Zipra Veterans’ Trust chairman Buster Magwizi yesterday described the acts of the suspected 600 former Zanla combatants who recently performed rituals at the sacred Njelele Shrine in Matobo district as “criminal”.
“As Zipra, we respect our dead and we have no culture of going about exhuming dead people,” he said.
“What these ex-Zanla combatants did was a crime. We are very angry that they came all the way to our people here.”
This follows reports that a group of suspected Zanla war veterans invaded the sacred shrine sometime in February. Chief Malaki Masuku said the group entered the shrine without his consent. Said Magwizi: “We stopped them from exhuming remains of ex-fighters in Mount Darwin.
“We are saying chiefs must make noise with the government to stop such a culture because it restores the pains in people of Matabeleland who have suffered so much under Zanla ill-treatment.” Traditional leaders last week met Matabeleland South governor Angeline Masuku at Esigodini as part of investigations to establish the motive behind the invasion.
“I do not know anything about the cleansing and Deputy Senate President Naison Ndlovu does not know anything about it.
“We will have to find out further who is behind this,” Masuku said. Villagers near the shrine said the group descended on Njelele where they allegedly conducted a ceremony to “appease the spirits of their colleagues killed during the war at Chimoio in Mozambique (in 1977)”.
The villagers accused the group of having cast a bad spell on the rainfall patterns in the region. The group allegedly arrived in a convoy of 16 buses and more than six cars.
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Earlier on, the group had reportedly visited Mozambique, exhumed the remains of their colleagues and took stones from the graves and dumped them at Njelele Shrine.
