Mbuya Nehanda

Charwe Nyakasikana, known as Mbuya Nehanda, meaning Grandmother Nehanda, was born in the Mazowe district near present-day Harare, in Mashonaland. Sources differ on her birth year, placing it between about 1840 and 1863. Among the Zezuru Shona she was the medium of Nehanda, a revered ancestral spirit, a mhondoro or lion spirit, and she is the only woman recorded as holding so influential a position in the religious hierarchy of Mashonaland in the nineteenth century.

When European settlers first arrived, spirit mediums like Nehanda at first promoted good relations. That changed as the British South Africa Company took land, labour and control, and introduced a hut tax in 1894. In 1896 the Ndebele rose against the company, and in June the Shona joined them in what became known as the First Chimurenga, a word meaning revolutionary struggle.

Nehanda used her spiritual authority to organise and inspire the uprising across the northern plateau of Mashonaland, working alongside another medium, Kaguvi, believed to be the spirit husband of Nehanda. Her leadership was both political and spiritual, reminding her people that their freedom was sacred, and the resistance spread widely and lasted into 1897.

The uprising was crushed. Nehanda was captured in December 1897 and tried together with Kaguvi in March 1898. She was convicted of the killing of a native commissioner, a charge her supporters have always disputed, and was hanged in Salisbury on 27 April 1898 with Kaguvi and others. Tradition holds that she refused to accept the Christian faith offered to her and prophesied that her bones would rise to continue the fight.

That prophecy was widely remembered in the guerrilla war of the 1960s and 1970s, which Zimbabweans call the Second Chimurenga, and she became an enduring symbol of resistance to colonial rule. In December 2020 a three-metre bronze statue of her was unveiled in central Harare.