supper

"They say they won't kill us. They just want their properties back," the note read.

Matabeleland, 1982. S's 23-year-old son had taken his girlfriend to the family farm for a party. S was in Bulawayo, not on the farm, but that morning she'd been violently sick. So had the girlfriend.

"Premonitions," says S, matter-of-factly.

S's son went out with his grandfather to a small mine on the farm. The pair never returned.

The note, handwritten by S's son, was delivered to the house that day. The body of S's father was discovered hours later by the mine. There was no sign of her son.

Who was behind the attack? The general consensus was that it was ZAPU , the Ndebele-based opposition to Robert Mugabe's ZANU. The Matabele "troubles" were just starting: in the mid-1980s around 20,000 died. Many were killed by Mugabe's Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, who were officially clamping down on "dissidents".

The then security minister Emmerson Mnangagwa wrote S and her husband a letter, promising that those responsible would be punished. "And some people hung for it," she says. "I don't know who." There was, of course, always the suspicion -- never voiced, never investigated -- that the Fifth Brigade themselves were behind the attack.

They found S's son's body nine months later, two weeks before her first grandchild was born.

"That's what I was praying for, that they'd find him first," she says.

She wipes her mouth delicately on her serviette. She's in her 80s now, a widow. "It will take me the rest of my life to get over it," she says.

"And now it's 27 years later and what do I read in the paper? ZAPU wants its properties back. Such a flimsy thing to kill someone for. If it was them."