National youth service training - Solidarity Peace Trust

4. Personal testimony from youth militia
The following two interviews were originally conducted partly in the vernacular and are translated,
summarised versions. Precise details of place have been left out to protect the informants.
Female youth militia, aged 19
This narrative is a summary of several interviews conducted during July and August 2002
“My life has been destroyed by this experience. Now I am going to have a baby – I don’t even
know who the father is because I was raped by so many people. I am also HIV positive and so I
will die anyway. I wish I was dead. I think about ending my life as there is nothing left for
me.” 194
I was forced to join the youth militia in November 2001. I was abducted in M suburb of Z where I was
selling vegetables on the side of the road, by a group of about 30 youths. They were accompanied by a
white twin cab with ZANU-PF written on the side. They took me home to get my belongings, and
when my aunt objected, she was told to be quiet or the place where we lodged would be burnt down.
So there was nothing she could do. I was taken to a local high school, where I was among other youth
numbering around 600, both boys and girls. We were told to shout ZANU-PF slogans, and I did not
know them, so I was beaten with a stick. We were then taught the slogans and revolutionary songs.
We had to get up at 3 am and run 20km every day. This was for two weeks. After running, we had to
march on parade like soldiers and at 9 am we got breakfast. We got one cup of tea and 3 slices of
bread. The next meal was between 8 pm and midnight depending on when food supplies arrived. Some
days youths would faint from hunger or thirst and they would be beaten and told they were making it
up. We then went to a bigger training centre for two days before deployment back to a Bulawayo
camp. The first day back, we were made to stand in the sun for two hours, and some of the girls
fainted. All the girls, numbering around 300, were therefore sent back to the bigger camp for one more
week of training, to make us tougher. I was then redeployed to the camp in town, and was there from
December until July 2002. There were about 900 of us youths in this base, around 500 boys and 400
girls. A war veteran called N was in charge of the whole camp, and a female war veteran aged 32 was
in charge of the girls, like a matron.
At the high school in November, there was no-one in charge of the dormitories, and on a nightly basis,
we were raped. The men and male youths would come into our dormitory in the dark, and they would
just rape us – you would just have a man on top of you, and you could not even see who it was. If we
cried afterwards, we were beaten with hosepipes. We were so scared that we did not report the rapes.
The gate to the school was always locked and manned by war veterans, and no girls were allowed
anywhere near the gates. The war vet in charge, S, said we would sell out to MDC if we were allowed
out at all.
Once we got to the base camp where we stayed for 7 months, the female youth militia slept in a big
room in a house, and were not allowed out at night. The room did not lock, and the boy militias woke
194 With extensive counselling and support, this girl was by August 2003 no longer suicidal. However, she remains isolated
from her community.
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