The Zimbabwean Experience of Transitional Justice perhaps as difficult as it seems. Here, the South African experience, with all its faults, has made us all take a breath and realize that we can deal with very broad problems of accountability. Rather than accept impunity, South Africa opted for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to guide its transition to democracy, and then has consolidated this by enacting a broad range of laws governing human rights observance. The TRC was not a panacea, however, and many problems still remain in resolving the history of racialized capitalism that is South Africa. In contrast to the partial accountability of the TRC, Zimbabwe is plagued by impunity rather than accountability – a world record for it, as I have commented else­where.2 In the period from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in 1980, and in all sub­ sequent decades up to the immediate present, Zimbabwe has had epidemic out­ breaks of organized violence and torture. These are invariably followed by planned forgetting and silence, underpinned by the weight of the law. Today Zim­babwe looks a skeleton of itself in regard to the explicit observance of the rule of law, with the courts and judges seriously compromised, the police in contempt of the courts and declaring partisan adherence to a political party, violence being routinely reported, and serious allegations being made of human rights violations.3 These are common facts now, but they are also not uncommon in Zimbabwe’s past. The particular configuration of abuses and violations may differ over the decades but the cycle continues, almost on prescription: gross human rights violations during a period of organized violence (war, civil war, insurrection, etc.), immediately followed by a formal impunity, and keep repeating every ten years or so. This is the prescription for how we Zimbabweans solve our political disputes. There is an uncommon sadness that we learn so little, it seems. Perhaps it is that Zimbabwe is ill, as many contemporary commentators have put it and as many Zimbabwean traditionalists have also suggested. Indeed, for the masvikiro (spirit mediums) of Zimbabwe, the country is plagued by the ghosts of the dead, unburied.4 Certainly the walking wounded would give this view considerable support, though few Western scientists might easily accept this connection. The walking wounded, however, give this view unqualified support and respect. Thus, Zimbabwe requires explanation in both cultural and biological 2  A. P. Reeler, ‘Can you have a reparations policy without justice?’, Legal Forum (2000), 12: 202–9. 3  See the reports of the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, available at <www.hrforumzim. org>. 4  See M. Mupinda ‘Loss and grief among the Shona: The meaning of disappearances’, Legal Forum (1995), 9: 41–9. International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe 31