Harare — A play that was banned by Robert Mugabe about a 1980s government crackdown in which rights groups say 20,000 civilians were killed has been performed in Zimbabwe for the first time. The play, 1983, The Dark Years, was banned by the censors in 2012, but following November’s de facto military coup against Mugabe, its director feels political freedoms are improving. President Emmerson Mnangagwa, was Mugabe’s security minister at the time and many say he played a big role during the Gukurahundi massacres — making the play’s airing, just months after he took power, even more significant. "We, as a theatre group, thought it is the right time to try and trigger this kind of debate whereby we need the nation to actually know what happened because, as we speak, the nation is divided by this term [Gukurahundi]," director and actor Adrian Musa, told Reuters after the show. In the local Shona language, Gukurahundi means "the early rain that washes away the chaff". The massacres began a...
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