Nhlanganiso Beseniya Sithole stared at the barrel of the gun when it was his turn to be killed - and decided not to die.
Instead of closing his eyes and accepting his fate like two male relatives killed by the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade that day in February 1983, he fought for his life.
"They clearly told us that they kill, and accused us of being dissidents, one by one," said Sithole. "They shot one of us in the head and in no time the other two were done with and it was my turn. One soldier took aim at me but before he could shoot I charged at him and he failed to get my head. Instead, he shot my arms that covered my head.
"I ran around the homestead and they followed but failed to aim, and I fled. They kept shooting until I disappeared into the bush."
Sithole's story is one of many detailing the Gukurahundi, a series of massacres of civilians by a unit of the Zimbabwe National Army between 1983 and 1987. The victims were predominantly in Ndebele- and Kalanga-speaking communities that formed the base of Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (Zapu).
According to the soldiers, a "dissident" was anyone who supported Zapu or anyone who fought during the liberation war under Zapu's military wing, the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (Zipra).
The army unit that carried out the massacres, led by the current minister of lands, agriculture and rural resettlement, Perence Shiri, reported directly to then prime minister Robert Mugabe. An estimated 20,000 people were killed during massacres in Matabeleland that Mugabe has dismissed as "a moment of madness".
Now, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was state security minister at the time, has yielded to pressure to address the Gukurahundi, which is largely blamed for the underdevelopment of the Midlands and Matabeleland provinces.
Since coming into power through a coup in November 2017, Mnangagwa has been attacked by the opposition and activists for his role in the Gukurahundi. But his spokesperson, George Charamba, said Mnangagwa was not the decision-maker.
"You cannot suddenly make the junior much more accountable than the person who was in overall charge," he said.
In an interview in March last year at his home, Mugabe said Mnangagwa and David "Dan" Stannard, a one-time spy boss, were the key players in the Gukurahundi.
Bowing to pressure last week, Mnangagwa said discussions about the matter should be encouraged. "I would like to see people debating the subject of Gukurahundi in newspapers, on television and other platforms," he told the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.
Next month, the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission will hear stories like Sithole's at hearings in the affected region."We will visit various communities in order to identify victims and those who were affected by Gukurahundi," said the commission chair, retired justice Sello Nare.Activists fear the hearings will not adequately address the Gukurahundi because two critical reports researched at the height of the massacres have not been located, despite being government records. That leaves the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace report as the only authoritative document publicly available."It's important to release the findings of these two reports. Without them a lot of questions will go unanswered or [answers will be] deliberately falsified," said Mbuso Fuzwayo, secretary-general of the pressure group Ibhetshu Likazulu.As justice minister in 2000, Mnangagwa said the government could not locate the two missing reports after the Legal Resources Foundation and Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights filed a supreme court application for access to them...