National youth service training - Solidarity Peace Trust

Training
The youths all report being taught to “walk like soldiers” and describe different types of military drills
including weapons training. They all refer to forced runs and other survival activities as routine. Some
refer to specific skills training in how to set up road blocks. All refer to “history lessons”. In some
cases, militia remember “Inside the Third Chimurenga” as a manual; others refer to having seen it in
the camp but that they did not read it themselves. History was not usually taught in a situation where
all youth had a manual, but rather war veterans or soldiers would instil a simplistic version of
Zimbabwe’s history into the youths through lectures and the teaching of slogans and songs. Paperback
vernacular pamphlets were also given to students in the camps. One such pamphlet to hand, entitled
“The 3rd Chimurenga” shows a voting paper on the cover and has the subtitle “Votela iZanu PF 2002”
with a cross opposite the Zanu PF symbols. The 75 page paperback summarises many of the same
issues raised in the more formal text, and 25 pages are full or half page adverts exhorting the reader to
Vote Zanu-PF.
No youth militia interviewed by the authors had ever received any type of skills training apart from
paramilitary skills; on being specifically asked about carpentry, agriculture, welding and some of the
other skills that government claimed would be taught in such a programme, all youth militia
interviewed by the current authors were adamant: they had never received any such training. One
female youth militia was asked about whether youth militia had been given skills in agriculture, as she
had been in a camp that was part of a farm. She replied that the male militia had killed and eaten the
cows, goats and chickens, and had uprooted rose bushes from flower beds.
One girl interviewed a year after her stint in the national service seems very confused about her
experiences. She was kidnapped into the training shortly before the Presidential election, was herself
severely asaulted and was given paramilitary training. She then spent some weeks in a remote bush
camp overseen by war veterans, where she witnessed the severe torture of MDC activists, and the
murder of one, whose corpse was buried in a river bed. Her story has been independently corroborated,
including names of the dead, the tortured, and the commanders, by one of the MDC activists tortured
in this camp. But she herself is unable to verbalise what was the purpose of it all, and remains full of
regret and guilt at having been party to something like this.
When asked what the training was about, one youth summarised it as follows: “it was about vandalism.
We were used to do the things the State does not want to do themselves. Then they can just say it was
just the youths, not us”.
Another said that “Mugabe is having an argument with the whites. That is what the Third Chimurenga
is about. It is a war situation.”
A further youth commented: “we are Zanu-PF’s “B” team. The army is the “A” team and we do the
things the government does not want the “A” team to do.
When questioned further, some youth militia expressed the opinion that MDC and the whites are one
and the same thing. For example, one interviewee (see Appendix 4), justified why he used to beat up
curio sellers: “I had to beat them because they were selling their carvings by the roadside. They were
attracting whites by doing this. As a result, they need to be beaten up so that they stop that. It was said
that such people that have links with whites are MDC supporters. So they needed a beating so they
could be stopped once and for all.”
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