The Wiriyamu Massacre by Mustafah Dhada

Author:Mustafah Dhada [Dhada, Mustafah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Africa, South, General, Political Science, Genocide & War Crimes, Imperialism, Historiography, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
ISBN: 9781350120006
Google: 6JvGDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-02-20T22:31:43+00:00

3

Gathering and Surveying the Evidence

Three authors govern this third group of three interviews, which is on evidence gathering and aerial surveillance of the killing fields. Domingo Kansande leads off this group with his encounters with survivors on the day of the massacre as he heads from Tete to visit his family south of the triangle. His presence of mind and sense of the historical moment kick in, giving birth to Wiriyamu as a fact-based narrative just as Wiriyamu faces the three-day manhunt for survivors. While Berenguer heads off to Tete to brief himself on the events, Kansande pens the first list of the dead, which he subsequently offers to Padre Ferrão upon his return to Tete days later. Kansande returns to the triangle repeatedly to help Padre Ferrão cross-check the data collected, for which he pays the ultimate price: torture at the hands of the secret police. Kansande ends his recollections by adding he never returned to his ancestral village M’Chenga after that, electing to settle in Changara, near Berenguer’s mission complex.

Padre Ferrão’s testimony neatly expands on Kansande’s text on data collection. It begins with a brief personal and professional introduction before launching into Chaworha survivors and their stories collected for the report he compiles with Kansande’s help. The remainder of the testimony is split among Kansande’s torture; Mixone’s protection and escape to Frelimo as an eyewitness; and the coercion the secret police and colonial administrators exercised on him in the face of journalists seeking his transparent input in the affair.

Irmã Lúcia’s narrative, the third in this group of testimonies, is unique among eyewitness accounts, none of which gives us a visual overview of the killing fields. Her account does, describing what she saw from the air, during a visit she paid soon after Operation Marosca: a visit that subsequently leads the army to send its men to clean up the site. The remainder of her testimony recollects her first encounter with Mixone, her military interrogation, and her efforts to avoid speaking to journalists.

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