Introduction
In April of 2011, a group of Zimbabwean migrants marched on the streets of Johannesburg, South Africa, and burned the Zimbabwean flag in protest (Kunene Reference Kunene2011). The march was organized by the Mthwakazi Liberation Front (MLF), a group of Zimbabweans living in Johannesburg who no longer want to be identified as Zimbabwean but rather as Mthwakazian. Their narrative centered on their Ndebele ethnic identity and their victimhood during the Gukurahundi.Footnote 1 Gukurahundi violence was perpetrated by the Zimbabwean state against its citizens, with an estimated twenty thousand people killed between 1981 and 1987, the majority of whom were from the Matabeleland regions of the country (CCJP 1997). No apology or restitution has ever been offered to the victims, and the government has prevented any public remembering of the violence. Two years before this, I encountered a group called Zimbabwe Action Movement (ZAM) that was equally vocal about the Gukurahundi atrocities. Members of ZAM were clear that they belonged to Zimbabwe, but that they wanted to redefine the terms of their belonging. Members of ZAM and MLF both saw Gukurahundi as an ethnic assault on the Ndebele; however, other migrants also narrate the significance of Gukurahundi and the need for its acknowledgement, but without associating it with ethnicity.
Using the the case of Zimbabwean migrants memorializing Gukurahundi in Johannesburg as a point of departure, this article argues that “push factors” for migration can play a consistently central role in shaping people’s subjectivities, although the significance of these push factors differs between people and shifts over time. I build on Liisa Malkki’s (Reference Malkki1992) work, which emphasizes the role that different migration contexts can play in shaping people’s imaginaries of home. The contexts in which populations find themselves after their initial migration are crucial in shaping the possibilities of what home is, or what it could be. This article explores how these understandings have shifted over time for Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa in ways that are not bounded by space. Political events in time and across space have played a significant role in shifting the space for hope, voice, and freedom in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
This article begins by recapping the importance of “home” in the literature on migration and emphasizing the importance of exploring how this concept shifts as social and political landscapes change, making the case for analyzing this through a narrative approach. It then introduces the Gukurahundi, demonstrating how immigration to South Africa provided the political space to remember the Gukurahundi atrocities, beyond the censoring reach of the Zimbabwean state. In this space, Gukurahundi has emerged as an anchoring narrative among the migrants. Even for those who moved from Zimbabwe decades ago, it remains central to their understanding of the repressive, exclusionary state that was left behind. In their personal narratives, the migrants seek to undo the aims of Gukurahundi. This is a crucial component of the way that the migrants have made sense of their lives. However, the political distance that made this memorialization possible was a double-edged sword, because the migrants did not feel as if they had gained political acceptance in their new state of South Africa. The ongoing xenophobia and recent xenophobic violence are a reminder of this, along with the difficulty the migrants experience in securing a “documented life” for themselves in South Africa.
The foundations on which home is built can be many and varied. For the Zimbabwean migrants, political inclusion was a key component of this foundation. Their lack of political belonging drove the MLF and ZAM to explore future possibilities of home. The possibilities they pursued maintained the Gukuruhundi violence as an anchoring event but signified it in very different ways. ZAM sought acknowledgement of Gukurahundi as the foundation for reconciliation so that victims and non-victims might equally belong to Zimbabwe, drawing inspiration from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The MLF, on the other hand, wanted acknowledgement of the atrocities to mark the beginning of a new nation in which healing from Gukurahundi could begin. Regime shifts in South Africa and Zimbabwe, from power-sharing to the resignation of Mugabe, have shaped the credibility of these possibilities for political homecoming. Ultimately, members of ZAM became so demoralized at the disconnect between their hopes for homecoming and developments in Zimbabwe that the group as a whole dissolved. The MLF continues, collectively reinforcing a narrative of events that seeks secession of borders, along with other interpretations of Gukurahundi and political homecoming that exist amongst Ndebele migrants in Johannesburg.
Imagining home
“The nature of home itself: a refuge in the world, a cosy warm place in juxtaposing to its immense, unknown surroundings where people may degenerate themselves” (Terkenli Reference Terkenli1995:331). For the purposes of this article, home is perceived in an idealized form, as a space of belonging, inclusion, and rest. In this context, it is often imagined in opposition to a reality in which a particular place of dwelling, which is nominally called home, has become a place of violence, terror, dislocation, or exclusion. Zimbabwe and then South Africa were reduced to spaces of dwelling for those who had felt excluded by Gukurahundi in the former and xenophobia in the latter. In both locations, group members felt that they had become liminal in the national order of things, occupying a space in which they did not really belong (Malkki Reference Malkki1992).
As Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Reference Gupta and Ferguson1992) argue, those who do not feel at home where they are imagine and construct home as a way of securing their identity and place in the world. Sara Ahmed (Reference Ahmed1999) and Liisa Malkki (Reference Malkki1992) argue that migration trajectories influence these imaginings of home. Malkki, for example, shows how the exile experiences of displaced Hutu Burundians in Tanzania influenced their imaginings of home. Those who were housed in a camp continually engaged in constructing and reconstructing their history as a people who were in temporary exile, with a goal of returning to a homeland in Burundi. Burundians who were not in the camps, on the other hand, had a different experience. Malkki (Reference Malkki1992) refers to this group as “cosmopolitans” because they did not have an essentialist view of home that could be found only in Burundi. Migration reconfigured “home” and what it meant: for some it became a future yet to come when the exiles returned, while for others it could exist in the present, wherever the exiles were.
In Malkki’s work we clearly see the importance of the socio-political spaces that people occupy in shaping their ideas of home. In the South African context that I explore, people’s political inclusion or exclusion is also marked by space. Illicit migration, for example, can push people into precarious spaces of residence and employment, relatively unprotected by the law. Moreover, certain spaces in South Africa—typically where socio-economic deprivation became politicized against migrants—have seen the outbreak of episodes of xenophobic violence (Landau Reference Landau2012; Neocosmos Reference Neocosmos2010). However, while space undoubtedly shapes people’s political belonging in South Africa, political developments such as the outbreak of xenophobic violence have resonated far more broadly than in the spaces in which they were directly experienced.
Just as the Gukuruhundi became an embodiment of exclusion and repression in Zimbabwe—even for those who had not experienced it directly—so the xenophobic violence in South Africa shaped the experiences of those who were not targeted by it, but who recognized in this violence the echoes of a broader pattern of political exclusion that shaped their everyday lives. Many of those I spoke with lived in the CBD of Johannesburg, a space where the threat of xenophobic violence felt real, although they had not all witnessed or experienced violence themselves. Nevertheless, stories of such violence, which they heard and shared, reminded them of the prejudice that they faced and the barriers that prevented them from gaining the legal documentation that signified political inclusion in South Africa. Jabu, a male in his late twenties when I interviewed him, one of the founders of the ZAM, emphasized that Zimbabweans needed to go back and fix Zimbabwe because the xenophobic violence clearly showed that they had no space in South Africa. Political events have resonance across space. Recognizing this also allows us to take full account of the degree to which the political homecomings imagined by ZAM and MLF were also shaped by events in Zimbabwe, especially the elections of 2008 and the subsequent power-sharing deal in the government of national unity (GNU) (Eppel Reference Eppel2009).
In her work on belonging, Ahmed argues for home as something that exists within the individual and is not necessarily limited to a specific location. She highlights that the notion of home changes as a person changes; the idea of home gets reconfigured by the experiences of migrants as they move. This is important as we explore the idea of Zimbabwe as home or not home for the migrants. The analysis that follows borrows from Ahmed’s insights but it also looks beyond the individual at the ways in which ZAM through their music narrate ideas of Zimbabwe as home.
Methodological Considerations
Given that this article focuses on the meanings that people draw out of experiences and events, my focus is not on the objective retellings of the events of the Gukurahundi or on the migrants’ movements from Zimbabwe to South Africa. Consequently, I do not enter into historiographical debates over the events in question (for such discussions, see, for example, Alexander, McGregor, & Ranger Reference Alexander, McGregor and Ranger2000; CCJP 1997). Rather, I remain focused on what these shared accounts mean to those who narrate them. I share Mark Freeman’s (Reference Freeman1993) perspective that memories of the past are not memories of facts but of imaginings of the facts. History, he argues, is not fixed, determined, and eternally standing still. Rather, it is a reconstruction of the past in light of subsequent events (Freeman Reference Freeman1993; Ricouer Reference Ricouer and Kathleen1984).
This objective made the narrative methods of C. K. Riessman (Reference Riessman1993) and Ann Phoenix (Reference Phoenix, Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou2008) most appropriate for examining this topic. Their approaches provide a framework through which to explore the structure, meaning, and socio-political repercussions of people’s narratives. From a narrative perspective, the meaning of events in people’s lives is constructed through storytelling, which links the past to the present (Clandinin & Connelly Reference Clandinin, Connelly and Schön1991). Narrative studies, then, are not simply interested in the chronological ordering of a teller’s life, but also in an evaluation of what those experiences mean (Uehara et al. Reference Uehara, Farris, Morreli and Anthony2001). Thus, in the context of this project, narrative methods allow for the values and interests of the narrator to be expressed as the migrants narrated their lives in Johannesburg linking them to the Zimbabwe they left behind.
The research informing this discussion consists of participant observation at community events, focus group discussions, interviews, and analysis of music by participants. Participants were drawn from two Zimbabwean migrant organizations in Johannesburg, Zimbabwe Action Movement (ZAM) and Mthwakazi Liberation Front (MLF), as well as other Zimbabwean migrants vocal about the Gukurahundi. I conducted twenty-four in-depth interviews and two focus group discussions which I analyzed using narrative methods, in addition to analyzing the songs. Although the organizations had female members, women were not forthcoming for interviews as such; only three women participated in this phase of the research presented here. Some participants were holders of work permits accessed through the Zimbabwe Special Dispensation program I discuss further below, while others held fraudulent South African identity documents, and there were some who were undocumented or held expired visitors’ permits, which may have influenced their willingness to be included in my research. The research process also involved translating some of the interview and focus group transcripts and song lyrics from Ndebele to English. I translated with a view of maintaining the intentions of the text and not the literal meaning of words, as Walter Benjamin (Reference Benjamin1968) and Lawrence Venuti (Reference Venuti1998) have recommended. In addition, my analysis of the songs involved an exploration of genre, style, and tempo (Aucouturier & Pachet Reference Aucouturier and Pachet2003).
Zimbabwe Action Movement and Mthwakazi Liberation Front
ZAM was a political pressure group based in Johannesburg that brought together victims of Gukurahundi who were working to bring democratization to Zimbabwe (Interview, Bongani). ZAM was formed during the excitement of the establishment of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), with the promise of a change of regime in Zimbabwe. Since the dissolution of ZAPU in the 1980s, there had been little hope of any meaningful opposition to the regime until the late 1990s. With the rise of the MDC came the hope of regime change. This, in turn, sparked the expectation that Gukurahundi would finally be acknowledged: healing and political transformation were to go hand in hand.
According to the organizing secretary, ZAM had an active membership of two hundred and fifty Zimbabweans (Interview, Bongani). Of these, seventy-five participated regularly in events. In 2008, I attended some ZAM meetings, which were held regularly on Sunday afternoons at one of the city parks in Berea. Some members of ZAM formed the music group Ithemba lamaNguni. They saw their creative work as a contribution to the Zimbabwe nation-building project (Interview, Bongani). Their second CD, Inkulu lendaba, which was produced in 2009, contains music that memorializes the Gukurahundi while simultaneously providing commentary on Zimbabwe’s contemporary political problems and South Africa’s reception of migrants. Some songs use old Ndebele poetry infused with new lyrics, tying together past and present struggles.
MLF, on the other hand, used the Gukurahundi to justify calls for a separate state for the Ndebele. It describes itself as a grassroots movement that seeks to liberate the people of Mthwakazi (Matabeleland and Midlands regions of modern day Zimbabwe) from the colonial yoke of Zimbabwean rule ("Mthwakazi—Organization of Emerging African States" n.d.). MLF has chapters in Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Botswana. The MLF members I interviewed emphasized they were no longer Zimbabwean but belonged to the nation of Mthwakazi. They intend that Mthwakazi would be formed through a secession of borders and the recreation of the precolonial boundaries between the Shona and Ndebele ethnic groups in Zimbabwe. Eleven members of MLF, most of whom held leadership positions in the organization, participated in a focus group discussion as well as in individual interviews.
Gukurahundi
The Gukurahundi violence was a devastating atrocity in the early years of Zimbabwean independence that remains officially unacknowledged. Even today, within Zimbabwe, those who were affected by the violence speak of it only in code. ZAM members mourned not only the officially sanctioned non-acknowledgement of the atrocities but also spoke about a community-level silencing of the Gukurahundi memory. Bongani, the organizing secretary of ZAM and a member of Ithemba lamaNguni, related how his grandmother spoke of the Gukurahundi as “that time,” refusing to blatantly name it; she also admonished them against speaking about it out of fear of reprisals from the Zimbabwean state. It is not surprising, then, that in the political space afforded by distance from the Zimbabwean state, Gukurahundi is actively remembered by the migrants, playing an anchoring role in their narratives of exile and home. Before I present the ways in which migrants narrate the violence, I briefly present a short contextualization of the violence and how it has been framed in literature. This is not a history of the violence, but merely an attempt to show the intersections of the violence with ethnicity and political party allegiance which now influence the ways migrants make sense of it, as either an ethnic assault or as the outcome of political party struggles for hegemony.
Two main political parties, Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) through their respective armed wings Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), both fought the Zimbabwe independence war. ZANU won the first elections after independence, while ZAPU had seats in parliament. Soon after the independence war, as the armed wings were being demobilized, challenges over their incorporation into the national army led to ZIPRA members deserting the army and taking up arms to fight against ZANU rule. This, among other events, caused the government to deploy one unit of the army, the Fifth Brigade, to rein in the ZIPRA army deserters, who were later called “dissidents.” The Fifth Brigade, however, did not just target the “dissidents”; unarmed citizens bore the greatest brunt from this force. The ZAPU-supporting areas targeted in the Gukurahundi violence—the Matabeleland and Midlands regions of the country—were predominately home to the Ndebele. As a result, Gukurahundi cemented the Ndebele identity (Eppel Reference Eppel, Rartopoulos and Savage2004; Muzondidya & Ndlovu-Gatsheni Reference Muzondidya and Ndlovu-Gatsheni2007) and framed the Ndebele as being outside the national polity (Worby Reference Worby1998).
Katri Pohjolainen Yap (Reference Yap2002) has argued that it is important to acknowledge the role that pre-independence tensions played in setting the scene for this post-independence violence. This historical perspective is important, as it enables us to better understand the role that Gukurahundi has played in shaping the idea that nation-building in Zimbabwe occurred at the exclusion of the Ndebele. The pre-independence tensions between the two independence party movements, however, found expression in the post-independence violence. ZANU PF, drawing support from predominantly Shona regions, had access to the state machinery and used it against residents of the Matebeleland regions of the country, Ndebele, and ZAPU supporters. Estimates of the fatalities from the Gukurahundi range from one thousand up to twenty thousand people (CCJP 1997).
Officially, Gukurahundi came to an end with the signing of the 1987 Unity Accord between ZAPU and ZANU. However, immigrants in Johannesburg report its continued significance in their lives to this day. The 1987 Unity Accord resulted in ZAPU becoming a part of ZANU. The Unity Accord made no concessions to ZAPU and offered no reparations to the victims of the violence; it promised only that the violence would stop (Eppel Reference Eppel2009). To this day, victims have received no official acknowledgement of the atrocities. Instead, a blanket amnesty was issued, and any form of commemoration of the events has been discouraged by the government. The government’s stance was that speaking about the Gukurahundi would only serve to prolong ethnic divisions among Zimbabweans (IRIN 2007). Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (Reference Ndlovu-Gatsheni2012) asserts that ZANU PF selectively deployed history, memory, and commemoration to claim uncontested political legitimacy, what he calls the violent elimination of enemies. There is no specific law prohibiting people from speaking about the Gukurahundi, but the state has invoked other laws to silence any discussion of the issue (Nehandaradio 2011; Sokwanele 2010). In 2011, a minister who addressed villagers about human remains that were believed to belong to victims of Gukurahundi found at a school was arrested. Similarly, in 2010, when the artist Owen Maseko set up a visual art exhibition on the Gukurahundi at the Bulawayo National Art Gallery, it was closed down, and he was arrested for “insulting” the president.
Gaining spatial distance from the political censorship of Zimbabwe, as discussed above, has allowed the migrants to speak about Gukurahundi and its continued significance in their narratives of being and belonging. In this following section, I begin by exploring a key similarity between the narratives: the significance of Gukurahundi in making Zimbabwe unviable as a “home.”
Remembering Gukurahundi in Johannesburg
Gukurahundi is a point of rupture, although understandings of the reasons behind that rupture vary. Thabani walks with a limp from an injury he sustained as a toddler, from a bullet aimed at his father during the Gukurahundi; he later fled Zimbabwe after the 2008 elections because of his active support of the MDC. He reflects:
I don’t know, I just think he was just trying to finish off the Ndebele and he succeeded. He killed a lot of people, and many people fled bagcwele iganga; many of them are here in South Africa, and when you tell them about home they don’t want to go back. (Interview, Thabani)
Thabani’s perspective is representative of others in my interviews and focus groups. The phrase “bagcwele iganga” literally translates to “they are scattered all over the bush,” connoting being discarded or thrown out. Here the story of migration due to the Gukurahundi is that of bodies “out of place” (Malkki Reference Malkki1992). This resonates with other accounts, such as that of Jocelyn Alexander (Reference Alexander1998), who details the migration that came as combatants fled the active violence of Gukurahundi in the 1980s. These narratives fit the framework of a refugee narrative, in which people are crossing borders to flee persecution. However, in the 1980s at the time of the violence, South Africa was not signatory to the refugee protocol. Furthermore, black South Africans had limited rights under apartheid, and those fleeing Gukurahundi were not seeking asylum from the apartheid regime. Thus, this is a de facto refugee narrative without a de jure framework within which it can be acknowledged. Notably, since the 1980s, this narrative has continued, as people cite the censorship surrounding Gukurahundi as evidence that the threat of further persecution remains. Thabani fled to South Africa as a result of the post-2008 election violence but focused his narrative on the Gukurahundi and how it had shaped his life as a result of the injury.
Migration from Matabeleland to South Africa by no means began with the Gukurahundi, but the violence gave it a different meaning and, in some cases, changed its form from circular migration to a more or less permanent move (Interview, Jabu). The movement of people between Zimbabwe and South Africa dates back to the Mfecane migrations (Mlambo Reference Mlambo, Crush and Tevera2010). The establishment of gold mines in South Africa and the subsequent recruitment of labor from neighboring countries contributed to the formation of migration routes between Matabeleland and South Africa, which were further strengthened by the ethnic affinity and similar language between the Ndebele and Zulu and facilitated the easy assimilation of the Ndebele. Tara Polzer Ngwato (Reference Polzer Ngwato2012) speaks of similar solidarities based on ethnicity at the South African/Mozambican border. Migration from Matabeleland to South Africa and Botswana by young men was sufficiently common that it was spoken of as a “rite of passage” (Maphosa Reference Maphosa, Crush and Tevera2010:137). This was mostly a circular migration, where people worked in Johannesburg but invested their earnings into building a life in Zimbabwe, where they planned to return and establish themselves.Footnote 2 Gukurahundi changed this movement for many, as increasing numbers moved in order to preserve their lives, with no interest in going back “home” to Zimbabwe (Interview, Jabu). Within ZAM and MLF, the Gukurahundi is narrated as an event that forced people to become “imgewu,” those who ended up in places not conducive to building a life.Footnote 3 Migration shifted from a circular economic move—in which the political community remained static—to a singular rupture, which created economic precarity and severed political communities, leaving many people effectively stateless (Interview, Jabu).
For young men in Matabeleland in particular, what had previously been a positive “coming of age” move was now experienced as forced migration, driven by the fear of being branded as political dissidents and persecuted as such. Themba, who experienced the Gukurahundi violence as a teenager through witnessing the closure of his school, talked about how his ability to speak Shona saved him from the beatings he witnessed being meted out to some of the teachers and fellow students the day his school was closed. He said he was one of the few young men from his area who did not flee to South Africa at that time, because his parents sent him to live in the city instead of his rural home. He also said this explained why he had a professional job as an engineer, unlike most people from his home area who had fled to Johannesburg instead. Themba said, referring to young men from the regions affected by Gukurahundi during the time of the violence:
Especially the youth, boys in particular, once you’ve grown up and you are at that stage of you are a man, you now live in constant fear (especially during the dissident era, especially in the rural areas); they’ll perceive you, like you know some information about dissidents…about the political arena generally. They suspect that you have joined politics, so as a result you find out that most of these boys or men that were out there, once at that stage maybe they will try to leave the country most probably, and the only destination was eGoli. (Interview, Themba)
As Themba explains, the army operated on the assumption that young men who had “come of age” were most likely to be dissidents or to have been trained in the ZAPU military wing. Several interviewees reported that, as a result, many young men from the Matabeleland areas fled the Gukurahundi and crossed the border to Botswana and South Africa (Interview, Tshengi). We see here that violence has always been gendered (Ayiera Reference Ayiera2010), as the generational and gendered dimensions of the violence are narrated in the young men’s experience of the Gukurahundi.
The violence of Gukurahundi was narrated as a breaking point between those who were targeted and the state. This political rupture was evident in the destruction of the documentary lives of those same individuals: the unacknowledged Gukurahundi left some victims and the children of those who were killed or disappeared undocumented and “living as foreigners” in Zimbabwe (Interview, Dumo). In some cases, people lost their identity documents when their property was destroyed in the violence. Others whose parents were killed or disappeared in the Gukurahundi have no way to be documented (Interview, Dumo). As Torpey (Reference Torpey2000) has argued, state recognition is reflected in, and predicated upon, the possession of documentation. People’s documentary lives, in turn, shape their everyday lives, curtailing access to education, employment, healthcare, and legal migration. As Dumo, a member of MLF who came to South Africa in the late 1990s after failing to secure employment in Zimbabwe, explained:
…looking at people’s movements because of the Gukurahundi, obviously if a person has not been well documented in Zimbabwe it means they are not able to get a job and so they feel like a foreigner in their own country. So now those people, after failing to get a job, so some of them choose to cross the borders and tell themselves that it is not any different, because even the place which I call home I live like a foreigner. So it’s better to be a foreigner elsewhere than to be a foreigner at home. (Interview, Dumo)
Dumo’s perspective here reinforces Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir’s (Reference Brysk and Shafir2004) argument that economic rights are the most meaningful way through which people can access the rights that come with citizenship. The link between prestige, dignity, and employment has long historical roots (Ranger Reference Ranger, Hobsbawm and Ranger1983). Consequently, employment becomes important in the way people experience their citizenship. Unemployment can be experienced as a form of marginalization from the nation state. Crucially, for the migrants, the Gukurahundi continued to embody the brokenness of the political relationship between Ndebele citizens and the state. The fact that this violence remains unacknowledged, they argued, was testament to the fact that it is continuing and that the threat of persecution remains (Interview, Tshengi).
The lack of redress has perpetuated the feeling that nation-building in Zimbabwe has excluded the Ndebele (Interview, Jabu & Bongani). Within Zimbabwe, most have learned to self-censor or to talk about the violence in code. The Gukurahundi was spoken of as “that time,” as Bongani reflected in an interview, similar to the ways I had heard my grandmother speak about the Gukurahundi. In South Africa, however, members of ZAM and MLF found the political space to speak freely about Gukurahundi and the unhealed wounds that it created. Indeed, it has become a key way in which group members make sense of their collective and individual lives. While both groups placed equal emphasis on the wound of Gukurahundi, they did not share the same vision of political homecoming. Before exploring these imaginaries of home, the following section explores the political space in which group members have found themselves in South Africa. Life in South Africa is characterized by a political marginalization that identifies “home” as a future reference point, not a reality.
Omabonwa abulawe: Zimbabweans in South Africa
The feelings that members of both groups shared about life in South Africa are tellingly captured by the lyrics of the song “Usizi,” by Ithemba lamaNguni. “Usizi” is a Ndebele word that means the kind of deep sadness associated with grief. This group of artists, Ithemba lamaNguni, operated within ZAM, writing and performing songs and plays that spoke about Gukurahundi. The Ithemba lamaNguni album from which this song is drawn uses traditional praise poetry infused with contemporary lyrics, some in the style of South African protest musician Mzwakhe Mbuli. This song and others were performed in community centers within inner-city Johannesburg, as well as recorded on CDs which were sold through their networks.
Lord God You who has forever been on your throne
No one can move you who is man to tempt you
But we humble ourselves seeking your glory
You alone know the difference you placed between your people
That you lovingly placed on the earth
Today some live as sheep without a kraal
Because others have become hyenas inside the kraal
The taller ones do not lift the short ones instead they step on them
Strong ones do not defend the weak instead they kill them
We are losing hope as your children of Zimbabwe and even where we run to
We have become omabonwa abulawe
Only you watch where we step that there are no thorns
And where we sleep that there are not snakes
It’s good to be able to move but we have lost our strength
Stay with us Move with us and Sleep with us
Keep us Lord in all this sadness Amen
Reference to the kraal, i.e., Zimbabwe, being infiltrated by hyenas captures again the narrative of persecution, during the Gukurahundi and beyond. The state, which should have protected those within its care, failed. Being in South Africa, however, is likened to being sheep without a kraal. Here, migrants are hunted to be killed. This reference to being hunted is significant; it implies an intentional attack on the migrants and not just the danger that comes because one is not protected. The migrants had found the political space in South Africa to remember Gukurahundi, but they had not been able to forge a political relationship with the state that enabled them to feel protected (Interview, Jabu). Instead, they face political exclusion from two states. As in Zimbabwe, their political exclusion in South Africa was reflected in the documentary lives of many group members. That same exclusion also left them exposed to violence, albeit of a different nature to that which they had faced in their country of origin.
Official recognition by the South African state in the form of documentation, refugee status, or work permits proved difficult for many interviewees to obtain. While many of the narratives that people shared would fit the official categories of refugee status, Zimbabwe-South Africa diplomatic relations have stymied access to refugee status for most Zimbabweans entering the country. Prior to 2009, the South African government’s response to Zimbabwean migrants was fragmented (Polzer Ngwato 2010), as it frequently tried to turn a blind eye to foreigners as a whole (Landau Reference Landau2008), even where constitutional rights to state provision existed (Vearey Reference Vearey and Tanisa2013). As such, many Zimbabweans rely on informal localized networks for welfare provision. In 2010, the South African government initiated a drive to document Zimbabweans, including amnesty for those who had fraudulent documents, a project called Zimbabwe Dispensation Project (ZDP) (Amit Reference Amit2011). Applicants were granted four-year work permits. Some, concerned by rumors that they would be deported once the permits expired, never applied to the project (Interview, Bongani).Footnote 4 Others were stymied by the timelines for the application process, which were short enough to exclude those who did not already have passports (Amit Reference Amit2011, Reference Amit, Nethery and Silverman2015).Footnote 5 Consequently, many Zimbabweans remain un(der)documented.
In Zimbabwe, violence destroyed the lives and documents of many in Matabeleland. In South Africa, the un(der)documentation of Zimbabweans exposes them to violence from state police as well as from other citizens (Landau Reference Landau2008). Xenophobia exists across South African society (Neocosmos Reference Neocosmos2010), but it is in relatively deprived areas where this xenophobia has been politically capitalized upon, turning periodically violent. This violence became particularly public following a series of attacks that killed, injured, and displaced “foreigners” across the country. Such attacks obviously have a devastating impact on those within the spaces where they erupt. But they also have a larger political significance, because they echo an everyday xenophobia that is experienced across the country. Consequently, even group members who had not experienced xenophobic violence directly felt that it embodied the broken political relationship with the South African state and its citizens. The violence of 2008 also served as a reminder of the abuse that migrants experienced prior to this date that escaped public notice (Landau et al. Reference Landau, Amit and Jinnah2013; Kihato Reference Kihato2013). For members of both groups, home had a political foundation. In South Africa, as in Zimbabwe, this foundation was broken.
At the same time that xenophobic violence was erupting in South Africa, momentous shifts were also underway in Zimbabwe. The 2008 elections arguably marked the high point of hope for the political opposition in Zimbabwe. Since the late 1990s, the Movement for Democratic Change had been garnering political support. In 2008, the hope surrounding MDC reached its apex. The MDC, its supporters argued, had the potential to unseat ZANU-PF. In the midst of political violence and intimidation, however, the MDC entered a power-sharing arrangement with the incumbent party. This had huge implications for the political imaginaries of home that each group held. For ZAM, it was the death knell for their collective vision of political homecoming, while for the MLF it solidified the idea that political homecoming would not be possible without the birth of a fundamentally new state.
No Place Like Home
In this third section, I will explore the different homecomings imagined by ZAM and MLF in the midst of the political exclusion they faced from both Zimbabwe and South Africa. Each drew a different meaning from the violence of Gukurahundi and, therefore, imagined a different means of healing this personal and political wound. These visions were, in turn, fundamentally shaped by political events in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
The ZAM members I spoke with were committed to building the Zimbabwean nation, but predicated on an acknowledgement of the Gukurahundi atrocities. ZAM was working toward a change of government in Zimbabwe, actively encouraging Zimbabweans to go back to the country to vote as well as encouraging kith and kin in Zimbabwe and South Africa to do the same. This, it hoped, would be the start of a new political dispensation.
Reconstruction without truth or without ...is like cooking for people using a pot that has just been used to cook poison, you see…Because people, they feel that we must reconcile but they don’t apologise, you see, so how can people forgive each other whilst the perpetrators are not apologising, you see. (Interview, Bongani)
ZAM members, as exemplified by the above quotation, spoke against the silence that the Zimbabwean government adopted after Gukurahundi. They called for reconstruction and reconciliation founded on an acknowledgement of Gukurahundi. The building of a Zimbabwean nation without the acknowledgement of Gukurahundi would be cooking using a pot with poison, i.e., the nation-building would be predicated on the killing of the Ndebele. This coheres with other recent scholarship that has highlighted the need for acknowledgement instead of the government’s silence when victims expected apology and restitution (Murambadoro Reference Murambadoro2015; Ngwenya & Harris Reference Ngwenya and Harris2015; Eppel Reference Eppel, Rartopoulos and Savage2004).
Despite the political exclusion that they felt within South Africa, ZAM members drew inspiration from the country’s transition to shape ideas about their own political homecoming. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) (Posel & Simpson Reference Posel, Simpson, Posel and Simpson2002), for example, was seen as an example of how the acknowledgement of past wrongs could enable a transition from violence to a multi-ethnic nation (Interview, Bongani). South Africa’s decision to maintain eleven official languages was also used as an example of how a state can accommodate multiple ethnic identities (Interview, Mabuya). Therefore, while South Africa considered Zimbabwean migrants to be “matter out of place,” it also provided a positive template for how inclusion might happen. The irony, of course, is that xenophobic violence might be seen as being encouraged by state officials and politicians who realized that their attempts to realize a “better life for all” had comprehensively failed. Nonetheless, the lure of transformative policies in South Africa continued to inspire the political imaginaries of ZAM members.
Ultimately, the political change imagined by the migrants was not to be. In 2008, the MDC entered a unity government with ZANU PF. When Robert Mugabe eventually stepped down in 2017, he was replaced by Emmerson Mnangagwa, who is considered equally if not more guilty of the Gukurahundi atrocities, as were the vice president Constantino Chiwenga and government minister Perence Shiri, the commander of the fifth brigade, to name only a few. Public hearings set up to speak about the atrocities were rejected by the public (Mutasa Reference Mutasa2018). But by this time, ZAM had long since dissolved. After 2008, the group branded the MDC as sell-outs as the GNU, they reasoned, would not provide the political space necessary to acknowledge the violence of the past and create the united, inclusive political future that they had imagined.
In the wake of ZAM disbanding, other groups became prominent in speaking about Gukurahundi, such as the Mthwakazi Liberation Front (MLF). The political moment in which this prominence emerged is significant: 2008 was the year in which outbreaks of xenophobic violence made the need for a political homecoming feel particularly urgent for those in South Africa, while the creation of the GNU made the prospect of homecoming in Zimbabwe seem particularly distant. In contrast to the ZAM, the MLF do not support the building of a Zimbabwean nation. Instead, they want a separate nation for the victims of the Gukurahundi. They argue that two separate nations were artificially combined to create Rhodesia during colonization, which in turn resulted in Zimbabwe. As such, they campaign for a recreation of the precolonial boundaries between the Ndebele and Shona states as a prerequisite for the healing of the Gukurahundi wound. As Tshengi, a group member who is in her fifties, argued:
So when we looked at it, we saw that for the Ndebele people siyahlukunyezwa (we are ill-treated), but we have been patient and long suffering; we have tried to say even though these people are ill-treating us lets live together. But they are spitting us out, they don’t want us, which is what made us stand up and say we want our own country ours that used to be led by … Mzilikazi, that is what caused us to say, no. These people are making us remember that these nations used to be two separate nations; we now want our country so that we also have our own country and we can suffer on our own. (Interview, Tshengi)
MLF invokes the pre-colonial era as a response to their marginalization in Zimbabwe. This is further used to construct differences between the Ndebele and Shona to justify pursuing a separate nation. As such, they decided to go back to the nation that was under Mzilikazi before colonization. In doing so, the pre-colonial boundaries, origins, and arrival in the territory now called Zimbabwe are reimagined: Gukurahundi is framed as the inevitable outcome of trying to bring two separate groups of people to coexist as one nation. Another member of MLF in a focus group reiterates what Tshengi said above as follows:
Even though the Shona say we came from South Africa, yes its our origin we got there (Zimbabwe) and found the Abathwa who were led by the mother uMthwakazi. Mzilikazi got there with Nyamazana, they (the Shona) were also not there, no one was created in Zimbabwe. Where it says God created man in Zimbabwe, they came from as far as Gabon … some of them came from Tanzania when it was called Tanganyika it had a Shona name…Others came from DRC, others from Rwanda; that is where they got this name Gukurahundi, its a Rwandan name meaning “sweeping clean.” If you find a Rwandan person they will tell you Gukurahundi means cleansing… they got there and took their portion, and we took ours. That is how we could stay together. (Focus Group Discussion)
The imagined origins of the groups making up Zimbabwe today are used to construct immutable borders between the Ndebele and Shona. The Shona are narrated as having migrated from the north of Africa, whereas the Ndebele migrated from the south. The two groups arrived and could coexist, side by side, independently, the interviewee asserts, but not when forced to operate as a single nation. By linking the Shona origins, which are connected to Gabon, Tanzania, DRC, and Rwanda, the speaker constructs them as prone to violence in the same manner as nations such as the DRC and Rwanda, where ethnic tensions are prevalent in the Great Lakes Region. Importantly, the different origins of the two groups are employed to justify pursuing a separate state for the people of Mthwakazi. The Ndebele are narrated as being under threat, pushed to the physical and political margins of the country. As one focus group participant explained:
Also we ask that they explain to us what is happening, can we know why we are being pushed out of the country? Right now if I tell you, Plumtree is the last town of Zimbabwe on your way to Botswana and yet it’s full of them [Shona] and we are pushed out we are no longer there. Plumtree is a small town; I don’t even want to talk about Bulawayo, we are no longer there, Gwanda is on your way to South Africa. We have been pushed out, we want to know why we are being pushed out so excessively. Does it mean they will go back to killing us like they did?
This speaker mentions border towns as a way of emphasizing that the Ndebele have been pushed out not only of the center of the nation but even out of its margins. The impression here is that the Ndebele have resigned themselves to the margins of the nation; however, here again they are being pushed out. This complaint against the presence of the Shona in what is “supposed” to be Ndebele territory is reiterated when people narrate their encounters with civil servants (Interview, Dumo). Dissatisfaction about government departments employing Shona officers in Matabeleland areas, linked to the inability to communicate with them and thus with the state in Ndebele, reifies the image of a Shona Zimbabwean nation. The seeming favoritism of the Shona with regard to employment and thus the privileging of the economic empowerment of the Shona over the Ndebele further bolsters this idea of a Shona state where the Ndebele are not welcome (Interview, Tshengi).
While ZAM and MLF both place huge importance on Gukurahundi, the meaning that they draw from this event is distinct. The political homecoming that they have collectively constructed mirrors these different meanings. However, these are not the only ways of seeing the Gukurahundi and, more broadly, of understanding ethnicity, statehood, and belonging in Zimbabwe. In other words, the constructed understandings of ZAM and MLF lean on the maintenance of their individual and collective narratives.
What is the Gukurahundi? Alternative understandings
In this final section, I begin with a poetic transcription (Glesne Reference Glesne1997) taken from an interview with Mabuya. He argued that the meaning he ascribed to Gukurahundi was the correct one because of his direct experience as it occurred, that is, his military involvement in ZIPRA and his subsequent arrest. He also spoke of his mother, who was beaten up because of his involvement in ZAPU and ZIPRA. Poetic transcriptions select phrases from an interview, but order them to capture the essence of the interview. This interview presents a different interpretation of events to those found in ZAM and MLF because it does not explain the causes of Gukurahundi as ethnic differences and instead sees it as a continuation of a colonial project of divide and rule. This alternative interpretation provides a sense of the diversity of ways in which political events are understood by the migrants in South Africa.
Gukurahundi
What was the real reason?
A strategy to disperse
People organized to take the revolution forward
The (Westerners) were very worried
Create Gukurahundi
Make sure ideology is smashed
Crush any national notion of any kind
1854 Europeans decided on the border
Create groupings to be controllable
We didn’t create borders
Robert is saying I am a white man in a black man’s skin
Interest of the people of Zimbabwe no!
People have stooped lower than ZANU
Retreat to their little corners
It is so good for the imperialist
That you think like Mthwakazi
The nation totally destroyed
I lost hope in 1980
We went to a wedding
The bride didn’t come
The husband independence appeared
Freedom never appeared
I was a freedom fighter not a war veteran
Not an ex combatant
We were fighting for a marriage
Nobody is a minority
We fought for a majority government
Should a Tonga be called Ndebele?
You are Ndebele Tonga or Kalanga
Karanga or Zezuru or whatever
Different languages made to disappear
Into a lie called Shona
You don’t behave the way you behave
Because of the blood in you
You behave the way you behave
Because of the information around you
The most stupid generation
Allowed the country to degenerate
We owe it to our children
We owe it to our ancestors’ resistance in the 1890s
But if you say
Lobengula you are Zimbabwean
Nehanda you are Zimbabwean
no no no no no no very emphatically NO
You are mad
(Poetic transcription of interview with Mabuya)
This poem presents Gukurahundi as the extension of a colonial project aimed at dividing Africans into smaller ethnic groups for easier conquest. Mabuya argues against the understanding of Gukurahundi as an ethnic assault on the Ndebele, especially by victims of the violence. He sees this as one way of continuing to perpetuate this violent project. He also sees Zimbabwe as a recent creation whose diverse ethnic make-up should make it richer and not be a source of violence.
Using a wedding metaphor to narrate and problematize the inception of the Zimbabwean nation, as a wedding without a bride, Mabuya presents freedom as the bride, a mother perhaps, who is important in bearing children in the marriage relationship, the nurturing, non-violent, and life-giving part of the marriage union. In the absence of freedom, the bride, Zimbabwe was doomed. Normally on the wedding day the bride is the focus; her beauty and attire are the spectacle on the day. In Mabuya’s view, the no-show of the bride is what predisposed Zimbabwe to violence; that is, the reason for Gukurahundi is located in the problematic inception of a Zimbabwe without freedom, and not on its multi-ethnic membership. In this way, he argues against the idea of Gukurahundi being an ethnic genocide.
The poem speaks of the ethnic relations between the Ndebele and Shona in Zimbabwe in a similar way to an article which was published in the online newspaper The Zimbabwean. The article comments on a Facebook Group called Ndebele vs. Shona where “Shona and Ndebele people insult each other.” The writer decries the fact that the Ndebele and Shona see each other as enemies and concludes by challenging the imagined origins of the two groups.
What the sharp assegais of 1893 and the lethal Gukurahundi bayonets of the 1980s taught us—if not the evil of man—is that whether born from the sacred womb of Nehanda or the royal loins of Mzilikazi, we all bleed the same color. Sonke sopha elibomvu. Tese tinojuja ropa dzvuku. (Jera 2013)
In this article, the Shona are said to be coming from the sacred womb of Nehanda and the Ndebele from the royal loins of Mzilikazi. It is not possible that a womb can produce offspring on its own and neither can the loins. The writer could have used a male Shona cultural symbol, Kaguvi, and spoken of the Shona coming from his loins. The choice of using a man and woman in imagining the origin of the Shona and Ndebele similarly speaks to the wedding of independence and freedom. By presenting the Shona woman, Nehanda, and the Ndebele man, Mzilikazi, singularly, the writer presents the impossibility of a pure ethnic identity.
In this way, the Zimbabwean nation is narrated as the coming together of different and separate people, the result being offspring that cannot make claims to the nation based on the purity of their ethnic identity. Here, the nation has to be imagined based on a forward-looking political agenda and not on ethnic origins. This fuses the Ndebele and Shona into one group of people, Zimbabweans, predicated on the commonality of being human. Importantly, here too is the acknowledgement from Mabuya that Nehanda and Mzilikazi or Lobengula were not Zimbabweans, showing that the origin is irrelevant as Jera, (2013) says, “we all bleed the same color.”
This view contradicts those of the MLF and ZAM about the Gukurahundi. Although it acknowledges the differences between the ethnic groups, Gukurahundi is not viewed as an ethnic assault but rather as the continuation of a colonial endeavor of divide and rule. In other words, Gukurahundi is testament to the absence of a key ingredient at the initiation of the nation, freedom.
Mabuya and others quoted in this section see Gukurahundi as a colonial project and call for Zimbabweans to rise above ethnic differences to embrace the idea of a Zimbabwe where both the Ndebele and Shona belong equally. In this sense, the narratives differ markedly from those of ZAM and MLF, who see Gukurahundi as an ethnic assault on the Ndebele, aimed at creating a Shona Zimbabwean state. However, it coheres with ZAM’s aim of building a Zimbabwe in which the Ndebele and Shona both equally belong.
Conclusion
In this article, I have focused on the narratives of political homecoming crafted by migrants in Johannesburg, some of whom are members of ZAM and MLF. The narratives presented here seek to redefine home for the migrants. Common among them is the acknowledgement of the divergent pre-colonial origins of the Ndebele and Shona groupings and the perceived marginalization of the Ndebele in Zimbabwe, as embodied by the Gukurahundi violence. Being effectively stateless as a result of the Gukurahundi is narrated here not only in relation to those who fled Zimbabwe in the 1980s as the violence occurred. Victims are said to be living as foreigners in Zimbabwe due to a lack of documentation and also because of the cultural identity the spaces and places are taking.
The above discussion has outlined the ways that the migrants view and narrate their migration trajectories as victims of Gukurahundi. The Ndebele are being pushed out of Zimbabwe by the silence of Gukurahundi today in the same way that the violence was a message that they were not welcome as members of the nation. Although migration to South Africa has a longer history prior to the violence, Gukurahundi has changed its meaning, and in this current moment with Zimbabwe’s failed economy the metamorphosis continues. Here the narratives of Gukurahundi and migration to South Africa converge to produce a classic refugee narrative of people whose state has not provided them protection and who thus seek the protection of another. However, in this tale, Gukurahundi victims and Zimbabweans in general who have moved to South Africa have not received recognition as refugees and asylum from the South African state. Instead, they remain at the margins of the state, navigating the precarious position of being “matter out of place.” What drives the search for a political homecoming is also a keen awareness of their precarious location in South Africa.
The narratives differ in the ways these divergent origins of the Shona and Ndebele are employed to justify the imagined present inter-group relations between these two ethnic groups. For ZAM, the Shona and Ndebele could be seen as compatriots building a Zimbabwean nation together, whereas for the MLF, they should become members of two adjacent nations of Zimbabwe and Mthwakazi. The first narrative was crafted in the early 2000s with the euphoria of a possible regime change in Zimbabwe prior to the 2008 elections. Here the Ndebele and Shona were imagined as equally belonging to Zimbabwe by focusing on the pitfalls of the lack of acknowledgement of Gukurahundi in order to provide course correction toward the building of a Zimbabwe the migrants could call home. Post-2008, with hopes for regime change dashed, the MLF narrative emphasizes the differences between the Ndebele and Shona to justify the creation of Mthwakazi as a safe place, a “home” at last, for the Ndebele.
Acknowledgments
I extend immense gratitude to all those who participated in the research and to Professor I. Palmary, who supervised the PhD research from which this paper is drawn. Thank you to colleagues from The African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at Wits who discussed earlier versions of this paper in the work-in-progress seminar, the 2017 PEAS ASR workshop participants in Ghana Accra, and to the three anonymous reviewers for their insights. Last but not least, thank you to S. J. Cooper-Knock for invaluable support with the revisions and response to the reviewers’ comments.
