Paper short abstract:

In recent years, Zimbabwe's Matabeleland region has seen a wave of second-generation public activism aimed at ‘breaking the silence’ around the 1980s Gukurahundi massacres. This paper explores the agendas of key public actors, whilst rooting their activism in a broader generational experience.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores a wave of historical counter consciousness that is currently taking place in Zimbabwe’s majority Ndebele-speaking regions and centred in Matabeleland’s capital city, Bulawayo. As a project of making Matabeleland’s history more visible, one of its core concerns is to ‘break the silence’ around the 1980s Gukurahundi massacres which saw between 10,000 to 20,000 people killed by government forces. The paper draws on multiple fieldwork visits between 2018 and 2022 that focused on second-generation Gukurahundi memory and activism. In particular, the paper zooms in on the work of some of the key public actors engaged in Gukurahundi activism. Drawing on in-depth interviews as well as observations of their public engagement, the paper explores their different agendas and, at the same time, roots their politics in a broader generational experience of growing up in the ‘noisy silence’ surrounding Gukurahundi (Alexander, 2021) and in the hey-days of ‘patriotic history’ (Ranger, 2004; Tendi, 2010). Their activism, I argue, can be read as an act of political resistance against the state’s History which has excluded their region’s experience for too long. Concurrently, it may be understood as a partial adoption of the historicised mode by which politics in Zimbabwe operates.