Decades after the Fifth Brigade swept through the villages of Matabeleland and Midlands, the survivors of the Gukurahundi massacres are finally speaking out, but their testimonies are laced with a profound distrust of the state’s attempt at reconciliation.
Many victims fear the current government hearings are merely “an attempt to sweep the matter under the carpet”.
Tholakele Sibanda, a resident of Emkhonyeni village in Tsholotsho, was only in Grade Two when the violence shattered her world.
In January 1983, her father was abducted by soldiers and accused of being a dissident.
The cruelty did not end with his disappearance. Sibanda recalls the harrowing instructions given to the village: the bodies of those killed were left in the open, and families were forbidden from burying them.
“Soldiers threatened that once they find us burying them we were going to be in serious trouble after likening the bodies of their loved ones as that of dead dogs,” Sibanda said.
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The trauma continued two months later when villagers were forced into a meeting at their homestead.
Twenty-one women and a male youth were accused of harbouring dissidents.
Sibanda’s own mother barely survived after being pulled from a burning hut by a soldier who had used her as an interpreter, though she was warned to “never divulge information that she survived” as the soldiers were “under instruction to kill everyone in the village.”
The institutional collapse during this period was absolute. When the family attempted to seek help, the state offered no protection.
Sibanda recounts that a local officer in charge refused to take a report, stating that police were no longer allowed to handle such matters.
“The officer in charge told us that he was under instructions to close the police station saying most of the police officers had been beaten to death for handling such matters,” she said.
The legacy of Gukurahundi is not just a memory; it is a cycle of systemic poverty.
Sibanda, who lost her grandmother and another maternal figure during the massacres, was forced to drop out of school to support her family. Today, she watches as her children are relegated to “menial jobs for survival due to lack of education.”
As the government pushes for closure through a six-month hearing process led by local chiefs, survivors remain skeptical.
They argue that involving chiefs is “an insult to the whole programme” because the chiefs themselves were victims and cannot counsel those equally aggrieved.
Sibanda and others are now demanding a shift toward international accountability.
“We have told the committee in charge of the hearings that we want an independent commission which should be an international tribunal,” she said, insisting that perpetrators must finally answer for why known villagers were targeted as dissidents.
For these survivors, true closure requires more than a hearing; it requires a formal apology and a process that is truly “victim-centered.”