On 22 December 2022, Zimbabwe celebrated Unity Day, a national holiday. It is meant to mark the anniversary of 22 December 1987, when the leaders of Zimbabwe’s then-largest political parties, PF-Zapu and Zanu-PF, signed the “Unity Accord”. 

Imagine someone told you this and ended the story there. That 22 December is Unity Day, full stop. You are not allowed to probe further and you are not allowed to tell the story behind the signing of this agreement. 

But what was this agreement, one would naturally want to ask? What led to it? Was it a peace deal? A ceasefire? Did Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe and the political parties they led just wake up and decide, out of nowhere, to sign an agreement of unity? 

Well, that is what the government of Zimbabwe would like everyone to believe. 

However, Ibhetshu LikaZulu, an organization that promotes the memorialisation of victims of the Gukurahundi Genocide, has taken it upon itself, to remind us all of the tragic events leading to the signing of the accord. But they are evoking memories that Zanu-PF would prefer to remain buried.

Genesis of a genocide

Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain through a negotiated peace settlement called the Lancaster House Agreement in 1979. One of its terms was that in the first post-independence elections, 80 seats would be contested by Black people’s parties and 20 would be reserved for whites. Of the 80 seats, the Mugabe-led Zanu-PF won 57 and Nkomo’s PF-Zapu won 20. 

Zapu won all the Matabeleland seats and a few in parts of the Midlands provinces.

This did not go down well with Zanu-PF, which preached that for Zimbabwe to progress, she needed to be a one-party state.

The minister of state security and head of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) at the time was Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, the current president of Zimbabwe. His job was to identify and deal with any threats to national security. 

It was Mnangagwa, in this capacity, who identified Ndebeles as a threat to national security for voting for Zapu. It was also his ministry’s responsibility to ensure that the threat was quashed, so it deployed state security agents to work with the army to deal with it. 

Fortunately for them, there was a special branch of the army, trained and ready to take on the task. In August 1981, Zimbabwe welcomed 106  North Korean military instructors to the country. Their job was to train the army’s Fifth Brigade, which reported directly to Mugabe. 

The Fifth Brigade’s first operation was codenamed Gukurahundi, a Shona word for the early rain that sweeps away the chaff after the spring rains. It was launched in Matabeleland North Province and spread across Southern Zimbabwe to Matabeleland South and parts of the Midlands provinces. 

Basically, the Fifth Brigade was deployed to all the constituencies that had voted for Zapu. Their instructions, according to informants, were to “wipe out Ndebeles”, and wipe them out they did try. 

The Fifth Brigade was hosted in Bulawayo and supported by 1 Brigade in their operations in Matabeleland and the Midlands. The commander of 1 Brigade at the time was none other than Zimbabwe’s current vice-president, Constantine Chiwenga.

Unspeakable atrocities

The Fifth Brigade and state security agents committed unspeakable atrocities in areas they deemed to be Zapu strongholds. They shot dead thousands of civilians, raped women and girls, tortured and disappeared thousands of people and robbed villagers of their livestock. 

Their targets were anyone who could not speak Shona. Ndebeles, to them, were all ethnic groups that were not Shona. These included Ndebeles, Kalangas, Sothos, Xhosas and many other minority ethnic groups. To this day when people say Ndebeles, with regard to Gukurahundi, they refer to people from Southern Zimbabwe, regardless of their “true” ethnicity. 

To justify the deployment of the Fifth Brigade, the government claimed that the soldiers were in Matabeleland to look for armed dissidents who were terrorising civilians. There had indeed been reports of dissidents who had defected from the army. Unfortunately, the Fifth Brigade targeted unarmed civilians and seemed to treat all non-Shona speakers as “dissidents”. 

It soon became clear that dissidents to the Gukurahundi meant all Ndebeles, including foetuses that they would rip out from the bellies of pregnant women. Some victims recount how soldiers would order mothers to put their dissident babies in large mortars commonly used to crush grain, and pound them to death with pestles. 

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Sydney Sekeramayi, the then minister of defence, justified the murder of civilians, claiming that dissidents had taken cover within the civilian population and thus in flushing out the dissidents it was unavoidable that some civilians would die. He acknowledged in an interview that indeed the army had been deployed to Matabeleland and it was killing unarmed civilians. 

The Gukurahundi Genocide lasted from 1983 to 1987 and the signing of the Unity Accord which granted amnesty to everyone who had committed crimes during the genocide. As part of the deal, PF-Zapu and Zanu-PF merged to form a new party, Zanu-PF. 

Many people believe that Nkomo had no choice but to sign the Unity Accord just to stop Mugabe and Zanu-PF from murdering civilians. Most of the Zapu leaders were in prison without trial for the duration of the genocide and were only released as part of the terms of the deal. It was, therefore, largely a coerced agreement and to many people Nkomo is viewed as a hero for signing the agreement and saving lives.

Unfortunately, the accord did not go so far as to make any efforts to get  justice for victims of the genocide. No effort was made at truth-telling, reconciliation, healing or any kind of peace-building. People were just told that there was a unity agreement and commanded to unite and live in peace. Part of this peace was meant to be achieved through the silence of victims. 

Speaking about the genocide was criminalised.

Mnangagwa

In 2017, Mnangagwa came to power via a coup that deposed Mugabe. In 2018 he won a disputed election and held on to the presidency. He has since been peddling the propaganda that his is a “new dispensation”. 

He announced that his government would allow people to discuss the Gukurahundi Genocide. The government of Zimbabwe has, however, proven to be insincere about dealing with the genocide. On one hand, the president claims that he is committed to peace-building, on the other state agents arrest people who try to memorialise the victims. One wonders if there’s really any hope for true peace-building in Zimbabwe when the perpetrators of all state-sponsored violence since independence are still in power. It is unlikely that perpetrators of atrocities can lead a justice, truth and reconciliation process, seemingly against themselves. 

In the past few years, Ibhetshu LikaZulu has erected memorial plaques with the names of people who were either killed or disappeared during the genocide, but all the plaques were removed or destroyed by state agents. 

Read in Daily Maverick: “Destruction of Gukurahundi memorials prolongs torture of victims and their descendants” 

Every year on 22 December, Ibhetshu LikaZulu hosts memorial services for victims of the Gukurahundi Genocide. They say that to many victims it marks the day when the genocide ended and thus they have chosen to make it a day of remembrance for the lives lost. 

This year’s commemorations were disrupted by police who dispersed the peaceful mourners and ordered them to go home. Police officers followed three participants and arrested them. 

The three were Thamsanqa Ncube, the vice-chairperson of Ibhetshu LikaZulu, Melusi Nyathi, a founding member of the organisation, and Samkeliso Tshuma, director of The Girls Table.

They were charged with contravening section 37 (1)(a) (ii) of the Criminal Codification Act: “Participating in gathering with intent to promote public violence, breaches of the peace or bigotry.” 

They spent a night in jail and were taken to court on 23 December. They were remanded out of custody until 20 January when their case will be heard.

It took the police hours to come up with a charge against the three. They had no legal basis to hold them but they did hold them without a charge until they decided to make one up. 

It is clear that their arrest is meant to intimidate the public from speaking about Gukurahundi. 

It is also clear that the three were not just randomly picked. Nyathi and Ncube were targeted for being in the Ibhetshu LikaZulu leadership. The organisation has given the state sleepless nights with its memorialisation of victims.

Tshuma has been on the state’s radar for a while. She has been hounded by agents from the president’s office for months, demanding information about who is funding her, among other things. 

Tshuma’s organisation has been involved in voter registration drives in an attempt to get more women and girls to register for the July 2023 elections. To the government of Zimbabwe, anyone who encourages people to register to vote is doing so on behalf of the opposition. They conflate wanting more people to vote with wanting more people to vote for the opposition. So, for promoting voter education and trying to empower women and girls to vote, Tshuma is now seen as an enemy of the state. George Charamba wrote a column about Tshuma a few weeks ago in The Herald. 

We can expect to see more arbitrary arrests and a further shrinking of the civic space in the months leading up to the elections. 

Be that as it may, it makes no sense for the government to declare a holiday, but also put out a gag order to prevent anyone from talking about how we came to have 22 December as a holiday in the first place. DM/MC

Thandekile Moyo is a writer and human rights defender from Zimbabwe. For the past four years, she has been using print, digital and social media (Twitter: @mamoxn) to expose human rights abuses, bad governance and corruption. Moyo holds an honours degree in geography and environmental studies from Midlands State University in Zimbabwe.