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Safundi: The Journal of South African and American StudiesVol. 10, No. 4, October 2009, 471–478

Review Article

‘‘Zimbabwe is Mine’’: Mugabe,Murder, and Matabeleland

Ian Phimister

Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe. A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and

the Midlands 1980–1988.

Introduction by Elinor Sisulu. Foreward by Archbishop Pius Ncube.London, Hurst, 2007. 448 pp. (pbk) 978-1-85065-890-0

Between early 1983 and late 1986, approximately 20,000 people lost their lives

in Matabeleland, that is, the western part of Zimbabwe occupied mostly by Ndebele-

speakers. The massacres were carried out by the Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwe

National Army. Although widely reported at the time, the murders were largely

ignored by the international community. Neither the former colonial power,

Britain, nor the United States of America was prepared to lift a finger. Harare’s

black African neighbours made no protest. Described by Zimbabwe’s ruler, Robert

Mugabe, as Gukurahundi, meaning the rain that washes away the chaff before the

summer rains, these events constituted a defining moment for his authoritarian

regime.

Of all of those who knew what was happening at the time, or soon afterwards,

the Catholic Church in Matabeleland was the first to go public with its concerns.

When initial approaches to the Mugabe government were ignored, sermons

denouncing the violence were preached, and news conferences called. Early in

April 1983, Moto, a popular Catholic magazine, declared in an editorial that

‘‘something too serious for silence has been happening in Matabeleland. Moto has

heard from sources too varied and reliable to be discounted, tales of brutality,

Correspondence to: Ian Phimister, Department of History, University of Sheffield, Jessop West, 1 Upper

Hanover Street, Sheffield, S3 7RA, UK. Email: i.phimister@shef.ac.uk. The author is also affiliated to the

University of Pretoria.

ISSN 1753-3171 (print)/ISSN 1543-1304 (online) � 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17533170903210996

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atrocities, and killings which, under any circumstances, are unjustifiable.’’1 For its

pains, the Church was denounced; such local reporters as were investigating the

atrocities were silenced; and several foreign journalists were deported or declared

prohibited immigrants. Impervious to criticism, the Mugabe regime persisted with

its reign of terror in Matabeleland and sections of the adjoining Midlands Province

until both regions were bludgeoned into submission. In 1987, a political ‘‘unity

accord’’ between the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front)

(ZANU-PF) party and the largely Matabeleland-based Zimbabwe African People’s

Union (ZAPU) party of Joshua Nkomo was signed; its effect was to consolidate

Mugabe’s grip on power, while permanently alienating the majority of

Matabeleland’s inhabitants from the governing party.Matters rested there for almost a decade. It was only in the political space briefly

opened up in the mid to late1990s by the Movement for Democratic Change in the

course of its challenge to ZANU-PF’s unfettered rule, that an independent

investigation into Gukurahundi became possible. Between 1995 and 1996, the

Catholic Church’s Justice and Peace Commission, whose reports on Rhodesian

security force atrocities had so infuriated the Smith regime in its day,2 began

examining the archival record. Over the same period, interviews were conducted

in the two areas selected for close study. Published in 1997 as Breaking The Silence:

A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands 1980–1988, the

investigation’s detailed findings were as shocking as its recommendations were

far-reaching. But in the event, they were simply ignored by a government so certain

of its hitherto unchallenged authority that it anyway permitted publication of

Breaking The Silence inside the country. Those Zimbabweans who thought that the

report, read in the wider context of the apparent precedent set by neighbouring

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, heralded a new era of

openness, were soon disabused of any such foolishness. Starting in 2000, and for

many of the same reasons which had underpinned the massacres in Matabeleland,

Mugabe’s murderous regime embarked on another violent political adventure.

By the end of 2006, with no end in sight to this enduring crisis, concerned activists in

the region decided that the time was right for Breaking the Silence to be republished.

With a forward by Archbishop Pius Ncube, and an introduction by Elinor Sisulu,

it is now available as Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe. Mugabe appears on the cover,

memorably portrayed in a Zimbabwe National Army uniform dripping blood.

The story told by Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe is no less horrifying now than it was ten

or so years ago, for all that it may no longer surprise some readers, given what has

happened in the intervening period. The narrative rehearsed here supplements

that offered in Gukurahundi;3 where I cite from or refer to the reissued report, I offer

page numbers in parentheses.

1 Editorial, Moto, April 1983.2 See, for example, Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, The Man in the Middle.3 Unless otherwise indicated, much of what follows is a shortened and revised version of Phimister, ‘‘The

Making and Meanings of the Massacres in Matabeleland.’’

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I

Towards the end of August 1981, Robert Mugabe, still only prime minister and not

yet president for life, announced at a ruling party rally in northeast Mashonaland

that North Korea had recently given Zimbabwe US$12 million to establish and train

a fifth brigade of the National Army. Declaring that he was suspicious of people

who did not wish to join ZANU -PF, or attend its meetings, the prime minister

closed by saying that he could not ‘‘understand the intentions of people who refuse to

join the party that was responsible for the independence and freedom of

Zimbabwe.’’4 One of the first harbingers of Matabeleland’s subsequent fate, this

announcement juxtaposed the creation of the Fifth Brigade with the renewed

articulation of an authoritarian and intolerant nationalism. Quite how ruthlessly the

two would operate together was soon enough revealed. Starting in Matabeleland

North in January 1983, and eventually expanding to encompass Matabeleland

South the following year, a campaign of terror was waged by the North Korean-

trained Fifth Brigade against the region’s inhabitants. Largely if not exclusively

Shona-speaking in composition,5 it was ostensibly deployed by Mugabe to suppress

dissident guerrilla activity in Matabeleland. This unrest, which the Harare

government claimed was perpetrated by forces loyal to Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU

party who were not prepared to accept the result of the April 1980 election, was

deemed all the more dangerous because of the opportunities it provided for proxy

intervention by South Africa.That the apartheid-era Pretoria regime armed and controlled bands of so-called

‘‘Super ZAPU’’ insurgents as part of a wider strategy of destabilising its neighbors

would seem to be beyond dispute.6 But it would also appear that the scale of the

threat posed by dissident activity, whether internally based or externally directed,

was greatly exaggerated. It was a convenient justification, cynically used by official

spokesmen to turn away criticism, as Gukurahundi illustrates (48–65).7 Indeed, the

Fifth Brigade was never put up against such armed dissidents as there actually were.

Its energies were devoted entirely to the rural civilian population.8 This single-

minded focus, as the journalist and former editor of the Bulawayo Chronicle, Geoffrey

Nyarota, later described it, saw ‘‘an estimated 20,000 . . . innocent civilians . . . brutally

massacred by the time Five Brigade was withdrawn in 1986.’’9 Probably ‘‘hundreds of

thousands of others were tortured, assaulted, or raped or had their property

destroyed,’’ concluded the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum.10 ‘‘Of the people

who died, some were shot where they were found; some were ‘disappeared,’ then

4 Sunday Mail, 30 August 1981.5 Africa Confidential, 3 March 1982. See also Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘‘The Post-Colonial State and Matebeland,’’

24–5.6 Amongst others, see Hanlon, Beggar Your Neighbours; Martin and Johnson, Destructive Engagement; and Africa

Confidential, 21 January 1987. See especially Woods, The Kevin Woods Story.7 The Star, 30 March 1983.8 Africa Now, April 1983; and Africa Confidential, April 1984.9 Nyarota, Against the Grain, 135.10 Geoffrey, ‘‘Their Words Condemn Them,’’ 3.

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executed and buried or thrown down disused mine shafts; some were taken to torture

camps where some died under torture or were later executed.’’11

Individual testimony of the tens of thousands of crimes committed by the Fifth

Brigade, removed from the regular chain of military command and answerable

directly to Mugabe, was harrowing in the extreme. Much of this is in the public

domain and is relatively well known, thanks to the joint efforts, extending back

over several decades, of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe,

and the Legal Resources Foundation. Two examples must therefore suffice. One

woman recalled events in western Tsholotsho at the end of January 1983:

The uniformed 5Brigade soldiers arrived and ordered my husband to carry all thechairs, a table, bed, blankets, clothes and put them in one room. They also took ourcash—we had $1500 saved, to buy a scotch cart. They then set fire to the hut andburnt all our property. They accused my husband of having a gun, which he didnot have. They shot at him. The first two times, they missed, but the third time theyshot him in the stomach and killed him. They then beat me very hard, even thoughI was pregnant. I told them I was pregnant, and they told me I should not havechildren for the whole of Zimbabwe . . . they hit me on the stomach with the buttof the gun. The unborn child broke into pieces in my stomach. The baby boy diedinside. It was god’s desire that I did not die too. The child was born afterwards,piece by piece. A head alone, then a leg, an arm, the body—piece by piece. (83–4)

In February 1984, three weeks after a government-sanctioned food embargo—the

deliberate denial of food and other services to the roughly 400,000 inhabitants

of Matabeland South—had come into operation, people forced to attend a rally at

Sibomvu, were harangued by a Fifth Brigade officer. He told them his name was

Jesus, ‘‘one of the leaders of the Gukuruhundi.’’ ‘These are some of the things he said

at the meeting: he had some gallons of blood in his car . . . He wanted more blood

because his supply was running low. They had come to this place to kill, not to play.

They had come to kill the Mandebele because the dissidents were found only their

area and not in Mashonaland . . . He did not mind thousands of people being killed.

‘‘You are going to eat . . . your children. After that you shall eat your wives. Then the

men will remain, and because dissidents have guns, they will kill the men and only

dissidents will remain. That’s when we will find the dissidents’’. Commander Jesus

spoke in Shona while one of the soldiers translated into Ndebele’ (316).

II

So far as reactions at the time are concerned, what is striking is just how much,

at least in broad outline, very quickly became known to the outside world. Important

elements of the international press were investigating Gukurahundi rumors by as

early as late January 1983. Certainly ZAPU itself lost little time in taking foreign

journalists to scenes of atrocities in Matabeleland. After witnesses gathered at

Mzilikazi Methodist Church in Bulawayo had testified to what they had seen and

11 Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum.

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experienced, Nkomo himself denounced the Fifth Brigade as a ‘‘political and tribal

army come to wipe out the Ndebeles.’’12 By early February 1983 all this was headline

news in South African newspapers. Under the banner of ‘‘TERROR TRAIL

OF DEATH REVEALED,’’ the Rand Daily Mail spoke of ‘‘many atrocities’’ in

Matabeleland, while others described the ‘‘New War Flames Lick[ing] over

Zimbabwe.’’13 International coverage was no less detailed. Britain’s Guardian

newspaper was particularly quick off the mark, although its local ‘‘stringer’’ was later

to pay for his investigative professionalism by becoming the first of several journalists

to be deported for their ‘‘false reports about the situation.’’ In the United States,

Newsweek, one of whose reporters had slipped into Matabeleland North in defiance

of a government ban, had no hesitation in blaming the ‘‘brutal and undisciplined’’

Fifth Brigade for a campaign of murder and rape. If this was not enough, at the end

of the month, a public call by the Anglican Bishop of Matabeleland for an impartial

commission of enquiry into reports of civilian massacres, was promptly backed by

Amnesty International (13).

Spokesmen for the Harare regime denied every foreign news report. Nor did

Harare’s stance alter in the face of mounting domestic criticism. Although

Zimbabwe’s two government-controlled daily newspapers could be relied on to toe

the official line, the April issue of Moto magazine, cited above, devoted an article to

the ‘‘fear and horror’’ gripping Matabeleland. Referring to the article in which ‘‘direct

reports from unimpeachable sources supported many of the allegations of killings

and brutality which had appeared in the foreign press,’’ an editorial criticized the

local media for shying away from reporting what was virtually a ‘‘state of martial

law . . . [where] the gun is ruling, [and] the people live in great fear.’’14 When neither

this nor private approaches elicited any response from the government, at the end

of March the Zimbabwean Catholic Bishops’ Conference released a pastoral

statement condemning the killing and maiming of ‘‘hundreds and hundreds

of innocent people.’’ There was, the statement declared, ‘‘incontrovertible evidence’’

of continuing ‘‘wanton atrocities and brutalities . . . We appeal to the government

to exercise its authority to put an immediate stop to these excesses and to appoint

a judicial commission charged with the responsibility for establishing the truth,

apportioning blame, and distributing compensation.’’15

Yet for all that the ruling party in Harare railed against ‘‘an exceedingly hostile

Press campaign by the Western media,’’16 it had little to worry about. A series of

well-informed articles in Africa Now, a monthly news magazine, detailing an alleged

‘‘Zero Hour plan’’ whereby the Fifth Brigade’s operation in Matabeleland was ‘‘aimed

not at armed rebels but at ZAPU itself’’ sunk largely without trace, as had an

12 The Star, 2 February 1983.13 Rand Daily Mail, 3 February 1983; and The Star, 7 February 1983.14 The Star, 9 March 1983.15 Rand Daily Mail, 30 March 1983.16 The Herald, 19 April 1983.

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unsparing Panorama BBC documentary broadcast the previous month.17 After all,

Nkomo’s own precipitous flight into exile in March 1983 following a Fifth Brigade

attack on his Bulawayo home, had no noticeable impact on British policy towards

Mugabe and his regime. So unconcerned was the old colonial power by what was

going on in Matabeleland that in August 1983 it even agreed to ‘‘re-train’’ Fifth

Brigade officers.18 For both Britain and the United States, Zimbabwe was treated as

a significant regional partner in a Cold War context compounded by the political

passions and regional destabilization associated with apartheid South Africa.

In December 1982, Ronald Reagan had added Zimbabwe to the list of countries

deemed eligible for US military aid, declaring that the ‘‘stability and security of

Zimbabwe, a pivotal new state striving with the support of the Western democracies

to achieve national unity and economic and social justice after years of civil strife,

is important to US interests in Southern Africa and to world peace.’’19 Nor, apart

from Bishop Desmond Tutu, as bravely outspoken then as later,20 were any of

Zimbabwe’s independent African neighbours prepared to voice any criticism. Moral

indignation was as selective as it was contingent. In Africa as in the West, Mugabe

was showered with praise even as the Fifth Brigade went about its bloody business.

In August 1983, Mugabe made a triumphant state visit to Botswana, which of all

countries, must have known exactly what was going on in Matabeleland. Everywhere

he went, he was greeted by large and enthusiastic crowds. At a banquet in his honor,

Mugabe’s audience ‘‘roared their approval’’ when he warned the ‘‘racist Pretoria

regime’’ that no amount of intimidation would ever make African states compromise

their principles. Mr. Mugabe, said Botswana’s President Quett Masire, represented

‘‘a symbol of hope for the people [of Namibia and South Africa] to whom freedom

and justice are distant dreams still to come true.’’21

Little wonder, then, that in February 1984, Nathan Shamuyarira, had been

sufficiently emboldened, when lecturing British and North American audiences on

the many positive achievements of independent Zimbabwe, to berate the ‘‘sensation-

hungry Western press.’’22 Gratifyingly for the Zimbabwean Minister of Information,

his theme was quickly taken up by a visiting member of Britain’s opposition Labour

Party. Speaking in Harare, a former Minister of State, Ted Rowlands, attacked British

media coverage of events in Zimbabwe. ‘‘Reports of minor clashes in Matabeleland

and the detention of British pilots tended to attract more attention in Britain,’’ said

Rowlands, ‘‘than successes in development projects undertaken since indepen-

dence.’’23 The message coming out of Whitehall was no different. Zimbabwe was

‘‘a classic case of Press [sic] neglect and misrepresentation,’’ explained the Foreign

17 Africa Now, April 1983. For a detailed account of media coverage of Gukurahundi, see Stiff, Cry Zimbabwe,

75–245.18 Rand Daily Mail, 3 August 1983.19 The Star, 3 December 1982.20 The Star, 22 March 1983.21 The Star, 15 August 1983.22 The Sunday Mail, 5 February 1984.23 Ranger, ‘‘Matabeleland since the Amnesty,’’ 161–73.

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Office Minister responsible for African affairs.24 Leading elements of the interna-

tional press were already tiring of the story. A condescending cover story in

The Economist, on ‘‘The Pain of Peace [in Zimbabwe],’’ made reference to the

Fifth Brigade only in the context of ‘‘cracking skulls,’’ as if the Gukurahundi

campaign was merely some kind of robust police action conducted against unruly

demonstrators.25 In May 1986, when Amnesty International published its damning

report on human rights abuses in Matabeleland, the Mugabe regime did not even

bother to rebut the charges. Instead the government-owned Sunday Mail attacked

Amnesty for ‘‘wasting away its credibility thanks to its growing naı̈ve acceptance and

use of baseless and alarmist reports created by dishonest and discredited sources.’’26

Mugabe’s government could anyway count on academic praise-singers to cast it in

the best possible light. An article on Matabeleland published in African Affairs,

the Royal African Society’s journal, purported to describe events in the troubled

province, but without once mentioning the Fifth Brigade. Although the author

professed to be ‘‘in no doubt about the scale of . . . the brutalities of 1983 and 1985,’’

he wrote as if the ‘‘balance of terror’’ was weighted most heavily on the side of the

dissidents.27 Underpinned by the belief that there was ‘‘almost no suspicion of me as

a historian sympathetic to ZANU/PF,’’ and seemingly oblivious to the possibility

that informants located with the help of ‘‘a guide provided for me by the District

Administrator’’ might not be entirely forthcoming about state-sponsored mass

violence in the very recent past, the article noted that there had been ‘‘too many

collapses of discipline, too many rapes, too many killings,’’ but only on the part of

dissidents.28 Beneficiaries of Mugabe’s ‘‘generosity and courage’’ when dissidents

were offered amnesty, the people of Matabeleland South’s Matobo district had

apparently, of their own accord, reached a general opinion: ‘‘a condemnation

of dissident violence.’’29 That this prudent expression of opinion might have been

influenced by popular memory of Bhalagwe Camp, the huge detention center in the

south of the district where thousands of villagers were detained and tortured by the

Fifth Brigade,30 was nowhere considered in this myopic celebration of the peace

of the grave in Matabeleland.

24 The Herald, 10 February 1984.25 The Economist, 21 April 1984.26 The Sunday Mail, 11 May 1986. See also Zimbabwe News, June 1986.27 Ranger, ‘‘Matabeleland since Amnesty,’’ 162.28 Ibid, 163.29 Ranger, ‘‘Matabeleland since the Amnesty,’’ 162–3, 172; and more recently, his self-exculpatory ‘‘Narratives

and Responses: The Zimbabwe Case,’’ where it is misleadingly claimed that ‘‘human rights organizations did not

publicly condemn Zimbabwe in the 1980s.’’ But see Lindgren, ‘‘Memories of Violence,’’ 164.30 See Gukurahundi, 223–31. Bhalagwe camp received extensive press coverage both in South Africa and in

Britain. Describing it as a ‘‘death camp,’’ a Sunday Times report, as carried by The Star (14 April 1984) said that

‘‘many people died and their bodies were thrown into shallow pits, splashed with kerosene, and set alight.

Identification papers were destroyed.’’ See also, Sunday Tribune, 8 April 1984, 15 April 1984.

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III

That the massacres in Matabeleland, so painstakingly documented by the report and

book under review here, are themselves part of a larger pattern, has long been

obvious to all but the most blinkered of observers. If Zimbabwe is indeed Mugabe’s,

as he asserted in December 2008,31 then he and ZANU-PF must take primary

responsibility for the rivers of blood that have been shed since 1980. But blame can

also be laid at the doorsteps of some Western and African leaders, not least those

in Southern Africa. ‘‘The truth needs to be told,’’ writes Elinor Sisulu in her

conclusion to Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe. ‘‘The silence needs to be broken’’ (xvii).

Hopefully, one day the leaders of this region, who have not cried out as loudly as they

should have against the enormous and heinous crimes against the people of

Zimbabwe that were committed in the past 23 years, will see fit to apologize to the

people of Zimbabwe.

REFERENCES

Hanlon, J. Beggar Your Neighbours: Apartheid Power in Southern Africa. London: James Currey,

1986.Lindgren, B. ‘‘Memories of Violence: Recreation of Ethnicity in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe.’’

In No Peace No War. An Anthology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts, edited by P. Richards.

Oxford: James Currey, 2005.Martin, D., and P. Johnson. Destructive Engagement: Southern Africa at War. Harare: African

Publishing Group, 1986.Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. ‘‘The Post-Colonial State and Matebeland: Regional Perceptions of Civil-

Military Relations 1980–2002.’’ In Ourselves To Know: Civil-Military Relations and Defence

Transformation in Southern Africa, edited by R. Williams. Pretoria: Institute for Security

Studies, 2003. 24–5.Nyarota, G. Against the Grain. Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman. Cape Town: Struik Publishers,

2006.Phimister, Ian. ‘‘The Making and Meanings of the Massacres in Matabeleland.’’ Development

Dialogue 50 (2008): 199–218.Ranger, Terence. ‘‘Matabeleland since the Amnesty.’’ African Affairs 88 (1989): 161–73.———. ‘‘Narratives and Responses: The Zimbabwe Case.’’ Paper presented at the University of

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Zimbabwe,’’ Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, May 2007, 3. http://www.hrforumzim.

com/special_hrru/Condemned_by_their_own_words.pdf.The Man in the Middle. Salisbury: Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, 1999.Woods, Kevin. The Kevin Woods Story. In the Shadow of Mugabe’s Gallows. Johannesburg:

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31 The Times, 19 December 2008.

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