why we hadn’t held a ceremony at Chimoio. Well this is how it happened. Mugabe decided that no cleansing was necessary in his Zimbabwe”.6 Whatever the truth about this angry account of Tekere’s meeting with Prime Minister Mugabe, the fact is that the Government of Zimbabwe did not address these deeply significant issues. Gravesites remained unmarked and cleansing ceremonies never took place. Many of the families of liberation war veterans who failed to return home after independence continued the hunt for their missing children for decades. Ironically it was not the government but former ZPRA fighters who made efforts to address the issues of liberation war dead and missing, acting on instructions issued by the late ZPRA Commander, Lookout Masuku, shortly before he died on 6 April 1986. Having been released from detention to a hospital bed Masuku gave instructions concerning commemoration and propitiation of the ZPRA war dead, including proposals for the establishment of shrines. Following his eventual release from detention his close friend and comrade, Dumiso Dabengwa, established the ZPRA War Shrines Committee and later the Mafela Trust (Mafela was Masuku’s nomme de guerre) to carry out the instructions Masuku had left. A research programme was launched “to establish the exact location of the graves of the fallen heroes, areas of origin (homes) and next of kin (so that we can) announce to the entire nation the fate of their sons and daughters who died in the liberation struggle”.7 In August 1990 the first list of 553 ZPRA war dead was published in Parade magazine by the Mafela Trust, and subsequently further lists were published.8 Grave sites were also located in this exercise and sites for the erection of proposed shrines were identified. It was whilst on a visit to one such proposed site at Pupu in Lupane, where a Mwali shrine was located, that Dabengwa was told by the spirit medium of the shrine that: “Mwali (the High God) was angry because the soldiers of the liberation war had still not come to be cleansed of their sins committed during the war. According to the custodian the suffering which rural people had endured since independence was the result of this failure to deal with the legacy of the war.”9 6 Tekere, Edgar, “A Lifetime of Struggle”, SAPES Trust, Harare, 2007, p 89. 7 Brickhill, Jeremy, “Making Peace with the Past: War Victims and the Work of the Mafela Trust”, in Bhebhe, Ngwabi and Ranger, Terence, (Eds) “Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War” Volume One, University of Zimbabwe Publications, Harare, 1995, p 167 8 Over the years the Mafela Trust has identified more than 800 ZPRA war dead and 400 grave sites, identified next of kin and arranged visits to the sites, as well as collecting and collating records of the liberation war including photographs published in SAHA, “ZAPU: Through Zenzo Nkobi’s Lens”, South African History Archive, Braamfontein, (nd) 9 Brickhill, Jeremy, “Making Peace with the Past: War Victims and the Work of the Mafela Trust”, in Bhebhe, Ngwabi and Ranger, Terence, (Eds) “Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War” Volume One, University of Zimbabwe Publications, Harare, 1995, p 173. 12