Gukurahundi, Media and the “Wounds of History”: Discourses on Mass Graves, Exhumations and Reburials in Post- Independent Zimbabwe

Abstract

Summary Graves are central to Zimbabwe's political landscape since they constitute sites of contestation in respect of memory and identity. Given the legacies of the Gukurahundi genocide, it is fitting to examine the debates and controversies surrounding the Zimbabwean government's plans to exhume the remains of victims from mass graves. In 1983 the Robert Mugabe-led government deployed a military unit (the Fifth Brigade) to the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces, supposedly to quash a “dissident” movement. The military unit went on to commit unspeakable crimes against civilians. By the time the Gukurahundi genocide ended in 1987, at least 20 000 Ndebele- speaking people had been killed. Memories of these horrendous crimes remain repressed and heavily guarded by the state, though there are increasing calls for justice, as well as calls to commemorate and rebury the victims of the Gukurahundi genocide. Recently, the government has been advocating the “fast-track” exhumation and reburial of Gukurahundi victims. However, some civic groups in Matabeleland are resisting this state-engineered mechanism of exhumation and social healing. Given that mass graves represent “crime scenes” and “wounds of history”, this article investigates the politics of memory triggered by the government's planned exhumation of Gukurahundi victims from mass graves. It explores how discourses on the exhumation of genocide victims from mass graves are mediated and contested in spaces of communication, such as news websites and Twitter. This article, which is informed by Achille Mbembe's theorisation of necropolitics, concludes that mass graves and bodily remains connected to the Gukurahundi genocide constitute symbolic representations of the ongoing political struggles in Zimbabwe. The government's attempt to appropriate, to manage and to control the Gukurahundi exhumations and reburials demonstrates its reaffirmation of necropolitics, which is an effort by the regime to obscure the massacre, to obliterate evidence and to legitimise its sovereignty. However, the government's power is not absolute since there is resistance from civic movements and ordinary people who regard the mass graves as evidence of the genocide, which is crucial to the pursuit of justice and accountability.