| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Shari Eppel Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Having written this report, what is the next step in the evolution of your career as a human rights worker in Zimbabwe?
I felt so strongly the need, at the end of this process, to move from documentation to intervention, to healing. That was always the intention of this report. The title itself says, "breaking the silence, building through peace." The idea was that we should not just tell the truth, but have some strategy for doing something for those who had been brave enough to come forward and tell the truth, that there should be some return to the communities that had suffered so much. So that was the next step for me, to see how I could become involved in rebuilding, in rehabilitation.
Were you making this up as you went along, so to speak, based on the situation in Zimbabwe? What you were encountering, or were you being exposed to an international, a global community of human rights workers? How did your education evolve, so to speak?
Writing the report was a learning process, because that was a secret process, if you like, and I didn't have support. But once I started to look into the field of rehabilitation, there was support, and there are other rehabilitation programs operating in the region. In fact, our office is the Matebeland office of an organization which also has a Harare office. And so I became the founder-director of the Matebeland chapter of the Amani Trust. There is also a Shonaland chapter of the Amani Trust. But they tend to be very much in the Western psychotherapeutic model, and so that's what we inherited and started out with.
When you say "rehabilitation," you mean as part of the healing process, to help people psychologically -- I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I want to understand this -- to help people psychologically recover from a trauma resulting from systematic terrorism, but which hasn't been acknowledged. Right?
Yes. This is the remarkable thing, that it's not widely enough recognized how long-lasting the consequences of violence are. People always say, "Well, there are cycles of ethnic violence in the world." But people don't look closely enough and don't do enough to rebuild communities where the social fabric has been deliberately destroyed by violence. Governments deliberately do this because they know that a dysfunctional community is a politically weak community. That's why we see so much organized violence in the world. If we want to break these cycles of poverty and victimization and then anger, people rising up and going to war with each other, then we have to deal with this, we have to go right back and look at all the consequences of civil wars.
You make an important point, which is that people tend to, in a way, write off events like those you're describing, just based on things like ethnic rivalries or racial hatred, or whatever. But, in fact, you're saying quite clearly that it's an instrument of government control of a population.
Sure. I think also the problem is that when you have a change of government, as I hope we will have soon in our country, there's often a euphoria and an impulse to look to the future and to feel good about what's happened in the past, even to you, and to say, "Well, let's sweep it under the mat, let's have an amnesty." Impunity for the perpetrators is often a trade-off which has to be made in order to have some peaceful changeover. But it's a devastating thing, in terms of its consequences for the very ordinary victims who have to carry on, and who remain often very poor, very marginalized, and who see the people who tortured them get off scot-free and often remain in power and rich and influential. So it's a very sad message to keep giving throughout history to victims, that they can be victimized and victimized, and one government after another will come in, forgive the previous government, and it's just business as usual. This has consequences for the future.
I think, again, as a psychologist, one can see that because it's what you deal with. People will accept that if you're raped when you're three, perhaps when you're thirty or forty or fifty, that can still be an issue in your life. If you really want to be a functioning adult, maybe you have to go back and deal with that. But I would say you can expand that, and you can talk about that in terms of bigger communities and societies as a whole. It's true for anyone, and that means for communities too. You can't avoid your past, it's with you and it's part of what you are now.
Now, armed with Western theories of healing an individual, you went to work in this environment, and you discovered that the people who had suffered were really asking you for something else. And what was that, and what did you learn from that?
We started off trying to work in the hospital setting, with counseling, with this kind of one-on-one psychotherapeutic intervention. And within a very short space of time, we had the community leaders in a particular community descend on us at the clinic and say, "We hear you're asking people about the violence, and we never thought the day would come when people would ask about this. And we have so many problems. We will buy you lamps, so that you can work night and day to deal with this. But not here in the clinic. Come and speak to us in the community." And so they, if you like, they dragged us out of the clinic and into the community, which is where the community knew healing had to take place.
They then asked you for specific actions with regard to the burial sites of the people who had been victims. What did the people want?
Well, it was interesting, at the community meetings, within a very short space of time, what people started to say to us was, "Look, we've told you of the stories about what happened, but we have very real problems right now. This isn't history. The violence has left problems which we have to deal with right now. And one of the worst problems for us is the presence of mass graves in the village setting. We have mass graves in the school yards. We have mass graves next to where we have our cattle; in our public meeting places. This is very important for us, because we have angry spirits which are linked to the presence of these mass graves, and causing problems."
What did they want you to do, or what did they suggest would help them deal with this problem?
In Matebeland, as in most of Africa, the culture pays a huge amount of attention to ancestral spirits. The ancestral spirits are believed to be the most important factor in controlling community life.
If you don't honor your ancestral spirits, then bad luck will befall you as a family and as the entire community. Things like droughts, illness, floods, crop failure, failure of development, failure to get married, and all sorts of things were being blamed on the presence of thousands of angry ancestral spirits, who were angry because they had not been properly honored and they had not had proper funerals, and they had not had another very important ritual called imboyesal, which is supposed to take place a year after the funeral, and which is the inauguration of the ancestral spirits into the family hierarchy.
The international human rights movement since Argentina, say, in the eighties, has had as one of its components an emphasis on the exhumation of grave sites where atrocities have been committed. And here, the forensic sciences are used to gather evidence to see what was done, how was it done, and whether a judicial proceeding can use this evidence to right a wrong. But what you're suggesting is this process has an entirely different use, which is related to an emotional healing, which you go on to suggest must be a component of a development strategy for rebuilding. Talk a little about that, and this insight that you acquired from working with this environment.
Yes. That was the situation we were in, where we've gone in thinking we were going to be dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, and find ourselves confronted with a thousand angry spirits. What the community needed was exhumation and decent reburial of the dead, identification and reburial.
Traditionally, men will be buried next to their cattle and women will be buried next to their fields, and this is what people wanted. So it became exhumations and a completely community-driven healing process, where the primary reason for us to exhume was to heal the dead, what I call drying the tears of the dead, in order to transform the lives of the living. In order to bring peace to the living, we had to first bring peace to the dead. This is the process that we've been involved in.
Was the government conscious ... obviously, if they've harmed people, they've killed them, and they commit these atrocities, they know what they're doing. But were they also aware of this cultural/spiritual impact of what they were doing as part of their campaign of terrorizing people?
Absolutely. There was nothing accidental about that. There was deliberate violation of burial rituals, deliberate desecration of grave sites, which, coming from [people of] those same cultures, was no accident. But you see this all over the world, a denial of the dead. To deny that the people were murdered is to deny they ever lived. It's a kind of a complete absence of these people from history, if the government has its way. Of course, this is a massive task; healing is returning the truth. Because in our region, people have been told these massacres never happened, people weren't killed, only dissidents were killed, innocent people weren't killed. But, of course, the bones restore the truth, the bones tell the truth back, and this restores self-esteem and dignity to the dead, which is what was desperately needed.
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