Gukurahundi

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The Gukurahundi was a series of mass killings in Zimbabwe which were committed from 1982 until the Unity Accord in 1987. The name derives from a Shona-language term which loosely translates to "the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains".^[5]

During the Rhodesian Bush War, two rival nationalist parties, Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), had emerged to challenge Rhodesia's predominantly white government.^[6] ZANU initially defined Gukurahundi as an ideological strategy aimed at carrying the war into major settlements and individual homesteads.^[7] Following Mugabe's ascension to power, his government remained threatened by "dissidents" – disgruntled former guerrillas and supporters of ZAPU.^[8]

ZANU recruited mainly from the majority Shona people, whereas ZAPU had its greatest support among the Ndebele and Kalanga peoples. In early 1983, the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, an infantry brigade of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA), began a crackdown on dissidents in the Matabeleland North, Matabeleland South, and Midlands provinces, home of the Ndebele and Kalanga. Over the following two years, thousands of Ndebele and Kalanga were detained by government forces and either marched to re-education camps, tortured, raped and/or summarily executed. Although there are different estimates, the consensus of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) is that more than 20,000 people were killed. The IAGS has classified the massacres as a genocide.^[9]