Zimbabwe: A Mother Killed For Supporting Change

One morning before the elections, my mother left the homestead to attend a rally to drum up support for their party’s candidate. We did not suspect anything would happen because it was now a routine exercise that she would attend the rallies and come back home safely. We thought all was just as usual as always.

It was only when it started getting late that we started getting worried because she used to return from the rallies before the sun set. On this day, she broke the tradition. We started searching for her at some compounds near to ours, but we could not locate her. Seeing that nothing was coming out of the search process, we set out for the growth point, accompanied by our uncle. My two young sisters, my brother and I make up the family since our father passed away in 1997.

When we got there, we met a few people who were drinking beer at beer outlets scattered all over the growth point. Since we were all under 18, we were not allowed into the drinking places and had to rely on asking people who went into the halls to check for us. They all came back with the same message: they could not find our mother.

Fear started gripping us and my young sisters and brother started weeping. We headed back home and we found her outside the door, naked and weeping profusely.

She told us that she had been stripped naked a few hours ago and paraded around the ward naked, all because she was an MDC member and official. She said that some of the youths touched her private parts, with some forcing sticks into her private parts.

We discovered there were bruises all over her private parts.