The three white coffins were draped in white lace and topped with small sprays of flowers. The mourners who filled a Bulawayo church last week to pay their respects to Zandile Tshuma and her daughters, Natalie, 15, and Nala, five, had not engaged in the usual tradition of first viewing the dead at their home: the bodies of this family had travelled all the way from England to reach their final resting place at Luveve cemetery on the edge of Zimbabwe’s second city, in Matabeleland.
While the deaths attracted few news reports in the UK, in Zimbabwe and South Africa, the tragic case has reignited concern over the region’s high rates of femicide. Many commentators on TV and social media expressed shock that a well-educated woman with a successful career abroad seemed as vulnerable to familial violence as a poorer woman in a southern African township.
Tshuma’s elderly parents were at the gravesides. The father, in a blue suit and clutching a wooden cane, and her mother, in the black-and-white uniform of her church’s elders, sat in silence. Never Mpofu, 44, a neighbour, was taught at primary school by Tshuma’s mother. He says he was saddened by the violent way the family had been killed.
Tshuma, a 42-year-old financial data analyst, Natalie, an avid computer science student and budding sportswoman, and Nala, described as a bubbly little girl, were all found dead at their home in Britain on 6 July.
Bedfordshire police have said that “work is now underway” to have a British-Zimbabwean man returned to the UK from South Africa in connection with the murders. “Zandile never really said if there were problems,” Mpofu says. “Whenever she came home, she was happy to see her family, but now we can see the monsters are out here.”
At the funeral service, Theophilus Khumalo, an uncle, says the family is deeply hurt by the killings and he hopes they will find justice.
“We will allow the law to take its course. We will not be drawn into anger or bitterness; we will not allow this tragedy to define us. Instead, we choose to honour their memory with grace, unity and unwavering faith in God’s justice,” he adds.
Each day, an estimated 137 women and girls around the world are killed by someone they know. Femicide - defined by the United Nations as an “intentional killing with a gender-related motivation” - is driven by discrimination and inequality.
Zimbabwe does not keep specific data on femicides, but according to government statistics, nearly 40% of Zimbabwean women aged 15 to 49 have experienced physical violence and an estimated 12% to 25% of them have been sexually assaulted.
Musasa, a local organisation set up to help survivors of gender-based violence (GBV), reported more than 30,000 GBV incidents in 2024, while the Zimbabwean police recorded nearly 19,000 cases. Much of the abuse happens inside the home. During Covid lockdowns, GBV rose by 60%.
Judith Ncube, minister of state for provincial affairs, says she is deeply concerned as southern Matabeleland, which borders Bulawayo, has the highest rates of intimate partner violence in the country.
“In the region of Matabeleland, it’s as if we take the silver medal. What has gone wrong, what’s happened to us, where did we get lost? In marriage, not everything is smooth, but it shouldn’t lead to death and a home of fear,” she says.
Ncube has called for an urgent debate about domestic violence and suggests launching home-care programmes for community elders to contact families to discuss problems.
“Something has gone wrong in our social fabric: we no longer have aunts and uncles who are go-betweens in marriages,” she says. “We need to capacitate caregivers to be professional and sit down with our young people and talk. We have pastors that can help, too.”
Samkeliso Tshuma, founder of the Zimbabwean advocacy group The Girls Table, says there is a critical need to educate people about domestic violence.
“It’s heartbreaking,” she says. “We need to use social media to raise awareness of what intimate partner violence does to a community, to a society and the families that we are building.
“We need people to renew their minds, because as long we have people who still think that there is a reason for a man to abuse a woman, then we have a long way to go,” she says.
Bulawayo’s courts are only too familiar with femicide cases. In July, a 43-year-old church elder was charged with murdering his wife with an axe then attacking the couple’s children with a metal rod in the city’s suburb of Nkulumane.
A study in Zimbabwe carried out by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and the United Nations put the direct and indirect costs of gender-based violence at up to $2bn, taking into account the cost of injury, trauma and death, multiplied by the loss of productivity and of young girls dropping out of school due to violence.
Miranda Tabifor, the representative in Zimbabwe of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), calls on the government to invest more in addressing domestic violence because of the far-reaching costs to the state.
The cost to the government to “address issues of psychosocial support [and] the social scars that continue to haunt the survivors of gender-based violence” Tabifor puts at more than $1bn, but she warns that the government will continue to lose up to 3.8% of its $57bn GDP if the violence continues to be unaddressed.
“We should all unite,” she says. “Every woman, every girl in Zimbabwe has to live a life free from violence, not just because it is their right but because it is the right thing to do.”