Zimbabwean soldiers allegedly raped 17 women and brutally assaulted many others on sensitive organs during the state crackdown on protests against a 150 % fuel price increase last month. Government has denied the claims of the women, who are currently in NGO safe houses, citing that only one of them has made a police report. Legendary writer and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga has weighed in on the side of the alleged victims, while opening up on her own experience.

Dangarembga has opened up on being a rape victim, as she challenged President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s denial of rape allegations against members of the security forces. The feminist firebrand considers her unreported experience of sexual abuse in 2004 as having emboldened her resolve to be a socially relevant filmmaker.

Bringing attention to her experience as an example of the trauma and repression rape victims struggle with, Dangarembga described as “callous” President Mnangagwa’s dismissal of claims that soldiers raped women during the crackdown on protesters last month. Mnangagwa dismisses the alleged rape victims who took refuge in NGO safe houses as stage-managed pawns in political score-settling.

“Am beyond shocked by the denial of rape by President Mnangagwa. ZRP have publicly said it can take 8-10 years for a rape victim to come forward. In my case I only faced it after 12 years, and still don’t know where or how to report. The callousness exhibited here is mindblowing,” Dangarembga tweeted.

During a recent France 24 interview, Mnangagwa denied that the army raped and killed civilians in extra-judicial retaliation to the January protests against the increase in fuel prices. “We have, both through print, media, radio, and TV, appealed to those victims to come forward and report to the nearest police station. If you’re not comfortable to report to the nearest police station you go to the nearest church and report the abuse you underwent. There’s only one single case that has come up,” Mnangagwa claimed.

In an exclusive interview with This Is Africa, Dangarembga said Mnangagwa’s narrative is conveniently one-sided. “My understanding is that rapes did occur during the crackdown,” insisted the author, whose feminist bildungsroman, Nervous Conditions was named one of the 100 greatest books of all time by BBC in 2018.

“Government has produced a few NGOs, including Musasa Project and the Adult Rape Clinic, who have supported the government position that rape did not happen. There are many NGOs working in the area, for example, Zimbabwe Project and Counselling Services, to name just two, that tell a different story,” she said.

State media has challenged NGOs providing medical and counselling services for the alleged victims to also help them report to the police. Government insists that the women are being paraded to give Zimbabwe a bad rap and justify the imposition of sanctions. Subregional bloc SADC has rubberstamped the government’s denial of responsibility in the crackdown that allegedly left 12 people dead. One of the alleged rape victims who anonymously spoke to Newsday cited fear of reprisal as her reason for not reporting to the police.

This is not the first time Mnangagwa has cited the absence of police reports to absolve the state apparatus of violence against civilians. Last year, during a largely successful international PR crusade, the president used the same reason to show The Economist that there was no political violence in 2008 elections.

“It was fair, very fair. Where is the evidence for violence? Not a single case was taken to the police,” Mnangagwa argued. NGO and private media estimates that more than 270 suspected opposition supporters were killed in 2008 as Mnangagwa’s party was smarting from its first electoral defeat.

“The Zimbabwe Republic Police has released information in the public domain concerning crimes, including rape, whose investigation is not being facilitated. The crucial question is why does the partisan guerrilla government, as exemplified in a recent
interview for French media by Mr Mnangagwa, ignore all these sources and
only point to those that corroborate their stance?” Dangarembga queried.

She also gave a long-run perspective of rape as a political control mechanism in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. “Rape has been a tool of intimidation, coercion and establishment of dominance through practising violence on women’s bodies since the liberation struggle.

“It has never been dealt with in the history of Zimbabwe.  Those who tried to engage with the issue of rape by state agents have often been silenced or
marginalised. An example of someone who was silenced and marginalised in this way is late poet Freedom Nyamubaya,” she said.

Nyamubaya was a Second Chimurenga veteran and author whose efforts to use her platform to tell the story of women, like herself, who were raped during the liberation struggle was not entertain by gatekeepers of the national narrative during the Robert Mugabe adminstration. Accounts that women in Matebeleland and Midlands were raped by soldiers during Gukurahundi are yet to be dealt with by the successive Mugabe and Mnangagwa administrations.

“My own experience occurred in 2004.  But I was not able to engage with it for a number of reasons, including the circumstance of the abuse.  I do think, though,
that this was a subconscious driver for my engagement with sexual
violence against women in my work as a socially relevant filmmaker,” Dangarembga told This Is Africa.

Dangarembga’s artistic confrontation of the structures of abuse, however, predates her experience of rape, starting with her disgruntlement with the gendered social programming of her siblings when she was a child. “My identifying as a feminist when I was in my twenties just and a student at the University of Zimbabwe, just after Zimbabwe’s independence, was important for me as it exposed me to feminist discourse.

“This is how I learnt to understand the systematic nature of patriarchal oppression in which violence against women is a strategy of silencing, indeed the violence visited upon those who are not white male heterosexuals in so many ways.  I began to see this happening during the early 2000s as Zanu-PF starts losing support,” she said.

The accomplished filmmaker described the Zanu-PF government’s illiberal chokehold on media institutions as a Nazi-inspired form of Gleichschaltung that sustains a culture of silence. “Government controls all media in the country, except some social media and other digital platforms.  The internet outage that took place in January this year reflected the government’s attempt to introduce Gleichschaltung on internet news as well. Gleichschaltung was the Nazi strategy of ensuring that all media presented the same narrative,” Dangarembga said.

It is this information blackout which propelled her towards the direction of film. She, however, worries that the “partisan guerrilla government” has also captured the creative industries, as evidenced by a resource war favouring establishment narratives in the film sector.

“People like myself, who work to speak truth to power, often find ourselves sidelined and unable to tell the stories that we see need to be told,” Dangarembga said, noting the importance of critical and commercial support for artists who seek to dismantle the structures of abuse.”As it is, young women will see the way that potential role models like myself are sidelined and will decide that it is not a good idea to follow in my footsteps,” she said.

Dangarembga recently gave a keynote address at Berlinale Africahub Talk, themed Inclusive Network Building: African Women. She is set to curate the African Book Festival in Berlin from 4 to 7 April this year.

Originally appeared in This Is Africa