60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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210 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness the destiny of other people and we never talk in terms of Ndebeles, Shonas, Vendas, Tongas – we never do that… In fact we discourage that in our own political philosophy. The people in ZANU did not vote for me because they were voting against Ndebeles. They voted for me and the Party because of what the Party has done, because of the record of the Party. Everywhere we went we told the people they were one, and so it is the oneness of the people we are more interested in’ (Zimbabwe News, October 1985). Further support for the argument that Gukurahundi was driven by political rather than ethnic considerations comes from Geoff rey Nyarota, the former editor of the Bulawayo Chronicle, cited in section I of this chapter. ‘Some Ndebele analysts argue that in deploying the Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland, Mugabe’s agenda had been to wipe out the Ndebele’, he writes. ‘My own view is that Mugabe wanted to destroy the PF-Zapu political support structure. Once the role played by Nkala is factored in, it becomes diffi cult to accept that Zanu-PF’s most senior Ndebele politician was motivated by a desire to decimate his own people. Nkala wanted Nkomo defeated as much as Mugabe sought to destroy Nkomo’s political base’. For Nyarota, what clinches his argument is ‘the fact that when opposition to Zanu-PF surfaced elsewhere than in Matabeleland, the full force of the ruling party’s violence was directed there as well – in Harare, Chitungwiza, Mutare, Masvingo and other centres. Shona people, not Ndebeles, then fell victim to ruthless violence. They were assassinated, assaulted, arrested and displaced after their houses and property were destroyed by marauding war veterans and Zanu-PF youth militias from their own tribes. Mugabe had become obsessed with power, and it is entirely likely that the motive behind the Gukurahundi atrocities was to crush political dissent rather than to launch an ethnic-cleansing exercise’ (2006: 132). However, given the close correlation between ethnicity and political support for ZAPU in Matabeleland, one massively reinforced by the Fifth Brigade’s murderous attentions (Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and Legal Resources Foundation 1997: 59), this fi ne distinction was doubtless lost on victims. Recalling the ‘widespread rape and murder’ for which the Fifth Brigade was responsible, Ndebele victims ‘perceived the rapes as an orchestrated, systematic attempt to create a generation of Shona children in Matabeleland – a “shona-ization” of the region’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2003: 25). Nor did the actual perpetrators distinguish between ethnicity and party affi liation. Everyone living in the Matabeleland countryside was targeted. ‘All Ndebeles were dissidents’, and the Fifth Brigade’s orders were to ‘wipe out the people in the area’ (as cited in Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and Legal Resources Foundation
the making and meanings of the massacres in matabeleland 211 1997: 59). The Fifth Brigade, Nkomo maintained right from the start, was ‘a tribal and political army that had come to wipe out the Ndebele’ (The Star, 2/2/1983). Central to the making of the ‘essentialised otherness’ of Matabeleland’s inhabitants was a particular kind of nationalism. The broad point acknowledged by Chirot and McCauley, that ‘the nationalism underlying twentieth century genocides and ethnic cleansings is…a modern phenomenon constructed to suit the needs of modernising states’ (2006: 46), requires elaboration when applied to post-colonial states. What is needed is the historical and political specifi city called for by Mamdani (2007). For Zimbabwe’s ruling elite, nationalism has tended to be exclusive rather than inclusive. If there ever was an exception to this general rule, it only lasted for a brief period. This was immediately after independence in April 1980, when ZANU-PF paid lip-service to what has been termed ‘civic nationalism’, that is, a broadly inclusive nationalism of ‘equal, rights-bearing citizens united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values’. But this conception of an inclusive citizenship, very soon gave way to an exclusive, highly authoritarian form of nationalism, in which ‘more complex if narrower categories of identity defi ned in terms of political loyalty and liberation war credentials’ were foregrounded, and whose outcome was a ‘lasting cleavage around selective citizenship’ (Hammer and Raftopoulos 2003: 25; and Raftopoulos 2003: 225). It was this ‘quasi-nationalism’ that brought ‘authorised violence down ruthlessly against marginalised antagonists who are in the nation yet for terrible moments not entirely of it. The brutalised in quasi-national violence are the people who seem to stand in the way of the nation being one under one leader’ (Werbner 1988: 92). Yet if the full-blown version of this authoritarian nationalism is now widely recognised as one of the defi ning, indeed mobilising, characteristics of the current crisis in Zimbabwe, its roots go much deeper than even the massacres in Matabeleland in the mid-1980s. Some of them stretch as far back as the hegemonic nationalist project under construction from the late 1950s onwards. The mainstream nationalist movements which fought against colonial racism and exploitation were also extremely patriarchal and utterly intolerant of dissent. While not all of these characteristics were present at all times, the fact remains that from early on, the signs were there (Raftopolous 1995, and Slater 1975). But most of the roots of authoritarian nationalism will be unearthed in the process of taking a long, hard look at the Second Chimurenga, that is, the Shona term for the liberation war of the 1970s, so called after the fi rst chimurenga/umvukela or uprising
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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8 development dialogue december 200
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In short, both the understanding of
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Behind most mass violence lurk econ
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ehind most mass violence lurk econo
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Is there a south perspective on gen
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is there a south perspective on gen
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The Voksenåsen Statement Genocides
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This Development Dialogue is publis
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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