An astounding number of mass graves surround Thabani Dhlamini’s home in south-western Zimbabwe.
One pointed out to the BBC lies near the ablution block of a primary school in the village of Salankomo in the Tsholotsho district.
Teachers were killed and dumped there in the 1980s.
In another, 22 relatives and neighbours are buried in two graves – all killed by Zimbabwe’s military under the command of then-leader Robert Mugabe.
Dhlamini (51) was just 10 at the time, but is still haunted by the memories.
“We were not able [to talk about it],” he told the BBC.
They were all victims of ethnic killings between 1983 and 1987, when Mugabe unleashed the North Korean-trained Five Brigade in strongholds of Joshua Nkomo, his arch-rival.
‘GENOCIDE’
Some describe what followed as a genocide.
It is not known how many people died – some estimates put it at more than 20 000.
Nkomo was a veteran freedom fighter from the south-western province of Matabeleland who, more than two decades after his death, is still fondly known as ‘Father Zimbabwe’.
The two men had had a fractious relationship during the long liberation struggle against white-minority rule – Nkomo came from Zimbabwe’s Ndebele minority and Mugabe from the nation’s Shona majority. They fell out two years after independence in 1980, when Mugabe fired Nkomo from the coalition government, accusing his party of plotting a coup.
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.


HEARINGS
Those targeted by the elite soldiers were mainly from the Ndebele ethnic group in Matabeleland and Midlands provinces.
Mugabe ruled for another three decades and 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.
Mnangagwa made a point of addressing the subject of reconciliation.
But it took seven years for him 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.
Dhlamini said he would take part in the hearings.
“I want to free myself from what I witnessed,” he said.
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.
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.
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.
CAN’T FORGIVE
“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 Dhlamini, who said his mother had been so traumatised she had never been able to live at the village.
Victims and survivors’ families are divided over whether the new government initiative would bring healing and change their fortunes.
In the neighbouring village of Silonkwe, Julia Mlilo (77) remembers every detail of what happened on 24 February 1983.At the sound of gunfire she had dropped her hoe in the field and escaped with her husband and children.
When they emerged, her father and more than 20 of her husband’s relatives had been burnt beyond recognition.
“Only the heads were identifiable,” she said. “I haven’t forgiven them, I don’t know what would make me forgive,” Mlilo told the BBC.
“I don’t trust the process, because it’s being done by the government, but I will take part in it,” she said.

DESOLATION
Tsholotsho, like many parts of Matabeleland, remains a desolate and forsaken area. And since the 1980s the findings of various commissions of inquiry into the atrocities have never been made public.
During the Mugabe era, a programme to give identity documents to children whose parents had perished or disappeared did begin and continues.
But previous public hearings and exhumation programmes have stalled.
In Bulawayo, the main city in Matabeleland, Mbuso Fuzwayo from the local pressure group Ibhetshu LikaZulu spoke to the BBC as he collected a metal plaque to commemorate those killed in Silonkwe.
STOLEN PLAQUES
Several plaques commissioned by the group have been stolen or destroyed.
The country has a long history of human rights abuses.
“What happened during the liberation struggle is that there was no-one who was brought to justice,” Fuzwayo said.
Mnangagwa was the minister of state security during the massacres, which explains the wariness felt towards him in the south-west. Some of that strong opposition comes from traditional leaders, who will be conducting the hearings.
Chief Khulumani Mathema from Gwanda North feels the process is fundamentally flawed.
“It needs to be a national issue that focuses on international best practices, which is how genocides are addressed in the whole world,” he told the BBC.
As a young boy, the chief was beaten up by soldiers.
“There’s no single genocide that has ever been completely solved when the perpetrators are still in charge.”
Fuzwayo (48), whose grandfather was allegedly abducted and never heard from again during the massacres, agrees.
“The chief perpetrator might be dead, that is Mugabe – but Emerson Mnangagwa remains in the absence of Mugabe,” he said.
Mnangagwa has always denied accusations he played an active role in Gukurahundi, and successive governments have rejected allegations that the operation amounted to genocide.
Mathema said the priorities of communities would be to exhume and identify bodies from the mass graves and allow families space to mourn their relatives appropriately.
But he believes there is another piece of the puzzle that the government will need to complete – truth-telling about what happened and the whereabouts of the disappeared.
“Up to today we don’t know why the people were killed,” Fuzwayo said. – BBC AFRICA
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