahundi genocide is continuing. So, … to stop it we need to start talking about development, start talking about equal sharing of the national cake, start talking about equal job opportunities and all those things. […] As long as those issues are not addressed, then you can’t talk about coming here and telling [us] about peace [and that] we are one.77
What came forth clearly from these narratives was that my informants perceived the violence of the past and their present-day struggles as inseparable, both rooted in the same unresolved ethnic conflict that pitted Ndebeles against Shonas. It was these two themes—a predominantly ethnic interpretation of the 1980s violence and its extrapolation into the present—that defined the Mthwakazi activists’ Gukurahundi narratives and marked a significant departure from earlier public elaborations.
Speaking of Gukurahundi as ‘genocide’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’, Mthwakazi activists commonly emphasized ethnic over political identities, in defining both victims and perpetrators and the conflict’s underlying rationale:
[I]t was ethnic cleansing. That’s why they did not care whether people were into politics or not, but they cared much about one’s language. Yes, mainly it was targeted at Ndebele-speaking people. That’s why they had to kill pregnant women, young people, school-going children.78
Although informants often deemed ZANU-PF or individuals such as Mugabe and Mnangagwa responsible, they commonly understood them as synonymous with ‘the Shonas’ or ‘the Shona elite’. As one high-ranking MRP member explained, ‘the perpetrators were the Shonas through the ZANU-PF-led government of Robert Mugabe …’.79
The blurring of political and ethnic identities was evident in many interviews. It was commonly held that ZANU was created as a ‘Shona party’, ‘to protect the interests of the people from Mashonaland’.80 The equating of ZAPU and Ndebele speakers was more complex as some stressed that ZAPU had been willing to represent all ethnic groups. Nonetheless, the activists’ narratives often conflated ZAPU and Ndebele. In part, this reflected the powerful legacy of ZANU-PF’s attempt to discredit ZAPU as tribal throughout the 1980s.
That ethnicity plays an important role in Gukurahundi narratives is unsurprising as ‘being Ndebele’ was experienced as central to their victimisation.81 However, the highlighting of ethnic over political interpretations marks a distinction from both the 1990s activism and the academic and human rights accounts that emerged concurrently. More precisely, it marks a reversal of the conflict’s rational from the one that saw Ndebele speakers attacked for their political affiliation82 to the one that saw ZAPU attacked for its perceived ethnic identity. As one informant explained, ‘they didn’t want a Ndebele leader. They still don’t up to this day’.83 This quote not only is for the dominant role of ethnicity in Gukurahundi memories, however, but also reveals how such narratives of Gukurahundi were often seamlessly connected to discussions of their own lived experiences. Indeed, this speaks to the second major theme within the Mthwakazis’ narratives, namely, the common assertion that Gukurahundi never ended but continued as ethnic marginalization in the present.
While pointing to the direct legacies of the 1980s atrocities, such as the killing of teachers, a lack of development during the 1980s, or the loss of parental income, many activists argued that they experienced more than the unremedied effects of past violence and destruction. They understood their own contemporary challenges as resulting from the same policy of ethnic oppression, which they believed had once unleashed the Fifth Brigade on their families. One MRP member, whose family had been directly affected by Gukurahundi, explained that it was only when he came to town to look for a job that he truly understood the stories of Gukurahundi that had circulated at home. ‘That’s when we realised the impact of Gukurahundi … You’ll find that somebody will come from as far as Harare to get the same job that you applied for, and you’re never considered’.84 It was these kinds of experiences, one informant explained, that made him and fellow youth activists from various organizations come together around 2012 to discuss the need for a forum to address issues of marginalization: ‘We sat in Bulawayo, and we agreed that […] [w]e needed to do something about it because if we allow this to continue in the next 10-20 years, there won’t be any Matabeleland. Our tribes won’t be even recognised, and we will continue to be destitute in our own country’.85
Underpinning such claims were references to the ‘Grand Plan’, an allegedly leaked’ ZANU-PF publication said to set out the strategy for ‘Shona majority rule’ in Zimbabwe. Purportedly written in May 1979 in London, the Grand Plan would have been created amidst the Lancaster House negotiations for independence, thus situating the project of ‘Shona rule’ in Zimbabwe’s founding moment. While some activists acknowledged that they cannot prove its origins, they also explained that they saw no reason to doubt what they could see unfolding before their eyes. As one informant asserted, the Grand Plan ‘was drafted with programs … to destroy [the] Matabeleland people and … we have seen the government of Zimbabwe implementing them each and every day…’.86 Notwithstanding its dubious origins, the Grand Plan’s importance for this article is rooted in its ‘credibility’87 to many of my informants. The fact that they believed in it revealed much about their perception of Zimbabwe and their own position within it.
Feelings of ethnic marginalization were deep-seated among Mthwakazi activists and influenced their everyday experiences. As such, Gukurahundi became part of a politics transcending debates around transitional justice and collective memory. From social media to protest songs and slogans, Gukurahundi was foundational to their everyday political engagement. Whether at demonstrations against a local supermarket allegedly employing Shona speakers over Ndebele speakers or at the election of what could have been Bulawayo’s first Shona-speaking mayor, Gukurahundi references featured in many protest performances.
The day Bulawayo residents, including many activists, were gathered at City Hall, anticipating the 2018 mayoral elections, I witnessed the Mthwakazi narrative take on full performative form. Anticipating what could have been the election of Bulawayo’s first Shona-speaking mayor, people had gathered in large numbers. They sang songs such as ‘lingamashona lalibulalobaba’ (‘You Shonas killed our fathers’) or wore shirts identifying them as ‘the dissidents that the Fifth Brigade was looking for’. Some wore traditional Ndebele headgear, and many performed the ‘toyi toyi’ marching dance, a ZIPRA military drill. Together, these performances evidenced how past and present had become intertwined in regional activism and specifically the imagination of the Mthwakazi nation.
The State, the Nation, and the ‘Beneficiaries’ of Gukurahundi
The Mthwakazi activists’ narratives had what Liisa Malkki has described as a ‘mythical’ quality.88 This is not to say that they were ‘false or made up’, but rather that they were mythical ‘in the anthropological sense […of being] concerned with the ordering and reordering of social and political categories, with the definition of self in distinction to other, with good and evil’.89 The order, which their recourse to Gukurahundi helped to construct, divided the country into Ndebele speakers and Shona speakers. The former were the victims not only of the 1980s violence but also of an overarching system of ethnic marginalization. The latter were implicated in this system, if not as perpetrators, then as ‘beneficiaries’. For instance, explaining that people from Mashonaland deny Gukurahundi and ‘don’t see anything wrong’ with taking jobs in Bulawayo, one of my informants maintained that ‘subconsciously and unconsciously, they’re part of the Grand Plan, and they’re working for it…’.90 Similarly, another argued that ‘there are innocent Shona people who are practicing that evil system subconsciously’.91
Even the MDC was implicated in this manner. As one informant explained, those representing the MDC were themselves ‘beneficiaries of the 1980–1987 Genocide’ and treated Ndebele speakers as ‘second-class citizens’.92 This, he continued, was evidenced by the fact that Ndebele speakers were always only given deputy positions within the party. ‘Why?’, he asked, ‘It is because [… of] an arrangement that came into effect through ZANU-PF government when they unleashed Gukurahundi [on]to our people’.
This sentiment of exclusion even from the MDC was born out in some activists’ recourse to ‘Code XXX’. Allegedly an MDC-authored Grand Plan extension, it asserts ‘that the real enemy is not the Shonas in ZANU but the Ndebeles in both ZANU and the MDC’.93 Whereas the MDC was once hailed as ‘the true heirs of ZAPU’,94 MRP termed it a mere ‘replica’95 or ‘photocopy’96 of ZANU-PF.
Such sentiments indicated the Mthwakazis’ strong sense of exclusion from Zimbabwean nationhood and of division between ‘Ndebeles’ and ‘Shonas’. These divisions took a comparatively abstract and political form. They were predominantly directed against the state, that is, it was a political ethnicity and state tribalism that was contested. Narratives rarely focused on ‘Shonas’ as individuals with whom conflicts arose in every-day interactions. Instead, ‘Shonas’ were the face of the corrupt state, the violent soldiers of Gukurahundi, and the beneficiaries of the system. As several informants stressed, they ‘are not actually fighting against any tribe [… but] against the system which promotes Shona dominance at the expense of the local people…’.97 Nonetheless, the conclusion often emerging from their narratives was that the people of Mthwakazi do not belong to the people of Zimbabwe. Dividing Zimbabwe into victims on the one side and perpetrators and beneficiaries on the other side ultimately left no space for the narrators themselves, as the victims in past and present, within the Zimbabwean nation. As one ‘Ibhetshu’ member explained, ‘[W]e don’t feel part of Zimbabwe. […] They killed us [and] they are now marginalizing us. So, it means that we are not part of them’.98
Their solution was to invest in an alternative space of political or cultural belonging, the ‘Mthwakazi nation’. Though based on the Ndebele state as it had existed during part of the nineteenth century, the extent to which informants drew on its history varied greatly. Some made recourse to a particular historical narrative that depicted the Mthwakazi Kingdom as a place of cultural plurality and peaceful coexistence. The extent to which this narrative is accurate is debatable.99 In any case, however, what was to be ‘restored’ seemed to be guided less by what had existed in the past and more by what Mthwakazi activists sought to reject in the present and envisioned for the future.
Strikingly captured in an image,100 shared by MRP on WhatsApp and Twitter, the Mthwakazi nation was thus often imagined as antithetical to their conception of present-day Zimbabwe. Depicting a divided map of Zimbabwe, the image shows the East coloured in red and grey, and filled, among other things, with skeletons, fists, and the words ‘no hope’. The West is coloured in green and contains, for instance, images of diamonds, industrial buildings and the words ‘hope’ and ‘happy life’. As illustrated in this image, utopia and dystopia existed within this narrative as two sides of the same coin, the former offering an escape from the latter. The extent to which activists believed in or advocated for total political independence varied. For some, this was the inevitable end goal and the only path to peace and prosperity. Others looked more soberly at the likelihood that such an endeavour could ever be successful. What united them all was a strong sense that ‘the Ndebeles’ and ‘the Shonas’ were distinct and that greater self-determination for the former was key to many of their present-day challenges.
Rooting Mthwakazi narratives
How can we make sense of the narratives explored above? What motivated members of the second generation to speak out against Gukurahundi in the post-coup era? Why were their narratives of Gukurahundi bound up with calls for Mthwakazi’s restoration? Later, I want to engage with two interrelated processes that may provide some answers to these questions. First, I will build on Werbner and Alexander to explore how acts of silencing have kept Gukurahundi alive in a highly emotive and fragmented form. Second, I will probe the context within which narratives of Gukurahundi remerged and to which they provided moral order.
The ways in which my informants described how they came to know about Gukurahundi is indicative of the repressive political context and the continued fear and pain that persisted in the affected regions long after the Unity Accord was signed. With limited public discussion, the second generation was left to learn about Gukurahundi through stories in their immediate surroundings. Yet, even within families, storytelling was often highly constrained. As one informant explained to me,
[I]t’s one of those topics that people will tell you, ‘You don’t talk about it’ […] ‘If you do this, something will happen’ […] ‘Don’t. It’s too painful. We don’t want to talk about it’. So, it’s hard to get information. But once in a while you get someone that slips … then you get that story of ‘this is what happened’.101
As this quote reveals, Alexander’s concept of ‘noisy silence’ also characterized the private sphere, in that an overall sense of silence prevailed alongside unconscious and conscious processes of memory transmission. For one, Gukurahundi was transmitted through what Marianne Hirsch calls ‘traces’ of violent pasts, including a ‘pervasive presence and consciousness of death’.102 Communities bore legacies of violence through scars and injuries, missing identity documents for orphans, and absent family members. Born during Gukurahundi, one of my informants, who grew up in the conflict’s immediate aftermath, explained how he learned of Gukurahundi through the many people missing in his community: friends without parents and relatives without husbands or wives revealed to him the horrors that had taken place.103
Concurrently, informants pointed to their families’ behaviours and attitudes. Particularly common were remarks about their fear of authorities or ZANU-PF and animosity towards Shona speakers. One informant told me about a recent chat with his grandfather in his rural home in which the latter related the community’s fear to vote against ZANU-PF. As my informant concluded, ‘Those things that happened in Gukurahundi, they still have it now, they are still afraid’.104
Confronted with Gukurahundi’s material, psychological, and socio-political legacies, silences were not neutral, but became a form of transmission.105 To many, they spoke of continued fear and traumatic memories too painful to relive. For instance, one informant explained,
[My father] still doesn’t [talk about the history] because I think he is traumatized…. The only glimpses … that we can see from him is when he is really, really intoxicated, […when] we’re having that family gathering, … reminiscing. He will say one or two things, but when he wants to go deeper, he will just close himself up and just say, ‘Let me go to sleep’…106
While most informants recounted instances during which Gukurahundi was mentioned within families, they often revealed limitations to open conversation. Stories were frequently shared only in a particular instance or by particular elders. When Gukurahundi was talked about, there often remained an aura of secrecy and fear. Stories were shared behind ‘closed doors’107 or ‘in their own small spaces’.108 Importantly, several informants remarked on the fragmentary nature of storytelling. Rather than receiving detailed and contextualized accounts, stories were shared only in ‘passing’;109 they were ‘never full, unedited’;110 instead, elders would only say ‘a little bit’.111
These emotive and fragmented processes passed on an ‘unfinished narrative’ in two senses. First, Gukurahundi was transmitted with an affective immediacy and a sense of continued impunity that blurred the boundaries of past and present. The stories and behaviours among which the second generation grew up provided no sense of resolution, reparations, or reconciliation. Instead, the ways in which Gukurahundi stories were told simultaneously revealed how they were silenced. Hidden by a generation whose public silences and private whispers exuded continued fear and suffering, Gukurahundi was experienced as both silenced history and affective presence. As one MRP member emphasized, ‘Matabeleland people, they are just silent, but [that] doesn’t mean they’re in peace’.112
Concurrently, Gukurahundi has remained ‘unfinished’ in the sense of still demanding narrative reconstruction. As Eppel suggested, due to ‘silence around the facts of Gukurahundi’, many young people seem to know only about ‘the microcosm’ of what happened in their village or to their parents, but lack ‘a broader understanding for the sweep of history of what happened during Gukurahundi..’.113
Like other post-conflict generations, the post-Gukurahundi generation inherited the violent past in raw, unprocessed form and with it the task to break parental and state silences by giving voice to the past.114 It is in this context that we must understand processes of narrative production within this generation. It is in this context that these acts have gone beyond merely ‘unburying’ first-generation memories. Having grown up with their elders’ stories, several Mthwakazi activists explained that they truly learned about Gukurahundi as adults, when they came to town, or entered Mthwakazi circles. Here, they began to do research and share stories among each other. From this process developed a set of records, containing events, quotes, and documents, which was widely shared among Mthwakazi activists and supported a distinctive narrative of Gukurahundi, shaped by the context within which it was reconstructed.
In part, this narrative must be understood in light of the unfulfilled hopes of the political activism of the 1990s. In 2018, Mthwakazi activists spoke in a fundamentally different environment. Hope for an inclusive Zimbabwean nationalism had given away to disillusionment. Since 2000, Zimbabwe had experienced a sustained economic crisis, marked by hyperinflation, rampant unemployment, and failing social services. If the 1990s saw attempts to challenge emerging political corruption, the 2000s saw the consolidation of political and economic power among a small and largely Shona-speaking, Harare-based ZANU-PF elite.
The past two decades also saw the repression of social movements and MDC’s struggle to withstand these pressures. The party experienced increasing internal violence and multiple splits.115 Although the MDC entered a Government of National Unity with ZANU-PF in 2008, ZANU-PF won a decisive electoral victory in 2013, aided by political repression and rigging.116 It may not be a coincidence that the MRP was formed only 6 months thereafter.
In Matabeleland, disillusionment was aggravated by increasing ethnic divisiveness within the MDC.117 While its ranks were once filled with Ndebele speakers, few remain. This has been aggravated by internal splits in 2005 and 2018, which lent themselves to ethnic interpretations, despite having had complex causes. Not only were the breakaway fractions’ leaders predominantly Ndebele-speaking, but also anti-Ndebele rhetoric was used to undermine their positions.118
The Mthwakazis’ narratives reflect this wider political landscape, which in part extends beyond regional borders. Economic hardship and political marginalization affect most Zimbabweans, particularly the younger generations that have grown up in perpetual crisis. A substantial scholarship has explored ‘youth perspectives’ on Zimbabwe’s contemporary political and economic realities. Many focus on areas in Mashonaland and find young people who feel marginalized by a gerontocratic system and political patronage,119 thus offering contrasting perceptions among some that the state works for ‘the Shonas’. Moreover, ‘Shona’ is an umbrella term that obfuscates marginalization experienced among ethnic subgroups.120 Among Mthwakazi activists, however, ‘Shonas’ often remained a homogenous category.
Rose Jaji discusses how increasing hopelessness of affecting change through party politics has led Zimbabwe’s youths towards alternative political spaces, including civic organizations or social media platforms.121 Although MRP participated in Zimbabwe’s party politics, the party’s ‘restoration agenda’ also marked a radical departure from it. As such, Mthwakazi activism can be seen as one strategy of navigating a wider political disillusionment. However, the very fact that such disillusionment has manifested in a revival of Ndebele movements in Matabeleland is inseparable from the fault-lines solidified during Gukurahundi.
Concurrently, that Mthwakazi activists understood Gukurahundi predominantly as a story of ethnic violence revealed which identities and divisions made most sense to them in the present. With the Unity Accord, ZAPU withered away as a political identity. Gukurahundi’s direct victims had experienced ZAPU nationalism and continued to identify as ‘ZAPU in heart’ after ZANU-PF subsumed ZAPU.122 Eventually, they turned to MDC as ‘true heirs of ZAPU’.123 As such, direct victims during the 1990s shared a strong ethnic and political identity and drew on both in making sense of their victimization during the 1980s.
By contrast, the second generation never experienced the unifying period of the nationalist struggle. Similarly, they never experienced divisions between ZAPU and ZANU-PF. Instead, they grew up in an independent Zimbabwe in which former ZAPU leaders had joined ZANU-PF and MDC and in which ethnic identities were experienced as more tangible than political allegiances in explaining divisions and inequalities.
In part, this difference explains the appeal of regional nationalism in the second generation. The challenge to Zimbabwean nationhood put forth by Mthwakazi activists would have been unthinkable in the immediate post-Gukurahundi period among victims who had, only a decade earlier, fought to liberate Zimbabwe as their own. Indicating their weaker identification with the Zimbabwean nation, many Mthwakazi activists retrospectively cast this struggle as a mistake, as far as it liberated the wrong country. As explained by Paul Themba Nyathi, a ZIPRA veteran and one-time MDC Member of Parliament:124
The youth have never been given a cause, particularly in this part of the country, to feel that they are part of Zimbabwe. […] That is why it is easy for the MRP to talk of secession, to say, ‘We are Mthwakazi Republic’. […] [T]hey romanticize it to some degree, but it also then addresses their sense of worth… If a country doesn’t protect you, if a country doesn‘t give you jobs, if a country doesn’t make you feel you belong, then of course you establish your own identity, which is what the Mthwakazi Republic Party is doing.125
The foundations for the Mthwakazis’ narrative were laid by ZANU-PF’s abuse of ethnic identities during Gukurahundi. Yet, the fact that heightened Ndebele consciousness in Gukurahundi’s aftermath evolved into Mthwakazi nationalism in this second generation owes much to the government’s failure to meaningfully address the pain and alienation of either generation.
Conclusion
This article has explored how and why Gukurahundi broke through into the public realm after decades of relative silence. It has argued that the Mthwakazi activists at the forefront of this public engagement drew on Gukurahundi not merely in a struggle for justice and healing but also to make sense of their contemporary realities and to reimagine political and national orders. This relied on an understanding of Gukurahundi not simply as a discrete historical event, but as the clearest expression of an ongoing ‘Grand Plan’ of ethnic marginalization. It was this narrative that formed the foundation for the construction of a moral order that divided the country along ethnic and regional fault lines and ultimately legitimized the idea of a separate Mthwakazi nation.
Mthwakazi activists’ engagement with Gukurahundi has provided insights into how the very repression of memory may allow conflicts to linger in ‘noisy silence’, providing future generations with a readily available lens to understand their own grievances. The narratives that have emerged in this context transcended traditional notions of victim storytelling as means of healing. Instead, they revealed how unresolved conflicts may be invoked in highly politicized forms. As such, this article provides a point of comparison to other cases where unresolved conflicts have been foundational to processes of identity construction and nationalist history-making across generations. Concurrently, it contributes to scholarship on Zimbabwe that has explored the politicization of history predominantly from an elite perspective, specifically, ZANU-PF’s construction of ‘patriotic history’.126 The case of Mthwakazi activists reveals that nationalist memory politics in Zimbabwe is not the exclusive domain of elite manipulation. Their narratives might be read as overt historical counter consciousness, as resistance to the regime’s politics of memory making, which has excluded their region’s history in many ways. At the same time, however, their strong historical consciousness may be read as an adoption of the historicized mode by which political legitimacy within Zimbabwe operates.
Evidently, the Mthwakazi activists’ narratives of Gukurahundi were informed by this particular politics and their views were not representative of the wider second generation. Yet, neither were they entirely separate. Indeed, during my subsequent research among the wider post-Gukurahundi generation, I once again spoke to many young people who provided predominantly ethnic interpretations of Gukurahundi127 and who connected this history to ethnic marginalization in the present. As such, Mthwakazi activism may be understood as an extreme manifestation of a more prevalent sense among this generation of their past and present exclusion from the Zimbabwean state and nation.
Footnotes
1. The precise number of people killed during Gukurahundi is a point of debate. See Jocelyn Alexander, ‘The noisy silence of Gukurahundi: Truth, recognition and belonging’, Journal of Southern African Studies 47, 5 (2021), pp. 763–85. The most common estimate among experts puts the death toll between 10,000 and 20,000. Most importantly, perhaps, this range was supported by the author of the ‘Breaking the silence’ report, Shari Eppel. See Shari Eppel, ‘“Bones in the forest” in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe: Exhumations as a tool for transformation’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 8, 3 (2014), pp. 404–25; Shari Eppel, Shari Eppel, ‘How shall we talk of Bhalagwe? Remembering the Gukurahundi era in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe’, in Kim Wale, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, and Jeffrey Prager (eds), Post-Conflict Hauntings: Transforming Memories of Historical Trauma (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2020), pp. 259–84.
2. See, for instance, Godwin Onuoha, ‘The presence of the past: Youth, memory making and the politics of self-determination in southeastern Nigeria’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, 12 (2013), pp. 2182–99; Craig Larkin, ‘Beyond the war? The Lebanese postmemory experience’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, 4 (2010), pp. 615–35.
3. Richard Werbner, Memory and the postcolony: African anthropology and the critique of power (Zed Books, London, 1998).
4. Alexander, ‘Noisy Silence.’
5. Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor, and Terence Ranger, Violence & memory: One hundred years in the ‘dark forests’ of Matabeleland (James Currey, Oxford, 2000); CCJP and LRF, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe: A report on the disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands 1980–1988 (Hurst & Company, London, 2007).
6. Gukurahundi, p. 45.
7. Alexander et al., Violence & memory.
8. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Wendy Willems, ‘Reinvoking the past in the present: Changing identities and appropriations of Joshua Nkomo in post-colonial Zimbabwe’, African Identities 8, 3 (2010), pp. 191–208, p. 195.
9. Alexander et al., Violence & memory. CCJP and LRF, Gukurahundi.
10. Ibid.
11. Alexander et al., Violence & memory, p. 182.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid. CCJP and LRF, Gukurahundi.
14. Alexander, ‘Noisy Silence.’
15. Alexander et al., Violence & memory.
16. Ibid. CCJP and LRF, Gukurahundi.
17. Alexander et al., Violence & memory; CCJP and LRF, Gukurahundi.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Alexander et al., Violence & memory.
22. Ibid.
23. CCJP and LRF, Gukurahundi, p. 54.
24. Ibid.; Alexander et al., Violence & memory.
25. For a detailed analysis of these years of violence, see CCJP and LRF, Gukurahundi; Alexander et al., Violence & memory.
26. CCJP and LRF, Gukurahundi.
27. Ibid.
28. Richard Werbner, Tears of the dead: The social biography of an African family (Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 161–62.
29. Ibid., p. 162.
30. CCJP and LRF, Gukurahundi.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. For a detailed discussion of Bhalagwe, see Eppel, ‘How shall we talk.’
34. CCJP and LRF, Gukurahundi.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. CCJP and LRF, ‘Breaking the silence, building true peace: A report on the disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980–1988’ (summary report, 2007), p. 13.
38. Gukurahundi; Alexander et al., Violence & memory.
39. Violence & memory; CCJP and LRF, Gukurahundi.
40. Gukurahundi.
41. Alexander et al., Violence & memory, p. 223.
42. Werbner, Tears.
43. Daniel Compagnon, A predictable tragedy: Robert Mugabe and the collapse of Zimbabwe (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2011).
44. Ibid.
45. Werbner, Memory, p. 95.
46. See CCJP and LRF, Gukurahundi; Alexander et al., Violence & memory; Werbner, Tears.
47. Personal communication, Oxford, 2021
48. Alexander, ‘Noisy Silence.’
49. Vukani Mahlabezulu translates loosely to ‘Wake up fellow people of Matabeleland.’
50. Imbovane Yamahlabezulu was the name of a regiment during the time of the pre-colonial Ndebele state. Imbovane by itself refers to a stalk borer ant that can damage maize grain.
51. Compagnon, Predictable Tragedy, p. 102.
52. Alexander et al., Violence & memory, p. 259.
53. Werbner, Memory, p. 9.
54. Ibid.
55. Alexander, ‘Noisy Silence.’
56. Ibid., p. 764.
57. Ibid.
58. Gibson Ncube and Gugulethu Siziba, ‘(Re)membering the nation’s “forgotten” past: Portrayals of Gukurahundi in Zimbabwean literature’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52, 2 (2017), pp. 231–47, p. 242.
59. In 2010, for instance, authorities shut down an art exhibition dedicated to Gukurahundi and arrested the responsible artist, Owen Maseko, on the charge of ‘undermining the president’s authority’. Alex Duval Smith, ‘Zimbabwe artist defies Robert Mugabe’, The Guardian, 4 April 2010, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/04/zimbabwe-artist-arrest-mugabe-censorship> (18 November 2022).
60. See, for instance, Eppel, ‘“Bones in the Forest”.’
61. On MLF, see Duduzile S. Ndlovu, ‘Imagining Zimbabwe as home: Ethnicity, violence and migration’, African Studies Review 63, 3 (2020), pp. 616–39; Susanne Verheul, Performing power in Zimbabwe: Politics, law, and the courts since 2000 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021).
62. Performing power, p. 181.
63. Director of Ukuthula Trust and author of the authoritative ‘Breaking the silence’ report, Eppel has worked with Gukurahundi victims for decades.
64. Eppel, ‘How shall we talk,’ pp. 271–72.
65. Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm, Remembering violence: Anthropological perspectives on intergenerational transmission (Berghahn Books, New York, NY, 2010), p. 17.
66. Informant A, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
67. See, for instance, Michael Jackson, The politics of storytelling: Variations on a theme by Hannah Arendt, Second Edition (Museum Tusculanum, Copenhagen, 2013); Kirk Simpson, ‘Voices silenced, voices rediscovered: Victims of violence and the reclamation of language in transitional societies’, International Journal of Law in Context 3, 2 (2007), pp. 89–103; Bessel Van der Kolk and Onno Van der Hart, ‘The intrusive past: The flexibility of memory and the engraving of trauma,’ American Imago 48, 4 (1991), pp. 425–54. David C. Stahl, Trauma, dissociation and re-enactment in Japanese literature and film (Routledge, London, 2018).
68. Eppel, ‘How shall we talk,’ p. 272.
69. On NPRC protests, see Ibid.
70. The name refers to an animal-skin loin cloth that forms part of traditional Ndebele attire and used to be worn by warriors of the pre-colonial Ndebele state.
71. Argenti and Schramm, Remebering violence; Alessandro Portelli, ‘What makes oral history different’, in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader (Routledge, London, New York, 2016), pp. 48–58.
72. Luise White, ‘Telling more: Lies, secrets, and history’, History and Theory 39, 4 (2000), pp. 11–22, p. 14.
73. Liisa Malkki, Purity and exile: Violence, memory and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1995).
74. Werbner, Memory, p. 2.
75. Avery Gordon, Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2008); see also Chris Moffat, India’s revolutionary inheritance: Politics and the promise of Bhagat Singh (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2019).
76. Informant M, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
77. Informant K, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
78. Informant L, Ibhetshu, 2018, Bulawayo.
79. Informant M, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
80. Informant N, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
81. Alexander et al., Violence & memory.
82. See, for instance, CCJP and LRF, ‘Breaking the silence,’ p. 6.
83. Informant F, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
84. Informant N, 2018, Bulawayo.
85. Informant O, 2018, Bulawayo.
86. Informant K, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
87. White, ‘Telling,’ p. 14.
88. Malkki, Purity, p. 55.
89. Ibid.
90. Informant N, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
91. Informant P, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
92. Informant M, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
93. ‘Code XXX,’ (n.d.), p. 1.
94. Compagnon, Predictable Tragedy, p. 101.
95. Mqondisi Moyo, in Zenzele Ndebele (ed.), The Breakfast Club (Centre for Innovation & Technology, Bulawayo, 14 January 2021), <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=473buHA8Btg> (19 February 2021).
96. Informant Q, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
97. Informant K, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
98. Informant L, Ibhetshu, 2018, Bulawayo.
99. For a history of the Ndebele State, see Julian Raymond Dennis Cobbing, ‘The Ndebele under the Khumalos, 1830–1896’ (University of Lancaster, 1976).
100. Book cover by D. Nyathi, of David Magagula, Goodbye Zimbabwe (Seraphim Publishers, South Africa, 2018).
101. Informant B, 2020, Bulawayo.
102. Eva Hoffman, After such knowledge: A mediation on the aftermath of the Holocaust (Vintage Books, London, 2017), p. 3.
103. Informant C, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
104. Informant D, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
105. On silent transmission, see Carol Kidron, ‘Toward an ethnography of silence’, Current Anthropology 50, 1 (2009), pp. 5–27; Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of postmemory: Writing and visual culture after the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 2012).
106. Informant F, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
107. Informant G, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
108. Informant H, 2020, Bulawayo.
109. Informant I, 2020, Bulawayo.
110. Informant B, 2020, Bulawayo.
111. Informant J, 2020, Bulawayo.
112. Informant K, MRP, 2018, Bulawayo.
113. Interview, 2018, Bulawayo.
114. On the role of second generations in ‘witness[ing] and work[ing] through’ violent pasts, see Marianne Hirsch, ‘Surviving images: Holocaust photographs and the work of postmemory’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, 1 (2001), pp. 5–37, p. 12. See also Generation; Hoffman, After such knowledge.
115. Sara Rich Dorman, Understanding Zimbabwe: From liberation to authoritarianism (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016).
116. Ibid.
117. James Muzondidya and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘“Echoing silences”: Ethnicity in post-colonial Zimbabwe, 1980-2007’, African Journal on Conflict Resolution 7, 2 (2008), pp. 275–97.
118. On the 2005-split, see Blessing-Miles Tendi, Making history in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe: Politics, intellectuals, and the media (Peter Lang, New York, NY, 2010). On the 2018-split, see Gibbs Dube, ‘MDC-T VP Thokozani Khupe beaten up, nearly set on fire in hamlet at Tsvangirai funeral’, VOA Zimbabwe, 20 February 2018.
119. For example, Marjoke Oosterom, ‘Youth and social navigation in Zimbabwe’s informal economy: “Don’t end up on the wrong side”’, African Affairs 118, 472 (2019), pp. 485–508; Rose Jaji, ‘Youth masculinities in Zimbabwe’s congested gerontocratic political Space’, Africa Development 45, 3 (2020), pp. 77–96. These findings were confirmed by personal interviews with young activists in Harare and Mashonaland Central.
120. Muzondidya and Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘“Echoing Silences”.’
121. Jaji, ‘Youth masculinities.’
122. Alexander et al., Violence & memory, p. 229.
123. Compagnon, Predictable Tragedy, p. 101.
124. As a director of Masakhaneni Projects Trust, Nyathi has worked with Gukurahundi victims for decades and facilitated talks between the NPRC and Mthwakazi activists.
125. Interview, 2018, Bulawayo.
126. Terence Ranger, ‘Nationalist historiography, Patriotic History and the history of the nation: The struggle over the past in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies 30, 2 (2004), pp. 215–34; Tendi, Making history.
127. A predominantly ethnic interpretation of Gukurahundi and an overall strong identification with this history among members of the second generation has also been found by Mphathisi Ndlovu and Lungile Augustine Tshuma in their research among university students in Bulawayo. Mphathisi Ndlovu and Lungile Augustine Tshuma, ‘Bleeding from one generation to the next: The media and the constructions of Gukurahundi postmemories by university students in Zimbabwe,’ African Studies 80, 3–4 (2021), pp. 376–96.
Author notes
* Lena Reim (
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