Gugurahundi devoured my bi-ethnic background - Pt 1

My name is Mandlakayise and I was born in 1970, the second last born in the family born in Gwelo. I am bilingual, my mother is Shona and my father is Ndebele and we are five in the family. My father was a solder in Smith's army and my mother was a housewife. I can say with equal truth that our life was very turbulent. My father was very abusive to my mother and I agonized to see my mother in such great pain sometimes beaten by my father for some very small reasons. My father wanted to prove he was the boss in the family and my mother never challenged this for once, instead she was on the receiving end all the time, the equation of power meant that my father had the upper hand, he was the breadwinner too.

She costumed herself to move within those boundaries that defined her in the home. My father would talk about leaving home and join the Zipra armed forces in Zambia. There was no dignity serving the Smith regime that was racist, he said. This was the talk day in day out and somehow my mother knew that my father would leave us and join the liberation struggle sooner or later. He was impatient, he was unstable and he was getting agitated serving the White regime. He cursed the White supremacy daily and how he was humiliated often in the front line when he was told to go and kill the "terries" his own people, kith and kin. How can a freedom fighter be a terrorist? Who is a terrorist? What constitutes a terrorist? It was poverty and desperation that made him to join the Smith's armed forces, to put bread and butter on the table for his family and that was what he could offer to sustain his family. He realized how wrong it was to join Smith's forces. He had to leave Rhodesia and go to where all the other men and women who thought it was worth it to fight for the good cause, liberation of their country. 

All of sudden, my father did not show up and my mother suspected correctly that he got the connection and he left and that was in 1978. How did he leave? He had civilian clothes with him packed in his bag when he was called to go to the front to fight the "terrorists' insurgency" from Zambia. In the night, he took away his RA uniform and was in civilian clothes and off he went to the point where he met the "men," Zipra forces. He had a lot of information with him and it assisted the Zipra armed forces very much. He did not go for training as he was already trained. At home, we were visited by the special branch, they wanted to know where our father was. My mother had no idea and she could not say much about my father. She said she did not know his thoughts about the liberation war to talk about him to the special branch.  They did not leave her alone, they visited her almost every week. She was supposed to report at the police station in Gwelo every week. Because the means to survive dried up of my father who had left, my mother looked for a job as a cleaner and she got it.

She was a cleaner at a hospital in Gwelo. A family of five children is a challenging responsibility. She was challenged and she rose up to the challenge. She worked hard to bring us up and gave us good education. We were now in town where education was better in terms of accessibility. If she was not at work, she went to the market to sell the articles she would have made, knitted jerseys, or tablecloths. There was something she sold to generate that extra cash for the family. We had just stabilized as a fatherless family; it was 1980 when all the news was telling that Zimbabwe was going to be born. We wondered if our father survived all those bombings we heard in the press coming from Zambia. Our father came back indeed as an invalid he had a missing leg. The bombings at the FC (Freedom Camp) in Zambia left him with just one leg. He managed to reconnect us and mother being my mother, she was all welcoming, ingénue.

She accepted the man who abandoned her back, he was the father to her children after all. Who knows how much she loved him, these two people were hubby and wife and their love exuded all ethnic limitations of thinking. For some reason best known to them both, my parents relocated back to Lower Gweru (it was now called Lower Gweru instead of Lower Gwelo) that was 1981. My father was demobilized, well he could not be in the camp as he was crippled but going to the rural area for the purpose of farming was not the best decision for both of them and the children needed to go to school. My father had said so and it had to happen the way he wanted it. It was my mother's output that the family relied upon. She worked very hard as usual to keep the family afloat. She had to look after her husband who was so wholly dependent on her for everything. It was the respect that my mother gave to my father that was touching.

This is a man who absconded and left her destitute with five children. He comes back to make failure plans of going back to the rural area to survive with very meager means when all reasons around them suggested the different, that they should stick it out in town for the purpose of the children who were school going and needed that school fees to do their secondary education.
It was in 1982 when the Gukurahundi atrocities started and it was the rural areas that were targeted most. It was nasty, solders came looking for "dissidents" and our father was a dissident according to their definition. He never thought he could be a target and get killed as he was crippled, how he could be a dissident anyway? He was a Zipra solder and that was enough. We had often heard about the Fifth Brigade and their brutality towards Zapu and Zipra but we never thought it could be as bad as was spoken about until they came to our home village.

They had been told that my father was an ex-Zipra, which was enough fuel to come to our home. We were all there, children, in broad day light. My mother had just prepared lunch for all of us when we saw a military car approaching the home. My father was there to welcome them. I have heard about the presence of cruel solders in Midlands, my heart beat frantically and seemed to die of pain of it. They surrounded the home and started going from one hut to the other looking for something, this something they wanted to find in our home. I remember the first thing that my father told them was, "look we fought this war together so why are you harassing me and my family. Look I lost my foot in the bombings in Zambia what do you want from me? Is the loss of a foot not payment enough to liberate this country?" They did not hear him instead he was struck down and was shot dead on the spot. Answering them just heightened their desirability to kill.

Those were the last words my father uttered regarding his struggle to liberate Zimbabwe and the price for it, death at short range, cold blooded. My mother screamed in desperation, now in Shona, giving them the knowledge that the wife is indeed of the Shona tribe. Then came the insults, so you are a whore to these Ndebele people, (uri hure reMandevere iwe, uri mutengesi), why did you marry a Ndebele man? Were there no Shona men to marry you? She was given a clap that sent her down rolling on the floor. We children started crying for our mother as we thought she was the next to be shot. "We are going to give you a good lesson and when we leave this place you will be carrying a Shona child in your womb.

It was these hateful epithets from their mouths, out of the realm of decency, all compressed into a single line of hate and killings. There was nothing reminiscent of what we knew or heard in our entire lives, everything seemed to be on the wrong side of the pale. She was dragged into the hut and she was raped in the presence of us children. They needed to teach her a lesson, her husband was dead outside when they were raping her in the hut. They were five men who literally hopped on to her, decency to undress to rape a woman all five of them was redundant in their lives, five men split naked, without clothes and taking turns, seeming to get the sexual satisfaction they wanted, full of it, an act atrophied only to sub-humans. We could not take it anymore to see our mother humiliated in that manner, we cried loud, we got beaten and told we would die like our father who was still lying dead on the ground all of us to see.

 There is crudeness of life and it was right in front of us. How do children look at a shot-down dead father and are beaten up never to cry, at the same breath and vein there are witnessing men hopping on top of their mother in broad daylight.  They did not kill her, it was not the Shona people they wanted to kill, but multiple rapes were enough to teach her a lesson. She was raped there in the presence of all of us her children to see. She was so ashamed of herself when they left her, she could have easily died of shame. If rape is done to inflict shame, then this is exactly what my mother endured in the presence of her children, no justice of pain and shame. I did not even try to search for her face. It was also not possible to cry out her pain. 

After the ordeal, it was dawn and neighbors had gathered to find out what had happened as they heard gun shots. My father's body was taken by the same solders who killed him and we did not know where his body was sent but we were sure he got killed as it was a gunshot at short range, he lay lifeless, blood all over him the whole time they were in our homestead. I witnessed that with my own eyes too. My mother collected the little she could get and she told us to leave the home immediately. We did and we relocated to Gweru and we lived with relatives for the time being. We can only speculate how we survived this as we were told in other homes children were gunned down as well. What I still remember too was to make sure our mother continued to breathe as she was gasping for breath all the time, we gave her water to drink. We went to the bus stop to get the first bus to town Gweru and we lived at my uncle's place, brother to my mother. 

My mother was admitted into the hospital as she had serious gynecological issues that needed hospitalization. She was hospitalized for a week to recover from the ordeal. After that she had to grieve for her husband and father she had lost. She did not know where he was buried, he must have been thrown in those mass graves were they threw all "dissidents" who got killed. This was Zimbabwe's new dispensation for you. In all these life threatening situations I realized that my mother never really cried. It was this rawness of Shona/Ndebele confrontation that irked me to high heavens, but still an ingredient of the two ethnic groups. Did we not hear Dr. Joshua Nkomo saying that in a new Zimbabwe there won't be any tribalism of any kind? Is independent Zimbabwe this crude?

My father lost his foot in a barbaric act of Smith regime so that he comes home and gets killed short range by the very comrades from the liberation movement. What an irony is this world! What is the difference between Smith's crudeness of the Bush War and Gukurahundi atrocities? Who thought that we would be worse off after independence? It was my father who left Rhodesia as he did not want to fight on Smith's side, he left and went to fight the just war in Zambia. Now is this the price we have to pay as a family having sacrificed so much already for the independence of new Zimbabwe? Did we not say it very loud and proudly we sacrificed enough and we were proud of the contributions our father made in the liberation of this country?

It is something to be left on our own without a provider, without the means, my mother had to sweep the hospital floors to give us the daily bread.  Again after the death of her husband she left the home to fend for family again in Gweru with a bleeding heart, the dead husband and father she can never have, and she does not know where her husband is buried. Did she not even deserve it to know where he is buried?  She lost the man she loved. He was abusive to her but he was the father to her children and that was enough for her. She did no demand more than a decent home with a father of her children. It did not matter if he was crippled or not. She loved him still. It is the pain she had to endure that it is her people who perpetrated those brutality on her, the rape and subsequent STD disease she succumbed to and the killing of her husband cold blooded. She had to look for a job again to look after her children as the hopes and a decent home in the rural area had quashed. Could it be a curse to be one of them?  

When we were in Gweru, we learnt more about the Gukurahundi atrocities in Matabeleland and Midlands. We heard that there were cases whereby a family head would be told to dig his own grave in the presence of his family and would be buried alive and the family looking. After that they would be told to sing pungwe songs and told to cook for them if they were hungry. The women would be raped the whole night and they would leave for another village. I never thought beyond the hidden agenda about Gukurahundi. Gukurahundi atrocities were planned well before 1980, to humiliate the Mathebele people. In as much as I loved my father because he was Ndebele I loved my mother because she was Shona equally. It was the language Shona that saved us from death.
We screamed in Chishona, a language our father had forbidden us to speak. But since our mother was bringing us up alone after the husband absconded, she switched to speaking Chishona with us, a blessing in disguise as we survived the atrocities not for any other  reason either than the fact that we spoke Chishona that time the atrocities were perpetrated on us and we survived.

 His death squatted in my psyche. I doubt if I would ever forget this bioscope of seeing my father gunned down by the very comrades and not Smith's Selous Scouts. When I think about him and how he died, every part of me cries, and it is my desperate determination to forget what transpired the day my father died. It is those moments that involve the play of acute pain only known by me. It would be sooner or later that we children who suffered these atrocities would demand justice, it is the wrongs that we want to put right. There should never be room for ethnic tensions in this country as Joshua Nkomo put it. Gukurahundi atrocities were meant to revoke and nurture raw tribalism and seek long time atrocities committed by either side a century ago. Revenge breeds hate and there can never be development in such a country marred by raw tribal conflicts.

It was my father's failure plans that put a lot of strain in the family and its development. But because my mother loved her husband so much she put up with all those plans that put her in a serious predicament all the time. While it was necessary for my father to leave the Rhodesian forces and joining Zipra forces to fight for Zimbabwe's independence, it was not called for to leave Gweru and settle in the rural Lower Gweru. Leaving Gweru meant cutting off the only source of income the family depended on since he left for the struggle.

It was not easy to generate income in a rural area where the children needed school fees for their education. It was my father's ego that made him wants to leave the town and be at a place where nobody would see his crippled leg. But he expected my mother to tend the fields and at the same time generate income from the crops to support the family. The beginning of 1980 and immediately after independence was a life of numerous uncertainties and my father was unable and almost incapable to sense, to read the fluid aspect of political events in the country. He may have been told in Zambia that when they get home they were going to be compensated for the liberation sacrifices they made in the war. Everything changed when Zapu lost the elections.

My father should have seen this coming and re-strategized our lives in Gweru than to take uncalculated risks that cost his life. I am sure he was marginally aware and conscious of the conflicts resulting from Zapu losing the elections. I wonder still what would remove this thunder of hate predicated on tribe in me, my father shot and my mother raped, all that happening in my presence at my chrysalis age.  When my mother recovered from the rape ordeal, she went to the same place, same hospital she worked before, looking for the same cleaning job. She got the job again and we got a house to rent and our lives were back on track without our father. My mother sent us to school and we worked very hard.


I qualified to go to train as a teacher at Gweru Teachers College. My other siblings qualified to nursing colleges and one of us qualified to go to the University for a Degree Course in Pharmacy and all that was possible through the absolute sacrifice of my mother who was then a single parent. Indeed it is the suffering that redeems and the world honors grace under pressure. This can be said with equal truth in my mother's life. She cried both tears in her life, tears of shame, loss, abandonment, but she also cried joyful tears when she saw her children doing well in their schooling, the education she cherished in her offspring, she worked hard to see all of them there, and her Kingdom came, here on earth.