Zimbabwe's own Fritzl

There is a very good chance that Constable Tsitsi Mauswa, the Victim Friendly Unit Coordinator at Mahuwe Post in Guruve District, Mashonaland Central Province, has never heard of Josef Fritzl. The wee police officer was barely fifteen and just starting Form Two at Dangamvura Secondary School in Mutare when, on the morning of 26 April 2008, the world awoke to the gruesome reality of an Austrian father who had been arrested for holding his own daughter captive in a sunless basement for 24 years, raping her for all those years and producing seven children with her. The last time people in these parts had heard of Austria were during the reign of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. But 73-year-old Josef Fritzl would bring Austria back on the world headlines for all the wrong reasons as his case dragged in 2009.

Blissfully unaware of the incestuous furore gripping all across Europe many seas away, a young Tsitsi waltzed through high school, graduating with respectable grades four years later and enrolling with the ZRP in 2014. Her first port of call after graduating out of Depot was Mahuwe Post, a satellite police station of Mushumbi, which sits right on top of the Mavhuradonga Range about 70km north of Guruve. At the foot of one the longest mountain ranges in the country, the Dande valley stretches to as far as the horizon, and you can drink into the summer beauty of the flat lands from the charge office porch at Mahuwe.

“I had my mandatory familiarisation stints at various sections at the post – charge office duties, investigations; and I finally landed at the Victim Friendly Unit to become a third addition to an overworked office that only had Csts Happiness Tsitsi Chimbetete and Bright Njenge before I came in,” says Cst Mauswa of her first days at Mahuwe.

“The sheer amount of work in that office was daunting. Still is, in fact. There were a lot of rape and domestic violence dockets. But the passionate crime of choice in these parts is of older men contravening Section 70 of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act, which criminalises sex with minor girls. These cases always coincide with the ripening of the masawu fruit, which is said to contain something libidinous in it. But I’m no expert on the matter; I just know that every winter and spring when the masawu are in season, we get mountains of cases where little girls have engaged in sexual acts with older men.

“So during my first days as a VFU coordinator, my primary job was to stay in the office and receive complainants’ reports while my two superiors were always on the go – conducting investigations, attending court sessions, taking complainants to hospital and so on. Sometimes I would accompany one of them to a scene so I would learn the trade of investigating crimes of passion.”

So it was something of a shock when one day, Cst Tsitsi Mauswa, just five months into her life as a police officer, she had a rape docket thrown on her lap.

“Of course I was excited. And scared at the same time. My very first docket as a VFU coordinator. It was not one of those stonewall rape cases where an inconsolable complainant drops into our offices to relate a harrowing account of events that led her here. No. We got this case through a tip off, baby – somebody from Chirunya Village was sure that a man from the same village was having sexual relations with his 31-year-old daughter and had born children with her.

“Maybe that was why I got handed the docket – it really looked far-fetched that a man with a wife and children - such grown up children - could lead such an impossible life right under the nose of the rest of the family and the surrounding community. To me, it was unthinkable. So I thought my job was to just go to the said homestead and prove that the rumour doing rounds was false.

“But what did I know; I was just five months into the job.”

Yes she was; but even then, not even her immediate supervisors who had handed Cst Mauswa her first case could imagine in their wildest dreams that they had just thrown a rookie into the lion’s den to investigate a potential case of Zimbabwe’s own Josef Fritzl.

So she set off to Chirunya, having borrowed a motorcycle because it is simply impossible to get to the place in the rainy season using any other means of transport that has more than two wheels. Once there, she started by visiting the homes that shared boundaries with the alleged scene of crime, where a 56-year-old Kudakwashe Mawoyo had set his home.

“There were friendly and accommodating enough but when I starting poking into the business of the next door neighbour, people began to get antsy. I only gathered that Mr Mawoyo was a very mean man whose path most people in the village tried hard to avoid. That was really not something I wanted to hear; but it also raised the scale of suspicion in me, and I finally called on the Mawoyo homestead to meet the alleged victim and hear for myself what was going on from the horse’s mouth.”

Her name was Patience. Patience has two children – the eldest is thirteen, the second child is eight, and at the time the investigations started, she was pregnant with a third. The anonymous tip had said that one or all of Patience’s children had been sired by her own father.

“Now, Patience Mawoyo was kind of soft in the head; her mental capacity was diminished somewhat. I heard that she was moody and could do anything. I wondered whether she was dangerous, and whether I should protect myself. But I took her to the side and after the necessary introductions, I dived straight into the reasons why I was at her place.

“On that day in December last year, the last thing I heard Patience say with her mouth was her reply after I had enquired about her health. When I asked whether she had been abused by her father and if the children were his, she literally clammed up. She physically closed her mouth in such a way that she never wanted it open it again. Ever. I had hit a dead end.”

Cst Mauswa returned to the village to look for more leads, and she finally dug out the person who had written the anonymous letter to the police. From him, she gathered that after Patience’s first child was born in 2003, there were whispers that Mr Mawoyo himself was the father, but these were quickly dispelled when the latter told anybody who cared to listen that Patience’s child had been fathered by her brother-in-law.

“But nothing was done to the brother-in-law; nothing in terms of making him responsible for his actions. He was not made to pay any damages, nor was he asked to take Patience as his second wife. And, given Patience’s state of mind, a concerned father would have reported such an incident to the relevant authorities. But nothing of that sort ever happened. A few months after this incident, the brother-in-law and his family migrated from Chirunya in search of greener pastures on the other side of the Mavhuradonha Range. He left Patience and his alleged baby at his in-laws’ home, and that was the last time he was heard of in the area.

“About five years later, Patience was pregnant again. This time nobody offered an explanation; there was muted whispering in the village again, but nobody was bold enough to raise alarm. Until late last year when she fell pregnant for the third time. When the anonymous letter arrived in our mailbox, Patience was still pregnant.”

Getting the alleged victim herself to talk proved to be a challenge that police officer still learning the rope was at odds to overcome. For, as long as her depositions were taken in her father’s domain, Patience was not going to say anything. Not who was responsible for knocking her up three times; and certainly nothing about her father. She simply went into deaf mode as soon as the subject of her suspected abuse came up.

Said Cst Mauswa; “So we decided that it was best if we took her away from her home for a while and try to get her to calm down and realise that we was only trying to help. I took her to my lodgings in Mahuwe Township and lived with her for a while. And during her stay, she gave me a hundred statements about the state of her life. Nothing could be relied upon.”

Cst Mauswa actually considered this to be a breakthrough, because she had finally gotten Patience to open her mouth at least. As days went by, Patience began to relax, and with the promises from the investigator that she was never going to see her father again, the victim just broke down one day and opened up.

“She cried as she told me that her father would take the advantage of her every time her mother was away. He would pounce on her in her bedroom during the night and even in broad daylight whenever her mother was not at home. Patience suffers from epileptic seizures, and she said her father would rape her even during her episodes. One day a seizure overtook her while she was preparing lunch – and when she finally woke up, her father was on top of her. Right in the kitchen, in the middle of the day. That was how daring he was.”

Patience could not remember exactly when the abuse started, but she knows she was still in her teens then. Follow up interrogations with her mother yielded nothing, as she flatly refused to testify against her husband. Just as Fritzl’s wife refused to stand against him in court, although she would divorce him after the trial, which returned a life sentence for the incestuous rapist kidnapper. But it looked like Patience’s mother was really not convinced that her own husband could do that to his own daughter; so much that one day when Patience had made a rare home visit since the abuse allegations broke, her mother gave her some juju, which was allegedly meant to make her forget her testimony once she got to the police station. But Patience threw the herbs in the river.

And before she could appear before the courts, Patience was taken to Harare where she stayed for some time, while receiving some psychiatric treatment and therapy. But all the therapy in the world could never prepare her enough to come face to face with her father in open court. Mawoyo was actually agitating that she stand across him in court so she could throw the rape allegations in his face. He was banking on the stranglehold spell he had on his daughter, hoping that if she saw him, she would be scared enough not to testify.

“But the court recognised the vulnerability of the complainant and ordered that her testimony be made in camera. With the firm promise that she was never going to see her father again, Patience was a model witness. The case had only three more witness besides the accused and the complainant, and the courts did not waste time to reach a guilty verdict, even when Mawoyo denied the charges in their totality.

He was sentenced to 42 years behind bars.

“The image of an abusive home is one that Patience may never recover from,” said Cst Mauswa. “When she came to my house for the first time, she never wanted to go back home again; and the same thing happened when she was taken to the psychiatric unit in Harare. She wanted to be everywhere else but home. Even when she knew that her father was no longer there, she still did not want to return. It took a lot of cajoling and empty promises for her to return home to her children.

“One can only imagine the traumatic years she suffered at the hands of her father until one brave person decided enough was enough.”