One of my earliest memories is of violence and death. It happened in Harare in 1984 when I was about seven years old. I was supposed to meet a friend to play at a dump site together. He got there before me and started playing with what turned out to be a hand grenade. The bomb exploded in his hands. He died. I was lucky to survive but I have no doubt that the incident shaped who I was to become.<\/p>\n
The device, from my understanding now, had been left by either Rhodesian soldiers or guerrilla fighters during the war of liberation which raged between 1966 and 1979. Death from grenades and landmines was commonplace in Zimbabwe during and after the struggle against colonial rule.<\/p>\n
My next exposure to serious violence came when I joined the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) as a constable in 1998. I was trained by former liberation war fighters and soldiers whom we suspected had been redeployed from the notorious \u201c5th Brigade\u201d. This army unit was responsible for the murder of thousands of Ndebele speaking people and supporters of the Zimbabwe African People\u2019s Union in the 1980s. I joined the police partly due to the lack of employment opportunities and the influence from my stepfather who was a police sergeant.<\/p>\n
The police trainers would subject recruits like me to various forms of torture, including water boarding and battering the soles of our feet with rifle butts and sticks. There were other \u201cendurance exercises\u201d that went way over the top. For example, recruits would be ordered to lie down and forced to roll over repeatedly until we were dizzy and throwing up. Apparently, this was done to strengthen us \u2013 both physically and mentally \u2013 and to get rid of \u201ccivilian weaknesses\u201d, as one trainer put it. I spent most of my post probation period with the Police Protection Unit \u2013 the agency responsible for the protection of prominent state ministers, judges and other VIPs.<\/p>\n
But I only really began to realise the extent of the systemic violence in my home country when I left Zimbabwe and started looking up texts, documentaries and meeting surviving victims of atrocities. In the last 50 years, five main conflicts have taken place in Zimbabwe. The liberation war (1966-1979), political violence (1980-present day) and the Matabeleland democides (1981-1987) \u2013 this is also known as Gukurahundi which is a Shona word meaning \u201cearly rain that washes the spring chaff\u201d.<\/p>\n
Finally there were the violent farm invasions and the Marange diamond massacre. Hundreds of thousands of people who were caught up in these conflicts have been killed and gone missing \u2013 their deaths covered up and brushed under the carpet by the state.<\/p>\n
By 2005 I had joined the police in the UK. But despite my new life I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about how, when and where people were being kidnapped, killed and concealed back home. This had a profound influence on what I chose to do with the next chapter of my life in academia and research. I enrolled for a degree in Forensics and Criminology, pursued a master\u2019s degree in Crime Scene Investigation and then a PhD in Forensic Archaeology.<\/p>\n
My research has brought me full circle and taken me back to those dangerous playgrounds which I drifted in and out of as a child. I wanted to use my skills as a forensic investigator to find the secret mass graves, the clandestine burial spots. I wanted to know where \u201cthe missing\u201d were being hidden. I realised that no systematic forensic investigation of that kind had ever been undertaken.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of my earliest memories is of violence and death. It happened in Harare in 1984 when I was about seven years old. I was supposed to meet a friend to play at a dump site together. He got there before me and started playing with what turned out to be a hand grenade. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":19584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9],"tags":[733],"class_list":{"0":"post-27962","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-all-news","8":"category-miscellaneous","9":"tag-miscellaneous"},"yoast_head":"\n