AFRICA SEMINAR: Remembering Gukurahundi: Traces of Zimbabwe’s Violent Past in the Present

Zimbabwean artist Owen Maseko, and Zimbabwean forensic anthropologist Shari Eppel, discuss the persistent physical, political, social and psychological traces of state violence in Matabeleland in the 1980s. Professor Amanda Hammar from the Centre of African Studies will moderate the event. Refreshments will be served afterwards.

This special CAS seminar starts-off an international workshop on The Politics of the Past in Zimbabwe, co-convened by CAS at the University of Copenhagen (Amanda Hammar), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Tromsø (Astrid Rasch), and the Arctic University of Norway in Trondheim (Minna Johanna Niemi).

Milan Kundera neatly encapsulated ‘the struggle against power’ when he stated that this was ‘the struggle of memory against forgetting’. This is well illustrated in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, where, since 2010, there have been increasing, if still mostly cautious, public demands to be allowed to remember and to memorialise the mass killings and ‘disappearances’ in the 1980s – known as Gukurahundi – of scores of thousands of ethnic Ndebele citizens by the newly post-independent, Mugabe-led Zanu-PF state. These demands are pitted against the state’s persistent efforts, forty year after the atrocities, to manage and suppress the full details of what happened, while simultaneously creating the façade of greater openness.

In this seminar, firstly, Zimbabwean forensic anthropologist Shari Eppel, will reflect on her observations over the last twenty-five years, during which time she and her colleagues have worked closely with communities in those rural areas most deeply affected by the Gukurahundi massacres. Engaging in the painful yet necessary work of exhumations and burials over decades, and in various forms of local community healing processes, she has noted important generational shifts in levels of fear-induced silence and new-found activism. Rather than the state having achieved the intended deepening of denial of its violence over time, the ‘one-and-a-half’ generation in particular – that is, those who were very young in the 1980s but who nonetheless carry penetrating and shocking memories of the violence – is at the forefront of efforts to ensure their versions of history and remembering are recognized.

In the second part of the seminar, Bulawayo-based visual artist, Owen Maseko – himself part of the ‘one-and-a-half’ generation – will share some of his work as an entry point into reflecting on the place of art in remembering, activism and repair. Maseko is someone who not only bore witness as a child to the effects of Gukurahundi on his own family, but decades later was subjected to the same state’s harassment when in 2010, his extensive one-man art exhibition on the subject of Gukurahundi at the National Gallery in Zimbabwe, was closed-down and banned, and he was arrested by the state.

The seminar will be moderated by Amanda Hammar, Professor of African Studies at the Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen, herself a Zimbabwean.