Genocidal Sloganeering Politics in Zimbabwe

During the war, I witnessed similar scenes of atrocities in my own village. What Samanyanga Kenneth Nyoka says was not uncommon during the Liberation War. It was a deadly death wish to say to someone: "Pasi newe!" Without ambiguity at all, this meant that the targeted person was meant to be buried 6 feet, in a grave. At times the graves were actually shallow. Since the victim was often hastily buried, no stones were used to cover the body and, therefore, protect it from dogs and wild animals. Let me tell you one example I witnessed.

In a village near Chikwaka there lived a petty thief. One day one of his own relatives approached Vakomana veHondo. "This man is a Rhodesian traitor," charged one of the accusers. The impromptu trial was staged in the kitchen hut of one of my customary grand uncles with whom I was very close. It did not take long before it became quite clear that the charged man was not only innocent but a victim of personal grudges. This kind of false charges of selling out was used to exact vengeance.

At the beginning, the Liberation War fighters used to beat to death these so-called sellouts. The beating often led to fatalities. On realizing the abuse of the freedom fighters to intervene in personal disputes, said fighters abandoned the administration of the deadly corporal punishment themselves. However, they ordered the accusers to do the beating themselves. So was the tragic case of the man whose Kangaroo court was staged in my village where some freedom fighters were quartered.

"This man is innocent," said Vakomana veHondo to the accuser. "None of what you said is true. Now that we have taken this innocent through this process, he will be aggrieved enough to really want to go and tell the Rhodesian military about this false accusation. For our safety, and that of the people in this village, this man, as innocent as he is, he must die to night. You, the accuser will have to kill him."

The ill-fated man was killed in my village. His body was buried in a shallow grave in what must have been a silted ancient lake because the soil was soft and there was an aquifer so close to the surface the village wells were located within the area. It was beneath this soft soil, which is actually loose sand, that the body of the murdered man was buried in a shallow grave. Village dogs did not have much work to do to dig up the grave to eat the remains of an innocent peasant. The flesh of that man was picked off by dogs, wild animals and birds of the air. For some strange reason reason, they carried off every limb of the cadaver except the head. Way after the end of the Liberation War, that man's skull was still in my village.

Some of us share these grisly and very real stories not because we have the gift of the tongue, no. We write these narratives to forwarn those who were lucky enough to not have witnessed wartime atrocities because they were not yet born or were safe in the heavily guarded urban areas, far away from battleground. Rural Zimbabwe, the location of our villages, mountains and forests, was the theatre of war. Far from the nonsense we are told by people who were in refugee camps in Botswana, Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia, those of us who were at the very centre of the war, along with our brave fighters with whom we forged the bonds solidarity that led to the freedom we lost not too long after 1980, are also Liberation War Veterans. We only write to remind our compatriots that words matter and that lives have been lost because of unbridled exuberance.

Prior to the end of hostilities in 1979, it was understandable to sniff out and stop any genuine traitors. The country was at war. Any treachery spelt danger for numerous people, particularly unarmed and powerless peasants. In any war, the largest proportion of the casualties of war are the unarmed poor. They cannot fight back nor can they defend themselves. These blighted of the earth had to be protected. The hard realities of a blood-soaked war made it imperative.

However, that war ended in 1979. We have not been at war with anyone of note since then. War habits of brutalizing and butchering civilians no longer serve any purpose. No one is such a danger to Zimbabwe's national security to warrant the swear of swift death and an undignified burial. It means that it is a bad, nay, an evil habit to commit war-era atrocities in times of peace. Only evil people wish vigilante-style death on their fellow citizens. Unless we have declared war on ourselves, I join any sane Zimbabwean who is against the unAfrican habit of the pasi-nanhingi sloganeering. It is a deadly charge and a call to vigilantism. We have no need for such lawlessness, nor is there any justification for it.

https://www.facebook.com/bvumavaranda.technocrat/posts/892605237576120