The story that won’t go away
By Fanuel Viriri
Rashiwe Guzha’s name still stops conversation cold in Zimbabwe.
A 23-year-old typist. Gone. No goodbye. No witnesses. No trace. Just the kind of silence that feels heavier than grief.
Her vanishing is a ghost story the country cannot shake — a stark and chilling reminder of the power held by the Central Intelligence Organisation. When the CIO is whispered in the same sentence as a missing person, fear answers before anyone else does.
How does a young woman step out of her ordinary life and vanish from the face of the earth? With Rashiwe, the answer lives in what was never said. In the gaps. In the files that do not exist.
And that silence is what chills the spine, every single time the story comes up.
May 1990. Harare. Rashiwe worked as a typist inside the CIO. She had just ended a relationship with Edson Shirihuru, then Deputy Director of the agency. After the breakup, she disappeared. An official inquiry was launched, but the findings were never released. With no body and no answers, many believe she was killed and her remains destroyed with acid. Police reportedly had 53 witnesses and strong evidence implicating others, yet the case never reached closure.
Edson Shirihuru was arrested and charged over her abduction. While awaiting trial, he allegedly told friends: “If I’m convicted, I will not go alone.” He died in August 1993 before the trial could finish. At his funeral, President Robert Mugabe declared the case closed — despite the witnesses and evidence still on record.
Years later in 2014, Collen Chingura Ndangariro, an alleged hitman, then a lecturer in Gweru, said Shirihuru framed him. According to Chingura, Shirihuru acted in a jealous rage after learning Rashiwe was seeing a cabinet minister. Chingura told veteran journalist and Now Daily Editor in Chief John Chimunhu in 2014 that he only drove her to a hotel used as a love nest on the day she vanished, as he often did on Shirihuru’s orders. He insists he was not involved.
“I did not kill Rashiwe Guzha,” Chingura told Now Daily’s Chimunhu exclusively.
“I drove her to the Earlside Hotel where I left her in the company of Eddison Shirihuru, who was her lover. I had performed similar errands before and it was routine for me on that day. I believe they went to the Selous Hotel after I left her, but I don’t know what happened after that,” Chingura said.
Shirihuru was, at that time, the CIO deputy director-general for external affairs.
During one interview, Chimunhu wrote Chingura was badly bruised and said he had been attacked by unknown people in Harare, who asked him, in a bar, about the Rashiwe Guzha case.
Chingura accused Shirihuru of killing Guzha, but would not state the reasons or say how it happened.
Chingura says his role on the evening in question was picking up Guzha from her workplace, on the ground floor of the CIO headquarters, Chaminuka Building in Harare.
Shirihuru is alleged to have murdered his lover at the CIO farm in Goromonzi. He surprised many when he turned up late at Harare International Airport, where he was due to accompany President Robert Mugabe on a foreign trip, in muddy boots and ruffled clothing.
So the file stayed empty, the witnesses stayed quiet, and a 23-year-old became a question Zimbabwe still cannot answer. Because some disappearances do not end with a body. They end with a silence powerful enough to bury the truth.
Her residential stand at The Chase, in Mount Pleasant in Harare lies forlorn but her story won’t go away.
