THABO MANALA
AN impactful educationist, jurist and champion of human rights, retired Justice Sello Nare, who died on 28 September at a hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa, receiving specialist medical treatment after a long illness, tried hard to resolve the Gukurahundi massacres during all his retirement — in vain.
Nare — who was buried in Bulawayo on 5 October — died without finishing the job, something he would have wanted to do, but put up a valiant effort.
He was 81.
Among his many contributions to society, Nare tried hard in retirement to resolve the Gukurahundi atrocities.
He genuinely believed the issue needs to be settled for Zimbabwe to go forward.
Now a team of traditional chiefs from Matabeleland will soon be embarking on yet another process to try to resolve the genocide problem, which continues to deeply divide the country.
A civil society initiative, Matabeleland Collective, initiated in 2019, also failed.
There were many other efforts before that, which also stalled. Born in 1943 in Kafusi, Gwanda district, Matabeleland South, Nare had an illustrious career spanning education, law, and human rights.
He attended Kafusi Primary School and later received a bursary to study at Dadaya Mission in Zvishavane, Midlands province.
His early career began in education, where he trained as a teacher.
He worked as a primary school teacher in Zvishavane and Gwanda between 1963 and 1970.
Nare later served as a headmaster from 1971 to 1973.
He taught at several schools, including Chegato and Msume in Mberengwa, before eventually pursuing a legal career.
His teaching career was highly impactful and changed lives.
Nare then joined the Judicial Service Commission from where he rose through the ranks — from the humble position of court interpreter to judge.
He trained at the Judicial College before being appointed a magistrate in the early 1980s.
Nare later studied law with the University of South Africa.
Socially and culturally, Nare was an embodiment of diversity and multiculturalism in Zimbabwe.
He was fluent in six local languages — Sotho, Venda, Ndebele, Shona, Nyanja, and of course English; whike knowledgeable in Kalanga and Shangani.
He also understood Nambya, all of which aided his work as a court interpreter.
Nare’s legal career saw him serve in various capacities across Zimbabwe, including as a magistrate in Bulawayo, Hwange, and Chiredzi, and later as the provincial magistrate for Mashonaland West and Matabeleland North.
“He was promoted to regional magistrate in Harare in 1993 and later served as Senior Regional Magistrate in Mutare before taking on the role of President of the Administrative Court in Bulawayo in 2003,” family spokesperson Lesley Ncube said.
In 2006, Nare was appointed President of the Labour Court in Bulawayo, a position he held until his retirement in 2013. For all his retirement life, he was locked in a bid to resolve the Gukurahundi conundrum.
“Justice Nare was deeply committed to nation-building and peace. He travelled across the country, advocating for reconciliation and unity until his retirement,” Ncube said.
“He was a humble and ethical man, deeply devoted to his church and faith, and committed to serving his country.”
In addition to his legal work, Nare was a dedicated member of the Church of Christ in Bulawayo, where he served as an elder.
He was also active in academia, chairing the Lupane State University Staff Disciplinary Committee in 2014.
An avid farmer, Nare worked his farm in Marula.
Nare is survived by his wife, Leticia Gladys Nare, three children, and 11 grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements will be announced in due course, but indications are that he will be buried during the coming weekend.
Nare may not have been a prominent trailblazer to some, like his fellow homeboys, the late Professor Phineas Makhurane or Delta chief executive Matts Valela, for instance, but his work was highly impactful on communities and society.
He was a good example of an ordinary professional doing extraordinary things in communities.
After contributing a lot to education at the grassroots level, to the legal profession and broader community, Nare later walked a path many of his peers would not have wanted, trying to resolve Gukurahundi given the raw sensitivities, emotions and volatile divisions with political and ethnic undertones which characterise the issue.
Nare dedicated most of his time after retirement to seeking justice and accountability for victims of the Gukurahundi atrocities.
He believed Zimbabwe needed healing on that issue to close that chapter and move on.
Even in his retirement, his unrelenting passion for human rights continued, inspiring a new generation as he led the first open process to tackle Gukurahundi, with a relatively public outreach programme and courageous push for reburials of victims of the 1980s state-sponsored campaign of murder and destruction by government security forces under the late former president Robert Mugabe against the now defunct opposition Zapu and its leaders.
The Zanu PF campaign was motivated by political, ethnic and hegemonic interests to destroy Zapu and its Ndebele minority supporters who stood opposed to its leadership and rule, a perfectly democratic activity.
Prior to his appointment as the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC) chairperson in 2017, Nare, who hailed from Gwanda, Matabeleland South province, one of the areas badly affected by Gukurahundi, had a burning desire to tackle human rights issues, showing unwavering commitment to justice and human dignity.
Despite the political and emotional nature of the issue, he showed unshakeable integrity and impartiality as chairperson, helped by his training and practice as a magistrate and judge.
Nare was appointed by Mugabe on 17 March 2017 to lead the NPRC.
The other commissioners were appointed in February 2016.
He found them doing the job and working on strategies that were going to be useful to the commission to deal with the issue.
That followed the death of the inaugural NPRC chair Cyril Ndebele in February 2016.
On 5 January 2018, the NPRC Act was enacted, giving Nare and his team teeth to bite and be effective. Nare used his role of NPRC chairperson to demonstrate that Zimbabwe needs to confront and resolve the Gukurahundi issue, close that chapter and move forward.
He worked through the NPRC and some non-governmental organisations such as Ukuthula Trust to push for a process of exhumations and reburials in Matabeleland.
“I attended, at the invitation of Ukuthula Trust, the exhumation,” Nare, told AFP news agency in 2019. “The deceased had been buried in a rocky place and the grave was shallow. The shin bone was protruding from the ground.
“The reburials from my point of view are a healing process. I believe that should create closure as regards what took place.”
As a judge, Nare understood that what was needed was truth, accountability, justice and reparations to deal with the issue effectively and decisively.
Yet he was also keenly aware of the dangers of the risky process and the attendant political environment obstacles. He also knew President Emmerson Mnangagwa, as one of the publicly accused architects of the atrocities, was anxious to close that ugly chapter in the life of Zimbabwe as a nation and in his own life with an exculpatory outcome.
That required courage for him to handle and manage the delicate issue, balancing between the interests of the political elites, especially those whose hands are tainted with the blood of innocent civilians, and the victims’ unrelenting quest for justice.
When he became NPRC chair, Nare started preparing for exhumations and reburials of Gukurahundi victims, with the involvement of the government, giving positive indications that the process had official backing, yet hostage to political considerations.
He also went for low-hanging fruits like birth certificates and other identity documents.
That role and process had long been coming. Genocide does not happen overnight.
It goes through various stages: From classification of victims, symbolisation, discrimination, dehumanisation, organisation, polarisation, preparation, persecution, killings and denial.
Mugabe and his Zanu PF regime ruthlessly implemented the genocide script meticulously following all those stages acknowledged by genocide scholars and researchers.
For years, government was stuck in denial mode. Mugabe died in denial, although he was pressured through the 2013 constitution-making process to confront the issue.
He did capitulate, but was never committed to resolving the problem.
Nare had to deal with that lack of political will, paranoia and internal sabotage as he was to later indicate in an interview with the Zimbabwe Independent on 26 April 2019.
Mugabe agreed under political pressure, but remained stuck in denial, only saying Gukurahundi was an “act of madness”. In the denial stage, perpetrators usually deny having committed any crimes at all. Mugabe denied responsibility until death in September 2019.
In his last interview at his Blue Roof mansion in Borrowdale, Harare, in March 2018 (not the pre-election Press conference), Mugabe told Zimbabwe Independent editors that Mnangagwa was responsible for the genocide, not him.
He also blamed Ndebeles for refusing to be led by Zanu PF and his government, saying that also fuelled Gukurahundi, particularly accusing the late Zipra intelligence supremo Dumiso Dabengwa of symbolising that resistance and defiance.
In the denial stage, victims are often blamed for their own deaths and tragedy. Evidence is openly hidden and witnesses are intimidated.
The agenda is to silence the victims. However, Mnangagwa has now climbed out of the denial mode into action, and Nare was there to implement the process, which had its genesis in previous political mobilisation and the 2013 constitution-making exercise.
NPRC was constituted in accordance to the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No.20) Act 2013 and National Peace and Reconciliation Act [Chapter 10:32 of 2018].
The establishment of NPRC was a realisation of the social and political will and aspiration of Zimbabweans to transition from a conflictual past to a harmonious future, authors of the constitution say.
It is one of the Chapter 12 independent commissions mandated to support and entrench human rights and democracy; to protect the sovereignty and interests of the people; to promote constitutionalism; to promote transparency and accountability in public institutions; to secure the observance of democratic values and principles by the state and all institutions and agencies of government and government-controlled entities; and to ensure that injustices are remedied.
After Mnangagwa came to power in 2017 through a military coup, He appointed Vice-President Kembo Mohadi to be in charge of the NPRC process and work with Nare, a fellow victim of Gukurahundi and friend. Nare said he lost relatives in Gukurahundi and Mohadi was one of the worst victims of the fierce crackdown.
Mohadi lived in a train for a week to evade security agents hunting him down.
He was badly tortured by security operatives in detention and could have also died like thousands of other victims had it not been for Judith Todd’s brave intervention.
Todd’s story about Gukurahundi is a tragedy on its own, yet a tale of bravery and sacrifice. It involves her rape by a Zanu PF military commander even when she was the second daughter of former Rhodesian prime minister Sir Garfield Todd.
Amid all this grim past, Nare gladly accepted the assignment and enthusiastically undertook the task to find peace and reconciliation until the end.
He was forthright and brave about it. He even approached Mohadi to tell Mnangagwa to release previous reports of the killings that government has been hiding for 40 years.
Mnangagwa, with his mentor Mugabe, studiously refused to release the reports, particularly the Chihambakwe Commission report which was on Gukurahundi and the Dumbutshena Commission report on the Entumbane military clashes between Zipra and Zanla in 1980 and 1981, a precursor to the events that partly led to the massacres.
The Chihambakwe report details the gruesome killings. Gukurahundi happened in stages: Matabeleland military lockdown (1981-82); the killings (from 1983 mainly); scorched earth policy (1984), urban political warfare (1985) and the mop-up purges and systematic marginalisation.
The deep-seated rivalry of the two liberation movements, Zapu and Zanu, which created the clashes, was predicated on political, ideological and ethnic factors, which polarised society.
So when Nare came in, it was the first time Mugabe and later Mnangagwa and Zanu PF had publicly acknowledged that Gukurahundi happened, after years in futile denial and trying to suppress the issue.
Ndebele, a lawyer and former speaker of Parliament, did not have impact as the first NPRC chairperson as he was seen as a Mugabe nemesis who even supported Simba Makoni in the 2008 presidential election.
Ndebele became speaker of Parliament in 1995 and had runins with Mugabe.
He eventually fell out of favour with Mugabe when he issued a parliamentary certificate saying Zanu PF should not discipline its then Masvingo chairperson Dzikamai Mavhaire, a close ally of the late Zanu PF maverick Edison Zvobgo, for bravely demanding “Mugabe must go”.
Ndebele believed there was nothing wrong even for a ruling Zanu PF MP and senior party official to say “Mugabe must go”, something which later became an opposition rallying cry and demand for decades.
That thinking is criminalised is Zanu PF, sometimes it is even considered treasonous. Mugabe described Mavhaire, who was first isolated and later pushed out to opposition until his return to Zanu PF last week, as a “witch”, while he branded Ndebele a traitor.
In 2000, Ndebele was replaced with Mnangagwa as Speaker of Parliament. While Nare was busy pushing his outreach programme and hearings after the NPRC Act was enacted, Mnangagwa started another process with civil society organisations under the banner of Matabeleland Collective to counter the official process.
The parallel initiative was led by his cronies and supporters who were openly bought, and so inevitably it collapsed. That indicated that Mnangagwa was not happy with Nare and his NPRC process, something which became apparent as time went by.
The situation further deteriorated when Nare started making public pronouncements, saying people were demanding Gukurahundi perpetrators be held accountable for their crimes and that people be allowed to speak freely. After being frustrated and thwarted, Nare later acknowledged the difficulties the NPRC faced, saying “to a larger extent, we have faced resource challenges”.
Nare’s commission was starved of resources and allowed to run its course. It was established in 2013 on paper, although it started working in 2018 for a 10-year period.
Section 251 of the constitution set the lifespan of the NPRC as 10 years, starting 22 August 2013.
The government wanted the commission to end in August 2023 even though it started its work late in January 2018 when the legal framework was put in place.
A High Court application was launched to resolve the issue. Justice Mafusire ruled on 13 March 2019 that NPRC would subsist from 2018 when it effectively started working for 10 years.
However, the government, showing Mnangagwa’s hand, appealed and the issue remained in the courts, with the process stalled. Meanwhile, the NPRC was reduced to a shell, at one time with Nare as the only office-bearer. It was crippled.
So it came to a point where Nare and his commission were badly crippled by government, thwarting the retired judge’s mission and process.
When Nare became ill, that marked the end of his bid to resolve Gukurahundi, which was frustrating and for him even tragic.
Now Mnangagwa is running another process with traditional chiefs who also risk facing the same fate. Mnangagwa’s interest is to close the issue without individual criminal responsibility or any liability.
In other words, he wants a whitewash, which is what Nare opposed. In 2018, Nare said chiefs from Matabeleland South and Matbeleland North would be involved in exhumations and reburials organised by Ukuthula Trust which had experience in the field of pathology and exhumations.
Addressing the chiefs at a workshop in Bulawayo, Nare said he had met Mnangagwa over the matter and it was agreed the exhumations should start as soon as possible.
“The exhumation and reburials of Gukurahundi exhumations will start soon,” he said.
“We met President Mnangagwa to discuss the matter and he indicated that he wanted the affected people to go ahead with the exhumations and reburials.
“The involvement of the President gives us a positive indication that the process should kick off as soon as possible.”
Nare said the NPRC would work with stakeholders such as the ministry of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage, National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, relevant government departments and non-governmental organisations.
However, Nare’s process did not get consensus and legitimacy as it was initiated, sponsored and controlled by the government.
He tried hard to break free, but was shackled and immobilised by the regime whose leaders are clearly determined to die in power without responsibility and accountability for their crimes spanning generations.
Not only Zapu leaders and its supporters were victims, but nearly all opposition parties and ordinary Zimbabweans from all walks of life have borne the brunt of Zanu PF’s colonial-style brutality and repression.
Human rights violations are continuing. Local human rights lawyer Dr Siphosami Malunga at the time said while it was commendable people were trying to resolve the issue, the problem was that the process was deeply flawed and would inherently produce a flawed outcome.
He said exhumations could not just be done casually without the necessary knowledge, expertise and capacity needed to ensure transparency, accountability and legitimacy.
Malunga has written the most comprehensive work on human rights and legal issues around Gukurahundi in his PhD thesis titled “Five brigade atrocities in Zimbabwe: categorising international crimes and evaluating the criminal liability of perpetrators”.
Some civil society activists actually went to court to try to stop the exhumations and reburials even though they failed as the f ight intensified. While Nare tried hard to resolve Gukurahundi, his mission was eventually thwarted and his dream deferred.
Robala ka khotso ntate Nare (Rest in Peace Justice Nare).
— Additional reporting by The NewsHawks Editorial.
