Brendan Seery
5 August 2007
opinion
It's amazing how time smoothes over the unpleasant cracks in your memory.
Until I opened the musty, yellowing clipping files of my work from 1983, I had forgotten how the pungent, sweet smell of death sticks in the back of your throat, how it settles in the membranes of your nose. And how, no matter how many beers you drink or how many showers you have, it still lingers.
I had found the bodies by smell. Six young men, piled together, probably in indescribable terror in their last seconds as AK-47 bullets ripped into them from close range. I had been told I would find them just off the main Bulawayo-Plumtree road in the Zimbabwean province of Matabeleland. I had rough directions, starting from a kilometre marker on the road.
But still it took some time - time I didn't have, because my car was parked in full view on the side of the road. Not a desirable position if the soldiers returned. Not difficult to find a young white man in jeans and T-shirt in the scrubby bush. Not difficult to put a bullet in his brain and get rid of a witness.
With the battered office Pentax camera, I squeezed off a few frames. And then vomited.
Later, I found another execution site. How many died there was difficult to tell, because the bodies had been piled up, set alight and burnt to ashes.
For weeks in the early months of 1983 I traversed Matabeleland, recording ever more horrifying tales of the destruction wrought by Robert Mugabe's North Korean-trained Five Brigade. Mugabe had unleashed the troops on this province - the stronghold of his political enemy, Joshua Nkomo - late in the previous year.
The unit was known by its Shona name, Gukhurahundi, which means "the wind which blows away the chaff before the rains". Clearly, Mugabe regarded the Ndebele people as just such chaff. Five Brigade was not a conventional military force, but more of a political killing machine. Reports of the numbers of people who died go as high as 20 000.
Apart from the bodies, I saw burnt huts, and people with stab, hack and bullet wounds. I spoke to women who had seen their husbands bayoneted in front of them; to old men who hid under beds when they heard the noise of our cars because they thought it was the soldiers returning; to shy, bruised girls who spoke in a quiet, roundabout way through gentle translators, about being gang-raped by drunken soldiers. I didn't speak to many young men; most were either dead or had fled to Botswana or South Africa.
Re-reading the files, I was amazed by what I had forgotten - or buried away. A conversation with my sister reminded me of my detention at the police station in Gwanda, for allegedly illegally interviewing Nkomo on one of his farms which had been seized by the government, and the time I was put in a cage for captured "dissidents".
I've long since healed, but Matabeleland still grieves. What was launched upon the province's unfortunate people has since been replicated in various ways on the rest of the people of that long-suffering country.
And now, as I read stories of people flooding across the border, I share the pain of these people, my people.
Please, South Africans, try to understand the suffering and show them some sympathy and dignity if you should meet them.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2007 Cape Argus. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
