Matabeleland: A cinematic reflection on love, loss, and the shadows of history

Daily Maverick

04-07-2025

Seven years in the making, Nyasha Kadandara's Matabeleland tells the story of a man striving to exhume and rebury his father who was killed during the Gukurahundi Genocide in Zimbabwe. Other stories — along themes of masculinity, love and the troubles of immigration — emerge as the bigger story plays out.
The protagonist of the story is Chris Nyathi, a Zimbabwean who makes his bread in Botswana by driving freight trucks. On camera, he flips out his cellphone and begins counting his children for the director. When asked for the total number, he struggles, he has never counted with the aim of getting to a total; the number tallies up to 17.
That is not the whole story, though.
Dumi, Nyathi's long-time girlfriend in Botswana, loves him, but would prefer to be his wife instead of being a mere 'girlfriend'. Nyathi says he cannot marry her now because his father was killed and buried improperly, and his affairs have never been in order — he first needs to successfully bury his father.
Nyathi's father was beaten to death by the Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwean army, a unit that reported directly to then prime minister Robert Mugabe. He was one of more than 20,000 people, many of them Ndebele-speaking natives of Matabeleland in southern Zimbabwe, systematically murdered by the brigade from 1983 until 1987 — in what is today called the Gukurahundi Genocide.
Many were shot dead, but not Nyathi's father. Nyathi was 22 years old when he came home from work one day and was told that his father had been killed. He worked for the Matobo National Park, a reserve adjacent the family home.
Shari Eppel, who makes an appearance in the film, says he was beaten to death while handcuffed. Eppel is director of Ukuthula Trust, an organisation that facilitates the exhumation for reburial of the remains of those who were killed during the genocide.
Exhumed
When Julius Mvulo Nyathi was exhumed in 2024, they discovered that the bones of his forearm — the radius and ulna — were broken at the same place on both hands, right where the handcuffs had been secured. And the autopsy report concluded that he was probably beaten with a metal object or rod while attempting to protect his head, until many bones on his body were broken, and until he could no longer resist. And until he was dead.
Kadandara was both the director and the cinematographer of the film. She told Daily Maverick that she fell in love with the camera during her studies at Columbia Journalism School, where she was enrolled in the MS Documentary Specialization in 2014.
There is a warmth in both the images of the characters and those of Matabeleland, the land. The characters seem absolutely relaxed in the glare of the camera, like they are oblivious of its presence. Kadandara said that both Nyathi and Dumi warmed to being filmed from the beginning.
We also see a lot of mopane trees and close-up images of the worms that feast on their leaves. And there are images of the lizards whose home are the crevices of rocks on the Great Dyke Mountain Pass that cuts through Zimbabwe.
'It was very much me filming home; and also wanting to show in little ways the beautiful things that I love about where I come from,' she said.
The filmmaker was born in Bulawayo in 1988, a year after the genocide officially ended — when, on 22 December 1987, Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union and Joshua Nkomo's Zapu signed what they called the Unity Accord and merged to form Zanu-PF, thus ending the killings.
Kadandara — who was raised in Malindela, a suburb of Bulawayo — says she did not know that so many people had been systematically killed in Matabeleland in the years just before she was born.
'You know, I grew up not being taught about it at school, and not being told about it by adults,' Kadandara says.
Atrocities
It was way into adulthood that she learnt of the scale of the atrocities that had taken place right in her backyard. And so she went to her mother for answers. She told her about what she remembered.
'My mother told me that there was a curfew. She told me that people used to get stopped, intimidated and beaten by the police,' she said.
She did not know that the genocide would be a big part of the documentary when she began. In an interview with Marmalade Collective, a Nigerian online magazine, she explained that she had initially wanted to make a seven-minute story focused on life a year after Robert Mugabe was deposed by a military coup in 2017.
'This shift happened after consulting with others, including my producer, who encouraged me to explore the story more deeply. What started as a short video within a larger multimedia piece turned into a feature documentary, which required much more time to tell the story properly,' she said.
For this film, Kadandara worked with LBx Africa, a Kenyan production company. Sam Soko, the co-founder, took on the producer role for Matabeleland.
'We are creative partners and have worked with each other in different combinations. I was, for example, one of his cinematographers for his 2022 documentary Free Money, available on Netflix,' Kadandara said. They have even more projects on the way, including a film about the Zambian women's football team that participated in the 2023 World Cup.
Kadandara has lived in Kenya for at least eight years now.
When Kadandara began filming in 2018, she flew to Zimbabwe from Kenya. She would also routinely fly into Botswana to film with Nyathi and Dumi together and, sometimes, separately.
'I would usually go for about two weeks at a time and sort of see what I could capture,' she said.
Covid-19 restrictions
The film was shot over six years. Some of the scenes were filmed at the height of the Covid-19 period, with restrictions sometimes complicating travel between countries.
For most of 2024, she worked with editor Jordan Inaan and producer Sam Soko to figure out what story to tell; a lover of music, Kadandara also compiled the playlist that composers Eduardo Aram and Gabriel Milliet used for the film score.
Nyasha said the producer was a big part of crafting the story and wanted him credited.
The result is a story that works at many levels. It is a love story, a story about a man struggling with the weight of his father's violent death at the hands of a powerful government; and the story of the estimated 20,000 people that who killed from 1983 until 1987. The film carries images of skeletons dug up from shallow graves distributed across the region — exhumed for reburial.
Kadandara said she hoped the film inspired a reckoning with the past. She and some Zimbabwean partners had planned a series of screenings across Zimbabwe and she was especially excited for potential screenings in rural Matabeleland. When asked if she was worried about possible censorship, Kadandara said she was not because she wanted to be hopeful about Zimbabwe.
'And a lot of the things people love about the film is not necessarily the political. It is the human story, the intimacy, the relationship dynamic,' she said. DM