Four Years in a Cave - by Julian Bhebhe

Book Synopsis

Four Years in a Cave documents a painful, real life-experience of an elementary school teacher who survives a brutal, barbaric, and tribally-charged military purge of the 1980s in Zimbabwe. A secretly selected and specially trained brigade abducts the teacher from a minority tribe, falsely accusing him of collaborating with dissidents seeking to destabilize the regime dominated by the majority tribe. The teacher is savagely tortured but he manages to escape and hide in a remote cave for four years. The brigade continues unleashing terror, annihilating the defenseless minority tribe, and tossing tens of thousands of bodies into disused mineshafts and shallow graves. After five years of anguish, the ruling elite engages the rival political party to negotiate the end of the carnage. Indeed, an agreement is reached to unite the parties, to pardon the dissidents, and vindicate the alleged collaborators. The same agreement also enables the genocide survivor to return to his teaching position, only to face retribution upon retirement. In this account, the retired teacher appeals to the international community to prosecute those responsible for the genocide, to release his retirement benefits, and compensate him for a crime he did not commit.