Gukurahundi and Murambatsvina: Travels Through a Troubled Land and Mugabe’s True Legacy

Zimbabwe is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. There is a place in the Eastern Highlands, which some call World’s View, but which you and I must call by its proper name, Malindidzimu. I have not seen it myself, but I have been told that on a clear day, if you look to the east and squint a little, you can see, across the valleys and low country of Mozambique, all the way to the Indian Ocean. If God had not already built for Himself a resting place in Kenya, He surely would have made Zimbabwe His abode of repose. 

But like most things of uncommon beauty, the very loveliness of that land have been the cause of its pain. Because Zimbabwe has been coveted by many over the centuries, its story has been a story of beauty, but also a story of pain. From Mapungubwe and the Great Zimbabwe, great cities conceived, built and abandoned even as those in Europe struggled through their ‘Dark Ages’; to Shaka’s mfecane that brought straggling, huddling masses to begin a new life in Matabeleland; to the beginnings of the invasion of the Europeans who, having discovered the light (or at least gotten out of the Dark), decided that this beauty had to be theirs. 

The owners of these lands tried to throw out these latest invaders. When they realised that these pale strangers from far-off lands were enchanted enough by the beauty of the land and all the riches that lay underneath it, they sent their young men to effect the expulsion. The Umlimo, the seer of his people, warned that the invaders were the cause of the drought and rinderpest ravaging the land (the same rinderpest that, months earlier, devastated the Maasai herds and laid them low just as these warriors were invaded). But this attempt, in the 1890s, which they called the chimurenga, failed. The newcomers were too strong, and too well-armed, and too entrenched, to leave. It did not help that to the south, and to the north, they had also seen lands that they coveted and occupied. 

It took seventy years for the Second Chimurenga to follow. This time, the fair winds were blowing, although it took many years, and many dead, for all to learn to share the beautiful land. At the head of the Second Chimurenga were men of uncommon vision, foresight and ability. They saw a future and a path that few could see in the darkest days of war and imprisonment and strife. Josiah Tongogara, the military genius who, like Moses before him, never lived to see the promised land his efforts were about to deliver. Shumba yeChirumanzi Leonard Takawira, who did not leave prison alive during the struggle. The Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, the Methodist preacher who took up arms against the oppressors. Edgar 2boy Tekere, who, as freedom approached, asked Robert Nesta Marley to play in Salisbury (soon to be known by its proper name - Harare) to celebrate liberation. Bob Marley stayed in Tekere’s home, and in Rufaro Stadium, the Wailers performed the great anthem ‘Zimbabwe’ in his last, greatest concert. Joshua Nkomo, the giant (we perhaps would call him ‘Kaliech’ in these parts) who began the resistance against the oppressors. Herbert Chitepo, the legal genius in three countries (he was the first black Director of Public Prosecutions in Tanganyika) and leader of the freedom forces, before a bomb under his Volkswagen exploded in March 1975 in Lusaka. This left the path open to the leader of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army - a bespectacled, introverted bookworm named Robert Gabriel Mugabe - to take over leadership of the Zimbabwe African National Union.

No one doubted Mugabe’s smarts (as Americans would say). Prison, where he had spent more than a decade, was not just about polemicising. He took the time to study, and by the end had accumulated an unbelievable seven degrees. 

Robert Mugabe became the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe in April 1980, after liberation. Robert Mugabe died today. Unfortunately for many of us in Africa, our imagination about the man is frozen at almost forty years ago. The haze of time, the myths and stories we tell ourselves, and our own notions of our continent and those who have occupied and oppressed us mean that we imbue Mugabe with a halo he does not deserve. We wear blinders to events in the decades just past to mythologise a man who long ago threw away any right to our encomiums.

For me, Robert Mugabe is synonymous with one word - Gukurahundi. There are many who say that Mugabe’s soul curdled when his beloved wife, the Ghanaian born Sally, died in 1992. That his dalliance with his secretary Grace Marufu, even as Sally was dying, was the turning point that turned Mugabe from a liberation hero to the conflicted tyrant he became. That narrative is wrong. 

In early 1983, Mugabe dispatched the Fifth Brigade, trained by the North Koreans, into Matabeleland. The excuse for this was that Nkomo was still keen on leading Zimbabwe, and that offended Mugabe’s sense of his destiny and his right to rule. So the Fifth Brigade, under Mugabe’s cousin Air Vice-Marshal Perence Shiri, invaded Matabeleland. No mercy was shown. Entire villages were cleared of their men, who disappeared to never be heard from again. When the Brigade was not patient enough, or the villagers were too slow, they were killed right there, and buried in mass graves. It goes without saying, but it must be said, that women and girls were raped in countless numbers. Huts were set ablaze, with the residents still inside them. By the time Gukurahundi subsided around 1985 (although there were scattered killings as late as 1987), twenty thousand people lay dead. Some say that many more were killed, but as the reckoning has never happened, we do not know yet. 

Gukurahundi is one of those Shona words that does not render itself properly in English. It tries to describe a type of rain, one that comes early in the season and clears the chaff away. It is a word that has passed on into infamy. There is another one. This one does not describe a weather phenomenon. But it is equally dismissive of the people it refers to. Murambatsvina. The clearing out of dirt. Of filth. And this one is one that I wasn’t told about, or read. This one I saw for myself. 

In the winter of 2005, I was working in South Africa, but had business to conduct in Harare. Incidentally, through a wrinkle of history, my boss was Kule Chitepo, Herbert Chitepo’s son. At this time, the inflation was just taking hold, and as a lark, I had taken a picture of a pile of banknotes, proudly labelling it ‘a million dollars!’ A few moons later, a single banknote would be denominated one hundred trillion dollars. That is Z$100,000,000,000,000. Which was worth only 40 bob. And losing value even as you stared at it.

So I landed in Harare Airport, as it was then, and was picked up by an old liberation fighter whose name I will not mention. We drove in a Hilux double cab that had seen better days. That was not the most remarkable thing about it. It was that it stank of petrol. The stench was so strong that you were afraid to blink too vigorously, lest you cause a spark that would blow both of us sky high. I had to ask what that was about. It turned out that you only drove when you had to, and you had to carry jerry cans everywhere you went. This is because petrol was in such short supply that you had to stock up wherever you found it.

We made our way into central Harare. Two months before, I had spent time in jail with some young men from Masvingo. Why I was in a jail in Thohoyandou in South Africa is not important (although I have written about it before), but in my conversations with those young men, I knew that things were breaking down. But what I saw in Harare that day brought home just how rapid the breakdown was, and rendered me speechless. Winter in the highlands of Zimbabwe can be brutal. If you imagine the chill of a cold day in a place like Nyahururu or Kericho, you can start imagining what the winter in Harare is like, if only worse. It chills you to the bone. It is cold enough to get to the low single digits celsius. Into this cold, Mugabe had thrown out his people. Thrown out entire families - infants, old people, the infirm and the disabled, into the chill of Harare. As with any Orwellian reasoning, the excuse was that it was an urban cleanup, designed to rid Harare of its slums. But its true nature was obvious. Opposition to Mugabe had started coalescing, and it was thought that it was centred around the poorer urban population. The brutality of Murambatsvina, in which I saw old women, huddled around jikos whose pitiful warmth could not break through the gloom and chill, may not have been to the murderousness of Gukurahundi, but it was just as pitiless. 

Three years later came an election. For the first time in a long time, there was a better than even chance of Mugabe losing. While his opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, a rumpled union leader, was not the most eloquent or organised of politicians, the mere presence of the MDC as a political force meant that things were up in the air, electorally. And indeed, due to exhaustion with the status quo, or an economy breaking all sorts of records as it plummeted towards oblivion, Mugabe actually lost that election. It was only the first round, and it was only 47.9% for Tsvangirai to Mugabe’s 43.2%. But he had lost. So Mugabe responded the only way he knew how. More than a hundred people were killed, tortured and imprisoned in the campaign of intimidation. Things got so bad that Tsvangirai opted out of the runoff, afraid that his people were going to be decimated.

Those of us in Africa eager to embellish Mugabe’s memory point to the events of twenty years ago, when he decided, in what seemed like a fit of pique, or else a carefully-considered policy, to throw white Zimbabweans off their farms. It is of course a comfortable thought, made all the more palatable by the unhinged reporting of British newspapers, which barely concealed their racism and droit de coloniser with their coverage of the country in the aftermath. But the truth is much more prosaic, and much less heroic. The action, which Mugabe called the Third Chimurenga, was an attempt to reverse some serious political losses he had suffered. In early 2000, he had lost a referendum on a new Zanu-PF constitution, which was supposed to paper over significant cracks in the nation’s polity. As would happen eight years later, Zanu-PF only ‘won’ parliamentary elections through some serious chicanery. All this, coupled with the land hunger of war veterans of the Second Chimurenga (some genuine, some obviously counterfeit), was the excuse for the land invasions. As all too often happens in these instances, what was couched as the desire to deliver long-sought after land justice became a wanton land grab, where, on the one side, gangs of crudely armed thugs kicked farmers off their land and on the other, the powerful and well-connected simply grabbed the choicest pieces for themselves.

It was a combination of the crudeness of the land ‘reform’, which devastated the agricultural base of the economy, and the aftermath, which saw serious capital flight, the departure of the best brains of the country, and economic sanctions, that broke the back of the Zimbabwean economy. Of course Mugabe, being no fool, was quick to blame the Europeans, and particularly Tony Blair, for his country’s predicament, but the collapse continued long after these could have been credible explanations. 

In the end, Mugabe was eased out of power. An enfeebled old man, ruling over a palace shot through with intrigue, surrounded by comrades who defenestrated him with nary a second thought. His wife was a figure straight out of Shakespeare, if Shakespeare had been a Zimbabwean playwright writing about a party in disarray, a wife who was fond of assaulting her son’s paramours, and a succession struggle in the middle of near-terminal decline. As Mugabe died in far-off Singapore, the Zimbabwe he had wrought continued to carry his legacy of ashes. 

Zimbabwe is still broken, and the dawn is still a ways away. Many of its people are outside its borders, while those who remain try to cope with a situation made the more dire by the consistent death of hope. But when I visited Harare all those many years ago, I stayed at a the Amanzi Lodge. In the middle of the accelerating decline, it was, and remains to this day, the most elegant hotel I have ever visited. The standards remained world class, even as world class became ever more impossible to maintain. The friends I made in those years, and have made since, convince me that this benighted land is only one turn of good fortune away from blooming in a way deserving of its deep beauty and charm.

Comments

  1. Always refreshing to read yours perspectives. I must add that Neighbouring countries especially South Africa and Namibia have benefited immensely from Zimbabwean professionals who fled the tyranny under Mugabe.

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  2. Great and enlightening piece.

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