ALICE: a former organizer, cross-border trader and domestic worker, aged 42, interviewed in a safe house.
In winter it gets dark early. It was some time after six p.m. and it was dark. Three cars full up with people drove up to my house. This was the 7th of June, 2008. When I heard the sound of cars, I looked through the curtain and saw that it was bad. There was nowhere to run. They were wearing army uniforms, not the militia uniforms of the Green Bombers8 but camouflage, the Zimbabwean army uniform, and they were armed with guns. They all got out of the cars. Some jumped over my gate. They found my stepson and started beating him, because he could not get the door of my bedroom open. He was trying to insert the key but I holding the key on my side. When I realized that they were beating him, I came out. I said, Please don’t beat up my son. He has done nothing wrong. I am the problem because I am a member of MDC. They said, Are you showing off with your MDC?
They went into my bedroom and started searching. They found MDC posters and flyers and T-shirts. They told me to carry all the stuff out of the house. They left my stepson and took me in their open truck, a cream Mitsubishi. I was sitting in the back, in the middle, and they were surrounding me, sitting on the sides. They were all beating me, kicking me and hitting me with sticks and fists. Some were saying that they wanted to throw me into the dam. Another car stopped and someone inside said, Did you find her? and they said, Yes, we did.
They wanted me to tell them where the MDC MPs lived, the MDC youths’ houses, the councillor’s house. That’s why they were beating me up—because I was refusing to tell them. They were saying, So you are be-ing like Jesus, who died for others? And now are you going to die for those people? I said, No. Whoever showed you my house should have shown you all the other houses. They said I was rude. They beat me up so badly. After that they said, Take off your clothes.
When I removed my clothes, just before we got to the Methodist church, they stopped the car in the dark and there they raped me. There were many soldiers. I don’t know how many raped me. I saw the first eight men who raped me but then I became unconscious.
I think they threw water on me because I became conscious just before we got to the police station. They said, Put on your clothes. I refused. They said, You don’t listen. In the end, I put on my clothes. When we got there, they said, Get off and carry your stuff. I got off the back of the truck but I couldn’t even walk. I fell down and they said Get up and I did.
Inside, when they got behind the counter in the police station, they threw a bullet at me and said Kiss it and I did, and they said, That bullet is yours.
(Annie Holmes and Peter Ortner edited Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives (McSweeney’s, 2010), the fifth volume in the Voice of Witness Series. Thanks to Voice of Witness for sharing the excerpts in this series.)