Understanding Gukurahundi Memories: How Childhood Survivors Pass Their Stories Across Generations

What is it about?

This chapter explores how survivors remember and speak about Gukurahundi, a period of state-led violence in Zimbabwe during the 1980s that impacted communities in the Matabelelands' and Midlands provinces. Many survivors were children at the time, and their experiences have been overlooked in both historical research and national conversations about justice and healing. As adults today, they live with memories of violence, loss, and silence that continue to shape their identities and families. Based on oral history interviews with 30 participants living in Zimbabwe, South Africa and other parts of the Diaspora, this study shows that memory is not just personal. It travels across time, place, within families, and over generations. Many of those who were children during Gukurahundi do not fit neatly into typical academic categories that label survivors as either a “first” or “second” generation. Instead, this chapter proposes the idea of a “1.5 generation” : people old enough to have directly experienced trauma, but young enough to have relied on adults for survival and storytelling. Recognising this “1.5 generation” helps us better understand how the trauma and silence of Gukurahundi continues to affect communities today. Their memories challenge the belief that the violence belongs only to the past. The chapter argues that the way these memories are carried within families and across borders must be taken seriously in any national efforts toward reconciliation, acknowledgement, and human rights repair. Ultimately, this work honours a generation whose role in shaping post-conflict memory and justice is vital yet too often ignored.

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Photo by Lesly Derksen on Unsplash

Photo by Lesly Derksen on Unsplash

Why is it important?

• Fills a major gap in scholarship by centering childhood survivors as active carriers of memory 
• Introduces the concept of the “1.5 generation,” expanding how scholars understand trauma transmission
 • Offers evidence-based insights valuable to transitional justice, reconciliation policy, and community healing
 • Records testimonies that are still at risk of silencing or erasure
 • Challenges assumptions that Gukurahundi effects are confined to history : demonstrating ongoing social and psychological consequences
 • Relevant beyond Zimbabwe: contributes to global research on memory after state violence (e.g., Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, Apartheid) Why now: As Zimbabwe reopens national debate on Gukurahundi, this research gives voice to those who must not be left out of policy-making and reparative processes.

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