BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe » The exhibit at the National Gallery is now a crime scene, the artwork banned and the artist charged with insulting President Robert Mugabe. The picture windows that showcased graphic depictions of atrocities committed in the early years of Mugabe’s 30-year-long rule are now papered over with the yellowing pages of a state-controlled newspaper.

But the government’s efforts to bury history have instead provoked slumbering memories of the Gukurahundi, Zimbabwe’s name for the slaying and torture of thousands of civilians here in the Matabeleland region a quarter-century ago.

"You can suppress art exhibits, plays and books, but you cannot remove the Gukurahundi from people’s hearts," said Pathisa Nyathi, a historian who lives here in the provincial capital. "It is indelible."

As Zimbabwe heads anxiously toward another election season, a recent survey has found that 70 percent of Zimbabweans are afraid they will be victims of political violence or intimidation, as thousands were in the 2008 elections. But an equal proportion want the voting to go forward this year nonetheless, evidence of their deep desire for democracy and the willingness of many to vote against Mugabe at great personal risk, analysts say.

In few places do such sentiments about violence in public life run as deep as here, and in recent months the government – whether through missteps or deliberate provocation – has rubbed them ever more raw.

Before the World Cup in South Africa in June, a minister in Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, invited the North Korean soccer team, on behalf of Zimbabwe’s tourism authority, to base itself in Bulawayo before the games began, a gesture that roused a ferocious outcry. After all, it was North Korea that trained and equipped the infamous Fifth Brigade, which historians estimate killed at least 10,000 civilians in the Ndebele minority between 1983 and 1987.

"To us it opened very old wounds," Thabitha Khumalo, a member of Parliament, said of the attempt to bring the North Korean team to the Ndebele heartland. "We’re being reminded of the most horrible pain. How dare they? Our loved ones are still buried in pit latrines, mine shafts and shallow graves."

Khumalo, interviewed while the invitation was still pending last year, wept as she summoned memories of the day that destroyed her family – Feb. 12, 1983.

Mugabe signed a pact with North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, to train the infamous army brigade just months after Zimbabwe gained independence from white minority rule in 1980. Mugabe declared the brigade would be named "Gukurahundi" (pronounced guh-kura-HUN-di), which means "the rain that washes away the chaff before the spring rains." He said it was needed to quell violent internal dissent, but historians say he used it to attack his opponent’s political base and to impose one party rule.

Mugabe’s press secretary, George Charamba, said the president has called the Gukurahundi "a moment of madness," but when pressed whether Mugabe had ever apologized for the campaign, Charamba bristled.

"You can’t call it a moment of madness without critiquing your own past," he said. "I hope people are not looking to humiliate the president. I hope they’re just looking at allowing him to get by healing this nation. For us, that is uppermost. Our sense of embitterment, our sense of recompense may not be exactly what you saw at Nuremburg."

Downtown Bulawayo has the sleepy rhythms of a farm town, but the psychic wounds of the Gukurahundi fester beneath its placid surface. At the National Gallery here, the stately staircase leading to the shuttered Gukurahundi exhibit is now blocked by a sign that says "No Entry." But the disturbing paintings, on walls saturated with blood red paint, can still be glimpsed from the gallery above, through the bars of balconies that surround cut-outs in the floor. The paintings themselves seem to be jailed.

Voti Thebe, who heads the National Gallery, said he allowed the artist, Owen Maseko, to create a sprawling exhibit about the Gukurahundi as a way to contribute to reconciliation. There was no money, so Maseko, 35, did it on his own time. He was just a boy at the time of the Gukurahundi, but he recalls the sounds of hovering helicopters and sirens.

"The memories are still there," he said. "The victims are still alive. It’s not something we can just forget."

In a large painting in three panels, a row of faces are shown with mouths open in wordless screams. In another, women and children weep what seem to be tears of blood. Three papier-mache corpses, one hanging upside down, fill a picture window. Throughout the galleries are recurrent, menacing images of a man in oversize glasses – Mugabe.

The day after the exhibit opened last year, it was closed down. Maseko was detained at the central police station, then transferred to prison in leg irons before being released on bail. Maseko’s case awaits the Supreme Court’s attention. He is charged with insulting the president and communicating falsehoods prejudicial to the state, the latter, more serious charge punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

David Coltart, a politician from Bulawayo who is arts minister in the power-sharing government of ZANU-PF and its political rivals, said he warned his fellow cabinet ministers that prosecuting Maseko could turn the case into a cause celebre and inflame divisions. Coltart, who has long fought the Mugabe government, said he also appealed directly to Defense Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was security minister during the Gukurahundi.

"It is only when nations grapple with their past, in its reality, not as a biased fiction, that they can start to deal with that past," Coltart said in a lecture delivered in the gallery above Maseko’s show. He called the Gukurahundi "a politicide, if not a genocide."

© 2011 The New York Times Company