4 Responses to ?Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe?
floence durrant
May 30th, 2007 12:17 1Thank you - May the Spirit of my God, the Spirit of my Foreparents be with you and bless you for such wonderful work on their behalf. My brother Mike must also be thanking you from his grave, because he too was mutilated and chopped to pieces by Mugabe and His Gukurahundi in July 1984 purely for questioning what was happening to his fellow Ndebeles. He was safe in Kwekwe which is in Midlands, a young man - an Agricultural officer for Matabeleland and Middlands, the best son for his parents, a father to a young family and the best brother God ever created for me.
Now that the truth is internationally known, I can exhale the stale breath I held inside me since he was killed and now I can move on with my life.
tanya tsutsunana
May 30th, 2007 15:22 2hey
thank you guys for writing about this issue.I was a teacher in tsholotsho and what I experienced as a human being was beyond comprehension.I have now become a born again christian so as to be able to forgive this inhumanity against humans.I lived it all,I watched villagers killed, school girls raped, teachers put in pit latrines and know of mass graves, of which when I go back home I will actively seek decent burials for those innocent lives which were left in those mass graves. I know the areas and the villages very well and they are still vivid in my mind.
I really don?t know if you are doing this to truly find meaning and understanding of what took place in Mat north and south, but whatever the case, God bless you in your endearvuor.
Sally D, South Africa
May 30th, 2007 20:32 3May God have mercy on Zimbabwe, when will the Terror end?
I pray that one day, the UN will be able to send in forensic teams to open the mass graves and prove what was done in Matabeleland to the world. This is what happened in Rwanda and in Bosnia. Every Zimbabwean needs to hear the truth about Gukurahundi. For this reason, I hope that the graves will not be disturbed, as they are crime scenes. However, residents should try to protect them as there may still be perpetrators alive who do not want their evil deeds exposed or the dead to tell their stories.
for Nora
June 3rd, 2007 12:58 4Gukurahundi was a terrible injustice and demonstrates the psychophathic nature of Robert Mugabe. What is often forgotten though is that the tactics used during Gukurahundi where developed and perfected during the war of liberation. People often view the liberation strugle romantically and fail to apreciate that the ?libarators? abused, maimed and killed civilians in the same way they did during Gukurahundi and the same tactics used to subdue and silence the opposition now were used then on defenseless villagers for crimes ranging from being ?a witch? being too light skinned. My mother who was a Community Development Worker with the Ministry of Internal Affairs was killed while villagers at a pungwe chanted kill the sellout. Her crime? as a widow she choose to continue working to support and sent her five kids to school. She also choose to remove us from the village where as girls we would surely have been raped during the many Pungwes. In as much as Gukurahundi?s legacy goes unpunished, Mugabe?s crimes against defenceless villagers and those who perished at the hands of the ?liberators? goes unaccounted and unreported. This man who has brought so much pain and suffering on our country deserves to be brought to justice. I pray and hope this happens in my lifetime.
From uMthwakazi
We have said and we we say it again the people of Mat'land need an independent separate state of uMthwakazi from Zimbabwe, this is the only solution. We observe that whilst many have climbed on the anti Gukurahundi bandwagon because of Mugabe's recent acts outside Mat'land the tribal attitudes have not changed. In Zanu PF John Nkomo is not even being mentioned as a Presidential contender because he is Ndebele, despite his senior position in the party; the MDC split for the same reason and Ndebele are assured of always deputising the Shona. The issue of tribal numbers continues to supersede human rights - todate everything remains defined in terms of tribal majoritarianism. Jobs, resources and opportunities in our region are for the Shona. Farms in our region, in Nyamayendlovu in particular were allocated to the Shona and yet the reverse is not the case. Nobody bothers to investigate or acknowledge the origins of the 1979 Zanu Grand plan of taking over Matebeleland. Nathan Shamuyarira a senior Zanu PF official was never publicly reprimanded by Mugabe or anyother senior Shona speaking official for his recent tribal views on Gukurahundi. What he said clearly says it all. Gukurahundi was never about dissidents. It was a long term plan hetched in the 1970s by Zanu PF to wipe out the Matebele, send them back to South Africa (hence the border jumping) and regain the Matebeleland territories for the Shona - thus reversing Inkosi uMzilikazi's nation building exercise of the 1880s. Umthwakazi shall be free!!!!!