Haunted by the 1980s massacres, she can't fully explain the atrocities since 2000, writes Peta Thornycroft.
Joice Mujuru can’t explain, nor does she fully understand, why she remained silent and sometimes did not even know when people were being killed by her colleagues in the government she served for 34 years.
But she has certainly found her voice since Robert Mugabe, 92, sacked her two years ago and she formed a new political party, People First. Now she is trekking around the country, explaining herself and lamenting the past.
Mujuru, 61, who served as Robert Mugabe’s deputy for more then 10 years, held hands at a rally recently with her former political opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, 64, president of the main opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and apologised for some of the worst political violence since 2000.
She says now that Tsvangirai made a “mistake” by going into the South African-facilitated unity government with Mugabe in 2009 after his party narrowly won elections the previous year.
Mujuru accuses her former allies of murder, corruption and massive deficits in the Zimbabwe state which is bankrupt and largely hungry.
She points her finger at “power-mad” Robert Mugabe, the man she saw as a father figure after he plucked her from returning guerrillas in 1979 and made her his youngest cabinet minister at 25.
But in the early 1980s Joice Mujuru wasn’t the only one who remained silent - or didn’t know - when thousands of opposition supporters were massacred in Matabeleland. Several Western embassies also turned a blind eye to that horror in deep rural areas.
The ANC in Lusaka also didn’t say much about its former allies being persecuted at that time. When Mujuru was last interviewed in her official, old colonial office by Independent Newspapers in 2013, she was jovial, confident, and seemed adjusted to losing her powerful husband, the former army chief Solomon Mujuru, who many, including herself, believe was murdered in 2011 on the farm he took from a white farmer 10 years earlier. She had support from nine out of 10 provinces to ensure she was re-elected as vice-president at the Zanu-PF congress the following year.
Six months later, wild-eyed Grace Mugabe was shrieking into a loudhailer around the country that Joice Mujuru, a lifetime pillar of the Salvation Army, was a whore who did black magic and was plotting to kill Robert Mugabe.
Mujuru was then expelled from the party she had joined as a school-leaver by crossing the border to fight against white-ruled Rhodesia. She lives in the large, slightly dilapidated house in the posh Chisipite suburb she bought after she became vice-president in 2004 as she was never offered an official residence. “You are talking to me as somebody who has grown gradually in Zanu-PF,” she said in the heavily-draped reception room she uses as her office.
“You train, you leave the fighting group (during the war), you get into government, and you are still young.
“You are being inducted into all these things, and you are trying to improve yourself and participate and equate with the rest of the (well-educated) team in Zanu-PF.
“I did not have a good education and I was torn between mothering children, educating myself and being a worker and a politician, and some things went missing.”
She recalls government failures, for example when “socialist” Zimbabwe launched co-operatives for the rural poor.
As minister of community development, she visited women raising chickens in a co-op.
“It failed dismally.
“The women had no refrigeration to freeze the chickens when they were slaughtered and donated thousands of them to the army, for which they got nothing.
“That (sort of thing) ripped my heart as it was so disorganised.”
But she told herself: “This is a new government of a black nation and I have to try and do something that will identify this party (Zanu-PF) that has fought for the liberation of these people.”
She said Robert Mugabe’s cabinet was not a debating society. “He was very secretive, and security matters were never on the agenda.
“That was left for weekly meetings of an informal committee, the Joint Operation Command, made up of mostly wealthy security chiefs.
As the years went by, Mugabe would not discuss the succession issue. “You would be accused of being a traitor if there was even any hint about that subject,” she said. Mujuru said she had just begun to read the Legal Resources Foundation and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace report about the 1980s massacres in Matabeleland.
“I read the first template (chapter) and then I could not sleep,” she said.
Not so easy to understand is her lack of memory of post-2000 political violence.
There is overwhelming evidence that most of it was planned by Zanu-PF seniors and executed by their hirelings.
The atrocities were intensively reported locally by privately-owned newspapers and the foreign press.
But vice-president Mujuru received weekly security briefings which she still cannot disclose. It’s safe to guess, however, that she’d have been told that the MDC, which emerged in late 1999 from the urban working class, was foreign-sponsored and wanted to restore colonial rule and effect regime change’.
“Zimbabwe will never be a colony again,” Mugabe wailed around the world.
“I can’t think of a definite period when I knew it was all going wrong,” she said.
“But in 1996, I said to him (Mugabe) at a rally, that I am leaving politics. “I sang a song at that moment saying goodbye to the people.
“He said to me you can’t leave us. We still have a lot to accomplish’.”
She was then made telecommunications minister and Mugabe and the cabinet ordered her to prevent the emergence of mobile phones in Zimbabwe, which saw years of court cases that the government finally lost.
But it is the violence which haunts her.
“I very much regret this past violence.
“That is why we have our party to try to show we can do politics and do peace.
“Look what happened in South Africa. They told their story of it (the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) and it stopped.
“It will not come out again because people will know about it.”
Her late husband was popular across Zimbabwe as the former commander of the guerrillas during the war who also stood up to Mugabe.
Some media speculated he was worth $9 billion (R127bn) when he died. Joice said the government took the two farms her husband bought about 90km north-east of Harare after independence.
“We had the title deeds for those farms,” she said.
He bought a third farm 30km south of Harare, but the house on it burnt down mysteriously last year. And there is the farm Solomon Mujuru took from Guy Watson-Smith in 2001, who has a high court judgement against the estate for more more than $1m.
The farmland has legally belonged to the state since 2005 when all seized farms were nationalised.
“People will be surprised when they see my husband’s estate, because there is so little in it,” Mujuru said.
She claims she is not being paid her state pension, and has not paid her workers on the farm where her husband died since March.
And she is a major tobacco and chicken farmer in Zimbabwe.
No one, including political analysts, is sure how far Mujuru can move in Zimbabwe’s fractious political happenchance before elections in 2018, or if Mugabe dies, or if he is persuaded to retire as a condition for an international loan to rescue the economy.
Most believe her best opportunity would be with Tsvangirai in a broad democratic front, as his deputy.
Regina Mhundwa, 45, a teacher, said she and many colleagues believe Joice has been with Zanu-PF since 1980 and is part of the rot.
“We believe she is only speaking about Zanu-PF and Mugabe now because she was sacked.
“But I would vote for her if she comes together with other opposition candidates in a coalition government because there will be checks and balances.”
A Harare bank clerk, Evans Chitura, 37, said he was watching closely: “I think Joice Mujuru will become president, because Morgan Tsvangirai is not feeling well, and now that the opposition groups are fighting from the same side, she is next in line to get the post.
“But the problem is, will she be able to change from the Zanu-PF ideas that are so deeply embedded in her?” Phineas Kondo, MDC councillor in Chitungwisa, a small dormitory town adjacent to Harare, said he could see Mujuru becoming national vice-president to Tsvangirai if a coalition of opposition parties fights the next election and beats Zanu-PF.
“She knows all the mistakes they made and will be able to rectify them.
“I like her for joining hands with the opposition and for taking on Zanu-PF and Mugabe.”
Independent Foreign Service