Warning: This story contains graphic content.

Consumed by war and a haunting number of dead, Africa is slipping into the kind of darkness the world has never seen. A river of innocent blood, stretching from Nigeria to Sudan, is devouring whole countries in suffering, as the hunted run to safety that doesn’t exist. In Tanzania, a place of atrocity that hasn’t even registered on the global consciousness, the exterminations have reached a frantic and terrifying peak. And unlike their northern neighbors, the mass graves in the shadows of Kilimanjaro are not the work of armed gangs or rebel militias, but a ruthless and power-hungry government. 

“It’s rapid. It’s brutal. It’s really well-organized. It’s cold-blooded,” warns Maria Sarungi Tsehai, one of the few brave enough to chronicle the carnage that’s spiraled out of control near the Serengeti. While the tensions were boiling under the surface for years, the rigged presidential election in October plunged the country into absolute chaos. Thousands of protestors, furious at President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s supposed landslide victory, took to the streets to rail against the government’s corruption and censorship. Hassan, who’s led Tanzania since 2021, had promised an open process and even lifted the ban on political rallies, only to jail her biggest rivals and block others from entering the race. 

In the few videos that have managed to leak from that horrible fall day, grisly footage shows police and other gunmen spraying bullets at the protestors, who were armed with nothing but rocks and sticks. Running for their lives, one video shows a pregnant woman being shot in the back and falling to the ground. People rush to help her, screaming for help, but she collapses. “I tried to call for help from others to pull her aside because she was still breathing,” one witness says, “but shots kept getting fired, and it hit one young man on the head. It was the most inhumane thing ever,” the witness said. “Someone’s mother died while I and others watched.”

Other gruesome scenes show a man lying in a pool of blood, as the person holding the cell phone whispers in horror, “Oh my God, this is our Tanzania.” CNN, who authenticated the images with the help of people on the ground and geolocation technology, reported, “In other parts of the country, videos have surfaced on social media of security officers and of armed men in plain clothes — who locals suspect are police — pursuing protesters and opening fire on them. … Several videos [show] what appear to be plainclothes officers getting off white pick-up trucks in Dar es Salaam and opening fire in the backstreets of civilian areas.”

One local sports management company posted on X that seven young soccer players under their contracts “were shot and killed at their homes during the protests.” The bodies of six of them were never found. In churches where pastors spoke out about the election, congregants were beaten, and sanctuaries — numbering in the thousands — were closed and under police watch. 

In one chilling photograph, a hospital floor is covered with rows and rows of bodies stacked on top of each other. A single stretcher outside is littered with 10 corpses. “One doctor, who treated victims of gunshot wounds over the course of four days there and requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, said the dead were brought to the morgue by police ‘until it was full.’ After that, he said, they piled the bodies outside the hospital.”

Like Iran, no one is quite sure how many innocent people were slaughtered because of a well-timed internet blackout, but satellite images show evidence of mass graves — full of hundreds of men, women, and teenagers — victims of a barbaric crime and cover-up the government denies any involvement in.

“With the help of open-source investigator Benjamin Strick, CNN reviewed dozens of videos and images of civilians lying dead from gunshot wounds, as well as images of bodies overflowing morgues at the Sekou-Toure Regional Referral Hospital in Mwanza and the Mwananyamala Hospital in Dar es Salaam.” The ones who did survive were badly wounded. “All had sustained gunshot wounds on different parts of the body. Especially the head, abdomen, chest, lower limbs,” the doctor shook his head. 

The brutality brought on by last October’s election, though, is only part of a disturbing national story. For the last few years, Tanzania has been plagued by hundreds of abductions — the mysterious kidnappings and torture of opposition leaders or people openly criticizing the government. Men and women who are brave enough to go public with their demands for free and fair elections have been vanishing — sometimes without a trace and never returned. Other times, they’re brought back to their homes, traumatized by what they’ve experienced, to serve as a warning to others.

By June of last year, U.N. experts reported that over 200 enforced disappearances have been recorded in the country since 2019, shocking African experts. Right now, several high-profile politicians, Catholic clergy, artists, and human rights activists are among the people who’ve simply disappeared. “In May [of last year], activist and opposition politician Mpaluka Nyangali, widely known as Mdude, was abducted from his home in Mbeya, southern Tanzania, in a violent incident witnessed by his wife and young child,” the BBC warned. “There were blood stains at the scene, showing the brutality of the attack.” But even now, his wife has not heard from him. “I beg for the release of my husband, I believe he is being held by police and the authorities. Mdude has done nothing. He has never stolen anything from anybody, I beg for his release. If he had issues, then take him to court,” she pleaded.

Former Tanzanian Ambassador Humphrey Polepole is still missing after “a violent abduction, and as many as hundreds, possibly thousands of Tanzanians have vanished without a trace following acts of dissent,” the BBC explains. Before disappearing, Polepole had resigned from his post, speaking openly about his distress over the state of his country. “Mzee Nyerere and Karume founded Tanzania with key values. It’s not a country of hooligans. This is not the country they envisaged,” he said. “I have worked for the government, I have worked for CCM, I have been MP. … I won’t be silenced,” he said.

Amnesty International sounded the alarm about his capture after his family found his broken door, cut electrical wires, “and a significant amount of blood at the scene.” His mother, who’d already endured the disappearance of Humphrey’s sister, went to the media in an emotional plea for the police to intervene. “If he is alive, return him to me. If he is not, bring his body and let me bury my child myself. They should not go and throw him into the sea. “They are hurting people as if they were hurting buffaloes or elephants,” she grieved. “It is very sad for our country.”

And the brutality extends well beyond Tanzania’s own. Boniface Mwangi, a Kenyan human rights activist, told his harrowing story on a new documentary from the BBC, “State of Fear: Inside Tanzania’s Enforced Disappearances.” He talks about being taken to the police without cause, interrogated, blindfolded, and driven for hours to a remote location in the bush for attending the public trial of opposition leader, Tundu Lissu, who was charged with treason for running against Hassan. “I was being slapped around, slapped, choked, manhandled. They said, ‘We’re gonna circumcise you.’ I said, ‘I’m circumcised.’ ‘We’re going to do that again.’” 

They told him to remove his clothes and underwear. “Then they lifted me and handcuffed me on a long stick in between two tables. They applied oil on my feet, and then they would hit me and hit me. They told me I’m making too much noise. … So they [filled] my mouth. They were playing gospel music in the background. … I had been screaming,” he remembers, “so they increased the volume.” Now, he says, you realize what is going to happen. “I was so scared. It was so much pain. I had no tears. My body went to shock. Then they stopped and … went to my backside, and they opened my butt cheeks and applied oil and they started putting, I don’t know if it was a stick or whatever it was, and they just push it to the very end.” They told him he should say thank you to the president of Tanzania. 

He looks far away, remembering. “It was a bloody sad affair. Everything that happened there was just ugly. They torture you. And brutalize you. When I came back, I wanted to disappear. I came back, [and] I struggled with suicide. I came back, I struggled with alcohol. Sometimes when I’m quiet and I’m alone, there’s a lot of sadness that comes and a lot of pain. And so, I have to keep on fighting over the pain and the sadness to stay alive and continue the struggle. I wanted my medical report to be public of what they did to us. And the wheels of justice grind very slowly. But one day I will get justice.”

Agather Atuhaire, a Ugandan activist who was kidnapped with Boniface, said afterward that she has lived “looking over her shoulder in Uganda, where I have made many powerful enemies because of my work. So, it was strange that the day I dreaded coming was in Tanzania, where I hadn’t even done anything.” Going back to that night, she remembers hearing Boniface screaming. “For them, sexual violence is a go-to thing, like it’s the first thing they think of.” Thinking back on how desperate she was, she remembers wishing she had poison. “I [could] swallow it so that I don’t go through so much pain, so much humiliation, so, so afraid. … And then I told myself, there’s nothing you can do. There’s no way out.”

She heard them tell her to take off her clothes. “I realized I hadn’t prepared myself for that. So, of course, I hesitated. I’m so afraid. It had already been clear. These are not people who have come to talk to you for your conversation, where you can even beg or whatever. No. They had come with one instruction. Inflict as much pain as you can.”

She winces as Boniface struggles with tears on the stage next to her, where they’re sharing their nightmare with the press. “Everything they did to Boniface, they did to me. They are inserting something in your anus. So bad, like, so deep. You want to beg them to actually rape you in the right place, because you are thinking it can’t be as painful as this.” She couldn’t walk for three days. Her feet were swollen from the beatings. Five days later, she was dumped at the border. Even then, she shakes her head, “I started … having nightmares.” But, Agather has come to believe, “It could have been worse. … I didn’t think we would get out of that alive.” 

Social media activist Edgar Mwakabela, known as Sativa, describes being kidnapped last June and driven 600 miles away, where he was handcuffed, blindfolded, and hit over and over again on his head with the flat side of a machete. The pain was overwhelming. His kidnappers wanted to know who was helping him and why he was criticizing the ruling party. Four days later, he was dragged to a river near the wild animal reserve, where he heard the cry, “Shoot him!” The sound of a gun cracked, and a bullet went through his skull, obliterating his jaw. Near death, he woke up and crawled to a road where wildlife rangers picked him up and rescued him. He believes he survived to tell his story. 

Others have not been so lucky. Lured away by strangers, mysterious telephone calls, or just grabbed by groups of men, the voices of Chadema party officials or young activists have been silenced — gone without a trace. Some, like Ali Mohamed Kibao, are finally found, too late. Body bruised and face burned off by acid, his family will at least no longer live in the torment of not knowing.

That’s a luxury fathers like Yusuf Chaula don’t have. His 25-year-old son, Shedrack, went missing after burning a photo of the president on TikTok. “We have made every effort. We are exhausted. We visited every detention facility. We went to prisons and police stations at different levels — local, district, and regional,” he shakes his head. “If we knew where he is, or where he is being held, or even if we knew he had died and been buried somewhere, at least we’d have a grave to visit,” Yusuf says emotionally. 

While their anguish — and the anguish of so many thousands of Tanzanians — has taken a backseat to the world’s other crises, October’s terror has finally started to catch the attention of international leaders. In a joint appeal by the embassies of Great Britain, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, and the European Union in December, the countries demand answers for the “credible reports from domestic and international organisations [that] show evidence of extrajudicial killings, disappearances, arbitrary arrests, and concealment of dead bodies.” They call on “the authorities to urgently release all the bodies of the dead to their families, to further release all political prisoners and allow detainees legal and medical support.”

Here in the U.S., the African Working Group sent an urgent letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz in November, reiterating the dangerous situation on the ground. “Reports emerging from the ground describe severe abuses by security forces. Individuals — including members of faith-based communities— who dared to speak out against the violence have reportedly been targeted. In addition, there are disturbing accounts that security forces have been dumping the bodies of those killed. These allegations point to serious violations that demand urgent investigation and accountability.” 

They point to the “growing international alarm” about “the seriousness of the situation.” Among other things, they ask for an independent investigation, accountability for the killings, the placement of Tanzania on the Special Watch List of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and a comprehensive policy review of U.S. engagement with Tanzania. “Tanzania stands at a precarious moment, and the United States has a vital role to play in supporting transparency, defending vulnerable communities, and upholding international human rights norms. We urge the Administration to take the steps outlined above without delay,” the group insists. 

For now, the country of stunning beauty and majestic peaks knows only suffering. It sits, like so much of Africa, on a precipice. On one side, tyranny and barbarity; on the other, hopelessness. 

“The only thing I want is justice,” Agather tells people now. “It’s what kept me going. … I was feeling so much pain, and that whole night I asked, 'What did we do to deserve this? What’s the point to this pain?’” she asked. “And I came to a consolation that maybe the point to this pain is that other Tanzanians, the Tanzanians we have told you that are picked up and tortured and killed … get justice.”