Their bones shall rise

LAST Wednesday, the High Court in Bulawayo ruled that the exhumation of thousands of bodies dumped in disused mineshafts at Chibondo by the Rhodesians during the liberation war, be discontinued.
Last Saturday, Nathaniel Manheru wrote a touching account of his visit to Chibondo. I too, have been there. The story about Chibondo might appear small and insignificant; overshadowed by bigger stories like the recent Sadc Troika mee-ting in Zambia; the re-election of Lovemore Moyo as Speaker of the House of Assembly; and, the scandalous voting patterns that later emerged; and, the crisis in Libya and the Ivory Coast.
But, there is no way one can visit Chibondo and not get profoundly affected. Even to those of us who have been to Nyadzonia immediately after the massacre by the Rhodesians where nearly 2 000 people were killed, Chibondo brought more changes to how you thought you understood yourself and the world around you.
And yet, there is this concerted effort to try and muzzle it, to try and sweep it under the carpet that has seen some people taking the issue to the courts.
When Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai stands up and says the exhumations at Chibondo are disrespectful of the dead and must therefore be stopped, he is not speaking in defence of African culture; he is talking cheap politics.
But, whose politics is it that doesn't want the story of Chibondo to be told? Whose political agenda benefits by the erasure from people's memories of such stories? A few years ago, the courts in South Africa prevented the ruling ANC from singing some of its freedom songs.
The High Court judgement about Chibondo is essentially the same. It is an attempt to make us forget ourselves. What connects us with our past are our memories. If that is erased, anyone can mould us into people of their liking. It is an old strategy that colonialism used to control us.
If suddenly they stopped us from singing songs like "VaChitepo kufa vachitaura", it is obviously to make us forget about Herbert Chitepo and ultimately our liberation story. Whose agenda is that? It surely can't be Tsvangirai's. If you visited Chibondo, you will walk away an angry person.
Manheru described graphically the corpses of two young boys, possibly herdboys, with catapults still slung round their necks. I saw them too. Like him, I also tried to imagine the little boys' final circumstances as free men.
They were probably herding cattle out in the veld that fateful day. Or, they could have been sent on an errand to the next village by their mother. If the poor woman is still alive, she will not forgive herself until she dies.
However, it is unlikely she could have survived such a severe sense of guilt. To her, the death of her sons was not the fault of the Rhodesians. She was to blame for sending her sons on that doomed errand because if she hadn't, her boys would still be alive.
There might be need to put a bit of geography to Chibondo. There are two ways to get to Chibondo, through Bindura or through Mt Darwin. If you decide to get there from Bindura, you travel through Matepatepa farming area as if you were going to Mt Darwin. Chibondo is about 40 kilometres from Bindura. The only problem is the road. It is bad!
The easier way is through Mt Darwin, past Tsakari and then onto the disused road to Bindura through Matepatepa. Chibondo is about 30 kilometres from Mt Darwin. Once upon a time, so the story goes, there was a gold mine at Chibondo that was forced to close because of the war. Like many other things that time, the mine belonged to a Rhodesian white family.
The owners were angry to be forced to close because the mine yielded much gold. They were angry of the war. They would close the mine but they would come back when the war was over.
And to make sure their high yielding mine remained out of bounds to everyone, they solicited the Rhodesian army to dump their 'kills' in its abandoned shafts.
Manheru could not talk about all the corpses. For instance, there was this corpse of a man whose nylon shirt was still intact; it carried a packet of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes in the pocket. Peter Stuyvesant was a brand of cigarettes that was manufactured by BAT then.
And inevitably, I began to construct a story around this man. His corpse fascinated me. One of the first short stories that I wrote when I returned from the war was not one of my own experience during the war, but of a tortured and disoriented young man going back home from a Rhodesian holding camp somewhere in the farms around Bindura.
The story was based on the horrible experience of my own elder brother. I shall come to his story later. I didn't know then, the ghosts of Chibondo were beckoning. Perhaps this particular man with a packet of cigarettes in his pocket was coming home from the city to visit his wife before he met his fate.
He surely must have carried other things besides the packet of cigarettes; groceries for the family; clothes for the children. It could have been Christmas for all we know. I also saw the corpse of the guerrilla whose feet and hands were strapped with barbed wire and wearing a pair of Super-pros. People supplied us with lots of those during the war.
No one is suggesting Chibondo should be raised to the same scale as Auschwitz, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were sent to the gas chambers by the Nazis during the Second World War. No! But, that was nearly a hundred years ago and we are still hearing a lot about it in the media. No one has taken anybody to court to stop it. In fact, in Israel, the children learn that critical story of their past from kindergarten.
Why should we be stopped to remember Chibondo? Why is there a deliberate effort to erase Chibondo from our collective memory? There was a corpse of a woman in a corroded drum wearing earrings.
Her hair was neatly plaited and it stood in defiant tufts on her head. How the ear-rings and the hair withstood over 30 years of acid and corrosion is a miracle. Perhaps, that was how she wanted to be remembered. Perhaps, that was how she wanted her story to be told.
Chibondo cannot be swept under the carpet on the threat that there was Gukurahundi in Matabeleland. No one is denying Gukurahundi! Indeed, it should be openly talked about and if there is any evidence of similar horrors to the one at Chibondo, let it be exposed.
Those are the nightmares of our lives that we have to accept and live with. Why should Chibondo be silenced, because it was white on black? When will people like Morgan Tsvangirai begin to see this blatant hypocrisy?
And when they are asked to champion the crusade to silence it, they foolishly agree! When I visited, they had exhumed more than 2 000. You cannot visit Chibondo and not get angry.
My elder brother, the one I mentioned earlier on, is an ordinary man. He was arrested during the war at his home in Muzarabani because I had joined the liberation war; in fact two of us, my younger brother, he is late now, and I.
The reason why Chibondo has become significant to him is that he was taken to a holding camp in the farms around there. He only knew about the existence of the horrible mineshafts recently when bodies began to be exhumed, and he became frightened.
He had not known all those people who were taken away during the nights and never returned, all of whom he didn't know, met their fate so close to where he was being held. The reason why they did not take him away was that he lied to them.
He lied that I was operating around his home area and that he could easily arrange to meet with me and the unit of guerrillas that I operated with. One night, he connived with a black Rhodesian soldier on guard and he escaped to Salisbury.
He walked to Salisbury more than 100 kilometres away, hiding during the day and walking during the nights. He stayed in the city hopping from place to place, never sleeping at one place twice, until the war ended.
That is how he survived to tell his story. That is why the recent revelations at Chibondo frighten him. He could easily have been thrown down the shaft like thousands others. And his crime, because two of his young brothers had gone to join the liberation war.
One of my huge disagreements with Father Oskar Wermter of the Catholic Church is his seemingly selective amnesia and application of justice. To me, it doesn't make sense to gag Chibondo and talk about Gukurahundi.
The time difference between the two is only two years. The last victim at Chibondo must have been thrown down the shafts at the end of 1979 or the beginning of 1980. The first victim in Matabeleland was in 1981. If people are required to account for their actions, there is no way the Rhodesians should be left out.
Is it because they are white that they are sacrosanct? I was in the platoon dispatched to Nyadzonia after the massacre. What has remained with me many, many years later are the ugly images, the harrowing cries of the dying and the nauseating smell of death hanging in the air.
It was the same horrible feeling at Chibondo. You could still hear their harrowing cries. I also cried. And, we are being asked to forget that, with some among us even leading that crusade. What does it require someone to do that?
I can understand Father Wermter doing it. He has always been part of the process to control us and he cannot deny it. And yet, our own High Court, using our own laws, has ruled on his side. Aren't our laws supposed to protect our history and memories? I have no doubt the Fallen Heroes Trust will appeal against this judgement. But if I was asked for my honest opinion, this is one judgement that begs to be breached. Chibondo, like Nyadzonia, is one of those places you can visit and not get angry.
Last week, MDC-T held a memorial service for its dead activists, fine. But, I can bet my last dollar Morgan (Tsvangirai) will not accept an invitation to visit Chibondo.
There, he will be confronted with thousands of angry ghosts and the bigger truth about the painful story of this country. If he went, perhaps he will restrain himself from ever daring his fellow Zimbabweans to give the country back to the Rhodesians and see if the MDC cannot free it. He sometimes says that you know. The people dumped in the shafts at Chibondo have refused to sleep. Their bones have risen! Once again, I will end by repeating a poignant poem by the late prominent South African poet, Dennis Brutus.
He wrote the poem to honour a fellow African shot by the police in the 50s during a peaceful protest march: We have no heroes and no wars/Only victims of a sickly state/We have no battles and no fights/Only victims killed on eyeless nights/Yet when the roll is called for those who died to free the country/No doubt these nameless and unarmed ones will stand beside the warriors who secured the final prize.
alexkanengoni@gmail.com