There is a story in a village in southern Zimbabwe that will take Vee from an inexperienced intern to a staff writer at the Atlanta Times. When she pitched it to her superiors, they booked her on the first flight back to Zimbabwe and made it very clear that they were taking a very big risk on her,  one they did not want to regret. She knew what that meant: come back with a compelling story or don’t come back at all. But today is her last day in the village and no one has been willing to tell the story she came searching for. Three weeks after arriving, Vee is seen heading towards the bus stop,  silky loose blouse blowing in the hot, unforgiving air. She has to pull down her pencil skirt every few steps each time it rises up her legs and she chides herself for packing it in the first place. Jeans would have been an equally inappropriate clothing choice but at least her legs wouldn’t be coated with a film of stubborn dust. She wears a headwrap to feign modesty but the luscious locks of the  Brazilian weave on her head spill out of it and flow down her shoulders. The arched eyebrows on her face have been drawn on and several layers of foundation and toner have contoured her nose to half its usual size. She tries to ignore all the stares and glares thrown her way until a little boy runs up to her at the bus stop and exclaims that his grandfather wants to see her. He has a story to tell her.

She follows him into the homestead and he points her in the direction of a large msasa tree under which sits an old man on a wooden stool, his walking stick leaning against the tree’s trunk. She slowly approaches him and kneels on the reed mat next to him, stretching out her hand in greeting.  He doesn’t take it. Instead, he asks her what her name is and she almost says Vee before she remembers she’s in Zimbabwe so she can use her full name. Vuyisile. It sounds strange and bitter in her mouth, like a foreign object lodged in between her teeth. He stares at her, prompting her to continue, because her introduction is incomplete. She is Vuyisile of the Khumalo clan, daughter of  Butholezwe, the son of Zwangendaba. He looks unimpressed that she forgot to recite her ancestry when she introduced herself. The heavy American accent probably didn’t help either. He says his name is Ndlovu, and leaves it there, only giving out his last name because it would be taboo for her to use his first name. Vuyisile smiles. Her mother’s maiden name is Ndlovu. She knows his clan names and stares him down while she rattles them off. She expects him to look impressed, or at least taken aback. His face reveals nothing. After a beat of silence, he stretches out his own hand to shake hers. 

She gives him her rehearsed introduction about how she’s a writer working with the Atlanta Times and she’s been sent here on assignment, to write about the Gukurahundi genocide and how the community is recovering forty years later. He reads in between the lines and hears everything else she doesn’t say. She is here to capitalize on this community’s grief by masquerading as one of  them. But she has no roots to this community, she does not identify with them or their pain, at least not past a point where she can use it to climb up the professional ladder. She’s a vulture here to feed on the scabs of his injuries.

There’s a long drawn-out silence while he ponders what to do. She’s about to leave, uncomfortable with the awkwardness of it all, when the old man flinches. His teenage granddaughters are pounding millet for lunch. They raise the pestles, these long wooden logs, and use them to crush the grains into a powder they will use to make a thick porridge called sitshwala. Each time the pestle makes contact with the wide wooden bowl the millet is in, a dark shadow crosses his face.  There is a story here and she knows it. All of a sudden, it becomes too real for her. She has heard the stories of how the soldiers used to beat the villagers with pestles. The size of the pestles made them the perfect tool to break backs. “They’re spineless cowards anyway so we’re not really doing much damage”, the soldiers would joke. Vuyisile wants to leave. This is not a story. These are real people with real pain and she will not be the gravedigger who excavates all that buried suffering.  She has crossed many an ethical line in her short career but this one cuts deeper.  She’s contemplating leaving when the man clears his throat and starts to speak.

He hesitates, unsure of where to begin. He doesn’t look at her but keeps his eye on the mountains in the distance. The first thing he says is that the girls are not his biological granddaughters. It pains him to say this, because he loves them dearly and sees them as his own flesh and blood, but his story is incomplete without stating this fact. He had three children of his own, two boys and a little girl he only got to hold for a week. When the soldiers grabbed him and took him to the concentration camp, his first wife went into hiding with the children. “She must have done a really good job of it too, because forty years later and they’re still hiding”, he says with a mischievous smile. Vuyisile is unsure of what the appropriate response is but he’s not looking at her so she doesn’t react. She knows they’re probably dead and she wonders how often that realization must have dawned on Ndlovu. To say they died would mean he would have to think about how they died. It’s common knowledge that even little boys were rounded up, made to dig their own graves and once inside, were shot in the head. And that’s if they were lucky. Most times, they were burned alive in the shallow graves. In both instances, their families would be held at gunpoint and told to sing and dance around the graves. Anyone who objected was shoved into the grave. He could survive the thought of his wife singing at his sons’ graves but what would break him is what happened to the baby. The babies were taken and placed into the wooden bowls and their mothers told to pound them into pulp.

The girls interrupt them. They bring a jug of water and a bowl to wash their grandfather’s hands.  As is custom, they kneel before him. Usually, a visitor would be the first to have their hands washed but Vuyisile is a woman and she’s younger than him so he ranks above her. He shakes his hands dry and the girls kneel in front of Vuyisile and she hesitates. It would be rude to refuse to eat their food, but she can also tell they don’t have much of it to spare. She makes a split-second decision to accept the food and lets them pour the warm water over her hands and she feels a tinge of guilt when she realizes that its borehole water. Borehole water is reserved exclusively for drinking in these parts. The nearest borehole is several miles away and the girls would have had to get up at the crack of dawn. Around here, every home carefully rations their water and the case  would be no different in this particular home. Any other visitor and they would have used the water from the river but as far as they are concerned, she’s an American. She looks like one, walks like one and talks like one. And as she sits here, capitalizing on the grief of a disenfranchised community for her own personal gain, she definitely feels like one. 

He explains that he met the girls’ grandmother in Bhalagwe concentration camp. Like him, she had fought in the liberation war against the British settlers. They had sacrificed everything, dropping out of school and crossing the country’s borders to go train in military camps. They had spilled so much blood, saw so much death and did terrible acts all so they could own the land of their forefathers. And against all odds, they had won. Rhodesia was given back to the people and it was renamed Zimbabwe. Joshua Nkomo was slated to become the first Black President of the new republic. But there was one problem. Robert Mugabe, Nkomo’s counterpart, wanted power and was not willing to cede it to a man from the Ndebele tribe. They were considered unworthy to lead, and then it was decided that they were unworthy to live. And so, the highest powers of government colluded to wipe out the tribe.

They called it Operation Gukurahundi, the name given to the early rains that wash away the chaff before the spring rain. Like a violent storm, the state’s army rolled into villages and left a trail of destruction in their wake. These were not ordinary soldiers. They were a specialized task force who received special military training in North Korea. They were known as the Fifth Brigade.  They said they were looking for dissidents, soldiers who had not laid down their arms and were causing trouble in the villages. Ndlovu and every other Ndebele guerrilla who had fought in the war were dragged from their homes at night. He cannot forget the night they came to his village,  even though he has spent the last forty years trying. His first memory is of the smell of smoke mingled with the stench of burning human flesh. The soldiers had found out that the neighbors were harboring two guerrillas and so they locked the whole family into one hut and set it alight. 

Ndlovu shook his wife awake and told her to run. Needing no other explanation, she leapt out of bed and grabbed the boys by their arms and told them to quickly put on their shoes. They were dazed and confused, irritated at being woken up in such a violent manner, and stared at her blankly.  She slapped them both across the face screaming in their faces that this was not a game. Terrified,  they did as they were instructed. She picked up the five-year-old and carried him on her back and put the baby in the eight-year old’s arms. The last Ndlovu ever saw of them was their shadows disappearing into the forest at the edge of their home. He took off in the opposite direction, thorny branches scratching his arms and rocks digging into his bare feet as he plunged deeper and deeper into the forest. He had just come from one war and he had not made it out alive of that one just to die in his own home. If they captured him, he wanted it to be in the next village. But he didn’t even make it to the other side of the forest.

The girls arrive with the food and the conversation comes to an abrupt stop. Vuyisile’s heart stops racing when she realizes that she is safe and there is no one coming to get her. She had gotten so  absorbed in the story that she has to double-check to see if her phone is still recording. The plates are placed before them and the two of them eat in silence. She scoops up some of the millet sitshwala with her fingers, dips it in the soup and blows on it tenderly before eating. The whole act makes her self-conscious. A real native would eat the food piping hot without even flinching. She hasn’t had sitshwala since her family left the country when she was eight and she can’t remember if it always tasted like spoiled oatmeal. She attempts to gnaw on the chicken feet but there’s barely any meat on it to even gnaw on. Heart in her stomach, she eats every morsel and drains a cup of water to keep the nausea at bay.

The girls come to clear the plates and their grandfather asks for one of them to grab his straw hat.  He suggests they go on a walk and Vuyisile is all too happy to agree. The pattern of the reed mat has imprinted into her skin and it hurts at the touch. Her legs also feel sore from the awkward modest position she has been sitting in. She rises to her feet and they slowly walk out the gate together in comfortable silence. He’s probably only in his early sixties but his face is creased with wrinkles. He walks at an awkward angle and would undoubtedly crumple to the ground without his walking stick. He still grimaces with every step and she feels an odd sense of protectiveness kicking in. Before she has time to dwell on this feeling, he points to a clearing in the distance. It’s the local primary school. “School” is an exaggeration. There’s just a tree with a blackboard underneath. The state of education in the whole region is abysmal. “You know why?” he asks. She  shakes her head. “They used to line up all the teachers and shoot them at point-blank range. No one ever wanted to teach after that”.

She’s seen a lot of truly atrocious things in her line of work but this story feels personal. Maybe because it is personal. She cannot understand how a government could slaughter over twenty thousand people and get away with it and she says so aloud. “Twenty thousand?” he scoffs.  “That’s what they told you?”. She is not entirely sure who “they” is but she knows he is right. That was just the official number but there was no way to verify those figures. Even now, so many families are still too scared to come forward because they believe their silence is the only thing keeping them alive. The day they talk is the day the soldiers come back and no one is willing to risk that. Except for Ndlovu. 

He says there were at least eight hundred people in the month that he was at the concentration camp. There were soldiers posted everywhere so the prisoners could not even contemplate the very notion of escaping. They were divided into men and women to accommodate the unique systems of torture used to brutalize their bodies. Ndlovu discloses how all the men were subjected to castration during their stay. “There’s already enough of you people”, the soldiers would smirk before bringing a hammer down on a prisoner’s groin. Or they would get creative and use electrocution instead. He spots the sympathetic look on Vuyisile’s face and promptly changes the topic. He explains that the women had it worse. They were raped on a daily basis and brutally beaten up afterward, the soldiers taking out their disgust at themselves on the women. Some of the lucky ones were released when they got pregnant. The others were killed. His second wife was part of the former. The grandchildren Ndlovu is raising in his home are the descendants of his torturers. 

SIBONGUMUSA NCUBE was a transfer student from Zimbabwe.