Let’s compile register of the dead in all our conflicts

January 1977 was the worst of the several months when I personally endured the ravages of the war for the emancipation of Zimbabwe from the toxic grip of rebel leader Ian Douglas Smith’s Rhodesian Front regime.

My ordeal started on my birthday, the very first day of 1977. I was arrested by the dreaded Special Branch on allegation that I had transported in my car the group of Zanla guerrillas who bombed Nyazura Police Station on the night of the last day of 1976. During the night of my fourth day of incarceration in Rusape Prison there was an extended commotion around midnight behind our remand prison cell. Thereafter, there was a pungent stench that wafted into our cell and rendered sleep totally impossible for the 36 prisoners packed therein.

As we emerged from the cell early in the morning to have breakfast, we were shocked by the sight that we beheld. A grotesque pile of dead bodies met our gaze against the wall. We, rather I, counted a total of 16 of them when instructed to do so by Detective Inspector Phillip Mhike of Special Branch, Rusape. Some were mutilated beyond recognition by gunshot wounds, while others had broken skulls, with brains spewing out. The bellies were ripped open on some, while the intestines flowed outside the bodies.

The dead bodies had been transported by the army in trucks from the Chigondo area of Hwedza district, where a detachment of Rhodesian soldiers surprised villagers who were engrossed in a pungwe or all night meeting in the company of Zanla guerrillas. Among the bodies were two whose clothing testified that they were Zanla fighters.

Mhike ordered me to take charge of the restoration of a semblance of order to the stinking pile as a prelude to taking finger-prints. The bodies were then ferried to be buried in a mass grave on the outskirts of the town. After independence local politician Didymus Noel Edwin Mutasa, then fiercely powerful, was quoted in the press as having discovered the mass grave. He made assurances that the bodies of the victims of the Chigondo Massacre would be accorded a decent burial.

I doubt that this ever happened.

As for the people of Chigondo I doubt that they ever found out what became of the relatives who were massacred around January 4, 1977. Neither did they ever inquire about the whereabouts of the deceased or seek any form of compensation for loss of kith and kin butchered by the Smith regime, along with thousands of other innocent rural civilians throughout Zimbabwe.

In an article which appeared in The Washington Post on September 2, 1979, under the headline, “Many die over the fate of a few in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia”, Jay Ross, an American journalist, suggested that at the material time the country’s bush war was certainly taking a much larger toll than the government admitted publicly, with as many as 100 people killed every day.

The official overall death toll in the guerrilla war that had ravaged the countryside for five years since late 1972 had mounted to more than 17 000 by July 1979.

“But it is hard to find people outside the government who believe the figures,” said Ross. “A wide variety of sources say as many as 100 persons are dying daily in the war or from war-related causes. The vast majority are blacks, either civilians or members of the Patriotic Front guerrilla forces based in Zambia and Mozambique.

“Considering that the war revolves mainly around the status of fewer than 250 000 whites, it is a conflict in which many are dying over the fate of a few.”

The government’s own official figure stood then at a total of fewer than 200 persons being killed per week. This figure excluded the thousands killed outside the country during crossborder raids mounted by the Rhodesian Air Force. Ross concluded that if the estimate of 100 casualties per day was anywhere near the correct figure, then a total of about 35 000 persons were being killed annually.

In their files, the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP), which was a long-term thorn in the side of the Smith regime, maintained meticulous records of atrocities. The commission’s files were replete with allegations of brutalities committed on innocent civilians, not only by the guerrillas, especially Zanla, but by the Rhodesian security forces, as well as by the auxiliary forces of Bishop Abel Muzorewa’s UANC party. The auxiliaries fought on the side of the government and were particularly notorious for the ruthlessness of their treatment of the rural population.

John Deary, head of the CCJP, was reported as having said that if his organisation were to follow up on every report of atrocity committed “we’d be digging up shallow graves for three months at a time”.

Of all these victims of senseless mass killings, such as those of Chigondo, there was never any compensation to relatives after the Lancaster House Agreement brought peace to Zimbabwe.

But, back in January 1977, I was still recovering from injuries inflicted on me by Mhike and Special Branch colleagues when I arrived back at Regina Coeli. This was a secondary school close to the Mozambican border, where I was a young teacher. My return was two days after opening day for the first term after my dreadful three-week sojourn in Rusape Remand Prison.

A day after my arrival back at Regina Coeli, a most distressing report reached my ears.

My close friend, John Dembaremba, the popular headmaster of Kagore Primary School, six kilometres north of Regina Coeli, had been brutally murdered by a detachment of Zanla guerrillas. As happened in hundreds of similar cases those days, not only was the deceased not accorded an opportunity to defend himself against whatever charges were brought against him; he was also denied a decent and timely burial. His body remained where he fell, right in front of his house for two full days.

Family and fellow teachers who witnessed his brutal execution, endured two days thereafter, while observing his body deteriorating in the summer heat of Nyamaropa in their midst. His crime?

Zanla informers, or vana mujibha, as they were called by terrified villagers all over the war-ravaged rural areas, had informed the guerrillas that Dembaremba was a sell-out.

That was it. Someone just had to whisper in the ear of a guerrilla that you were a mutengesi and that became your death sentence. Execution was instantaneous. Around 50% of the 100 war victims who perished per day around September 1979 died in such circumstances of injustice. None of the surviving relatives of those victims were ever compensated after independence.

I believe sincerely that the word mutengesi or the slogan “Pasi nemutengesi” (Down with the sell-out) should be effectively banned from the lexicon of the Shona language of Zimbabwe.