Gukurahundi massacres: Can the ghosts be exorcised from Zimbabwe’s mass graves?

Operation Gukurahundi was launched, which at the time the government said was a counter-insurgency mission to root out dissidents who had been attacking civilians.

“Gukurahundi” means “cleansing rain” in the Shona language.

Those targeted by the elite soldiers were mainly from the Ndebele ethnic group in Matabeleland and Midlands provinces, and the killings laid the foundation for lingering ethnic tensions.

Mugabe ruled for another three decades – only after he was deposed by his former deputy Emmerson Mnangagwa did it seem that Gukurahundi might be properly confronted, even though he has also been accused of involvement.

Mr Mnangagwa made a point of addressing the subject of reconciliation, given the criticism over how various initiatives to allow exhumations and reburials had foundered.

Even so it has taken seven years for President Mnangagwa to establish what he has called the Gukurahundi Community Engagement Programme. A series of village-level hearings, where survivors can air their grievances, is set to follow Sunday’s launch.

Mr Dhlamini said he would take part in the hearings.

“I want to free myself from what I witnessed, I need to vent out what I felt,” he said, tapping his chest.

He, along with a group of boys from his village in 1983, saw how soldiers frog-marched 22 women, including his mother, into a hut which they then set on fire.

When the women broke down the door to flee the flames, the soldiers mowed them down with their guns before they could escape.

Mr Dhlamini’s mother was the only survivor as she managed to hide along the side of a nearby grain hut.

The soldiers then ordered the older boys in the terrified group watching nearby to carry the bullet-ridden bodies of the women into the smoking hut and another alongside it.

Mr Dhlamini’s 14-year-old friend Lotshe Moyo was one of them – but because he was wearing a pin supporting Nkomo, afterwards he too was ordered inside, shot and both huts burnt to ashes.

Today their remains are still in the ruins – an overgrown area surrounded by a chain-link fence and lots of crosses. On a whitewashed brick wall, the names of the dead are inscribed.

“When we started talking about it my memory returns and it seems as if it had happened today. It makes me feel as if I can cry,” said Mr Dhlamini, who added that his mother had been so traumatised she had never been able to live in the village.

Victims and survivors’ families are divided over whether the new government initiative will bring healing and change their fortunes.