ZIMBABWE’S VANISHED
It’s seven years since Itai Dzamara disappeared after stepping out for a haircut. He’s one of legions of people who have disappeared in the autocratic country
It’s seven years since Itai Dzamara stepped out of his home in Glen View, Harare, to get his hair cut.
“He asked me to make breakfast and left for the barber,” his wife, Sheffra Mtukudzi, tells the FM. While at the barber, a group of unknown men accused the outspoken activist of stock theft, bundled him into an unmarked pick-up truck and sped off.
“It’s now seven years since my husband was taken — without knowing what happened to him or where he is,” Mtukudzi says.
It’s suspected that state security agents are behind Dzamara’s disappearance. The former newspaper editor fell foul of the administration as the founder of Occupy Africa Unity Square, a movement demanding the resignation of Zimbabwe’s autocratic leader Robert Mugabe. A few days before his abduction, he’d told thousands gathered at a Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) rally to rise against Mugabe.
Dzamara is one of numerous victims of forced disappearances in Zimbabwe — activists, civil society leaders and members of the political opposition who have vanished without a trace, allegedly at the hands of state security agents.
“If opponents and critics cannot be silenced by other means, then forced disappearances exist as the last card,” Rashweat Mukundu, a Harare-based political scientist, tells the FM.
The list of the vanished seems interminable, their stories heart-wrenching. Take opposition activist Tonderai Ndira. On May 13 2008, 10 armed men surrounded his Harare home. They marched him to unmarked vehicles and sped off. His body was found in Beatrice, south of Harare, a month later. He had been shot in the heart and suffered multiple stab wounds. His eyes had been gouged, his tongue cut and his neck, skull, jaw and knuckles broken.
Patrick Nabanyama was taken from his home in Bulawayo. A polling agent for veteran Zimbabwean lawyer and opposition politician David Coltart in the June 2000 parliamentary election, Nabanyama was abducted by a gang of armed assailants in an unmarked white Mazda truck. He was never seen again.
On August 11 2010 a provincial magistrate in Bulawayo officially declared Nabanyama dead (his body has never been recovered).
As is the case for so many of Zimbabwe’s “disappeared”, justice has proved elusive. Cain Nkala, a local war veterans’ leader, was charged with Nabanyama’s abduction. But he was taken from his own home before the matter could come to court. His body was found in a shallow grave.
Forced disappearances have by no means been confined to Mugabe’s dictatorial rule. They’re a grim feature of Zimbabwe’s historical landscape, says Mukundu, “an entrenched practice in Zimbabwe’s body politic”.
Before independence in 1980, the Rhodesian regime was known to abduct leading activists and nationalists. Lawyer and activist Edson Sithole and his secretary, Miriam Mhlanga, were among those allegedly “disappeared” by members of the Rhodesian Special Branch. An empty grave at the National Heroes’ Acre in Harare bears Sithole’s name.
Post-independence, the practice continued, with thousands forcibly disappeared during the 1980s massacres (an Amnesty International report puts the number as high as 20,000), and apparently politically motivated abductions like those of Ndira, Nabanyama, Dzamara and human rights activist Paul Chizuze continued well into the 2000s.
Little seems to have changed since Emmerson Mnangagwa took power in 2017. The Zimbabwe Peace Project, a human rights organisation that tracks abductions and cases of extreme violence by uniformed officers, recorded 86 such cases in 2019, dropping to 36 in 2020 and 16 last year. With an election due next year, politics-watchers are concerned there may be an uptick again.
Comedian Samantha Kureya is among those who seem to have offended Mnangagwa’s administration. On August 21 2019, she was allegedly abducted from her home in the dead of night by people identifying themselves as police. She says she was bundled into an Isuzu truck, taken to an unknown place, assaulted, and forced to drink sewage as punishment for “mocking the government”.
It’s a near-mirror of the abduction of MP Joana Mamombe and opposition activists Cecilia Chimbiri and Netsai Marova. They disappeared in 2020 after being stopped at a police roadblock while on their way to an antigovernment protest in Harare. A week later, they were found 70km from the capital. The women told of torture and sexual abuse, and claimed they had been forced to drink their own urine.
That was before the courts issued an interdict, preventing them from talking about their ordeal.
The police deny having had the women in custody during that week. The state, for its part, accuses them of
having staged their own abduction.
It’s a common refrain from the authorities. In a September 2019 state address, Mnangagwa reportedly expressed concern about “the growing trend of politically motivated false abductions in the country, which are calculated to put government in a negative light”.
Similarly, when asked by the FM about allegations of state involvement in abductions, information minister Monica Mutsvangwa blames Western detractors for peddling falsehoods. The state will assist in attempting to solve cases of forced disappearance, she adds, provided “there is no politicisation of such matters so that the police can discharge their duties responsibly”.
“The Zimbabwe government has a constitutional obligation to protect all and every [one] of its citizens, inclusive of the Itai Dzamara instance,” Mutsvangwa says.
That may be little comfort to Mtukudzi. A police task force was established two years ago to investigate her husband’s disappearance. To date, it has produced nothing. “The government ... is not taking my husband’s disappearance seriously,” she says. “It’s very painful that someone can just vanish and nothing happens.”
Mutsvangwa, for her part, appeals to “all who may be privy to any leads to contact the national police”, saying the state is open to receiving “any helpful information that may help in the resolution of this ‘Dzamara’ matter”.
Mukundu doubts the political will of the government to turn things around. “Zimbabwean authorities have not resolved any cases, including those in which state security agents are implicated and in which irrefutable evidence exists,” he tells the FM.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Stephen Chuma, spokesperson for the youth wing of the Citizens’ Coalition for Change (CCC), formerly the opposition MDC Alliance. Asking the government to end forced disappearances is akin to “asking the devil himself to end sin”, he says.
Chuma is particularly concerned about the number of forced disappearances since Mnangagwa came to power. He reels off the names: “Blessing
Toronga, who was abducted in the afternoon in Glen Norah in 2019 and only found in a high state of decomposition in Beatrice, a month later; Blessing Kanotonga from Budiriro; Obert Masaraure; Tatenda Mombeyarara; Cecilia Chimbiri, Joana Mamombe and Netsai Marova, just to mention a few.”
He adds: “The issue of forced disappearances is a stain on both Robert Mugabe’s regime, and [on] the current Zanu-PF government.”
Back in 2019, rights group Amnesty International said available evidence suggested a trend in the state-sanctioned targeting of human rights defenders. Amnesty Southern Africa director Dewa Mavhinga told news agency TRT World that state complicity seemed clear, given that all victims of abduction or torture had been known government critics or activists, the abductors had been armed with “with military-grade weapons like AK-47 rifles, and speaking with government authority about dealing with elements threatening national security” . Despite an abundance of evidence, there has not been a single arrest.
As Chuma notes, it’s the survivors of abductions who seem to end up being persecuted, while the perpetrators walk away scot-free. Take Chimbiri,
Mamombe and Marova: “Two years on, [they] are still before the courts on trumped-up charges that they faked abductions.”
Chuma has an “unshakable” resolve to campaign for a better Zimbabwe. Still, like other figures and activists demanding political change in the country, he lives in fear of being taken.
“No-one is safe,” he says. “And every night ... we sleep in fear of that unusual midnight knock from abductors.”
Dzamara’s wife, Mtukudzi, is also afraid. She’s scared that if she protests about his disappearance, she may also be taken. “I am leaving the issue of my husband to God, because he alone knows what happened to my husband and who did it,” she says. “I believe the truth will come out one day.”
Plaxedess Mutariswa, Ndira’s wife, tells much the same story. “I was very stressed and lived in fear. When I was moving from Mabvuku to another location, the same people who abducted my husband stopped our vehicle and took two boys ... who were helping with my relocation,” she says. “They wanted to take me too, but other cars stopped and they were too many people who wanted to know what was happening. That is how I survived.”
Both Mtukudzi and Mutariswa tell the FM of the toll the abductions have had on their families — of economic hardship, the trials of raising children alone, and the trauma inflicted on their families.
“Whenever my children, who were six and nine at the time, saw cars coming their way, they would flee,” Mutariswa says. “They thought they were the same men and that they had come for them too.”
For Mtukudzi, there’s hurt in her children “asking whether their dad is coming [home] or not. It’s painful that my kids are growing up without knowing their dad, or why he was taken and where he was taken.”
Seven years on, she’s working to ensure his memory lives on.
“We keep his memory alive annually on his birthday,” she says.
There’s precious little else the family can do.