We ran away from Soldiers
FreeAfrica (March 6, 2007)
By: Thabo Siziba

“… get up! Get up! The soldiers are coming. Hey! Get up! We have to run now. The whole neighborhood is running past, can’t you hear people running and whispering outside…” these would be the cries and shouts of our parents and grandparents as they aggressively woke us up to flee an approaching regiment of Mugabe’s killer machines, code named the Gukurahundi. It was in the 1980s and we were the mess they had been ordered to come and clean up. We were just little children. Only our parents could ‘understand’ what was going on – or did they, really? Well they were listening to the news and the message was just as clear as it had been meant to be. Anybody and anything associated with the Ndebele (“dissidents!” as they were regularly referred to) people had either to be killed or destroyed. Labelled as supporters and breeders of dissidents, the entire Ndebele population became the ‘number one enemy of the State’. With the rest of the country shut from the realities of the Matabeleland and Midlands regions, the Mugabe government unleashed its most brutal Fifth Brigade Army into these regions with special orders to do whatever was necessary to humiliate, control and wipe-out the entire Ndebele population. The army would come by night dressed as dissidents and also arriving to cause the same kind of horror and havoc that their counterparts (daytime doubles) would do – ironically to the same communities that during daytime would be accused of having harbored dissidents the previous night. During daytime or in the early hours of the morning the same group of men seen as dissidents at night would appear in government army uniforms, this time coming to kill or maim whoever would be ‘suspected’ to have been visited by the dissidents prior. In certain instances whole neighborhoods would be burned down with occupants screaming inside the huts and in other cases neighborhoods would be grouped up to dig a mass grave for themselves and then thrown inside and either shot down at or simply buried alive. Pregnant women would have their tummies slit in a bizarre gamble to see whether the child inside was a girl or a boy. These were some but just a drop in the sea, of the atrocities committed by Mugabe’s Zanu P.F. Regime during the early 1980s to the late 1980s.International media caught very little of these horrors because of the State ban on foreign media, particularly to the regions that were being terrorized and actually, even independent local media was very much restricted to these regions except for the government run media whose work was to spin events pro-government. To the rest of the country, the killings were justified. Government media outlets flashed propaganda statements pro-Zanu P.F. to the rest of the non-affected regions of the country and even to this day it remains difficult to explain the horrors that the Ndebele people endured, to people coming from some parts of the country such as Mashonaland whom the government protected and served all so well at that time. Some people from these regions sincerely got so brainwashed by the propaganda media spins against the Ndebele people that even todate some still believe the truth about what really happened in Matabeleland is all a load of exaggerations and claims. But then there are still those who strongly believe that the Mugabe regime had a just cause… Mugabe himself has acknowledged it as a period of “madness” by his regime but that is all his party has ever given as an explanation or apology for the genocide whose intentions failed.

Now I sit back and I reflect on those days when me and my grandmother and the rest of the family ran through those bushes of the village escaping the terror of soldiers and I cannot avoid but just feel so much anger and abuse over my identity and its manipulation by State propaganda to always be regarded as a second class Citizen in my own homeland. There is so much hate and anger in me and although I know that it is exactly what the plan was to accomplish for the Mugabe regime in order for it to stay ruling indefinitely I cannot help myself. I also know so many fellow citizens of my country who are Ndebele too just like myself who also at first glance would appear to be all fine and normal but when ‘push comes to shove’, will unconsciously vent so much anger and hatred. Perhaps the Shona people too have this psychological illness, to which many of us Zimbabweans are in constant and unconscious denial. Perhaps this is the reason why Zimbabwe’s Ndebele and Shona populations never seem to look each other in the eye. Mugabe and his masterminds designed a system of governance that would be based on such gross national divisions, mistrust and hatred. The secret saying goes that even today, a Ndebele and a Shona person may work and converse kindly with one another but that will not at any point mean that they have gathered full trust and love for one another. “iNdebele liNdebele, iShona liShona” these are the kind of slurs that are attured at times of venting within either populations. The meaning simply being that the two, Shona and Ndebele are better off divided, divided by a history of repeated State sponsored hate. It would be better if such divisions would be simple differences of cultural and traditional values. The underlying seed of hatred was planted and its roots are so deep in the populations’ sub conscience that in most cases the apparent is often denied as steering tribalism; yet when ‘push comes to shove’ the divisions and hate between the two populations blossom so fast and shamelessly. Since independence Zimbabwean politics has been maintained on tribal grounds and the Zanu P.F. regime started this trend and succeeded. Today opponents of Zanu P.F. first have to battle the almost impossible tribal rivalry between the Ndebele and the Shona people before they can even begin their war against Mugabe’s continued terror acts. And that is very difficult. Most opposition parties and groupings against Zimbabwe’s Mugabe regime, for this reason, end up as divided factions with all sorts of internal tribal squabbles that mostly always serve to convenience the Mugabe regime.

Bringing hope and strength to Zimbabwe’s people is going to be a long and lasting battle. The population of Zimbabwe is a peaceful population and having already gone through the horrors of the ‘Independence’war against the Smith regime in the 1970s and then again the government sponsored terror and abuse in Matabeleland in the 1980s, Zimbabwean people have been forced into voluntary submission to fate. Survival of the fittest is now the name of the game throughout the country and the main priority above all political motivations has now become the scavenging of food to live through to the next day.

Zimbabwe’s story is like Hollywood fiction tale. All too extreme to believe, yet it is a reality through which humans in that country are forced to comprehend.