ABSTRACT
About three years into Zimbabwe’s independence, there was growing dissent in the provinces of Matabeleland and the Midlands. The government of Robert Mugabe reacted by sending a North Korean-trained brigade to crack down on the dissent. Close to 20,000 people were killed during this military action, which has come to be known as Gukurahundi. During Mugabe’s lifetime, as has been the case with his successor, discussion of Gukurahundi has been quasi-criminalised. The ZANU-PF governments have advocated for collective amnesia in this chapter of Zimbabwe’s early post-independence history. Collective amnesia has been buttressed by the forbidding of the erection of any monuments that memorialise Gukurahundi. This enforced collective amnesia speaks, in many ways, to the structures of systemic marginalisation in certain parts of Zimbabwe. In a way, these marginalised parts are ‘othered’ and their belonging to the national body is constantly questioned. This chapter grapples with the question of how, why, and which kinds of memories deserve memorialisation and which are seen as undeserving of memorialisation. In thinking through these questions, this chapter brings into conversation Caswell’s idea of ‘archiving the unspeakable’ and Brett et al.’s conceptualisation of the symbolic politics of commemoration and monuments at sites of trauma. Given that physical Gukurahundi monuments have been perennially desecrated in Zimbabwe, this chapter examines how social media and cultural productions such as literature and visual arts can be considered intangible monuments and symbolic sites of memorialisation.
