Nehanda Becomes a Figure of Resistance and Memory

In the late nineteenth century, British South Africa Company expansion across the Zambezi-Limpopo plateau confronted established political and religious systems among the Shona and Ndebele peoples. Central to Zezuru Shona spiritual life were mhondoro, ancestral lion spirits believed to communicate the will of the supreme deity, Mwari. The female royal ancestor Nehanda, traced by oral traditions to Nyamhita, daughter of the fifteenth-century Mutapa founder Mutota, possessed successive female mediums known as svikiro. By the 1880s, Charwe Nyakasikana, a woman of the Hwata dynasty of the Mazowe valley whose birth date is uncertain, came to be recognized as this spirit's incarnation, conducting agricultural rites and offering counsel that earned wide authority.

Initial contact between Nyakasikana and European arrivals was not immediately hostile. Early accounts note that she advised her followers to greet incoming settlers peacefully as traders, offering them cattle as formal welcoming gifts. However, the subsequent establishment of British company administration provoked mounting friction. The introduction of hut taxes in 1894, combined with labor demands, cattle regulations surrounding rinderpest outbreaks, and agricultural disruptions, transformed local attitudes. Following the outbreak of resistance in Matabeleland earlier in 1896, spiritual authorities across Mashonaland began mobilizing their communities against company rule in the uprising known as the First Chimurenga.