The time is exactly 10:47 hrs and the day is 15 May 2020, exactly five years ago to the day.
On this serene Friday morning and under a cloudless blue sky, an ambulance screeches to an agonizing halt outside Parktown Hospital near Waterfalls, some 15 kilometers south of Harare.
A visibly traumatized female patient, face contorted and hair dishevelled, is being helped out.
With her face partially covered, the ambulance crew stretcher her out at breathtaking speed into the infirmary to avoid the desperate news-hounds jostling for the prized photograph of this ghost-like figure visibly grimacing in pain.
It is clear the unfortunate woman is more desperate than the press corps. While the latter are stampeding for a simple scoop and a headline, the former is barely clinging to dear life!
It turned out the unfortunate woman at the mercy of the clicking cameras was Hon. Joanah Mamombe, the MP for Harare West.
She had just had further scans and examinations done by a team of doctors in the city and was now being detained at this hospital just outside the capital for treatment and close monitoring following abduction and torture. .
But the scary sight that had been rushed into hospital under our startled sight was starkly different from the affable and bubbly legislator that our mortal eyes are accustomed to.
On this day Joanah was haggard and looked like an apparition—-which was understandable given what she and her two colleagues had gone through in the preceding 24 hours.
Already inside the Parktown hospital and wailing in agony were two other dedicated warriors for change, Joannah’s colleagues Cecilia Chimbiri and Netsai Marova.
Watching brutalised, helpless women loudly crying for help always touches the very strings of any normal human heart.
Ten minutes later, with tears in my eyes —and in my capacity as a party spokesperson— I addressed the press outside Parkview Hospital.
I had no option but to cry because I had just had a scary, unnerving sight of three defenceless female victims of abduction and torture wailing in agony.
A few days earlier, these three brave cadres had been abducted from right inside Harare Central police station, driven to an unknown forest inside a fittingly black Datsun Wish vehicle where they were sexually abused, tortured and later dumped some 70 kilometers away.
To this day, theirs remains a horrific tale of mystery regarding how they were taken from right inside a police station, driven to a forest and taken into a pit where the solemn and despicable script of their predicament began.
The three brave ladies were grossly abused in those pits by Emmerson Mnangagwa’s merchants of terror. Their anal regions were brutally pierced by gun bayonets while they were fed with their own ghoulish faecal diet.
Yes, the regime’s securocrats made them eat each others’ faeces and to drink each others’ urine.
From the pits where many horrible and despicable things were done to them, they could not even remember much else.
All they remembered was that after what seemed like eternity—and now with their clothes torn—they were dumped in the deathly quiet of the morning at some rural growth point where a sympathizer picked them up.
The place turned out to be the appropriately named Muchapondwa shopping centre in Musana in Bindura South, Mashonaland Central province, some 70 kilometers away from the capital.
Muchapondwa is a Shona word which literally means “you shall be killed.”
This is the place where the three brave female cadres were found dumped and left for dead by the regime’s merchants of death.
Muchapondwa—the place whose name has a deathly ring to it.
The route the abductors and their abductees used to Muchapondwa will never be known, as the Devil’s itinerary is always a closely guarded secret!
We shall never know whether the three brave cadres were taken along the Shamva road, past Denda shops after turning left at Chabwino, via Mupandira and Nyava shopping centres before arriving at Muchapondwa.
We shall never know whether these peddlers of violence chose to go via Mazowe road to Bindura before turning right past Trojan Mine, Manhenga, and then Chiveso before dumping their brutalized human cargo at Muchapondwa.
Or whether these merchants of darkness used the more direct route via my beloved Domboshava, past my late mother Pelagia Makumbe’s homestead at Makumbe village, negotiating those dangerous and nervy curves at Cheza before crossing the dry Nyaure river to bundle out their unwilling passengers at Muchapondwa.
Whichever of these three routes they used, what is certain is that it was a route to national shame.
It remains an indictment against this illegitimate regime that it could allow State-paid merchants of violence to abuse defenceless women, including a Member of Parliament, a mere four days after Mothers’ Day; that day when the chastity of feminine power is celebrated worldwide.
How could any sane person choose to abuse and indignify women, including a revered Member of Parliament, barely 96 hours after the world had celebrated the chastity of women?
Nothing beats this barbarism, which is well beneath the sacred value of humanity— ubuntu.
To this day, the police owe this nation an explanation as to how these women were taken out of their custody. The police spokesperson Paul Nyathi had confirmed to a local daily that they had these three women in their custody.
Hours later, the ZRP tweeted that the women were not in their custody.
Someone must tell us what happened between the time of confirmation and the time of denial.
Who could have the temerity to abduct people from right inside a police station, unless it was the police themselves who handed over these women to a more insidious State security unit?
I am well aware that the police can hand you over to more ruthless goons. Some 18 years ago, I was abducted, brutally assaulted and tortured together with several other party colleagues inside the infamous room 93 in the basement of the Law and Order section at Harare Central police station.
Yes, that misnamed section where neither law nor order prevails!
Room 93 in the basement of Harare Central Police station had visible blood stains on its walls—probably a trick to unsettle you psychologically.
I know to this day that the guys who brutalized us for three continuous days without food and water inside this dingy room were definitely not police.
But when the police hand you over and allow you to be taken out of their custody, as might happened to the three brave female cadres, it can only be worse.
I have a sneaking feeling the police tweet announcing that the three were no longer in their custody was a feeble attempt to absolve themselves by letting the world know that the “prisoners” were now being held by a separate, more callous unit of the State.
I still have the hunch that the tweet was a Pontius Pilate gesture by the police to wash their hands and absolve themselves from what was to come.
In case something worse happened to the three women, as it certainly did, the police might have been absolving themselves of any responsibility,
Yet ED can’t absolve himself. It’s his government and he is the Commander-In-Chief. So he must take responsibility for whatever misfortune befell the hapless victims from any of the country’s security organs.
Listening to the girls’ sordid and horrific tales of abuse and torture is akin to listening to a story of death. Their lives will never be the same again, given the visible trauma and fear that is still palpable in their eyes.
Indeed, something inside them died as a result of that experience.
I still have the same feeling myself after my own traumatic experience as I still can’t stand the sound of banging doors.
Today, the Mnangagwa regime continues to harass, intimidate and arrest innocent civilians, journalists as well as human rights defenders and defendees.
Blessed Dhara Mhlanga was only recently granted bail while many others continue to be needlessly thrown into gaol and denied their Constitutional right to bail.
We must all feel involved. We must have the heart to say if they arrest or brutalise any one of us, then they would have done so to all of us.
Pastor Martin Niemoller, a German Lutheran pastor, had this today about Hitler during the brutal and horrific era of the Third Reich:
“First, they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. They came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
Similarly, Mnangagwa’s merchants of terror could be coming for you tomorrow and by then , there might be no one left to speak for you..
Luke Tamborinyoka is a citizen from Domboshava. He is a qualified journalist and political scientist by profession. You can interact with him through his Facebook page or via the X handle @ luke_tambo.
