SW Radio Africa news - The Independent Voice of Zimbabwe
Former ZIPRA combatants say ZANU PF should return war records that it seized during the Gukurahundi period to enable the true story of the liberation struggle to be told. The ex-fighters say these records are crucial to correcting the distortions about ZAPU’s contributions and the politics of the liberation struggle as a whole.“It’s the whole history of ZIPRA. These were all the records of our operations from 1963 until independence 1980,” ZAPU leader Dumiso Dabengwa told SW Radio Africa’s Big Picture programme.“Everyone who was in ZIPRA had a file with details such as their photograph, their relatives and places of origin. Even little children who were in our refugee camps had files.“We catalogued deaths, those who got captured by the enemy and the circumstances of their capture but all that is gone and ZANU PF won’t say where these are,” Dabengwa added. Dabengwa said ZIPRA was already compiling details and accounts of ZAPU’s role in the struggle, their efforts were being hampered by lack of resources.“The Mafela Trust is handling the project and we are trying to reach out as much as we can to those who took part in the war to give us their accounts.“Once this is done we are hoping that a historian will help us to write a true account of our country’s liberation history,” Dabengwa added.